POW (prisoners of war) are combatants captured by the opposing side and confined until freed at the end of hostilities or some other disposition is made of them. The latter has included slaughter, exchange, ransom, recruitment into the enemy's armed forces, or simply being abandoned to look after themselves. The first hurdle, of course, has always been to have a surrender accepted in the heat of battle. Thereafter treatment of POWs has varied from appalling degradation to reasonably humane treatment. It has often hinged on the circumstances of their capture and the resources available to their captors.
For much of history, POWs were slaughtered for the same reason towns were sacked and burned—pour encourager les autres—and this continued to be one of the rules of war for many centuries: submission might save your life, unsuccessful resistance meant death. It is not always appreciated that the sack of towns after the garrisons obliged the besiegers to take them by storm was an accepted rule of war, as was the taking of hostages and their execution in reprisal for the acts of irregular forces up to and including WW II. Even so, there was a recognized if ill-defined line between what the out-of-control soldiers of a forlorn hope might do after storming a breach (their officers could very well be killed themselves if they tried to stop them), and the systematic rapes of Magdeburg and Nanking, centuries apart in time but alike in cold-blooded beastliness.
The traditional alternative was enslavement, much practised by the Romans, sometimes after marching their POWs through the streets of Rome along with other booty, and thus clearly giving them some value as property if not as human beings. Many cultures also sacrificed captives to their gods, but only the Aztecs of Mexico fought wars specifically to capture large numbers for sacrifice, their weapons being crafted not to kill but to disable. The horse peoples, of course, could not allow prisoners to slow them down, and this has remained a characteristic of the cavalry; tanks find it hard to take prisoners, too.
The cash value of a POW was appreciated under the feudal system, and a knight might expect his surrender to be respected by an opponent of his class who also knew that his family or kinsmen would pay a suitable ransom. It took the Scots twenty years to raise the required ransom for King David II after his capture in the battle of Neville's Cross in 1336, but one suspects that they were not trying very hard. The common soldier, being of no monetary value, could expect no such consideration. The Swiss, when fighting for themselves, and the Hussites very particularly reversed the formula and killed any enemy knights they captured. The slaughter of the flower of French chivalry captured at Agincourt may have been a tactical necessity, their numbers being too great to control, but it represented a great financial loss to the English soldiers which Henry V promised to compensate.
Following the excesses of the Thirty Years War, more humane treatment of POWs began to be a feature of European warfare during the rest of the 17th and into the 18th centuries. Captured officers, who were still usually of ‘gentle’ birth, would be offered the chance to give their parole. An officer on parole was often treated more like a guest than a prisoner and could look forward to being exchanged for a prisoner of like rank taken by his own army. We see here the beginnings of a new, pragmatic reason for more humane behaviour, in that even common soldiers were spared. Admittedly they could expect to be confined in cramped, insanitary conditions such as prison hulks moored in estuaries, but the glimmer of the idea that it made military sense to encourage surrender was beginning to illuminate the minds of commanders. This could certainly be taken too far: under the 1808 Convention of Cintra, Junot's defeated French army in Portugal, all 26, 000 of them complete with arms, equipment, and loot, were shipped home on British ships, on parole that they would not fight in Portugal again.
The problem illustrated by the poor deal struck at Cintra was that a large number of prisoners could become an insufferable burden to their captors, who could themselves be suffering from serious shortages. The only Confederate soldier hanged for war crimes after the American civil war was the commandant of the POW camp at Andersonville, Georgia, and he was very much a victim of circumstances beyond his control. The stockade was designed to hold 10, 000 prisoners and the first Union soldiers to arrive were housed and fed decently. But by August 1864, after the prisoner exchange system broke down because of the South's refusal to treat African-American soldiers as such, the camp's population had swelled to over 32, 000. Overcrowding quickly led to a terrible deterioration in conditions and the hard-pressed Confederate commissariat simply did not provide the necessary rations. Twelve thousand, nine hundred and twelve men died during Andersonville's fourteen-month period of operation and the spectacle that greeted the Union soldiers who liberated the camp was truly appalling. Be it said that the Union, with an abundant commissariat, ran its own death camp at Elmina in New York state, known as the ‘Andersonville of the North’, which was designed to hold 5, 000 prisoners but at one point contained 9, 400. Some 3, 000 Confederate POWs died there.
Irregular warfare created the worst problems. The Spanish in Cuba, the British in the Second Boer War, and the US in the Philippines insurrection all employed concentration camps to mop up the ‘crowd cover’ used by the guerrillas. Overcrowding and disease killed hundreds of thousands, although it should be noted that the situation on the veld was so appalling that some Boers actually sent their families to the British for internment. Prior to the fortified-villages strategy in the post-WW II Malayan emergency and Mau Mau uprising, no nation developed an answer to this problem that was both humane and militarily effective, and whether the fate of non-combatants in these situations is blamed on the irregulars who use them as cover or on the regulars who must perforce remove that cover to get at them depends entirely on one's point of view.
The proper treatment of POWs was not formally addressed until the Geneva and Hague Conference and Conventions of 1864, 1899, and 1907, which declared that soldiers who lay down their arms were to be decently treated. WW I was thus the first major war to be regulated by some form of international agreement for the treatment of prisoners and this, along with the activities of the International Red Cross, ensured that treatment of POWs was generally humane. One notable exception was the treatment received by British and Indian prisoners at the hands of the Turks after the siege of Kut Al Amara in 1916. Many of these POWs died on the long marches they were forced to make on their way to inadequate prison camps, but their treatment was not much worse than that received by the average Turkish soldier, and this illustrated a further problem.
The Geneva Convention of 1929 stated that prisoners of war were to be housed and fed no worse than garrison troops of the capturing power. Although the Japanese general responsible was later hanged for it, the unfortunates on the infamous ‘Death March’ of surrendered US and Filipino soldiers from Bataan to their POW camp were, in fact, fed standard Japanese army rations. In a sense their fate was that of the garrisons who held out for too long in earlier sieges, only now they were so weak and exhausted after their long and hopeless resistance that they lacked the strength to endure an ordeal they would have survived had their commanders surrendered opportunely.
This is not to acquit the Japanese of bestial behaviour. They believed that surrender was a disgrace and therefore treated the Allied soldiers they captured with utter contempt. No attempt was made to house and feed them adequately, medical attention was non-existent, and many died in the appalling conditions of the prison established in the Changi barracks in Singapore. Many more died while working on the Burma-Thailand railway, although it should be noted that the use of POWs for manual labour was specifically permitted under the Geneva Convention. Starving them, beating them, and using them for sword practice was not.
On the eastern front both sides treated POWs abominably. Of the 5.7 million Red Army soldiers taken prisoner, over 3 million died from disease, starvation, and ill-treatment. Captured Germans (in a war in which neither side was much given to taking prisoners) fared little better, 45 per cent of them dying in captivity. Both sides put their POWs to hard labour, and the same grim statistic about survival being intimately linked with how fit they were when captured applied: of the 100, 000 men taken captive after the prolonged and bitter battle of Stalingrad, only 5, 000 ever returned to Germany.
The right to escape and not be punished unduly (30 days' solitary confinement) was enshrined in the Geneva Convention. For most POWs escape has been impossible but for Allied prisoners in German camps during WW II, an escape attempt gave at least some relief to the boredom of prison life. The most famous attempt was the ‘Great Escape’ which involved a multinational team of 600 POWs at Stalag Luft 3 in Germany. Three very long tunnels were dug during 1943-4 and on 24 March 1944, 76 prisoners managed to escape from the camp. This mass escape infuriated Hitler who ordered an estimated 5 million German police, soldiers, and Hitler Youth to recapture the prisoners. Only three men made it back to Britain and the rest were all recaptured within two weeks. Tragically, 50 of them were then murdered by the Gestapo on Hitler's express orders.
POWs have continued to experience mixed treatment at the hands of their captors, notwithstanding a new Geneva Convention, signed in 1949. Allied prisoners held by the Chinese during the Korean war were kept in very poor conditions and subjected to ‘brainwashing’ in order to convince them of the communist cause and turn them into vehicles for Chinese propaganda during the war. Similar methods were used against the 651 American prisoners captured by the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam war. The harsh conditions suffered by these prisoners led to the return and even rescue of American POWs becoming a major political issue in the USA during the peace negotiations of 1972-3. The manner in which US Pres Jimmy Carter permitted himself to become obsessed with hostages held in Tehran towards the end of his presidency gave terrorist groups and regimes leverage to use against the USA. It is to be noted that when they tried the same on the Soviets, selective lethal retaliation or the very credible threat of massive reprisals caused their citizens to be released promptly. During the Gulf war the Iraqis used coalition prisoners and civilian internees as human shields to protect important targets from air attack, and similarly in 1994 UN troops were captured by Serb forces and used as human shields during the Bosnian conflict. Just as in the past, humane treatment of POWs remains dependent on the circumstances, the resources, and the disposition of their captors.
Bibliography
- Barker, A. J., Prisoners of War (New York, 1975).
- Garrett, Richard, POW: The Uncivil Face of War (London, 1981).
- Marvel, William, Andersonville: The Last Depot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)
— Niall Barr/Chris Mann
