This entry is a subentry of Prisoners of War.
Although in ancient times wartime captives who were not rich enough to be held for ransom were usually enslaved as laborers by the victors as laborers, by the early modern era, with the emergence of centralized states and regular, professional armies, the practice had changed to regular exchange of prisoners, either during or after war.
In the Revolutionary War (1775–83), although higher‐ranking officers were usually exchanged during the war, the majority of soldiers were not. Because the British government considered the Americans rebels and refused during the war to recognize the Continental Congress as a sovereign government, captured American fightingmen were often treated like criminals. American sailors or seamen from privateers were imprisoned in Britain, sometimes accused of piracy. The majority of American prisoners of war (POWs), however, were soldiers who were confined under wretched conditions in floating British prison hulks around New York City. Many died, some escaped, but few accepted British offers to switch sides. Survivors were exchanged after the war. No accurate count was made, but perhaps more than 18,000 Americans became POWs. During the War of 1812, the legal status of the United States and its servicemen was not an issue; American POWs were generally treated properly and were repatriated following the peace.
The Texas War of Independence (1836) proved particularly brutal. Viewing Texans as rebels, the Mexican leader Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna refused to take prisoners. Texans captured at the Battle of the Alamo and at Goliad were executed.
During the Mexican War (1846–48), although native Texans captured serving with the U.S. Army were executed as rebels, the Mexican treatment of other North American POWs was fair and humane.
The Union army and the Confederate army in the Civil War were modern mass armies of citizen soldiers. In modern wars of intense nationalism and mass citizen armies, civilians identified more closely with the citizen soldier than with the hired professional. Furthermore, the stakes of war became less subject to compromise. Consequently, the practice of prisoner exchange during hostilities declined. During the Civil War, at first, Union and Confederate POWs were regularly exchanged; in 1863, the Union army issued General Order Number 100, The Rules of Land Warfare, detailing regulations for treatment of POWs and enemy civilians in occupied territory. In 1864, however, because prisoner exchange was helping to sustain the Southern war effort and because the Confederacy refused to recognize former slaves serving as African American soldiers in the Union army, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant stopped the regular exchange of POWs. Consequently, both sides were swamped with POWs.
In all, there were some 220,000 Confederate POWs in the North and 211,000 Union POWs in the South, and the makeshift Civil War prisoner‐of‐war camps became notorious on both sides. A total of more than 50,000 Union and Confederate POWs died on both sides. After the war, a U.S. military commission convicted the commander of the camp in Andersonville, Georgia, Capt. Henry Wirz, for the maltreatment and death of 14,000 Union POWs. Although probably guilty of inefficiency rather than the conspiracy for which he was convicted, Wirz was hanged in 1865, the only Confederate official to be executed.
By the time of World War I, the major powers had agreed to the laws of war, which included the treatment of prisoners of war. Drawing on the U.S. Army's 1863 regulations, delegates at the Hague Peace Conferences (1899, 1907) agreed that each other's POWs should receive decent treatment. After the Spanish‐American War of 1898, the United States quickly repatriated thousands of captured Spanish soldiers, and the Spanish returned their limited number of U.S. POWs. In contrast, the Philippine War (1899–1902) eventually degenerated into guerrilla warfare, and counterinsurgency measures were taken in which prisoners on both sides were sometimes tortured and killed.
The enormity of World War I overwhelmed the major powers with millions of POWs. However, since most of the American fighting occurred only in the final months of the war, just 4,120 American soldiers wound up in German POW camps. U.S. diplomats and the American Red Cross sought successfully to ensure decent treatment. Only 147 American prisoners died in the German camps, most of them from previous wounds.
By contrast, World War II was characterized by the mistreatment and even murder of Allied prisoners and civilians by Germany—especially on the eastern front—and by Japan throughout Asia and the Pacific. This led to the postwar trial and execution of some German and Japanese officials and military officers for war crimes. The 1929 Geneva Convention further elaborated details for treatment of POWs. While subjecting many captured civilians and others to slave labor, torture, or death, Nazi Germany usually treated American (and West European) military POWs within the Geneva rules.
Before December 1944, the majority of American soldiers held in Stalags (German POW camps) were captured airmen. In the ground war, only a few G.I.'s were captured before December 1944, but in the surprise German Ardennes offensive, known as the Battle of the Bulge, thousands of Americans were surrounded and captured. In the Malmédy massacre in Belgium, eighty‐six captured G.I.'s were executed by a German SS unit on 17 December. During the bitter winter of 1944–45, the Germans force‐marched thousands of Allied POWs across the country in an attempt to keep them from the armies invading from the east and west. Several thousand American POWs in the east were therefore liberated by the Red Army and held for a while, after the German surrender on 8 May 1945, and through the Potsdam Conference in July, although they were eventually repatriated before the end of 1945. Of the 93,941 American POWs held in the European theater during the war, only 1 percent died in captivity, most of them from combat wounds.
In contrast, Japan's treatment of POWs was brutal. Influenced by the military, Tokyo had not signed the 1929 Geneva Convention, and Japanese military leaders instilled in their soldiers the belief that surrender was a betrayal of the emperor and a disgrace to the individual and his family. Pursuing a policy disdainful of Allied servicemen who surrendered, the Japanese military treated Allied POWs viciously. Some POWs, such as captured American airmen who bombed Japan, were beheaded. The majority of American POWs had been captured when the Japanese conquered the Philippine Islands in the winter of 1941–42.
In the infamous Bataan Death March of April 1942, some 78,000 American and Filipino POWs led by Gen. Jonathan Wainwright, many already starving and weak from malaria, were beaten, clubbed, and bayoneted as they were forced to walk sixty‐five miles with little or no food, water, or shelter to the prison camp near Cabanatuan. Between 7,000 and 10,000 people died or were killed on the march. (After the war, Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma was held responsible and executed. In the Philippines, homage is paid annually to the American and Filipino victims on Bataan Day, 9 April, when Filipinos rewalk parts of the death route.)
After the Americans began the liberation of the Philippines in October 1944, the Japanese put surviving POWs onto ships to take them to Japan as hostages. There were orders to kill them if the Americans invaded the home islands. Nearly 4,000 American POWs died in unmarked transport ships sunk by American planes or submarines, but others survived the journey in filthy holds to be worked in mines and other hazardous facilities in Japan until the Japanese surrender in August 1945. (Indeed, after the emperor's call for surrender, several dozen captured American airmen were beheaded by imperial military units in Japan.) Of the 25,600 American POWs held in the Pacific during the war, 10,650 or nearly 45 percent died, most of starvation and disease since they were worked incessantly and given little food, clothing, shelter, or medical treatment.
In the postwar era, despite the trials in Nuremberg and Tokyo of Germans and Japanese for war crimes, several Communist states refused to accept the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which further developed the laws of war. In the Korean War (1950–53), North Korean forces executed many G.I.'s in the field, their bodies later re covered with their hands tied behind their backs. A report to Congress in 1954 concluded that this was a deliberate tactic of psychological warfare. Many more Americans were captured during the winter of 1950–51 when United Nations forces retreated following the massive Chinese intervention.
Of the more than 7,000 Americans captured by the Communists during the Korean War, only 3,800 returned alive. An estimated 1,000 were murdered, and at least another 1,700 died of sickness and malnutrition. When the Chinese Communists took control, the prisoners' physical conditions improved slightly, but they now underwent indoctrination efforts. Under torture, a number of American airmen “confessed” to germ warfare and other atrocities. Twenty‐one Americans and one Englishman renounced their citizenship and decided to remain in China following the armistice in 1953. Although only one out of every twenty‐three American POWs was ever suspected of serious misconduct, the so‐called “brainwashing” of POWs who denounced the United States led to a public outcry. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10631, prescribing a code of conduct for American POWs designed to forge captive Americans into a unified community through a common standard of behavior.
In the Vietnam War (1965–73), North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in the South refused to consider any requests from the International Red Cross Commission regarding POWs. In effect, Vietnamese Communists viewed American servicepeople as having been criminals before they were captured and thus as without the status of POWs. In the ground war in South Vietnam, some Americans were shot while trying to surrender. Others were taken north to POW camps. Many of the navy and air force aviators captured during the bombing of North Vietnam were held in a prison known sarcastically as the “Hanoi Hilton.” Most of the POWs suffered considerable mental and physical abuse and some were tortured, but only a few agreed to issue anti‐American propaganda.
Between 1964 and 1972, of the known American POWs held in North Vietnam, 114 died in captivity. After the Paris Peace Agreements (1973), 651 POWs returned to American control. However, the status of over 2,000 Americans missing in action (MIAs) and the question of whether the Socialist Republic of Vietnam had retained some American POWs remained controversial for years afterward.
During the Persian Gulf War (1991), although Iraq, like the United States, had signed the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Saddam Hussein refused to allow the International Red Cross Commission to inspect Iraq's POW facilities. In captivity, the twenty‐three American POWs, including two female soldiers, suffered physical mistreatment that ranged from sexual abuse of the women to electric shocks and bone‐breaking for the men.
Bibliography
- Pat O'Brien, Outwitting the Hun: My Escape from a German Prison Camp, 1918.
- Ralph E. Ellinwood, Behind German Lines: A Narrative of the Everyday Life of an American Prisoner of War, 1920.
- Clifford Milton Markle, A Yankee Prisoner in Hunland, 1920.
- William B. Hesseltine, Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology, 1930; repr. 1962.
U.S. Department of the Army , Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination and Exploitation of Prisoners of War, 1956.- Stanley L. Falk, Bataan: The March of Death, 1962.
- John G. Hubbell, et al., P.O.W.: A Definitive History of the American Prisoner of War Experience in Vietnam, 1964–1973, 1976.
- David Foy, For You the War Is Over: American POWs in Nazi Germany, 1984.
- Marion R. Lawton, Some Survived: An Epic Account of Japanese Captivity During World War II, 1984.
- John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, 1986.
- Richard B. Speed III, Prisoners, Diplomats, and the Great War: A Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity, 1990.
- Susan Katz Keating, Prisoners of Hope: Exploiting the POW/MIA Myth in America, 1994.
- Dwight Messimer, Escape, 1994.
- S. P. MacKenzie, The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II,
Journal of Modern History ,66 (September 1994), pp. 487–520
