The American 82nd, 101st, the British 1st and 6th, the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion, some of the legendary vanguards of the Allied advance in Europe.
But when landing in hostile territory surrounded by enemies, what are you supposed to do when someone surrenders to you? I read in Beevor’s D-Day that in Normandy after seeing their comrades mutilated when their parachutes were entangled certain American airborne decided that they would take no prisoners - an attitude shared with Canadian forces when they met with SS brutality.
What was the official Allied policy here? You haven’t any holding camps and keeping them around with you isn’t exactly practical. Was the problem of prisoner-taking for airborne infantry a factor in their selection and training?
I don’t know about any official policy, but a few years ago I was discussing this very problem with my Uncle who during the war was a sergeant in the paratroop regiment, a Red Devil.
He was involved in the advance towards Berlin, he said to me “what can you do with them, your advancing, they are the enemy, you have no resources to take them prisoner, do you leave them behind you to possibly attack you, there was only one solution, we executed them, quickly and cleanly, and moved on towards our objective.”
He was not proud of this, it was a different time, they did what they had to do.
First of all, you must understand that large scale mass parachute drops as part of an offensive action didn’t happen all that often in the second world war, or any subsequent time for that matter. So the kind of situation you are describing is relatively rare to begin with. Parachute troops didn’t spend the war fighting from their parachutes, they largely just fought as regular infantry.
The war in Europe is one largely characterized by rapid movements of mechanized and armoured formations, with lots of artillery. When your offensive achieves a breakthrough and takes a position, you may come across surrendered enemy troops and these can be marched into captivity in the rear area. Where a parachute unit comes in is that you can launch them into the immediete rear area of the enemy on the eve of an offensive where they could cause disruption and confusion, and maybe seize key targets and hold them until the advancing armoured and mechanized troops reach them. That’s really all they can do. Without artillery, armoured vehicles or resupply, your parachutists are just a mob with rifles and are no match for an enemy with these things. They can’t even retreat very effectively because it’s kind of hard to outrun a truck on foot.
The best case scenario for them is that they land somewhere within walking distance of their objective, capture it by surprise without getting all killed/captured themselves, then hole up in there and pray that the rest of the offensive goes off as planned and reaches them before they run out of ammo and/or the enemy manages to turn their artillery around on them and kill them all for sure.
So when your parachutists capture some POWs during the course o their operation, they can intern them somewhere until the rest of the offensive reaches them. It’s not as if your small group of parachutists are going to start some kind of aggresive war of manuever to encircle and destroy the 4th Panzer division as soon as they hit the ground, so “I guess we should just summarily execute all the prisoners because we’re going to march on Berlin right away and there’s nowhere to send them”.
I can’t answer your question but it reminds me of the situation in Saving Private Ryan, when they take a prisoner from a machine gun emplacement while well beyond the front-line. They decided to disarm him and force him to walk towards the American forces behind to be properly captured.
And of course what ended up happening is that the instant he was out of view of the Americans, he turned around and joined back up with another German unit.
That said, they weren’t Airborne and that was kind of an unusual situation.
I believe that it was fairly common in the early stages of the war, but once word got around that you could always count on some bookish, idealistic young American GI to finally succumb to the horrors of war and summarily execute the German soldier in question it stopped happening.
But if that GI had just been put in another troop, the one without the slightly older infantryman who loved to show off pictures of his wife and kids, his mind would have never snapped.
This thread makes me wonder- would it be a valid strategy for an army to order some of its own soldiers to surrender with the intent of overwhelming their opponent’s ability to handle them, so as to distract them from actual fighting as they divert troops from the front lines to come back to serve guard duty at makeshift prison camps? Would this be a war crime?
One of my Mother’s Husbands was in a regular US Army Europe in WWII.
He said the sergeant would say, “Private Plant, take this guy back to headquarters.”
Private Plant marches the prisoner off, has no idea where headquarters is, is scared shitless, so the POW is shot trying to escape. Private plat reports to the sergeant who says, “Too bad. Have a smoke.”
A relative who was in the advance after D-day (infantry, not paratroops) Told me that his unit dealt with captured Germans by taking all their weapons, taking their backpacks with their food, tying their hands behind their backs, and telling them to walk farther behind the lines to other American units, where they would be put with other prisoners (and fed).
He said that, in some cases, the local people took revenge on these Germans for several years of brutal occupation. But he said “at least, we didn’t kill them. And those locals probably had justification for what they did.”
Official Allied policy was that shooting prisoners was a war crime, full stop. There is no exemption in the Hague or Geneva conventions for airborne forces allowing them to violate the prohibition on killing prisoners or those rendered hors de combat. US soldiers were charged with killing POWS in Sicily in the Biscari massacre, for example.
That said, the reality of war is that the killing of prisoners does happen in pretty much every war. Aside from clear cut cases of murdering POWs after combat, attempting to surrender in the heat of combat is itself risky. Snipers and those armed with flamethrowers tend to not make it to POW cages due to the manner of their armament.
This is actually a mischaracterization of the war. The vast majority of every nation’s forces were foot bound infantry. The US and UK’s infantry divisions were able to have fully motorized supply, unlike Germany which continued to rely heavily on horses for both supply and to move artillery, but there were never enough trucks to motorize the actual infantry in Allied infantry divisions. Their supplies were moved by trucks, but the infantry had to hoof it. The only times the Western front was really characterized by rapid movements was during the race across France after the breakout from Normandy and during the final collapse of Germany. Before the breakout, the fighting in Normandy from June to August was a long slogging match; advancing a half of a mile in a day was exceptional. After the race across France came to an end, slogging matches became the norm again, such as Hurtgen Forest, the Battle of the Scheldt, the Battle of Aachen and the Lorraine Campaign.
Like many aspects of military life, this “stategy” has a name: “perfidy”. Wikipedia sez:
Currently a war crime by virtue of being in violation of the 1977 addendum to the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Was generally held before to be a war crime also by earlier conventions, such as the 1907 Hague Convention.
The general rule is that once you surrender, you’re supposed to stay surrendered. I suppose you’re obligated to try to escape and rejoin your own forces, but only if you surrendered in good faith. If you feign surrender, that’s perfidy.
And yeah… from the outside, good-faith surrender followed by attempts to escape captivity would be difficult to distinguish from feigned surrender followed by an attack, if enough time passed. (But the latter would be hard to do in a way that could be confused with the former, if the army being surrendered to did a halfway-decent job of disarming the surrendering forces.)
I thinkrobert_columbia wasn’t asking about turning on one’s captors, but merely surrendering in such numbers as to overwhelm the opposing force in dealing with prisoners. The real problem with that is that one aremd man can control a huge number of prisoners, so you’d need to give up in truly astounding numbers to tie up any significant portion of the enemy force – and if yo can afford to do that, and still have enough troops left to fight to win, you probably are better off just sending your troops in to a straight-up fight and swamping the enemy with numbers, rather than trying any fancy tricks.
Yes, that’s what I was talking about. Say you had a bunch of farm boy conscripts who can barely shoot a rifle but were drafted under the laws of your country and put under your command (they are technically “real soldiers”). You decide that they’re too slow and too poor a shot to help you meaningfully, so you order them to surrender to the enemy. You hope that the enemy becomes so distracted processing (name, rank, serial number) the prisoners and building and staffing a larger prison camp for them that they let their guard down a little - then you attack with your highly trained elite special forces.
I can give you one data point on the ratio of prisoners to captors: my uncle landed at D day. Later in the day he was shot through the shoulder. About 12 Germans surrendered to his unit and he was their escort to the rear. He had a rifle that he could not use because of his wound, but he was their only guard and they dociley went along.
True, but Steamboat Willie does shoot Capt. Miller, and Upham shoots him at the end - Steamboat Willie even greets him by name. I couldn’t find a better clip for the 2nd part, but the Germans were all standing there with their hands up, and Upham shot Steamboat Willie anyway.
I can’t see mass surrender as a strategy being productive, but sending personnel to be captured to help aiding incitement in POW camps has happened. During the Korean War Koje-do POW camp was host to a number of incidents ranging from riots to prisoners being tried and hung by self-appointed people’s courts for collaborating with the enemy to the commandant of the camp, Brig. Gen. Francis T. Dodd being taken prisoner and put on trial - by his prisoners. There’s a somewhat lengthy but good article on the camp here, from it: