wow I didn’t know that…
It’s been a long time since there was an old fashioned war as envisioned by the Geneva conventions. In WWII the Germans were pretty good at providing names and allowing inspections, at least with western front troops. The Japanese not so much. For instance the real life story that inspired Saving Private Ryan was the story of the Niland brothers. Of the three dead Niland brothers one was discovered to be alive a year later when his POW camp was liberated in Burma.
I knew a era POW, sadly recently deceased. He was shot down in 1967 and held until 1973. If anyone thinks the North Vietnamese gave a rats ass about the Geneva Conventions, they are sadly mistaken. As noted earlier, almost everyone has a breaking point. Common to POWs of this area, many provided their captors with misinformation. Interesting is that POW abuse tapered off after 1970. Prior to that time the U. S. Did not want much said of the POWs. However, Admiral Stockdale’s wife, whose husband had been held since 1967 (+/-), had enough of this and about this time started going public. My friend believed this stopped the abuse. His belief, which obviously cannot be verified/proven, is that the Russians advised the North Vietnamese it wasn’t in their best interest to continue with the abuse. Ergo, post-1970 the torture ceased.
My uncle was a POW in Germany during WWII. I just checked the telegrams: 2 months and 1 day between the telegram saying he was MIA and the one via the Red Cross saying he was a POW. Fairly fast for late-ish 1944. Later in the war things were breaking down completely in Germany.
The German Red Cross was a total joke during the war. First of all, it was headed by this guy, who was in the SS. Secondly the “inspections” by the Red Cross of POW camps were a charade. Prisoners were given new blankets, etc. before the inspection and had them taken away right after. Red Cross packages were stolen, etc. The Red Cross in the Nazi era was purely window dressing.
No Red Cross people intervened when my uncle was forced to march randomly around Germany in the winter of 1945 with virtually no food and never any shelter.