I’m sure that being a POW, even under the best of circumstances, sucks ass. Nevertheless, in the World War II era did the Allies (the US in particular) treat their own POWs as poorly as allied POWs were treated (where torture, starvation, and forced labor were par for the course)? Were any enemy POWs tortured (for information and/or for sport) by their Allied captors? Were they set to labor for their captors? Were they starved?
My Grandma said that the German POW’s were treated well in North Texas where she worked in a POW camp.
There are bad and have always been bad prison guards.
As a policy, not so much in numbers but when …
No, no, yes, no. But the labor was primarily agricultural. There were several POW camps near places I grew up, and heard a lot of stories about how the German and Italian prisoners worked in the citrus groves or in the fields. There was no mistreatment and they weren’t forced to make war materiel.
BTW, the Geneva Convention of 1929 did specifically allow using POWs as laborers. There were a lot of rules associated with it - no dangerous work, no work on the war effort, no working beyond hours & conditions allowed for civilian workers, officers didn’t have to work (but could volunteer to), etc. So adding it to a list of “poor treatment” is unfair.
Many POW’s in the UK, especially Italians, liked it so much they stayed on after the war and married local girls (there was an understandable shortage of men at the time).
As for torture, I am pretty sure that there would have been some, and some guards would have behaved badly, but I doubt that there was any systematic torture or starvation of prisoners.
“The Allies” of course would include the Soviets, who definitely were not known for treating POWs well. Or releasing them in a timely manner, as it turned out. There is definitely a reason why in the closing weeks of the war Germans were rushing west to get captured by the US and British.
…and also the US who were known not to take.Prisoners from Japan at all.
Yeah, it’s situational. On the Eastern Front you didn’t want to be a POW of anyone, be it German or Soviet. Eastern Front was hell on Earth.
On the Western Front both the Allies and the Germans behaved better. Many German POWs on the Western Front ended up shipped to the United States where they lived much better lives in the camps than they did as German soldiers. Only the most diehard nationalist Nazis had any desire to leave the camps and get back to the fighting.
So on the Western Front once you made it to your final camp, life was pretty good. But there could be risks surrendering and while in custody of front line troops. There are many instances of Americans killing Germans who had surrendered. This is honestly an understandable and 100% predictable thing, because the front line troops who are the initial soldiers that the Germans surrendered to had been literally fighting and dying against these same guys for weeks, had seen many friends killed by the Germans and etc. I’m not talking right/wrong, just reality–front line soldiers are not always going to respect the white flag.
But in general, most surrendering soldiers did get processed and taken POW, and once they were no longer near the front they generally didn’t have to fear mistreatment.
In the Pacific Theater there were far fewer POWs because the Japanese as a rule tried to never surrender. The number of Japanese that actually did surrender was shockingly low given the scale of the war, and many have speculated that the reason the Japanese treated POWs so poorly is because in their culture just the thought of surrendering made you so dishonorable that you were basically scum…so they would have no respect for enemy combatants who had surrendered rather than died honorably in battle.
Americans in the Pacific Theater came to know of the brutality of Japanese toward the American POWs so there was certainly some brutality on the American side. There’s a scene in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima that show Americans executing a small group of Japanese soldiers that had just surrendered. But in the Pacific Theater just like in Europe, once you’re past the front line troops being a non-Soviet POW to one of the Allied powers was fairly decent in comparison to fighting in the front lines of WWII.
My Grandmother told me that German POWs working rice farms in Stuttgart, Arkansas were well treated and generally glad to be there. I have read of one uncooperative prison being encircled by car headlights and exposed to Arkansas mosquitoes one night,
From WIki on Allied attitudes (bolding mine).
[QUOTE=WIki]
Western Allied governments and senior military commanders directed that Japanese POWs be treated in accordance with relevant international conventions. In practice though, many front-line soldiers were unwilling to accept the surrender of Japanese personnel due to a combination of racist attitudes and reports of atrocities conducted against Allied troops
[/QUOTE]
Plus the Japanese fought to the death because they feared that they would be killed anyway (and mutilated). A fact of which the US (at least) was well aware.
[QUOTE=Wiki]
Allied forces continued to kill Japanese personnel who were attempting to surrender throughout the war.[37] It is likely that more Japanese soldiers would have surrendered if they had not believed that they would be killed by the Allies while trying to do so.[2] Fear of being killed after surrendering was one of the main factors which influenced Japanese troops to fight to the death, and a** wartime U.S. Office of Wartime Information report stated that it may have been more important than fear of disgrace and a desire to die for Japan[**
[/QUOTE]
As for why the difference between Germany and Japan…my own speculation has been that it was a racist element. The Germans were white and the Japanese were not. And vice versa for the Japanese.
There were many POW camps throughout the USA during WWII, and my father was a transportation captain at one of them, responsible for having them transported from the bunkhouse to the agricultural fields in which they worked. They were decently housed and fed, and not worked any harder than a hired field hand would have been. I don’t think they were even held behind a fence. In the case of one in my town, one of the German POWs maintained contact with a local girl that he met, and after he was repatriated, they got married.
http://www.traces.org/germanpows.html
That’s a really good link, with additional links to other sites within.
There was an article a year or two ago about German POWs in Canadian logging camps. The number who returned to Canada after the war and became Canadian citizens was impressive.
There are reports that German POWs in POW camps in the US were treated better by the locals than Black G.I.s assigned to guard them.
I’ve posted this here before, but here it is again. It’s the memoirs of a Afrikakorps veteran who was captured byt the Brits and escaped from them specifically to surrender to the Americans. He talks about his time as a POW in Mississipi, Louisiana, Idaho, and Utah.
Are there any reports of US or British personnel torturing POWs?
I ask because I recently watched a movie in which a WWII-era soldier expressed some moral qualms about the way modern warfare is conducted. His counterpart in the conversation says something to the effect of “I know that sometimes you guys got messy too.”
Your putting the cart before the horse. Japanese would not surrender, preferring death to being taken captive; it was drilled into them from their first days as conscripts through the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors that to be taken prisoner was the most shameful act imaginable. From the first American victory on land at Tenaru River at Guadalcanal, in the aftermath wounded Japanese soldiers greeted their would be saviors with hand grenades and small arms fire when corpsmen went to go to their aid. One side effect of this is that when Japanese did become prisoners, they were often veritable fonts of intelligence information as they had never been told what was expected of them should they become a POW and they were psychologically shattered for having already done the most shameful thing imaginable. Your link is about the mutilation of war dead, quite a different topic altogether and something the Japanese did to Americans as well. E. B. Sledge’s memoirs, which the wiki article uses heavily also describes him and a fellow marine coming upon the body of a marine whose hands and feet had been severed from his body and his penis cut off and inserted in his mouth post mortem.
In many ways, Axis POWs were treated better as POWs by the US Army than they were by their own armies.
There are lots of non-apocryphal stories of German POWs working in Texas, Iowa and other agricultural states who chose to come back after they were repatriated and make their lives here.
Many of them actually gained weight and became healthier as POWs- we had enough food to go around, so we fed the POWs adequately, which wasn’t even the case for their own armies at the time.
While what follows is certainly a violation of Geneva and Hague Conventions on the treatment of prisoners, one could debate the use of the word torture. From Cornelius Ryan’s A Bridge Too Far:
One of the most chilling statistics I ever heard was about Japanese POW camps. Japan went to war in China in 1931. When Japan lost the war in 1945 it had to release all the POWs it had in captivity. The total number of living Chinese POWs after fourteen years of war was fifty-six.
But you can’t just say “Japanese didn’t surrender”. Maybe they surrendered at a lower rate than Germans, but many did surrender, and some were executed by American forces. I’m not in a positing to track down cites right now, but can do so if you don’t believe it.