When I was young I remember my friend’s father refused to have Hogan’s Heros on. The television was switched off. He was a Scotsman, served in a Lancaster, and had mates who were incarcerated in German POW camps. There was nothing pleasant about their experience.
I guess we tend to hear about the bad camps and not much about the more benign places.
When I was hitchhiking through Europe 40 years ago a guy picked us up (two American chicks, one Jewish) and, when he found out we were from Oklahoma, he said he knew Oklahoma, having been a POW there during the war. (We did not even know there were POW camps in Oklahoma.) He kept saying “Oklahoma!” and asked us to sing the state song. We both got a little nervous thinking at that point he was going to take us out into the wood and shoot us because we were from the state where he was incarcerated as a POW and also he must be a nazi. But instead he took us to his house, introduced us to his wife, who cooked us a fine German meal, and then he invited us to spend the night in their guest room. (We had to sing “Oklahoma” for the wife, too.)
I gather he that he had a good POW experience or else he was a very forgiving person. He said he was there for 10 months and really enjoyed meeting some Indians as he and his friends had loved playing cowboys and Indians as boys. (Another surprise. I never pictured German kids playing cowboys & Indians.)
There’s a sad story in Bill Bryson’s book on Australia, concerning a POW camp near a small country town in New South Wales, housing some two thousand Japanese prisoners. They were miserable and ashamed for committing the disgraceful act of letting themselves be taken prisoner: these guys, reportedly, refused to co-operate with their captors in any way, and spent much time devising hopeless rebellion / escape schemes, in an attempt to – in their eyes – redeem themselves just a little bit. In August 1944, over a thousand of them attempted a mass breakout by night, taking the guards by surprise: 378 got out – hard to tell what they hoped to accomplish, beyond inconveniencing the enemy. It took nine days to round them all up – in the course of the whole exploit, 231 Japanese were killed and 112 wounded. I find it hard not to feel sorry for the poor misguided so-and-so’s – whatever evil many of them may have committed pre-capture.
Germans have long been great fans of the Wild West and all things to do with it. The Western tales by the author Karl May, who was writing I think a century-plus ago, enthralled generations of German juveniles.
Surprisingly enough, westerns were a huge hit in pre-war Germany. Karl May was a best-selling author whose main genre was westerns (despite the fact he never visited America until late in his life).
eta: Cowboy ninja’d.
The American Southwest is a popular vacation destination for Germans even today. I doubt you could swing a cat by the tail at the Grand Canyon in the summertime and not hit a German.
But who denies that segregation existed? And how’s it relevant to the question in the OP?
In general, German and Italian POWs would have a ok treatment as POWs once installed in camps in Great Britain or the US/Canada. The would be expected to work, and would in return be often surprisingly laxly guarded. Especially this was true in the North Africa theater, perhaps the most “civil” of the fronts during WWII. I believe it was Rommel who described the war in North Africa as “Krieg ohne hass” - war without hate.
However, towards the end of the war, the German POWs who where held in American, British, and particularily French POW camps on German or previously occupied soil, would routinely be mistreated, especially being crammed into overflowing camps, and often without any medical care, housing, blankets or even food and water. For many this situation lasted for months, with many thousands of POWs dying in these camps.
This was probably a combination of an increased level of cruelty by Allied troops exposed to much horror and grisly stories as more and more German atrocities came to light, as well as the sheer numbers of POWs (about 4-5 million i believe on the Western Front after the armistice) simply overwhelming the Allied forces.
So, in the West at least, Axis POWs would be fairly well treated once in camps, until towards the end of the war, when the whole continent made a decent into chaos and barbarism. (This is not to say there wasn’t plenty of both during the war as well, of course, but except in areas with active fighting, there was a semblance of ordrer) I would recommend Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent as an excellent source for this, as well as all the other post-WWII barbarisms that engulfed Europe following the war.
As a side note, there were a small number of German POWs who escaped from prison camp in the United States in WWII. One man, Georg Gärtner, was able to evade capture for 40 years until he turned himself in. Interesting story.
A long told joke/story that is doubtless apocryphal does give an indication of some of they way things were, at least in the working fields.
A man is driving through Texas, he is in an area where POWs are being used to harvest fields, as most of the farmhands are away fighting in the war.
He stops at a field being harvested by Italian POWs, the prisoners are casually harvesting the field, taking breaks, and there is only one guard. The guard is asleep in the truck with his shotgun unloaded.
The man then goes to a field being harvested by German POWs. They are working diligently and there are more guards with loaded shotguns. But they are alert. Sometimes they don’t bother to turn off the truck as the Germans finish harvesting the field quickly and its off to the next field.
The man finally finds a field being harvested by Japanese POWs. There is almost 1 guard per prisoner in the field, and the shotguns are leveled at the prisoners. The prisoners are working slowly because they don’t want to make any sudden moves.
Nothing he posted contradicted what I said. In fact, it reinforces it.
Simply listing the number killed vs captured certainly doesn’t prove that some of those “killed” actually had surrendered. There are first hand accounts of troops killing Japanese who had been captured-- sometimes by the troops on their own and sometimes under orders.
There is a reason we say that “war is hell”, and this is one of them. It should be no surprise that this happens in pretty much all wars, and especially all-out warfare like WWII.
What I meant was that the Japanese had no easy way of dealing with taking American prisoners.
The reasons for this were the (increasingly) overwhelming American naval strength, which left each Japanese-held island outpost attacked more or less on its own, except for infrequent and furtive resupply by submarines or fast destroyers.
If the Japanese took American prisoners, they had no way of removing them from their islands to POW camps, no way of keeping them prisioner on their islands, and they often had insufficient food for themselves, let alone prisioners.
So, the Japanese were unlikely to take Americans prisioner when they overran US positions - except for immediate interrogation (if there were English-speaking Japanese interrogators handy).
The situation was not symmeticial - obviously, the Americans could easily feed, guard and transport Japanese POWs, if they took any. Put it appears a rule of thumb in warfare that if soldiers are not likely to be taken prisioner by the enemy, they are unwilling to extend the same courtesy to that same enemy. Hence, such battles were likely to be ‘to the death’.
The wikipedia article is a good read.
Actually, I’m Black, so it’s equal degrees of amusing and pathetic for a White Southerner to tell me that they have more “Black” anything than I do. Are you next going to tell how racism has affected you personally?Or better…. are you going to recount a teary-eyed reminiscence of your Best Black Friend (BBF) who stood by you through “thick and thin?”
I like those.
I only hear about 1-3 of them daily.
The most interesting point is that the hatred that led to no prisioners being taken was very much a “bottom up” phenominon - that is, the US powers that be made efforts to get more prisioners taken, efforts which were resisted by the soldiers ‘in the field’. It was not a case of official US policy in action (US policy was all in favour of taking prisioners), but rather one of the intense brutality of the battlefield creating a culture ‘in the field’ in which prisoners were unlikely to be taken.
Racial hatred certainly played its part, but I think just as significant were more personal issues - namely, that US soldiers believed, with justification, that the enemy they were fighting would not take them prisioner if they were overrun (or if they did, they would be treated very badly), and episodes of ‘false surrender’ made even the attempt to take Japanese soldiers prisioner hazardous. Under such conditions, it isn’t surprising that soldiers would prefer to kill rather than take surrenders - even though such behaviour is, of course, self-defeating (in that an enemy that cannot surrender has no choice but to fight to the death).
Add to that the brutalization of intense combat, and you get an exceptionally brutal war.
The UK had a series of prison called Cagesthat German POWs were sent to if it was thought they had valuable intelligence. There they were tortured for the information and most of them were executed afterwards.
Did any POWs die as a result of being in a transport ship that was sunk by their side?
This happened on numerous occasions, for instance:
I never said that this didn’t occur; however dismissing the actual casualty figures as ‘simply listing killed vs captured’ and saying it doesn’t prove some of those “killed” had actually surrendered is most certainly not a solid basis upon which to lay the claim that, in your words, “many Japanese surrendered” and that “[m]aybe they surrendered at a lower rate than Germans” when the simple fact of the matter is that they had been indoctrinated to believe death was preferable to capture and that they were *expected *to commit suicide before allowing the shame of becoming prisoner. If you ever happen to visit Saipan, Laderan Banadero has been known as Suicide Cliff since 1944. It’s where many of the Japanese soldiers and civilians jumped to their death to avoid capture.
If you have the time for a longer read, I’d highly recommend War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John Dower who is quoted in the wiki article (Dower states that in “many instances … Japanese who did become prisoners were killed on the spot or en route to prison compounds.”[74) or Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army for an examination of how the IJA came to this state by bastardising and adapting a code (honorable surrender is in fact allowed in bushido) intended for a warrior caste to the masses; the IJA was in fact noted for how well it treated Russian prisoners in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese leadership was quite serious in the propaganda slogan it drummed endlessly into the civilian population from 1944 on: ichioku gyokusai, literally 100 million shattered jewels, figuratively 100 million die together. They were quite prepared for Japan to commit national suicide before surrendering.
It’s really a broader question: How many POWs were killed by friendly fire?
I can find other examples of one side attacking the transport of their enemy side, which happened to be transferring POWs at the time. For instance:
Other than attacking transport, I keep thinking there must have been examples of POWs killed in camp by indiscriminate bombardment… but I can only find one example, based on a fairly extreme situation:
With all the area bombing (particular firebombing), I would have thought POW camps would have been more commonly affected, but I can’t find much obvious evidence.