Consider the below an amendment to that post:
To the OP: Is surrendering (as a soldier) an immoral act in your view?
What about the surrender of Singapore in 1945 ?
The still had 80,000 fighting troops
Who’s idea was that?
That would be Arthur Percival, who was a British officer, in command of British and Commonwealth military personnel, and so irrelevant to the legality of surrender by U.S. military personnel.
I’d guess you’d be dramatically wrong.
As @Martin_Hyde has tried to explain, it’s part of U.S. military culture. I had the Code of Conduct drilled into me throughout my Initial Entry Training, and again during my Primary Leadership Development Course, and it was just a general background element of Army culture in-between.
I don’t think anyone in extremis is actually making a considered, carefully weighed, rational choice between death or prison. But having a formal Code of Conduct that explicitly emphasizes that U.S. Soldiers* don’t surrender is a significant element of establishing clear expectations and cultural norms.
And, again, historical reporting seems pretty clear that General King did consciously consider that his decision to surrender his command would result in his court martial, and that factor did apparently weigh on him. Of course, he ultimately did decide to surrender his command, and there didn’t actually seem to be any serious consideration of subjecting him to a court martial, but that cultural norm backed by legal sanction really was a factor.
*I was a Soldier, so I’m speaking directly to U.S. Army culture which I personally experienced, but of course the Code of Conduct also applies to and is part of the military culture of Sailors, Marines, Airmen, Coast Guardsmen, and Guardians.
Ops! Sorry missed that bit
It is an act which is wrong according to the ethos which the military attempts to instill in soldiers. That is the GQ extent to which that question can be answered. Its standing according to some hypothetical absolute morality, or whether the military should attempt to instill that ethos, are questions for Great Debates.
And I disagree with your representation of military culture. Servicemembers, including soldiers, do surrender and have surrendered when further resistance would be pointless.
I’m honestly not sure what to do with that. I’ve never contended that U.S. military members have never surrendered - clearly, factually, they have, and I’ve even specifically cited cases. My personal first hand, lived experience of U.S. Army culture included a deeply ingrained norm that U.S. Soldiers don’t surrender. Of course that norm gets violated in extremis. That doesn’t mean the norm doesn’t exist.
If your experience of U.S. military culture was different, or if you have authoritative cites on U.S. military culture that differ from my personal experience, well, ok, it’s a big military. It’s possible that the norms I lived with weren’t universal.
But just citing cases of surrender doesn’t disprove the existence of cultural norms against it.
Well, we know that literally tens of thousands of US soldiers have surrendered throughout US history.
I have asked twice and so far have seen zero examples of a US soldier being prosecuted for surrendering. There are probably some but it would seem rare.
So, despite what the military instilled in you, they don’t really seem to back it up. For some reason they are not acting on their own regulations in this case.
Cultural norms are not laws. Societal norms can guide the enforcement of laws, but the culture within any particular organisation has little to no bearing on legality.
Here in Australia we are undergoing a very painful and public examination of exactly this problem. The cultural norms within certain groups serving in Afghanistan and their behaviour has become public. Some serving members have been prosecuted, and there has been a large and public fallout that is ongoing. This group’s cultural norms of behaviour within the armed services was way past legal. They are judged not just on the basis of the laws and regulations in force, but under the societal expectations of the country they serve.
In a very real way they have brought shame on themselves and their service.
As I noted above, - there appears to be no universal prohibition on surrender in the US. There is a prohibition of shameful surrender, and other shameful abrogations of trust or responsibility. I find it odd that a lot of the discussion seems to simply ignore the actual wording. Perhaps cherry picking words to meet a preconceived idea of that the rules should be, rather than addressing what they actually are.
It doesn’t matter if there is some sort of ingrained cultural norm in the US service that suggests surrender should not occur. You can’t be charged with violating a cultural norm. It isn’t a legal instrument.
To give another example to try to re-emphasize the point that this is part of culture building, the U.S. military, particularly the various infantry forces of the different service branches, have an ethos of “never leave a fallen comrade behind.” This is a very serious part of infantry ethos and esprit de corps. There are many, many examples I can point to from actual history, within the last 20 years and throughout the prior 100 years, where men have given their lives trying to live up to this ethos. Sometimes in situations where it was probably deeply unwise.
None of this is to say no one has ever left behind–in fact thousands of men have been. There are circumstances where anything else is impossible.
It’s also worth noting that adherence to this principle is part of the reason we have small teams that have literally been combing the various islands of the Pacific Theater for 75 years looking for remains of lost American servicemembers, that vast majority still out there have few or no living relatives that ever knew them personally, but the military continues trying to bring them home.
There’s both a cultural norm against surrender as well as actual, codified military law. So I’m not sure why you would say it isn’t a legal instrument. I would say the reason it is both a cultural norm and a law – unlike for example the ethos of “never leave a fallen comrade behind” (which I do not believe is codified in law at all), is there are actually imaginable surrender scenarios where you would actually want to punish the officer who gave the order after the fact. For example if they surrendered in a situation where it was manifestly unnecessary, and where it put surrounding units at grave risk etc. I’m not familiar with cases of this happening, but I think there’s obvious reasons you want to have it written down that such behavior can be punished.
Again, here is the code of the U.S. Fighting Force:
Again, that Code was issued under Executive Order 10631, which means it is in fact a binding lawful order on all U.S. military personnel. That phrasing does seem to allow someone in command to surrender their forces if they lack the means to resist, but there’s no mention of “shameful”, and the prohibition on surrender “of my own free will” is absolute.
Now, whether anyone has actually ever been prosecuted for violating the Code of Conduct is another question, and I’m not aware of any such prosecutions. So it may well be that effectively it isn’t really a legal bar. But it does exist.
This is my point. Or course there are conditions where surrender is against military law. What there is not is a universal prohibition.
A lawful order is not quite the same thing as law. Escalating the code of conduct to the level of law is not a given.
Herein lies the question. The code isn’t law. It is contained within a lawful order, and seems to have never been used to prosecute anyone. Right now, I think anyone looking at answering the OP would conclude that surrender is not universally prohibited.
So what would be the difference between “captured”, and “surrender”? If you’re conscious, you can continue resisting regardless of other circumstances. If you’re alone, injured, out of ammunition, and a dozen enemies suddenly surround you, do you have to charge them with a knife knowing you’re going to get shot long before you can reach them, or can you give up at that point? And why is that not surrendering?
And even then, huge numbers of French soldiers disregarded the order and continued to fight throughout the war. When the war ended, no one put them on trial.
Agreed.
I think that’s fair enough.
But I still object to your contention “that a lot of the discussion seems to simply ignore the actual wording. Perhaps cherry picking words to meet a preconceived idea of that the rules should be, rather than addressing what they actually are.”
I think you’re reading a lot into the word “shameful” in the UCMJ. I also find your position strange, no laws are “universal” and the question was not about universal laws. The question of the OP was when can a U.S. soldier disobey an order to surrender. There is no real legitimacy to an order to surrender under U.S. military law. There are situations where surrendering may not be punished, but there is not, AFAIK, any situation where if you continue to fight you would be punished. For example any U.S. service members in the Philippines who had refused King’s general surrender and melted into the wilderness to fight a guerrilla war, would face zero legal consequence–they had not disobeyed any valid order, and in fact were upholding general code to continue fighting.
I made pains to mention earlier in the thread–a strategic or tactical withdrawal is not the same thing as surrendering. Disobeying a withdrawal order would be an individual soldier assuming for themselves strategic/tactical command authority higher than that of the officers above them in the chain of command. That is not legal.
That would be surrendering. As @Francis_Vaughan has pointed out, surrendering under those conditions wouldn’t constitute a direct violation of the UCMJ. By a strict reading of the Code of Conduct, it would actually be a violation of Article II. But I can’t imagine anyone would actually be prosecuted for surrendering under the conditions in your hypothetical.