I’m curious if the British tortured captured American POWs (or perhaps captured spies) during the Revolutionary War and/or 1812? How about the Americans torturing captured British during those same wars? What about the two sides of the Civil War in the US? Did they torture each other at POW camps? Or was letting them rot/starve to death in disease-filled and under-resourced camps enough torture on its own?
The ancestor of a restaurant owner, a Confederate, was hanged by his heels and questioned. The descendant has a picture of Abraham Lincoln hanging upside down in the dining area.
Yes, captured soldiers have been tortured and abused in virtually every major war of note. However even back in the 18th century there were “laws of war” and certain concepts of civility and appropriate behavior. How often were these followed? “It depends.” The typical way Americans and British treated captured enemy combatants during the Revolution was imprisoning them, the British frequently made use of brig ships. Conditions for POWs were poor because the logistics of it were not great and each side predictably was going to put far more effort into supplying and caring for its own soldiers than captured enemies. The crowded conditions and endemic diseases of the era often made being a captured combatant a high likelihood of contracting a serious illness.
Why would they? If nothing else, there is self-preservation: if you torture soldiers from the other side, then you can expect to have the same treatment if you get captured.
Here’s what the King’s Articles of War for the Royal Navy said in 1749; haven’t been able to find contemporary Articles for the Army:
I think the Army Act of 1955 replaced that. A very quick skim of that PDF did not specifically mention how to treat prisoners of war other than referring to other laws relating to prisoners.
Lets not forget Andersonville
One major difference is that back in those days, prisoners were expected to be cared for by their own side. In other words, British soldiers held prisoner by the Americans were expected to have their food and supplies provided by the British, and American prisoners held by the British were expected to have their supplies paid for by Americans. Washington was having enough trouble feeding his own armies let alone providing for his men who had been taken prisoner, and adding to the troubles was the fact that the American army hadn’t really taken the time to set up proper procedures and supply chains to handle the proper care of Americans taken prisoner.
The prison ships that @Martin_Hyde mentioned were brutal, but while those conditions would be considered torture today, they weren’t intentionally torturing the prisoners. It was more about lack of supplies and neglect than intentional torture. Sick prisoners were transferred to medical ships, though in practice, with medicine and supplies being extremely scarce, a medical ship was only a medical ship in name. There weren’t any medical supplies on many of these so-called medical ships, so for all practical purposes it was just another ship.
In many of these prison ships, prisoners only had about a 1 in 3 chance of surviving to the end of the war, which gives you a good idea of how bad the conditions were on these ships.
POW systems were much less formal during the Revolutionary War. Part of this was, as I already mentioned, that Washington’s army simply hadn’t prepared for it, but part of it was that if the British adopted the formal treatment of prisoners that was usually reserved for wars with other countries, this basically admitted that the U.S. was a country and wasn’t a bunch of rebellious traitors. On the other hand, executing all prisoners as traitors was seen to be as unusually harsh. The British government kinda went “meh, we want no part of this argument”, and left it up to the local military folks to figure out what to do. With no uniform guidance from the folks in charge, conditions and the treatment of prisoners in individual camps varied greatly.
Officers received much better treatment than grunts. In those days, officers were generally free to roam around, and would often head the efforts to organize and feed their soldiers who were being held captive. Officers were expected to behave like proper gentlemen, but many would take advantage of their position and influence to help their men escape. Again, the issue of whether the U.S. was a country or not crept into the treatment of officers, and Britain initially threatened to treat all officers as any other traitor. The Americans then threatened to do the same to British officers. The British and the Americans never truly came to an agreement over the issue, so the treatment of officers did vary quite a bit in different locations.
The Americans didn’t have enough resources to hold and guard prisoners, so many prisoners were sent to different areas to provide labor for farms. The prisoners often got paid for their work, and since these weren’t prison camps, the prisoners also often escaped and either rejoined their own side or just said screw it and went somewhere else to live in peace. POWs were also allowed to switch sides and enlist int he enemy’s army. Some ended up being loyal after the switch, but others simply took advantage of this as a loophole and once they had the opportunity they escaped and rejoined their original side.
In the Civil War, things were much different. Initially they followed the European parole system, where prisoners were exchanged and put on “parole”. A soldier on parole could not rejoin his unit and fight until a soldier on the other side was also paroled, then both could rejoin their units and resume fighting. Prisoners were handled using this system because neither side was set up to handle large numbers of prisoners, and this system had been proven to work in Europe and elsewhere.
The parole system broke down in the middle of the war, due mostly to the Confederates refusing to treat black prisoners as equal to white prisoners. Both sides quickly ended up with more prisoners than they could handle. Conditions in the camps were notoriously bad.
In the Civil War, the North paid to feed Confederate soldiers that they had taken prisoner, and the South paid to feed Union soldiers that they had taken prisoner, so the Revolutionary War practice of each side caring for its own was no longer in effect.
As they say, the victors get to write the history books, so Andersonville in the South often gets tossed out as the prime example of poor prison conditions during the Civil War. But the North had Camp Douglas in Chicago and Elmira Prison in New York State that both had similarly poor conditions. Andersonville received a lot of press after the Civil War. The Union camps did not.
Torture was officially forbidden in both wars. Despite the rules against it, torture did happen on numerous occasions, and those who committed the torture usually got away with it, especially during the Revolutionary War since soldiers could be treated as traitors and not POWs, which meant that the captured soldiers could be tortured and killed as traitors. Most soldiers were not intentionally tortured, though. They were just subjected to truly horrible conditions.
As I understood the Andersonville conditions, much of it was a lack of supplies and manpower to handle the volume of prisoners they had. Toward the end of the war, the situation in the south was disorganized and resources were in short supply. The choice was to crowd even more people into the existing facility, sickness and all, or build more facilities. The Confederates did not have the time, money, manpower, or priorities to build more prison camps or any hospitals. Or even to build proper water supply let alone enough food.
I believe the Brits would hang their seamen for doing that. I don’t know about the British Army, but I would suspect they would have been quite displeased.
Apparently US troops did something like waterboarding during the Spanish-American War
Not that I think only the US did, or that it only happened in that conflict. My point is that this has been around a very long time, even though it has officially been banned:
This courtesy wasn’t usually extended when the enemy was non white.
Considering most often the wars were between different European countries, the odds a common foot soldier spoke the other side’s language well enough to be a useful soldier must have been close to nil. Then once the weapons became fancier than the bow or spear, a certain amount of training would be required (i.e. the musket line drill) Even archers required a certain amount of skill and tactical knowledge which may have varied between armies. Torture abolished in England in 1640 makes me wonder if that was a Puritan Christian thing? Why did Europe within a century or so suddenly discover that torture was not acceptable?
George Washington on the subject of the abuse and torture of prisoners captured by his army:
“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any [prisoner]. . . I do most earnestly enjoin you to bring him to such severe and exemplary punishment as the enormity of the crime may require. Should it extend to death itself, it will not be disproportional to its guilt at such a time and in such a cause… for by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”
From
https://theowlsnest-pg.blogspot.com/2014/08/george-washington-on-torture-and-abuse.html
Probably for volunteering to switch sides but if I recall correctly they didn’t have much problem pressing foreign sailers into service by force. I imagine other navies of the time might have pressed captured British sailers into service as well.
The British and the French would gladly take an enemy crewman, and hang one of their guys who switched sides if they caught him.
The British had an empire to protect by sea and badly needed crews, and some of the Americans they impressed actually were British.
Torture was forbidden from the Code of Justinian onwards and even before that was looked at dubiously.
Torturing needed a warrant in the Middle Ages.