The Geneva Conventions call for prisoners of war to be taken care of and treated humanely, but what is a military supposed to do when it simply, logistically or circumstantially, can’t feed or take care of enemy POWs?
Release the POWs? Then they could easily regroup as a force and pose a military threat to you again in the near future.
Has this situation ever occurred? If so, what was done?
There isn’t an alternative spelled out in law about how to treat POWs humanely. You aren’t going to find the GC suggesting that the prisoners be released or something.
Think of it like tax law: you’re responsible for paying your taxes. If you are incapable of paying your taxes, you have broken the law. You either follow the law or you violate it, and it is your responsibility to follow it, and the IRS doesn’t care that your bank account is empty or why it is that way.
As a practical matter, armies will typically move POWs to a place where they can be secured, which tends to be places where logistics isn’t a problem. Obviously it may be difficult for the 101st Airborne to take care of prisoners while surrounded in the Ardennes, but the same problem doesn’t apply to a prison camp in Kansas.
Not that I’m aware of, but it’s not hard to imagine a situation where this could happen. If the capturing military force is itself facing logistical deprivation, or captures an enemy force significantly larger than itself, then that could make feeding such a group of POWs impractical, especially for an extended period of time.
Traditionally, long before the Geneva Conventions, warring parties had prisoner exchanges, which helped this situation, among other things. During WWII, the Red Cross engineered large prisoner exchanges. One of the reasons conditions for POWs got so bad in the American Civil War was that the prisoner exchanges which took place at the outset broke down part way through, and the Union POW camps as well as the Confederate camps were full to bursting. You hear about Andersonville and so on, but the Union camps were atrocious, too, partially because both sides had more prisoners than they could handle.
There is parole of POWs. Basically you have the POW agree not to take up arms again for the duration of the war or for a set period of time. In return the POW can be released or given other freedoms.
Check out the POW section of the article below.
US military personnel are not supposed to accept parole if captured.
Why did the prisoner exchanges break down?
The Union realized that the war would be won through attrition.
IIRC this sorta situation occurred during the American Civil War.
The South had a POW camp. The prisoners were treated poorly. But that was because they had no supplies and the guards/administration was nearly as bad off as the captives.
The North, OTOH, had a similar POW camp and they treated their captives poorly. Not because of a resource problem but because they could/wanted to.
Long story short, at the end of the Civil War those in charge of Southern camp got tried and hung out to dry. Those in charge of the Northern Camp got off easy peasy.
I believe it happened a lot on the Eastern Front in WWII (where both factions in question did not typically obey the Geneva Conventions).
Interesting, thanks for the info.
This is probably an IMHO question, but I wonder how many soldiers, if paroled after being captured by a particularly heinous enemy (i.e., the Nazis) would actually abide by a promise they made not to take up arms again. Doubtlessly many would break the promise, on the belief that the enemy was so evil that fighting them was more important than keeping one’s word.
In the Civil War, there was parole of prisoners, besides exchange.
I don’t know if it happened in the north, but southern prisoners, released by the union on their honor, were forcibly conscripted again.
This is why we can’t have nice wars.
Richard Shenkman wrote two books that I read while young – “Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of World History,” and “Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History.” I don’t recall which of the two books this excerpt appeared in but I do recall him saying that German forces captured by Americans during World War II suffered so poorly that Eisenhower had them re-classified from POW to a lower classification called DEF – Demilitarized Enemy Forces.
This was a popular history book, not an academic work, so there was not cite on the page itself. There may have been a bibliography, but I don’t remember. In any event, I don’t recall ever reading about that DEF qualification before or since. Not sure how accurate that particular book was, just throwing it out there as a possibility. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable than me can comment on its accuracy.
Another large factor was disagreement concerning exchange of the black soldiers the Union started recruiting in 1863. Jefferson Davis and the confederacy issued a statement that black Union soldiers and Union officers would not be exchanged. Lincoln rescinded the order that allowed exchanges to take place until the Confederates agreed to treat the black soldiers the same as white soldiers. Privately, one might suspect that the Union was also well aware that stopping the prisoner exchanges strangled the Confederate supply of troops more than the Union.
See the third paragraph here. Ken Burns also brought this up in his documentary:
My great-grandfather was released after he was captured at 2nd Bull Run. He was told not to re-engage in the war for six months under penalty of immediate execution if captured again, and told to go to Ohio (rather than home). I have a copy of a letter he wrote to his buddies back in his old unit (Company K, 23rd NY Volunteers), crowing about the girls he was seeing and the good food he was eating. As far as I know, there was no exchange at that time, although later there was a definite pecking order, such as xxx number of privates for a general, etc.
Interesting. But Second Bull Run was in August, 1862. According to the page I linked, Lincoln rescinded the exchanges in June, 1863 after the Confederates refused to exchange soldiers from a black Massachusetts regiment.
That’s a good historical example of one response to the problem of “we can’t care for these POWs according to our Geneva Convention obligations.” Call them something else. (As you say, “Disarmed Enemy Forces”.) That way, we can distribute them to countries that need short-term slave labor to help in reconstruction rather than keeping them in POW camps and trying to manage and care for them ourselves.
I never realized the US had done this before the ad-hoc redefinition of the phrase “enemy combatant” in 2008 to mean “not protected by the Geneva Conventions”.
There were a number of camps on both sides. The only person tried was Henry Wirz, the commander of the Confederate camp at Andersonville, Georgia.
I meant July, 1863.
Great grandfather was lucky. When he was captured, the Rebs wanted to kill him immediately, but an officer had him escorted to the rear. That night, a man was assigned to guard him while it was decided whether or not he would live or die. As my GG talked to the guard, they suddenly realized that they knew each other from when my GG had visited Virginia prior to the war. In the morning, the guard vouched for my GG, who was subsequently released. Come to think of it, I’m lucky as well.