He died in Toronto about 5 years ago - he survived the PoW camp and emmigrated to Canada in the 1950s.
The only person still alive who would know his story is my Dad - who wasn’t there, of course, but who did know him and his brother (my Grandfather) pretty well.
If you’re interested, I can ask my Dad next time I call Scotland - I only talk to him occasionally since I don’t live there at the moment - I live, er, at exit 10 
I’ve been told that the men who know certain codes have orders to shoot themselves rather than be captured.
Soldiers are not allowed to surrender. Leaders are not allowed to order their men to surrender. So long as they have the ability, soldiers must repel or resist the enemy.
Now when you run out of ammunition, are taken by surprise, or are otherwise overran to the point where you have no ability to effectively engage the enemy, then you are “captured”. Semantics? Maybe. But that’s how they teach it at SERE. Surrendering is illegal, getting captured isn’t.
Similarly, we never retreat, but may “fall back” from time to time.
When I was in the Navy my job was as a Damage Controlman. In a fire I was the first guy in the door with the fire hose. If there was a huge engine room fire I was probably toast.
Ah the bravery of youth.
“You are charged with running away from the enemy and looking for a safe place to hide.”
“I prefer to think I was advancing to a defensive position in the line of the enemy attack.”
Suppose a commander decided to emulate the Japanese “special” attacks of 1945 and ordered pilots to fly their planes into enemy ships. Would that be a valid order the pilots would have to obey?
The Armed Forces Code of Conduct puts it this way:
(It does go on to say that if that happens, we are still to make every attempt to resist and escape)
That language squares with “you don’t surrender, you get captured” when applied to the individual fighter, but seems to contemplate as real the notion of a command (squad, batallion, entire Army Group) becoming compelled to surrender and actually calls it “surrender”. As quoted above, the UCMJ considers it a crime to “shamefully surrender”, without defining “shamefully”(*). I believe that what happens with such surrenders is that afterwards (once the captured personnel are back among their own, and provided that their country is still in a position to exert authority over them), a Board of Inquiry is convened to determine if the CO indeed did exhaust all the possibilities for resistance or if his own command mistakes caused an avoidable defeat/capture (e.g. USS Pueblo case).
[sub](*sort of reminiscent of the elliptical language in old sodomy statutes *…“the abominable crime against nature”… * OK, does that mean there’s such a thing as an aesthetically pleasing crime against nature? 
But seriously, if there’s no situation where one can surrender with dignity, wars will be hella tougher, longer and bloodier… )[/sub]
One of the things that has not been stated here is that currently, a risk assessment must be done before any operation or mission is undertaken. Every NCO is instructed in how to do a proper risk assessment. The NCO must weigh the necessity of the mission against the possibility of casualties. I am not saying in the height of battle that the Command is conducting a minute by minute and play by play risk assessment, but one is done before the mission and most risk factors (such as the likelyhood of encountering the enemy) are taken into consideration. For an essential mission, there may be a higher risk allowed, for a non-essential mission, the acceptable risk will be much lower. Orders are given based upon this matrix.
In short, a truly suicidal mission would probably not have an acceptable level of risk in the planning, in the conduct, maybe.
SSG Schwartz
Valid and legal order, yes.
I can’t imagine a circumstance where a pilot would be ordered to do ‘special’ kamikaze-style attacks with a $30million+ warplane, though. If it was less than a ‘do this or everyone dies’ situation, I would imagine the commander who gave the order would at the very least be cashiered, if not court-martialed and sent to prison. And I would imagine, depending on the situation of course, if a pilot refused that order and it was less than a ‘everyone dies if we don’t do this’ situation, then he would likely be forgiven for refusing the order.
Courts Martial are tough judges, but they are usually a jury of mixed enlisted and officers, as well as a senior officer sitting as judge. They’re not generally fools, and nearly always have field experience themselves in command positions.
You’re right about the risk assessment, but that’s for formally planned operations. During the heat of combat, orders may be given without a full risk assessment, and those orders could result in death of individual soldiers - to protect the larger element, to protect civilians or even to just accomplish the mission. In spite of the risk to individual soldiers, it would be legal to give these orders and refusal to follow said orders would be dealt with most harshly.
In short - soldiers don’t get to decide when to follow orders based on risk of death or injury to themselves or others, only based on legality of those orders.
I wonder how this compares with other countries’ militaries. I knew a Dutch guy who said he’d been in the army, and they had the right to refuse an order if they thought it was unreasonable.
It should be noted that different standards apply for different circumstances as well. An officer giving an order that would risk the life of another with no great overriding reason would likely be refused and the enlisted man would have avenues of appeal - if nothing else, he could go to his ranking NCO and complain, and the NCO could escalate over the officer giving the order.
In the Air Force, we had safety standards that applied during non-combat operations that were different from combat ops; if an officer ordered us to violate peacetime non-combat safety regulations, we were authorized to refuse. But if in combat situations, we did not have the right to refuse solely based on risk to ourselves. It’s a different set of rules for wartime / combat situations. In combat especially, or in situations such as when at sea or other life-and-death situations, a high level of risk or even a guarantee of death is not enough reason to refuse an order legally given.
I’m not a military lawyer, but as a former Navy officer, I do not believe that such orders would be lawful in the U.S. military.
In practice, there have been incidences when people have taken such action on their own initiative, but I do not believe that they could have lawfully been ordered to do so.
For example, IIRC, a U.S. Navy officer in WWII voluntarily went down with his submarine to avoid being captured, due to his knowledge of pending strategic operations.
Just a quick question. Say I, (hypothetical) Spc KJC, along with 2Lt Someguy are trapped in a soon to be fatal situation. After he orders me to stay and hold the fort while he errr…falls back, is there ever any question posed as to why the 2Lt didn’t offer to stay behind himself? If somebody has to die does the miltary automaticly value people by rank? What if Maj. Goodbody was a medic and Col. Soandso ordered him to stay behind so he (the Col.) could get the wounded to safety? Would it matter if the wounded then died if it could be assumed the good doctor could have saved their lives if he fell back and the Col. stayed and provided cover?
This is going to be one of those threads of a thousand hypotheticals…
It’s not so much that the military values the lives of higher ranks higher than of subordinates, BUT the higer ranking staff have a duty to see that the operation gets commanded and the mission accomplished AND are the ones with the knowledge of what has to be done. (Of course, asshats placed in command DO end up believing that indeed they and their kind are of a superior caste… see Catch-22))
Now, specifically as to the punk officers in kjckjc’s theoreticals: As mentioned before, if anyone raises the issue before a competent authority, an inquiry after the fact will be conducted as to their actions. If it is determined that the commander deliberately sent men to their deaths to save his own ass out of cowardice in the face of the enemy, or that he negligently abandoned them to their fate and blew the mission, he’ll get courtmartialed and may face anything from loss of career to loss of life. You and I, the junior ranks both officer and enlisted, OTOH, **still ** have to obey a lawful order to make a hopeless last stand or serve as sacrificial decoy. Redress comes after the fact, and if that means posthumously, well, sorry about that.
(BTW, the second kjckjc hypothetical is IMO most unlikely IRL as it would be daft to order your one Medical Corps officer to fall behind to provide cover while there are wounded in the retreating unit: that’s a job for a fighting man (it doesn’t have to be the colonel!), so the hypothetical Col. Soandso’s order would be to deliberately make the retreat – where part of the the objective is to get as much of his unit as he can in a position to eventually get back in the fight – less succesful. He’s toast at the inquiry unless he’s got a doozy of a story.)
See, I know the specifics of the movie, but not the real event. It is my hope that a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine wouldn’t be sent out with chemical-exposure suits instead of radiation-exposure suits (in the movie, the sailors were going into the reactor area with suits designed to protect them from exposure to hazardous chemicals–but not from radiation, they were effectively rain coats and the men suffered severe radiation sickness, burning et cetera), would have a completely incompetent duo in charge of the reactor that remained unaware of what was happening until it was too late and et cetera.
But assuming all of that did happen, I do imagine a U.S. captain would most certainly send a few dozen men in to patch up the reactor–if the option is “lose all my men, the ship–and possibly cause the Soviets to think we have tried to use a nuclear weapon on them” versus “lose a few men and save the crew, possibly the ship, avert international incident” the choice is clear.
It isn’t an ethical decision per se, it’s a matter of duty. You have a duty to not lose your ship, you have a duty to not lose all your men simply to avoid losing a few of them. These are horrible decisions to have to make, but guys who captain ships tend to be very capable men for a reason.
Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a practical “radiation suit.”
Those “rain suits” are intended to protect workers from radioactive contamination (particles of radioactive material). A worker might get contaminated, for example, if sprayed with coolant. When the worker leaves the contaminated area, the anti-contamination clothing (“anti-c’s”) are stripped off of the worker, and the worker would be decontaminated to stop further exposure.
There is no practical way to shield a worker from the type of radiation found in a reactor compartment, however. You can’t wear a suit made of four inches of lead to shield against gammas, for example. Those lead-lined aprons they give you at the dentist’s office would do essentially nothing against a hard gamma flux, nor would a suit made of such material.
His name was John Phillip Cromwell he was awarded the medal of Honor for his actions.
Former Army Captain here.
In a way, yes, the military values people by both rank, AND importance to the mission. In fact, when clearing a chemical environment, the commander has to pick the ‘least mission essential person’ to unmask and breath the air once the area is presumed to be safe, just to make sure it really is safe. While that will often result in the most junior member (or biggest screwup) of the unit, it doesn’t always have to be that way. Sometimes the least mission essential person may be a 2LT who just got there and was on the mission as a learning exercise. You may have a hard time justifying that, though, when you all get back to HQ and the battalion commander asks you why you risked the life of a newly trained officer. But there certainly could be times where a private was deemed more important than a specialist or even higher, based on MOS and your current mission.
I always dreaded that practice, especially when I was a company commander. I’m glad I never had to do that…how hard would it be to order a soldier to demask as the guinea pig…even if he or she survived, you’d have one heck of a mental case going on there, because they’ve now been essentially told by their commander that they are expendable?
As far as regular mission objectives, that’s usually not a consideration, because if you have a tough and potentially very hazardous order to give, I would usually want my best people to execute it, because I know they would have the best chance of succeeding. In reality, in the fog of war, you’d never break it down to “let’s send this guy for a suicide mission.” You evaluate the situation, take account of your capabilities and the enemy position, consult with your NCOs and other officers (if there’s time) and make a decision…then they execute it. There’s usually not time to sit and debate this stuff.
As an aside, when I say the military values people by rank…I mean the “MILITARY.” Big military…the very high brass who deal with numbers and units, not individual soldiers, (except for the subordinate commanders under them.) I found in my time in the Army, that at the Company level and below, and even to a large extent, at the Battalion level, that there is a lot of personal caring for everyone in the unit, and so at that level, there isn’t a thought process of “this person out ranks this other one, so they’re better.”
You deal with your soldiers every day, and the company becomes a family, so there is usually not any valuing of life by rank at that level, unless the leader is a total waste of space.
I recall some years ago reading the story of a group of Australian ex-servicemen trying to force the government to provide them with the usual war pension.
They had been charged and imprisoned in WWII for refusing an order. An inexperienced officer had asked a squad of men to go into some trenches to “clean them out”. An NCO told them not to, that if they met up with any resistance they would be killed. He suggested that the operation be done differently.
The officer had these men arrested and sent another squad who in fact were ambushed and killed in the trenches.