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http://wih.sagepub.com/ War in History http://wih.sagepub.com/content/11/2/148 The online version of this article can be found at:   DOI: 10.1191/0968344504wh291oa 2004 11: 148 War In History Niall Ferguson Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War:     Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com can be found at:

War in History Additional services and information for           http://wih.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts:   http://wih.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions:   http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints:   http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions:   What is This?  - Apr 1, 2004 Version of Record >> at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and PrisonerKilling in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat 1 Niall Ferguson Compared with the First World War, which ended quite quickly once the position of Germany became strategically hopeless, the Second World War proved exceedingly difŽ cult to end even after the overwhelming economic advantage of the Allied powers had turned the strategic tide decisively against the Axis. Both German and Japanese forces continued to Ž ght tenaciously long after any realistic chance of victory had disappeared. Part of the explanation lies in the extremely violent battleŽ eld culture that developed in two key theatres of the war, which deterred soldiers from sur- rendering, even when they found themselves in hopeless situations. This cul- ture had its origins on the Western Front during the First World War. But in the Second World War it became ofŽ cial policy on both sides, not only on the Eastern Front but in the PaciŽ c theatre as well. Only when the Allied authorities adopted techniques of psychological warfare designed to encour- age rather than discourage surrender did German and Japanese resistance end.

‘ P ochemu ? Why did you continue to Ž ght?’ This was the question one Red Army ofŽ cer asked of a German commander after accepting his surrender in May 1945.

2 This article seeks to answer that question by sketching a hypothesis about the dynamics of military defeat, and in particular the phenomenon of surrender. It seeks to explain why it proved so difŽ cult to end the Second World War, even after the overwhelming economic advantage of the Allied powers had turned 1 The article was originally given as a lecture for the Second World War Experience Centre at the State Apartments, Royal Hospital, Chelsea, on 17 October 2000, and at a seminar at the Harvard History Faculty on 27 November 2001. I would like to thank (inter alia) David Blackbourn, Hugh Cecil, John Keegan, William Kirby, Charles Maier, Ernest May, Roger Owen and the editors of War in Historyfor their comments. I would also like to thank Alex Watson for his assistance with the research.

2 G.H. Bidermann, In Deadly Combat: A German Soldier’s Memoir of the Eastern Front (Lawrence, KS, 2000), p. 291.

War in History 2004 11 (2) 148–192 10.1191/0968344504wh291oaÓ 2004 Arnold at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 149 the strategic tide decisively against the Axis. In particular, it offers a suggestion as to why both Germany and Japan continued to Ž ght so tenaciously – and so lethally – long after any realistic chance of victory had disappeared.A signiŽ cant part of the explanation, it is argued, lies in the extremely violent battleŽ eld culture that developed in two key theatres of the war, which deterred soldiers from surrendering, even when they found themselves in hopeless situations. This culture had its origins on the Western Front during the First World War.

3 But in the Second World War it became ofŽ cial policy on both sides, not only on the Eastern Front but in the PaciŽ c theatre as well. Only when the Allied authorities adopted techniques of psychological warfare designed to encourage rather than discourage surrender did German and Japanese resistance end.

I In common with most combatants in the world wars, my vantage point is that of a fundamentally unheroic individual with minimal military training. Millions of such men all over the world found themselves trying to kill one another between 1914 and 1918, and again between 1939 and 1945. And although the development of artillery in the First World War and aerial bombardment in the Second meant that the majority of military casualties were not victims of ‘face-to-face’ combat, nevertheless infantry engagement, supplemented by tanks and mobile artillery, continued to be of decisive signiŽ cance.

4 For men who fought in the great battles of the mid-twentieth cen- tury, there was a Ž nite number of alternatives – at most Ž ve, a number which grew smaller as the moment of engagement drew closer:

(a) to stay in one’s place, obey orders, Ž ght and risk death; (b) to attempt to ee, that is to desert; (c) to refuse, along with one’s comrades if one could persuade them, to obey orders to engage the enemy, that is to mutiny; (d) to mutilate oneself in the hope of passing off a self-in icted wound as an authentic ‘Blighty’ and getting sent back to a dressing station; or (e) to give oneself up to the enemy, that is to surrender.

Of these, perhaps the most important was option (e) – surrender. This is for a simple reason: when it happens on a sufŽ ciently large scale, surrender is what ends wars. It was a common misconception of the age of total war that victory went to the side that killed the most of the enemy in battle. As Elias 3 N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (London, 1998), ch. 13.

4 For a stimulating if somewhat undifferentiated discussion, see J. Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (London, 1999).

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 150 Niall Ferguson Canetti put it: ‘Each side wants to constitute the larger crowd of living Ž ghters and it wants the opposing side to constitute the largest heap of the dead.’ 5 But if killing the enemy had been the key to victory, the Central Powers would have won the First World War and the Axis Powers the Second (Table 1). Clausewitz, however, knew that the ‘net body count’ is not the key, as he made clear in the fourth book of On War:

Now [it] is known by experience that the losses in physical forces in the course of a battle seldom present a great difference between victor and vanquished respectively, often none at all, sometimes even one bearing an inverse relation to the result, and that the most decisive losses on the side of the vanquished commence only with the retreat.

6 It is in the retreat, Clausewitz pointed out, that soldiers ‘lose their way and fall defenceless into the enemy’s hands, and thus the victory mostly Table 1 The ‘net body count’ in two world wars (millions) First World War Second World War a Allied military deaths 5.411.3 Central Powers/Axis military deaths 4.0 4.6 Difference: the ‘net body count’ 1.46.7 Percentage difference b 35 145 a It should be emphasized that the Ž gures for the Second World War are especially problematic, not least because of the large numbers of quasi-military formations (e.g.

Soviet ‘partisans’, German Volkssturm). As in all wars, a proportion of deaths was due not to enemy action but to disease, accidents and other factors unrelated to enemy action.

However, the propo rtio n was s malle r th an in previo us wars be caus e of i mproved m edic al provis ion.

b The excess of Allied over Axis death tolls expressed as a percentage of the Axis death toll.

Sources : Author’s own calculations based on the Ž gures in J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London 1985), p. 75; R. Overy (ed.), The Times Atlas of the Twentieth Century (London, 1966), pp. 102–5; M. Harrison, ‘The Economics of World War II: An Overview’, pp. 3f., 7f., and ‘The Soviet Union: The Defeated Victor’ in M. Harrison (ed.), The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 268–301, 291; R. Overy, Russia’s War(London, 1977), pp. xvi, 287; J. Erickson, ‘Red Army BattleŽ eld Performance 1941–45: The System and the Soldi- er’, in P. Addison (ed.), Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War in the West, 1939– 1945 (London, 1997), pp. 235f.; R. Overmans, ‘German Historiography, the War Losses and the Prisoners of War’, in G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge and London, 1992), p. 141; J.

Ellis, The World War II Databook: The Essential Facts and Figures for all the Combatants (London, 1995), pp. 253–6.

5 Quoted in C. Coker, War and the 20th Century: The Impact of War on Modern Consciousness (London and Washington, 1994), p. 93.

6 C. von Clausewitz, On War, ed. A. Rappaport (London, 1982 [1832]), p. 309.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 151 gains bodily substance after it is already decided’. This was a paradox he attempted to resolve with his famous emphasis on morale:The loss in physical force is not the only one which the two sides suffer in the course of the combat; the moral forces also are shaken, broken, and go to ruin. It is not only the loss in men, horses and guns, but in order, courage, conŽ dence, cohesion and plan, which come into consideration when it is a question of whether the Ž ght can still be continued or not. It is principally the moral forces which decide here, and in all cases in which the conqueror has lost as heavily as the conquered, it is these alone. . . . In the combat the loss of moral force is the chief cause of the decision.

7 And hence the fact that: The losses in a battle consist more in killed and wounded; those after the battle, more in artillery taken and prisoners. The Ž rst the conqueror shares with the conquered, more or less, but the second not; and for that reason they usually only take place on one side of the con ict, at least they are considerably in excess on one side.[Captured] artillery and prisoners are therefore at all times regarded as the true trophies of victory, as well as its measure, because through these things its extent is declared beyond a doubt.

Even the degree of moral superiority may be better judged of by them than by any other relation, especially if the number of killed and wounded is compared therewith . . . If prisoners and captured guns are those things by which the victory principally gains substance, its true crystallisations, then the plan of the battle should have those things especially in view; the destruction of the enemy by death and wounds appears here merely as the means to an end.

8 A logical inference from this is that enemy troops should be encour- aged to surrender – or, at least, not discouraged from doing so. There were, in any case, humanitarian arguments for not killing those enemies who laid down their arms. The merciful treatment of prisoners of war was widely recognized as a hallmark of civilized nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was one of Napoleon’s maxims that ‘Prisoners of war do not belong to the power for which they have fought; they all are under the safeguard of honour and generosity of the nation that has disarmed them.’ 9 European colonists protested – perhaps rather too much – whenever they encountered customs or prisoner killing among indigenous peoples, whether native Americans or Afghan tribesmen. Before the First World War, prisoner killing was explicitly proscribed by two regulations of 7 Op. cit.

8 Op. cit., pp. 311f.

9 P.G. Tsouras, The Greenhill Dictionary of Military Quotations (London and Mechanicsburg, 2000), p. 379.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 152 Niall Ferguson the Hague Convention. Regulation 23(c) stated that it was forbidden to kill or wound a prisoner who had surrendered by laying down his arms. Regulation 23(d) prohibited the order that no quarter be given.

10 Yet the laws of war can seem very remote to men in battle; there is no right of appeal after a foe decides to ignore Regulation 23(c). The decision to surrender – to become a prisoner – therefore involves weighing up not the terms of the Hague Convention but:

(a) the likelihood of one’s being killed if one continues Ž ghting; (b) the likelihood of one’s being killed by one’s own side if one attempts to surrender; (c) the likelihood of one’s being killed by the enemy if one attempts to surrender; and (d) the differential between the recent quality of life as a Ž ghting sol- dier as compared with the anticipated quality of life as a prisoner, including, the possibility that one might sooner or later be killed.

On the other side, there are the countervailing in uences of (e) disci- pline and (f) aversion to dishonour, the importance of which, relative to naked self-preservation, varies according to the quality of a soldier’s training and the culture of the army he Ž ghts in. The factors that keep men Ž ghting have been neatly summarized by W.L. Hauser as submission, fear, loyalty and pride.

11 Of these, loyalty to the ‘primary group’ – the small unit to which a soldier belongs – is sometimes said to be the most important: men often Ž ght on in desper- ate situations in order not to let their ‘pals’ down, so the argument runs.

12 Wesbrook, on the other hand, has argued that military disinte- gration may have more to do with a failure of loyalty to the bigger entities of regiment, nation, leadership or cause. Men will only Ž ght on if they feel a ‘legitimate demand’ is being made on them to risk their lives.

13 On re ection, these are neither mutually exclusive nor 10 J. Hussey, ‘Kiggell and the Prisoners: Was He Guilty of a War Crime?’, British Army Review (1993), p. 48. These were explicitly incorporated in the British Manual of Military Law . See also H. Fujita, ‘POWs and International Law’, in P. Towle, M.

Kosuge and Y. Kibata (eds), Japanese Prisoners of War(London and New York, 2000), pp. 87–94.

11 W.L. Hauser, ‘The Will to Fight’, in S.C. Sarkesian (ed.), Combat Effectiveness: Cohesion, Stress, and the Volunteer Military (Beverly Hills and London, 1980), pp. 186–211.

12 See, e.g., M. Brewster Smith, ‘Combat Motivations among Ground Troops’, in S.A.

Stouffer et al. (eds), The American Soldier: Combat and its Aftermath (New York, 1965 [1949]), pp. 108f., 136f., and the brilliant case study by M. Janowitz and E. A. Shils, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, in M. Janowitz (ed.), Military Con ict: Essays in the Institutional Analysis of War and Peace (Beverly Hills and London, 1975), pp. 177–220.

13 S.D. Wesbrook, ‘The Potential for Military Disintegration’, in Sarkesian, Combat Effectiveness , esp. pp. 256ff. See also the discussion in S. Labuc, ‘Cultural and Societal Factors in Military Organisation’, in R. Gal and A.D. Mangelsdorff (eds), Handbook of Military Psychology (Chichester, 1991), pp. 471–90, and S. Noy, ‘Combat Stress Reactions’, in Gal and Mangelsdorff, Handbook of Military Psychology,pp. 507–30. The paramount importance of ‘political awareness’ to morale was of course a Soviet axiom: V.V. Shelyag, A.D. Glotochkin and K.K. Platonov, Military Psychology: A Soviet View [Soviet Military Thought, no. 8] (Moscow, 1972), pp. 392f.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 153 wholly sufŽ cient explanations of military resilience. The bonds of the primary group may be an important determinant of morale, but by themselves they cannot explain large-scale military outcomes. Com- radeship within small groups tends to be found in most armies. On the other hand, armies that lack such small-scale solidarity can still continue to Ž ght. When casualties are exceptionally high – as on the Eastern Front after 1941 – primary group identities are hard to sustain.

Yet in that case men on both sides kept Ž ghting. This may partly have been because they felt the causes they were Ž ghting for were legit- imate. But it will be argued here that there were also negative reasons for keeping Ž ghting which had nothing to do with either primary group loyalty or the legitimacy of political demands. The dynamics of defeat can equally well be understood in terms of primary groups and legitimate demands; for most surrenders are part of a collective action by a unit or a whole army, rather than individual actions. It is clearly safer to surrender as a group than to surrender as an individual, and the primary group sometimes was the unit that agreed to enter captivity together. In the same way, surrender can be a re ection of good disci- pline if a large group of men is ordered to lay down its arms by its own commanding ofŽ cer and does so in good order.To illuminate the predicament of the potential captor , it is helpful to imagine a schematized game: instead of the prisoner’s dilemma, the captor’s dilemma. The captor’s dilemma is simple – accept the enemy’s surrender or kill him. The captor has been Ž ghting an opponent who has been trying to kill him, when suddenly the opponent makes as if to surrender. If he is sincere, then the rational thing to do is to accept his surrender and send him back through the lines towards a prisoner of war camp. There are four arguments for doing so, namely the prisoner’s value as:

(a) a source of intelligence; (b) a source of labour; (c) a hostage; and (d) an example to his comrades, if by treating him well you can induce them either to imitate him by giving themselves up too or to recip- rocate by acting mercifully if the tables are subsequently turned.

14 It should be noted, however, that most if not all of these beneŽ ts ow to the captor’s army as a whole and may not be discernible to the individual captor. What are the arguments – on the other side of the captor’s dilemma – against taking prisoners? Here the immediate interests of 14 On the importance of reciprocity rather than international law in Churchill’s repeated interventions to ensure good treatment of German POWs, see B. Moore, ‘Unruly Allies: British Problems with the French Treatment of Axis Prisoners of War, 1943–1945’, War in History VII (2000), pp. 183, 190. Churchill worried that the killing of Italian and German prisoners by the Free French might lead to retaliatory massacres of British POWs in Axis hands.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 154 Niall Ferguson the individual captor come to the fore. One possibility, as we have seen, is that the supposed surrenderer may be blufŽ ng. Accepting sur- render is therefore itself risky. It may also be quite difŽ cult to transport a prisoner back to the lines – in the First World War the British army speciŽ ed a ratio of between one and two escorts to every ten pris- oners 15 – and anyone given this job has to be subtracted from the attacker’s force (which may of course have some appeal for the individ- ual captor). The problem is increased if the man surrendering is wounded and incapable of walking unassisted. The simple solution is obviously to shoot the prisoner and forget about him; had he kept Ž ghting that would have been his fate anyway, and while he was Ž ght- ing he probably in icted casualties on the attacker. This then is the captor’s dilemma: to accept a surrender, with all the personal risks entailed; or to shoot the surrenderer, with the likeli- hood that resistance may be stiffened, thus increasing the risks to one’s own side as a whole. It is important to distinguish here between killing that happened in the heat of battle and more cold-blooded killing – or, indeed, fatal neglect – away from the battleŽ eld. In his Middle Parts of Fortune , a thinly Ž ctionalized memoir of the battles of the Somme and Ancre, Frederic Manning vividly captures the experience of killing surren- dering men when the ‘blood is up’. Almost deranged by his young friend Martlow’s death, the hero Bourne runs amok in the German lines:

Three men ran towards them, holding their hands up and scream- ing; and he lifted his ri e to his shoulder and Ž red; and the ache in him became a consuming hate that Ž lled him with exultant cruelty, and he Ž red again, and again . . . And Bourne struggled forward again, panting, and muttering in a suffocated voice.‘Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!’ 16 Such things happen in most wars. As George S. Patton succinctly put it: ‘Troops heated with battle are not safe custodians.’ 17 Winston Churchill implied as much when he sardonically deŽ ned a prisoner of war as ‘a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him’.

18 It is hardly surprising that during or immediately after intense Ž ghting such requests often go unheeded. Nevertheless, there has been con- siderable variation between different armies, as well as within armies, in the readiness of troops to kill surrendering men or newly taken prisoners, as well as in the readiness of commanders to condone such behaviour. There has also been a great deal of difference in the way 15 Hussey, ‘Kiggell and the Prisoners’, p. 47. Cf. G. ShefŽ eld, The Redcaps: A History of the Royal Military Police and its Antecedents from the Middle Ages to the Gulf War (London and New York, 1994), p. 56.

16 F. Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune (London, 2000 [1929]), pp. 216f.

17 Tsouras, Greenhill Dictionary , p. 380.

18 Op. cit.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 155 prisoners have been treated by those in charge of POW transports and camps. Decisions to surrender were clearly in uenced by expectations of treatment in enemy hands at every stage of the process of capture and internment. To understand why some armies surrendered before others therefore requires knowledge of how those expectations were formed.It goes without saying that we must proceed with caution when apply- ing to warfare the terminology of economics. Economists are familiar with markets in which goods not Ž re are exchanged, and in which production rather than destruction is the norm. To be sure, soldiers – especially the newly trained former civilians who fought the world wars – like to say that they are ‘doing a job’. They are paid for their work and partly incentivized in the usual way (bonuses or promotion for good work). Armies are not so very different from any other public sector utility. The captor’s dilemma outlined above is really just a vari- ation on the familiar ‘agency problem’: the ‘proprietors’, who want prisoners, cannot get their remote ‘agents’ to override their individual self-interest, which is to kill them. The parallel decisions – whether or not to surrender, whether or not to kill the surrenderer – seem like a typical problem from game theory. However, we need to bear in mind a number of peculiarities of the political economy of warfare:

1. military training is designed to promote cooperative behaviour at the expense of individualistic utility maximization; 2. soldiers in combat have abnormally short time horizons – they discount the future steeply; 3. information is very far from being perfect in the ‘fog of war’.

II For those who had not read or who had forgotten their Clausewitz, the First World War provided a colossal reminder that it was capturing not killing the enemy that was decisive. Despite the huge death toll in icted on the Allies by the Germans and their allies, outright victory failed to materialize: demography meant that there were more or less enough new French and British conscripts each year to plug the gaps created by attrition. However, it did prove possible, Ž rst on the Eastern Front and then on the Western, to get the enemy to surrender in such large numbers that his ability to Ž ght was fatally weakened. Thus the large-scale surrenders (and desertions) on the Eastern Front in 1917 were the key to Russia’s military defeat. Overall, more than half of all Russian casualties took the form of men who were taken prisoner – nearly 16% of all Russian troops mobilized. Austria and Italy also lost a large proportion of men in this way: respectively a third and quarter of all casualties. One in four Austrians mobilized ended up a prisoner (see Table 2). The large-scale surrender of Italian troops at Caporetto came close to putting Italy out of the war.

19 19 On Caporetto, see R. Seth, Caporetto: The Scapegoat Battle (London, 1965), esp.

pp. 80–3, 156–9; C. Falls, Caporetto,1917 (London, 1965), pp. 64–9.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 156 Niall Ferguson Table 2Prisoners of war, 1914–1918 Country of Minima Maxima Prisoners as Total Prisoners as origin (POWs c. a percentage mobilized a percentage of POWs Nov. 1918) of totalof total casualties a mobilized a France 446 300 500 000 11.6 8 340 000 5.4 Belgium 10 203 30 000 11.0 365 000 2.8 Italy 530 000 600 000 25.8 5 615 000 9.4 Portugal 12 318 12 318 37.2 100 000 12.3 Britain 170 389 170 389 6.7 6 147 000 2.8 British Empire 21 263 21 263 3.3 198 000 10.7 Romania b 80 000 80 000 17.8 1 000 000 8.0 Serbia 70 423 150 000 14.6 750 000 9.4 Greece c 1 000 1 000 2.1 353 000 0.3 Russia 2 500 000 3 500 000 51.8 15 798 000 15.8 USA 4 480 4 480 1.4 4 273 000 0.1 Total Allies 3 846 376 5 069 450 28.0 45 001 000 8.5 Bulgaria 10 623 10 623 4.2 400 000 2.7 Germany 617 922 1 200 000 9.0 13 200 000 4.7 Austria-Hungary 2 200 000 2 200 000 31.8 9 000 000 24.4 Turkey 250 000 250 000 17.2 2 998 000 8.3 Total Central 3 078 545 3 660 623 19.9 25 598 000 12.0 Powers Total 6 924 921 8 730 073 24.2 70 599 000 9.8 a Percentages calculated using minima.

b Romanian Ž gures are very approximate.

c Greek prisoners Ž gure includes missing, and so probably overstates the number of prisoners.

Sources : War OfŽ ce, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War ,1914 –20 (London, 1922), pp. 237, 352–7; J. Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire (London, 1980), p. 44; J.M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London, 1985), p. 75.

By comparison, surrender rates for the British, French and German armies were low. Around 5% of all Germans and French mobilized ended up as prisoners, and less than 3% of Britons. The low point of British fortunes in the war – from around November 1917 to May 1918 – saw large increases in the numbers of Britons in captivity: in March 1918 alone, around 100 000 British prisoners were taken, more than in all the previous years of Ž ghting combined.

20 In August 1918, however, it was German soldiers who began to give themselves up in 20 R. Garrett, P.O.W.(Newton Abbot and London, 1981), pp. 100f.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 157 large numbers (see Figure 1). Between 30 July 1918 and 21 October, the total number of Germans in British hands rose by a factor of nearly four. This was the real sign that the war was ending.Contemporaries clearly understood the beneŽ ts of taking prisoners alive. A substantial proportion of the British Ž lm The Battle of the Somme consists of footage of captured Germans. OfŽ cial photographers were encouraged to snap ‘wounded and nerve-shattered German pris- oners’ being given drink and cigarettes.

21 Sergeant York’s capture of 132 Germans was one of the highlight s of American war propa- ganda in 1918.

22 Neverthe less, men on both sides on the Western Front were deterred from surrendering by the growth of a culture of ‘take no prisoners’.

23 Despite its illegality, the practice of prisoner killing appears to have evolved more or less spontaneously among front-line troops. In part, it was the product of what would now be called a cycle of violence.

Prisoners might be killed by men eager to avenge slain comrades. In his diary for 16 June 1915, A. Ashurt Moris recorded his own experience of killing a surrendering man:

At this point, I saw a Hun, fairly young, running down the trench, hands in air, looking terriŽ ed, yelling for mercy. I promptly shot him. It was a heavenly sight to see him fall forward. A Lincoln ofŽ cer was furious with me, but the scores we owe wash out anything else.

24 Figure 1 Cumulative total of German prisoners taken by the British in France, four-weekly periods, July 1917 – December 1918.

Source : War OfŽ ce, Statistics of the Military Effort (London,1922), p. 632.

21 See Ferguson, Pity of War, p. 368 and plates 25 to 28.

22 H.C. Fooks, Prisoners of War (Federalsburg, MD, 1924), pp. 97f.

23 Stories about such incidents abounded on both sides and can be found not only in post-war memoirs but also in contemporary letters and dairies. The examples given here are all additional to those cited in Ferguson, Pity of War, ch. 13.

24 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 183.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 158 Niall Ferguson Private Frank Richards of the Royal Welch Fusiliers recalled seeing another man in his regiment walk off down the Menin Road with six prisoners only to return some minutes later having ‘done the trick’ with ‘two bombs’. Richards attributed his action to the fact that ‘the loss of his pal had upset him very much’.

25 Alternatively, prisoners might be killed as revenge for earlier atrocities committed by the other side. There were numerous stories of fake surrenders, in which gullible soldiers were gunned down after responding to a disingenuous white ag or cry of ‘Kamerad’. The vengeful mentality was certainly encour- aged by war propaganda, which made much of the civilian victims of (for example) submarine warfare. In May 1915 the avant-garde sculp- tor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska wrote from the Western Front to Ezra Pound, describing a recent skirmish with the Germans: ‘We also had a handful of prisoners – 10 – & as we had just learnt the loss of the “Lusitania” they were executed with the [ri e] butts after a 10 minutes dissertation [ sic ] among the N.C.[O.] and the men’.

26 This kind of thing also seems to have been encouraged by some commissioned ofŽ cers, who believed the ‘take no prisoners’ order enhanced the aggression and therefore Ž ghting capability of their men. A brigadier was heard by a soldier in the Suffolks to say on the eve of the battle of the Somme: ‘You may take prisoners, but I don’t want to see them.’ Another soldier, in the 17th Highland Light Infantry, recalled the order ‘that no quarter was to be shown to the enemy and no prisoners taken’.

27 Private Arthur Hubbard of the London Scottish also received strict orders not to take prisoners, ‘no matter if wounded’. His ‘Ž rst job’, he recalled, ‘was when I had Ž nished cutting some of the wire away, to empty my magazine on 3 Germans that came out of their deep dugouts, bleeding badly, and put them out of their misery, they cried for mercy, but I had my orders, they had no feelings whatever for us poor chaps’.

28 In his notes ‘from recent Ž ghting’ by II Corps, dated 17 August 1916, General Sir Claud Jacob urged that no prisoners should be taken as they hindered ‘mopping up’.

29 Colonel Frank Maxwell VC ordered his men (the 12th Battalion, the Middlesex Regiment) not to take any prisoners in their attack on Thiepval on 26 September 1916, on the ground that ‘all Germans should be exterminated’.

30 An argument often used was that prisoners would be a burden on those who took them prisoner. Private Frank Bass of the 1st Battalion, Cambridgeshire Regiment, was told by an instructor at E ´ taples:

25 R. Holmes, The Western Front (London, 1999), p. 179.

26 Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska to Ezra Pound, 22 May 1915.

27 Hussey, ‘Kiggell and the Prisoners’, p. 47.

28 M. Brown, in association with the Imperial War Museum, Tommy Goes to War (London, 1999), p. 116.

29 P. GrifŽ th, Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven and London, 1994), p. 72.

30 Op. cit., p. 72.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 159 ‘Remember, boys . . . every prisoner means a day’s rations gone.’ 31 Others offered arguments with almost genocidal overtones. In June 1916 a ‘Major Campbell’ was quoted as follows in the Young Citizen Volunteers’ magazine, The Incinerator : ‘If a fat, juicy Hun cries “Mercy” and speaks of his wife and nine children, give him the point – two inches is enough – and Ž nish him. He is the kind of man to have another nine “Hate” children if you let him off. So run no risks.’ 32 Such incidents occurred in other theatres of war. At Gallipoli in May 1915 Captain Guy Warneford Nightingale of the Royal Munster Fusil- iers and his men ‘took 300 prisoners and could have taken 3000 but we preferred shooting them’.

33 Sometimes this ‘preference’, as we shall see, was simply to avoid the inconvenience of escorting prisoners back to captivity. John Eugene Crombie of the Gordon Highlanders was ordered in April 1917 to bayonet surrendering Germans in a captured trench because it was ‘expedient from a military point of view’.

34 That this kind of thing happened during the First World War was acknowl- edged by senior British ofŽ cers. As Brigadier General F.P. Crozier observed: ‘The British soldier is a kindly fellow and it is safe to say, despite the dope [propaganda], seldom oversteps the mark of propriety in France, save occasionally to kill prisoners he cannot be bothered to escort back to his lines .’ 35 Exactly how often such prisoner killings occurred is impossible to establish. Clearly, only a minority of men who surrendered were killed this way. Equally clearly, not all of those who received (or indeed issued) such orders approved of them or felt able to carry them out.

36 But the numbers involved mattered less than the perception that sur- render was risky. Men magniŽ ed these episodes: they passed into trench mythology. The German trench newspaper Kriegsugbla ¨tter devoted its front page on 29 January 1915 to a cartoon depicting just such an incident. ‘G’meinhuber Michel’ advances on a Tommy (‘Hurra! – Wart, Bazi, di kriag i!’); the Tommy puts his hands up (‘Hat eahm scho . . .’); the Tommy then shoots at the advancing Michel (‘Bluatsakra!!! TeiŽ ! TeiŽ !’); Michel then gets the Tommy by the throat (‘Freindl! Jetzt gehst Maschkera’); he proceeds to beat him to a pulp with his ri e butt (‘Doass muass a englisches Boeffsteck wer’n’); and is duly rewarded with the Iron Cross.

37 The more such stories were repeated, the more reluctant men were to surrender. John Keegan is therefore surely wrong to dismiss prisoner-killing incidents as ‘absol- utely meaningless . . . in “win/lose terms” ’, 38 for future decisions about 31 Brown, Tommy, p. 28.

32 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 182.

33 Op. cit. Bourke cites three other Irish examples on p. 439n.

34 Op. cit., p. 189.

35 Brown, Tommy, p. 73 (emphasis added).

36 Op. cit., pp. 117, 183.

37 Imperial War Museum, Kriegsugbla ¨tter , 29 Jan. 1915.

38 J. Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1993), p. 50.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 160 Niall Ferguson surrender plainly were affected by the belief that the other side were taking no prisoners.Why did German soldiers, who had hitherto been so reluctant to give themselves up, suddenly begin to surrender in their tens of thou- sands in August 1918? The obvious interpretation – following Clause- witz – is that there was a collapse of morale. This was primarily due to the realization among both ofŽ cers and men that the war could not be won. Ludendorff’s spring offensives had worked tactically but failed strategically, and in the process had cost the Germans dear, whereas the Allied offensive of 7–8 August outside Amiens was, as Ludendorff had to admit, ‘the greatest defeat the German Army has suffered since the beginning of the war’. Unrestricted submarine warfare had failed to bring Britain to her knees; occupation of Russian territory after Brest-Litovsk was wasting scarce manpower; Germany’s allies were beginning to crumble; the Americans were massing in France, inex- perienced but well fed and numerous; perhaps most importantly, the British Expeditionary Force had Ž nally learned to combine infantry, artillery, armour and air operations. Simply in terms of numbers of tanks and trucks, the Germans were by now at a hopeless disadvantage in the war of movement they themselves had initiated in the spring.

39 Victory was out of the question, and it was the rapid spread of this view through the German ranks that turned non-victory into defeat, rather than the ‘draw’ Ludendorff appears to have had in mind. In this light, the mass surrenders described above were only part of a general crisis of morale which also manifested itself, as Deist has con- vincingly argued, in unprecedented levels of sickness, indiscipline, shirking and desertion.

40 Yet no matter how hopeless their situation, German soldiers still had to feel they could risk surrendering before the war could end. And that meant that Allied soldiers had to be ready to take prisoners, rather than kill surrenderers. The testimony of Lt R.N.R. Blaker of the 13th (S) Battalion, Ri e Brigade, illustrates how the process worked. On 4 November 1918, during a heavy barrage of German positions at Lou- vignies, Blaker went ahead of his men to scout for enemy machine- gun emplacements. It is worth quoting his account at length, as it does much to illuminate the psychology of both surrender and prisoner taking. He surprised two German lookouts in machine-gun emplace- ment, killing them both. ‘Thereupon’, he recalled:

yells came out of the dug-out and I shouted ‘come out’, and out came Ž ve pretty scared looking Germans with ‘hands up’. I motioned them to go back through the barrage towards our lines, 39 Ferguson, Pity of War, ch. 10.

40 W. Deist, ‘The Military Collapse of the German Empire: The Reality behind the Stab- in-the-Back Myth’, War in Historyi i i (1996), pp. 186–207. See also G.G. Bruntz, Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918 , Hoover War Library Publications no. 13 (Stanford, CA, 1938), pp. 207–21.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 161 and after a slight hesitation, they had to do so. I then went to another likely place on my front and managed to do exactly the same as before to another machine-gun crew.

As dawn broke Blaker then became aware of more ‘enemy heads occasionally peeping out’, and decided ‘to try to get them out of their holes’. Understandably, the Germans were reluctant to come out of their shelters while British shells were still falling, but they seem to have obeyed his orders to lay down their weapons and march towards the British line. Blaker attributed their not shooting him to ‘funk’ induced by the artillery barrage. Encouraged by his success and by the sight of his own men advancing towards him, Blaker now decided on ‘going on a bit and risking it’ and so ‘went [on] disarming and sending back Germans here and there’. Coming up behind a solitary house on the road to Le Quesnoy, however, he came close to over-reaching him- self: I . . . went round to the front, where there was no door, and peeped inside a room which opened into the road and saw there a crowd of Germans, some sitting down and some standing. I don’t know who was more surprised – they or I. Anyway I managed to pull myself together a bit quicker than they did and advanced just under the doorway holding a Mills bomb in my left hand and my revolver in my right, the only thing I could think of to say was ‘Kamerad’, and so I said it, at the same time menacing them with my revolver, they didn’t seem very willing to surrender, so I repeated ‘Kamerad’, and to my surprise and delight they ‘Kameraded’, 2 ofŽ cers and 28 other ranks. My idea is that they were holding some sort of conference, as the barrage was not then reaching them in full force. Both ofŽ cers and three of the other ranks had Iron Cross ribbons on!

Blaker thought of keeping them in the house, but became aware of more Germans outside the house ‘beginning to peep out of dug-outs’, and so decided instead to repeat his earlier tactic of disarming the prisoners and sending them towards his advancing men. Once again the Germans were less ready to risk leaving shelter than they had been to surrender, but Blaker: couldn’t afford to stand any nonsense so off they went. I saw two blown up by a shell but I couldn’t waste much time beyond seeing that the others were actually going the right way, as I was getting a bit anxious about the heads along the road which were peeping up, so I went along collecting them and succeeded without any trouble in getting the road quite clear and collaring two machine-guns and a trench mortar and the crews.

This added a further 25 or 30 to his now very considerable ‘bag’ of captives. One of the last Germans he captured ‘expressed great War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 162 Niall Ferguson surprise’ that the large group in the house had capitulated ‘to me alone’.

41 Five things about this account stand out. First, what began quite ten- tatively soon developed a momentum of its own. Clearly, the German units Blaker had stumbled upon had been close to cracking: his appearance was the catalyst for a collapse, beginning with a few individ- uals and culminating in a large group. Secondly, at least some of those he captured were not raw recruits but seasoned troops, with Ž ve Iron Crosses among them. Thirdly, it is clear that for the Germans there was safety in numbers, because a single English ofŽ cer simply could not gun down more than a handful of Germans. Fourthly, the role of the ofŽ cers was important in legitimizing the decision to surrender and ensuring all complied. Once Blaker had them ‘in the bag’, the rest came quietly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Blaker only shot Germans who reached for their guns; from the outset he spared those who reached for the sky. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he delegated prisoner killing to the artillery by forcing his captives to march through the barrage to the British lines.) Plainly, after a certain point Blaker lacked the means to kill those who surren- dered to him. Had they wished to, the German ofŽ cers could have ordered their men to kill or capture him; he could have shot only a few before being overwhelmed. But the Germans felt sufŽ ciently conŽ dent that they would be well treated to opt instead for surrender. Blaker’s experience was typical of the way the First World War ended. By the last weeks of the war, the German army had reached a point of what natural scientists call ‘self-sustaining criticality’.

42 Quite simply, the arguments against surrender outlined above had been over- whelmed by the arguments in favour of it. In this context, an important role was almost certainly played by the promise of Allied propaganda that Germans would be well treated if they surrendered – indeed, would be better off than they were in the German lines. By 1918 Allied propagandists had come to realize the importance of encouraging enemy troops to give themselves up. Thousands of lea ets had been dropped on the German lines, some of which were little more than advertisements for conditions in the Allies’ prisoner of war camps. The Americans had even devised cheerful cards for surrendering Germans to sign and send to their relatives: ‘Do not worry about me. The war is over for me. I have good food. The American army gives its prisoners the same food it gives its own soldiers: beef, white bread, potatoes, beans, prunes, coffee, butter, tobacco etc.’ 43 In the last three months of the war, food was evidently as enticing a prospect for German troops as the Fourteen Points. How important such tactics were in under- 41 T. Donovan (ed.), The Hazy Red Hell: Fighting Experiences on the Western Front ,1914– 1918 (Staplehurst, 1999), pp. 207–13.

42 For a somewhat popularized introduction, see M. Buchanan, Ubiquity: The Science of History. . . . or, Why the World is Simpler than We Think (London, 2000).

43 Bruntz, Allied Propaganda , p. 112.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 163 mining German morale is not easy to say; but they surely did more to hasten the war’s end than orders to ‘take no prisoners’.

III The numbers of men who ended up being taken prisoner in the Second World War were huge – much larger than in the First (See Table 3). Altogether between 1914 and 1918, as we have seen, some- where between 6.9 and 8.7 million men were held as prisoners of war – around a tenth of the total number of men mobilized, and rather fewer than the 9 or 10 million who were killed or died as a result of the war.

In the Second World War around 96 million people served in the armed forces of all the belligerent states, of whom approximately 35 million – more than a third – spent at least some time in enemy hands.

44 In the case of the German army, virtually every soldier still on active service at the end of the war spent at least some time as one kind of camp inmate or another. However, as we shall see, the overwhelming majority did not become prisoners until after the war was over – after the armistice had been signed and they had been ordered to lay down their arms. Indeed, up until that point the impressive point about the German army was the extreme reluctance of both ofŽ cers and men to surrender. In the Ž rst phase of the war the most spectacular prisoner haul was in France. Here even more than in 1918 the importance of morale in determining defeat was apparent. On paper, the Wehrmacht did not enjoy a decisive superiority over the French army; indeed, in many respects it was the defending force that enjoyed the advantage. Though inferior in the air, the French had twice the number of wheeled vehicles, and 4638 tanks to the Germans’ 4060. Moreover, French tanks had thicker armour and bigger guns.

45 Yet the weakness of French morale was obvious even during the ‘Phoney War’, 46 and when the German offensive was launched, many units put up only token resist- ance. On 15 May, Rommel’s men were able to take 450 prisoners in the course of two small skirmishes; later they captured 10 000 in the space of two days. Rommel himself was struck by the readiness of the French ofŽ cers to give themselves up, and by their insouciant ‘requests, including, among other things, permission to keep their batmen and to have their kit picked up from Philippeville, where it had been left’.

47 44 B. Moore and K. Fedorowich, ‘Prisoners of War in the Second World War: An Overview’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford and Washington, DC, 1996), p. 1.

45 E. Weber, The Hollow Years: France in the 1930s (London, 1995), p. 275n.

46 A. Horne, To Lose a Battle: France, 1940 (London, Basingstoke and Oxford, 1990 [1969]), pp. 150–5, 361. Cf. W.L. Shirer, The Collapse of the Third Republic: An Inquiry into the Fall of France in 1940 (London, 1972), pp. 739–55; G. Forty and J. Duncan, The Fall of France: Disaster in the West, 1939–1940 (London, 1990).

47 Horne, To Lose a Battle , pp. 411, 479.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 164 Niall Ferguson Table 3Prisoners of war, 1939–1945 a Troops mobilized Prisoners of war POWs as percentage of troops mobilized Allies UK5 896 000172 6002.9 Canada 1 100 0009 0000.8 Australia 1 340 00026 4002.0 New Zealand 150 0008 5005.7 South Africa 250 00014 6005.8 India 2 582 00079 5003.1 France 4 600 000 1 456 500 31.7 Belgium 653 500200 000 30.6 Poland 1 490 000787 000 52.8 Yugoslavia 3 740 000125 0003.3 USSR 34 476 700 5 700 000 16.5 USA 16 354 000139 7000.9 Axis Germany (and Austria) 17 893 200 11 094 000 62.0 Italy 4 500 000430 0009.6 Japan 9 100 00042 5430.5 a The table shows only those countries for which data could be found. On 22 June 1945 SHAEF headquarters announced that 7 614 794 POWs and DEF/SEP (disarmed enemy forces, surrendered enemy personnel) were in British and American camps, of whom 4 209 000 were said to be soldiers captured before the German capitulation. According to Zabecki, however, the Western Allies captured only 630 000 Germans prior to surrender, but this seems too low. Overmans estimates that up to 1 May 1945, at most 3 million German servicemen were ‘missing’ (2.3 million were dead), i.e., just 0.7 million were pre- armistice POWs. So the vast majority of German POWs were captured after the armistice.

The Japanese Ž gure in the table is for prisoners captured by Australian and American troops in the South-West PaciŽ c Area between 1942 and 1945. But Hata suggests that no more than 50 000 Japanese were taken prisoner before the armistice. Note that the Ž gures in the table take account of inter-Allied transfers of POWs. The USSR handed over 25 000 men to the Czechs and 70 000 to the Poles. The US handed over 5 000 to Luxembourg, 667 000 to France, and 31 000 to Belgium. The British handed over 33 000 to the Belgians, 7 000 to the Dutch and 25 000 to the French.

Sources : B. Moore and K. Fedorowich, ‘Prisoners of War in the Second World War: An Overview’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich (eds), Prisoners of War and their Captors in World War II (Oxford and Washington, DC, 1996), p. 1; J. Keegan (ed.), The Times Atlas of the Second World War (London, 1989), p. 205; R. Overmans, ‘German Historiography, the War Losses and the Prisoners of War’, in G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (eds), Eisen- hower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge and London, 1992), pp. 141, 155; J. Ellis (ed.), The World War II Databook: The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants (London, 1995), pp. 253–6; D.T. Zabecki, World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1999), p. 1249. See also M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2000), pp. 512–13; S.P. MacKenzie, ‘The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II’, Journal of Modern History LXVI(1994), pp. 516–17; I. Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt: The Changing Nature of Japanese Military and Popular Perceptions of Prisoners of War Through the Ages’, in Moore and Fedorowich, Prisoners of War,p. 263; E. Maschke et al., Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges: Eine Zusammenfassung (Munich, 1974), p. 207; Y. Durand, La vie quotidienne des prisonniers de guerre dans les stalags, les o ags et les kommandos, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1987). at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 165 Another German ofŽ cer saw ‘several hundred French ofŽ cers who had marched 35 kilometres without any guard from a prisoner of war dis- patch point to a prisoner of war transit station . . . with apparently none having made their escape.’ 48 Karl von Stackelberg was baf ed: ‘20 000 men . . . were heading backwards as prisoners. . . . It was inexplicable . . . How was it possible, these French soldiers with their ofŽ cers, so completely downcast, so completely demoralized, would allow them- selves to go more or less voluntarily into imprisonment?’ 49 British soldiers captured in 1940 could not help noticing that ‘the French had been prepared for capture and so were laden down with kit, while we were all practically empty-handed’.

50 In all around 1.8 million French troops were taken prisoner in 1940, of whom nearly a million were kept in Germany as forced labourers until 1945.

51 It is true that perhaps as many as half of those who surren- dered did so in the period between 17 June, when Pe ´tain announced that he was seeking an armistice, and the implementation of the armis- tice eight days later.

52 But it is still remarkable that more than a third of the French army had already been taken prisoner before 17 June.

It is indicative of the poor state of French morale that colonial troops from French Africa felt that they had fought with more determination than their supposed masters; their units certainly took heavier casualties.

53 What lay behind the French collapse? In part, as Marc Bloch argued shortly after the de ´ba ˆcle, it was abysmal leadership; 54 perhaps, as Ernest May has recently contended, the Germans were simply lucky in their decision to switch the direction of their main attack from Belgium to the Ardennes.

55 But at root this was a collapse of morale. In the words of one German ofŽ cer:

French spirit and morale had been . . . broken . . . before the battle even began. It was not so much the lack of machinery . . . that had defeated the French, but that they did not know what they were 48 Weber, Hollow Years, p. 282.

49 Horne, To Lose a Battle , p. 416.

50 R. Gayler, Private Prisoner: An Astonishing Story of Survival under the Nazis (Wellingborough, 1984), p. 23; D. Rolf, Prisoners of the Reich: Germany’s Captives, 1939– 1945 (Dunton Green, 1989), p. 30. For a good example of the mood of the ordinary French soldier, see G. Folcher, Marching to Captivity: The War Diaries of a French Peasant, 1939–45 (London and Washington, 1996), pp. 122–31 (‘My bed at home, how much I thought of it at that time!’).

51 See in general Y. Durand, La vie quotidienne des prisonniers de guerre dans les stalags, les o ags et les kommandos, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1987).

52 Op. cit., p. 23.

53 M. Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Se ´ne ´galese in French West Africa, 1857– 1960 (London, 1991), pp. 92–6.

54 M. Bloch, Etrange de ´faite: te ´moignage e ´crit en 1940 (Paris, 1946).

55 E. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000).

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 166 Niall Ferguson Ž ghting for. . . . The Nazi revolution had already won the Battle of France before our Ž rst armoured divisions went to work.

56 To use Wesbrook’ s term, there was a failure of legitimate demand on the French side: the cause of defending the Republic did not seem worth dying for. A related factor was that the French had learned defeatism from the pyrrhic victory of 1918. This was the mood that had been foreshadowed in Louis-Ferdinand Ce ´line’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, with its ghastly evocation of the slaughter of the Great War’s opening phase. The same mood inspired the letter of the Nobel laureate Roger Martin Du Gard to a friend in September 1936: ‘Any- thing rather than war! Anything . . . even Fascism in Spain . . . Even Fascism in France: Nothing, no trial, no servitude can be compared to war: Anything, Hitler rather than war!’ 57 Yet it is inconceivable that the French would have surrendered in such large numbers and in such an orderly fashion if they had not expected to be treated comparatively well by the Germans. The assumption clearly was that, with the war seemingly over, they would swiftly be returned to their native land. On an even larger scale were the Soviet surrenders that followed the launch of operation Barbarossa against the ill-prepared Red Army in June 1941. In a series of encircling manoeuvres, the Germans captured hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops who appeared to the invaders to be not only ill-equipped but demoralized. By 9 July the German forces west of Minsk had already captured 287 704 prisoners.

58 It was a similar story at Bialystok and Smolensk. By the autumn, more than 3 million had been marched off into captivity. There were many reasons for the Soviet collapse, not least Stalin’s pig-headed refusal to heed intelligence about the impending German invasion, which com- pounded the damage he had already done by purging the Red Army’s ofŽ cer corps.

59 Ill-prepared, ill-trained, ill-equipped and above all ill- led, hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers found themselves out- manoeuvred and encircled. There was certainly little incentive to break out of the German ‘cauldrons’: the NKVD units sent by Stalin to punish shirkers and saboteurs were the devil the soldiers knew, while the German forces were initially seen by some naive souls (in the Ukraine especially) as liberators. In other words, Soviet prisoners in 1941, like the French in 1940, ‘came quietly’ partly because they did not expect to be killed by the Germans, merely incarcerated for the duration of a war which, to judge by its opening phase, seemed unlikely to last long. At this stage in the war, being Hitler’s prisoner seemed to many Soviet conscripts preferable to being Stalin’s cannon fodder.

56 R.G. Waldeck, Athene Palace, Bucharest: Hitler’s ‘New Order’ Comes to Rumania (London, 1943), pp. 196f.

57 Weber, Hollow Years , p. 19.

58 J. Erickson, The Road to Stalingrad: Stalin’s War with Germany , vol.i (London, 1975), p. 159.

59 G. Gorodetsky, Grand Delusion: Stalin and the German Invasion of Russia (New Haven, 1999).

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 167 No collapse of this magnitude disgraced the armies of Britain and the United States during the war: less than 3% of British forces and less than 1% of Americans ended up as prisoners, despite the fact that they were Ž ghting on foreign soil rather than defending the patrie .

60 Unlike their French counterparts, British, Dominion and American soldiers tended to surrender not because of a loss of conŽ dence in the wider aims of the war, but because ofŽ cers sought to avoid futile sacri- Ž ce of life when a position became indefensible. The typical capture narrative in Anglophone war memoirs has the enemy completely sur- rounding a unit and the ofŽ cer ordering his men to lay down their arms rather than die ‘pointlessly’.

61 This was what happened, for example, when nearly 2000 Canadians were captured at Dieppe.

62 It was the same story when the American forces surrendered in the face of overwhelming odds at Guam.

63 Characteristic was the view of the American marine Chester Biggs, captured by the Japanese in 1941: ‘It is all right to die for a cause if the cause is a good one, but to die just for the sake of saying “We fought to the last man and didn’t surrender” is not a very good cause.’ 64 By contrast, surrenders by individuals or small groups were frequently unpremeditated: the classic experience was of getting lost and inadvertently stumbling into an enemy position, a situation in which the captors were more surprised than blood- thirsty.

65 Men who simply ‘cracked’ after too long in the Ž eld were more likely to ee than to surrender (hence the fact that such men usually ended up being court-martialled for desertion).

66 60 But also partly because they fought overseas and therefore had more discretion about when they engaged the enemy. The British were also lucky in 1940. Had Hitler pressed home the German advantage before the Dunkirk evacuation could be completed, many more prisoners would have been taken.

61 See, e.g., J. Stedman, Life of a British POW in Poland, 31 May 1940 to 30 April 1945 (Braunton, Devon, 1992), p.8; S. Kydd, For You the War is Over(London, 1973), pp.

50ff.; P. Kindersley, For You the War is Over (Tunbridge Wells, 1983), p. 11; E. Walker, The Price of Surrender, 1941: The War in Crete (London, 1992), pp. 31–5; H. Spiller (ed.), Prisoners of Nazis: Accounts by American POWs in World War II (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1998), p. 36; J. Baxter, Not Much of a Picnic: Memoirs of a Conscript and Japanese Prisoner of War, 1941–1945 (Trowbridge, 1995), p. 37.

62 C.P. Stacey, The Canadian Army, 1939–1945: An OfŽcial Historical Summary (Ottawa, 1948), pp. 80, 179.

63 D.T. Giles Jr (ed.), Captive of the Rising Sun: The POW Memoirs of Rear Admiral Donald T. Giles, Jr. (Annapolis, MD, 1994), pp. 44–7. Cf. B.T. FitzPatrick and J.A. Sweetser III (eds), The Hike into the Sun: Memoir of an American Soldier Captured on Bataan in 1942 and Imprisoned by the Japanese until 1945 (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1993), pp.

54f; D. Bilyeu, Lost in Action: A World War II Soldier’s Account of Capture on Bataan and Imprisonment by the Japanese (Jefferson, NC, 1991), pp. 64f., 73f.

64 C.M. Biggs Jr, Behind the Barbed Wire: Memoir of a World War II U.S. Marine Captured in North China in 1941 and Imprisoned by the Japanese Until 1945 (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1995), p. 10.

65 See, e.g., Fooks, Prisoners of War, p. 127f.; D.J. Carter, POW: Behind Canadian Barbed Wire (Elkwater, AB, 1998), p. 71; H. Buckledee, For You the War is Over(Sudbury, 1994), pp. 2f.; R.C. Begg and P.H. Liddle (eds), For Five Shillings a Day: Experiencing War, 1939–45 (London, 2000), p. 199.

66 No matter how solid the primary group loyalties and patriotism of a unit, few soldiers could endure more than 200 combat days without cracking in some way:

W. Holden, Shell Shock(London and Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 101–3.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 168 Niall Ferguson Yet despite the consolation that ‘discretion is the better part of valour’, 67 British, Dominion and American servicemen taken prisoner were often dismayed by their own feelings of guilt after being captured, which was not something they had been prepared for.

68 In the words of the American POW Andrew Carson: ‘We had been trained to act instinctively, immediately to commands like “Attention”, “At ease”, “About face”, “Man your battle stations”, and “Fire when ready”, but the word “Surrender” was foreign. It had not been programmed into our minds and therefore brought no response.’ He and his comrades could only weep, swear and try to convince themselves that ‘we had done our very best’.

69 Not all British soldiers went into the ‘bag’ passively, however – even when ordered to destroy their arms by their own commanders. ‘Not fucking likely, you yellow bastard!’ was the furi- ous reaction of one member of the 51st (Highland) Division when ordered to surrender by an ofŽ cer of the Kensington Regiment in June 1940.

70 This attitude found its echo among some Australian and New Zealand troops in similar situations. Rather than surrender on Crete, Donald Watt’s unit of Australians opted to split up and try to escape; when cornered, his friend Frank was ready to try ‘punching his way out, as though in some sort of Western movie’.

71 But these were the exceptions. What of German surrenders? It is tempting to infer from Figure 2 a repetition of the exponential process of collapse the German army had experienced in 1918. Beginning with the surrender of Paulus’s 6th Army at Stalingrad on 30 January 1943, the war ended with a suc- cession of large-scale surrenders: the collapse of Army Group Centre in July 1944, when 25 divisions gave themselves up; the surrender of more than 18 divisions at Jassy in August 1944.

72 On closer inspection, however, there were important differences between the endings of the two world wars. It is, unfortunately, far from easy to make a precise comparison between the events of 1918 and 1945 as the available stat- 67 G. Broadbent, Behind Enemy Lines (Bognor Regis, 1985), p. 6.

68 See, e.g., Rolf, Prisoners of the Reich , p. 22; D. Edgar,The Stalag Men: The Story of One of the 110 000 Other Ranks who were P.O.W.s of the Germans in the 1939–45 War (London, 1982), pp. 1–13; Garrett, P.O.W., pp. 10–15; Spiller,Prisoners of Nazis, p. 154. Cf. E.J. Hunter, ‘Prisoners of War: Readjustment and Rehabilitation’, in R.

Gal and A.D. Mangelsdorff, Handbook of Military Psychology (Chichester, 1991), pp. 743f.; S. Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War (New York, 1997), pp. 232f., 245; F.J. Grady and R. Dickson, Surviving the Day: An American POW in Japan (Shrewsbury, 1997), p. 43.

69 A.D. Carson, My Time in Hell: Memoir of an American Soldier Imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1997), pp. 8–15.

70 Gayler, Private Prisoner , p. 13.

71 D. Watt, Stoker: The Story of an Australian who Survived Aushwitz-Birkenau (East Roseville, 1995), pp. 11ff. For examples of very reluctant Antipodean surrender in the PaciŽ c theatre, see J. Bertram, The Shadow of a War: A New Zealander in the Far East, 1939–1946 (London, 1947), p. 135; K. Harrison, The Brave Japanese(Adelaide, 1967), p. 90; Baxter, Not Much of a Picnic, p. 37.

72 R. Overmans, ‘German Historiography, the War Losses and the Prisoners of War’, in G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs: Facts against Falsehood (Baton Rouge and London, 1995), p. 153.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 169 Figure 2German prisoners of war, 1st quarter 1941 – 1st quarter 1945.

Source : E. Maschke et al., Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen (Munich, 1974), pp. 194f., 200f. (Tables 2, 5).

istics were computed on different time-scales. But this much can safely be said. The vast majority of German prisoners were captured only after the ofŽ cial surrender signed by General Jodl at 2.41 a.m. on 8 May 1945. According to Zabecki, for example, the Western Allies had cap- tured just 630 000 Germans prior to the capitulation.

73 The Maschke commission put the total number of Germans held prisoner in the Ž rst quarter of 1945 at more than 2 million, roughly shared between the eastern and western theatres of the European war.

74 Overmans esti- mates that the number of POWs at the time of the German capitulation ‘cannot have exceeded 3 million, of whom some 2 million would have been in the East’.

75 In other words, at least 8 million of the Ž nal total of 11 million German captives laid down their arms after the ofŽ cial surrender. Not untypical was the Kurland Army, which resisted to the bitter end despite having been surrounded by the Red Army as early as January 1945. Moreover, an incalculable but large proportion of the 3 million pre-capitulation prisoners clearly gave themselves up in the very last weeks of the war. By contrast, the biggest prisoner hauls of the First World War came (according to the British statistics) in the period 24 September – 21 October 1918, i.e. before the armistice was signed on 11 November. Although we should not exaggerate the com- pleteness of the collapse in 1918 – there is indeed some evidence that German resistance was stiffening as the Ž ghting neared the German 73 D.T. Zabecki, World War II in Europe: An Encyclopedia (New York and London, 1999), p. 1249.

74 E. Maschke et al., Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen des Zweiten Weltkrieges: Eine Zusammenfassung (Munich, 1974), pp. 194f., 200f (tables 2, 5).

75 Overmans, ‘German Historiography’, p. 141.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 170 Niall Ferguson border – it nevertheless seems fair to say that German forces were slower to surrender in the Second World War (see Figure 3).Germany’s allies responded to military adversity in diametrically opposite ways. Italian soldiers, as is notorious, surrendered quite read- ily. By contrast, the Japanese resisted even more tenaciously than the Germans. In the PaciŽ c War, the Western armies’ ratio of captured to dead was around 4:1. The Japanese ratio was 1:40.

76 Only 1700 Japanese prisoners were taken in Burma, compared with 150 000 who were killed; of the prisoners, only 400 were physically Ž t and in the Ž rst week of captivity all of them tried to commit suicide.

77 It was only when they were on the verge of starvation in the closing months of the war that large numbers of Japanese troops began to give themselves up (Figure 4).

78 And even as late as July 1945, 17 000 Japanese lost their lives in a futile attempt to break out of Sittang.

79 Unlike other nationalities, the Japanese tended to be captured singly and only when incapacitated.

80 One Japanese soldier refused to lay down his arms until 1974.

81 Figure 3 German prisoners taken by the British in two world wars before the armistice/surrender (half-yearly cumulative totals).

Note: It is impossible because of the nature of the data to compute exact Ž gures for the Ž nal phase of surrenders before hostilities ceased.

Sources: As for Figures 1 and 2.

76 I. Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt: The Changing Nature of Japanese Military and Popular Perceptions of Prisoners of War Through the Ages’, in Moore and Fedorowich, Prisoners of War, p. 269.

77 C. Kinvig, ‘Allied POWs and the Burma–Thailand Railway’, in Towle et al., Japanese Prisoners of War , p. 48.

78 A.B. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the Southwest PaciŽc (Lincoln and London, 1998), pp. 77f.

79 L. Allen and D. Steeds, ‘Burma: The Longest War, 1941–45’, in S. Dockrill (ed.), From Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima: The Second World War in Asia and the PaciŽc, 1941–45 (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 116f.

80 Op. cit., p. 271.

81 H. Onoda, No Surrender: My Thirty Year War (London, 1975).

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 171 Figure 4Japanese prisoners taken by US forces, 1942–45.

Source: A.B. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets (Lincoln and London, 1998), p. 154.

The question is therefore straightforward: how can we explain the relative tenacity of the German and Japanese armies in the Second World War? Why did they keep Ž ghting after any rational hope of victory had evaporated?

IV One possible explanation might be sought in the realm of military discipline. Armies during and after the First World War had sought to deter men from surrendering or running away by increasing the per- ceived likelihood that they would be killed by their own side if they attempted to do so. During the First World War, British military justice was a good deal harsher in this regard than German. In the British army, 266 soldiers were executed for desertion, 18 for cowardice, 7 for quitting their posts and 2 for casting away their arms: 293 in all. By contrast, only 18 Germans were executed for comparable offences, despite the fact that the German army was twice as large.

82 Only on 23 June 1918 did Ludendorff issue the desperate order: ‘Every man going to the enemy will be punished with death on return to Germany.’ 83 82 A. Babington, For The Sake of Example: Capital Courts-Martial, 1914–1920 , (London, rev. edn 1993), p. 189. Cf. C. Jahr, Gewo ¨hnliche Soldaten: Desertion und Deserteure im deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Go ¨ttingen, 1998). These are Ž gures for executions for desertion. For total death sentences, the Ž gures were: Germany, 150; France, 2000; and Britain, 3080 – for sentences carried out: Germany, 48; France, 700; and Britain, 346. OfŽ cial Ž gures do not include men who were summarily shot by their ofŽ cers or comrades for trying to desert.

83 Bruntz, Allied Propaganda , p. 206. See also p. 210.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 172 Niall Ferguson In Britain the death penalty for desertion was abolished in 1930, 84 and although British war leaders – notably Churchill and Montgom- ery – were fond of phrases such as ‘never surrender’, it was never restored.

85 The Americans too were lenient: only one GI was executed for desertion during the entire Second World War.

86 But in Germany and Russia the penalties for desertion were signiŽ cantly stiffened before and during the Second World War. It was Trotsky who pion- eered the draconian rule that if Red Army soldiers advanced they might be shot, but if they ed, they would deŽ nitely be shot.

87 Under Stalin, the principle was extended to include the commanding ofŽ cers or families of deserters.

88 Those Soviet prisoners of the Germans lucky enough to survive the war found themselves imprisoned once again under equally harsh conditions for ‘Betrayal of the Motherland’.

89 The Wehrmacht executed between 15 000 and 20 000 of its own men, mainly in the later stages of the war for the so-called political crimes of desertion or Wehrkraftzersetzung , and effectively sentenced many thousands more to death by assigning them to ‘punishment battalions’, the standard sentence for soldiers who lost their weapons.

90 Such draconian discipline became increasingly important on the Eastern Front when very high casualty rates (up to 300% of the original strength of some divisions) prevented the formation of primary group loyalties, and desertion rates began to rise.

91 Phrases such as ‘most severe punishment’ and ‘ruthless use of all means’ became routine euphemisms for summary executions. By the end of the war, German Landsers faced what might be called Trotsky’s choice: ‘Death by a bullet from the enemy or by the “thugs” of the SS.’ 92 Did the threat of the death penalty or some other sanction deter men from deserting or surrendering? There is some evidence that it did: as one German deserter who made it to the Russian lines explained in October 1942, the reason that more of his comrades did not surrender was fear ‘that if they deserted their families would be punished, that if they were seen trying to cross over they would be 84 L. Sellers, For God’s Sake Shoot Straight! The Story of the Court Martial and Execution of Temporary Sub-Lieutenant Edwin Leopold Arthur Dyett, Nelson Battalion, 63rd (RN) Division during the First World War (London, 1995), p. 125.

85 Apart from his famous ‘never surrender’ speech of 4 June 1940, Churchill also exhorted the Singapore garrison to Ž ght to the death (15 Feb. 1942).

86 J.P. Pallud, ‘Crime in WWII: The Execution of Eddie Slovik’, After the Battlex x x i i (1981), pp. 28–42.

87 D. Volkogonov, Trotsky:The Eternal Revolutionary (London, 1996), pp. 178ff.

88 A. Beevor, Stalingrad(London, 1988), p. 169.

89 L. Rees, War of the Century: When Hitler Fought Stalin (London, 1999), p. 223.

90 Bidermann, In Deadly Combat , p. 9. See also O. Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford, 1992), pp. 71f.; S.G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington, 1995), p. 90.

91 For details, see O. Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke, 1985), pp. 29–36; Bartov, Hitler’s Army, pp. 98– 101. Cf. M. Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (London, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2000), pp. 524f.

92 Fritz, Frontsoldaten , p. 95.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 173 shot, and that if they were caught they would be executed’.

93 Another German deserter who gave himself up to the Americans in France later explained how he had weighed up his con icting fears – of his own side’s military discipline as against the enemy’s superior Ž repower:

I remember very well the day that it was all made clear to me, the impossibility of Germany prevailing. It was July 26, 1944. There had been an air raid by 1,500 American ‘Flying Fortresses’ and I didn’t see one Luftwaffe plane in the sky to challenge them. Of course, superior forces don’t always win, but when the superiority is as enormous as that, there’s nothing you can do. Close by us was the SS Tank Division Das Reich and contingents from the Hitler Youth.

They were totally smashed up from the air. They didn’t even have the chance to show how brave they were. When that sort of thing happens, you know it must be the end . . . it was hopeless, we couldn’t possibly have won the war. Of course, you didn’t dare say so to anyone, you didn’t know if they would tell your superior ofŽ - cers, and then they’ll have you for betraying your country by talking about defeat. It was possible that you would end up hanged.

94 Yet there is reason to doubt that the deterrent effect of the death penalty alone kept the majority of Germans Ž ghting to the bitter end.

Ahrenfeldt’s Ž gures reveal that the desertion rate for the British army was no higher during the Second World War than during the First, when desertion carried the death penalty (Figure 5): indeed the Figure 5 British army annual desertion rates in the two world wars (per 1000 of total army strength).

Source: R. Ahrenfeldt, Psychiatry in the British Army in the Second World War (London, 1958), appendix B.

93 Bartov, Hitler’s Army , p. 99.

94 B. Carruthers and S. Trew (eds), Servants of Evil: New First-hand Accounts of the Second World War from Survivors of Hitler’s Armed Forces (London, 2001), p. 257.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 174 Niall Ferguson average was slightly lower in the Second World War (7 per 1000 compared with 10 per 1000).

95 The calculus of desertion is clearly rather different from the calculus of surrender; still, the British evidence is suggestive. Another possibility is that men refused to surrender not out of fear of punishment but out of fear of dishonour. As is well known, the Japanese military sought to stigmatize rather than prohibit surrender.

96 Although there was no formal prohibition of capture in either the army or the navy’s pre-war criminal codes and disciplinary regulations, by 1940 surrender had become taboo.

97 ‘Never live to experience shame as a prisoner’ was the stark message of the 1941 Field Service Code, and the Japanese army simply refused to acknowledge the exist- ence of Japanese prisoners of war.

98 Many Japanese servicemen cer- tainly seem to have absorbed this message. Even at the end of the war there was extreme reluctance to make use of ‘Surrender Passes’ bear- ing the word ‘surrender’ in either Japanese ( kosan, kofuku ) or English:

‘I Cease Resistance’ was the preferred euphemism. Some Japanese sol- diers refused to lay down their arms until the Imperial Headquarters issued an order on 15 August 1945 that ‘servicemen who come under the control of the enemy forces . . . will not be regarded as POWs’.

99 There was something of this aversion to surrender in Nazi Germany too. In Mein Kampf Hitler had bitterly recalled the trauma of 1918, when ‘political discussions’ among new conscripts – ‘the poison of the hinterland’ – had undermined the morale of the army.

100 Twenty years later, when Goebbels concluded a speech at the Sportpalast with the words ‘a November 1918 will never be repeated’, Hitler ‘looked up to him, a wild, eager expression in his eyes . . . leaped to his feet and with a fanatical Ž re in his eyes . . . brought his right hand, after a great sweep, pounding down on the table and yelled . . . “Ja” ’.

101 ‘As long as I am alive,’ he told General Franz Halder in August 1939, ‘there will be no talk of capitulation.’ 102 It was a refrain repeated until the suicidal end. His last ofŽ cial proclamation of 24 February 1945 95 One reason for the discrepancy is the very high desertion rate in the Ž rst year of the First World War, when there had been no selection of volunteers beyond a basic physical check, allowing many psychologically unsuitable recruits to join the army.

96 The phrase ‘shame culture’ was coined by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict during the war: Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, p. 269. Cf. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets , p. 97.

97 Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, pp. 260f.

98 S.P. Mackenzie, ‘The Treatment of Prisoners of War in World War II’, Journal of Modern History lx vi (1994), pp. 513–17. Cf. T. Asada, The Night of a Thousand Suicides:

The Japanese Outbreak at Cowra (Sydney, London, Melbourne and Singapore, 1970), pp. 2, 7.

99 Hata, ‘From Consideration to Contempt’, p. 263. Cf. Y. Aida, Prisoner of the British: A Japanese Soldier’s Experience in Burma , trans. H. Ishiguro and L. Allen (London, 1996), p. 6: ‘If there was a surrender on all fronts, we too would surrender . . . without bearing the stigma of being called “prisoner” ’; see also p. 50, for the distinction between ‘prisoners of war’ and ‘disarmed military personnel’.

100 A. Hitler, Mein Kampf , trans. R. Manheim (London, 1992), p. 183. See also pp. 172f.

101 I. Kershaw, Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (London, 2000), p. 117.

102 Op. cit., p. 217.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 175 envisaged a protracted war of resistance on German soil, which implied the complete destruction of the country and something close to collective suicide.

103 Again, there is evidence that such ideas were internalized by serving soldiers. When the American psychologist Saul Padover interrogated Lieutenant Rudolf Kohlhoff after his capture in December 1944, he elicited a revealing response to his question about the possibility of a German defeat:

But I tell you Germany is not going to be defeated. I don’t know how long it will take to achieve victory, but it will be achieved. I am convinced of it, or I would not have fought. I have never entertained thoughts of losing. I could not tell you how victory will come but it will. Our generals must have good reason to Ž ght on. They believe in the Endsieg . Otherwise they would not sacriŽ ce German blood. . . .

the Wehrmacht will never give up. It did not give up in the last war either. Only the civilians gave up and betrayed the army. I tell you, the Americans will never reach the Rhine. We will Ž ght to the end.

We will Ž ght for every city, town and village. If necessary we will see the whole Reich destroyed and the population killed. As a gunner, I know that it is not a pleasant feeling to have to destroy German homes and kill German civilians, but for the defence of the German Fatherland I consider it necessary.

104 Another prisoner, a young parachutist, told the same interrogator that he was ‘deeply humiliated for having permitted himself to be captured’ and felt he ‘should have died “on the Ž eld of honour” ’.

105 Such attitudes were obviously more prevalent among those troops who had been most thoroughly indoctrinated by the regime. As Ameri- can troops neared Marienbad in the Sudetenland in April 1945, Gu ¨n- ter Koschorrek – a disillusioned veteran of the Eastern Front – had no doubt that ‘in this endgame, some brain-damaged troop leaders . . .

[would] follow Hitler’s orders to the letter and Ž ght to the last round of ammunition’.

106 Yet even self-consciously unpolitical professionals were in uenced by Hitler’s orders to Ž ght to the death. When Martin Po ¨ppel, an experienced paratrooper ofŽ cer, found his unit sur- rounded by the Gordon Highlanders in Rees in April 1945, he and his men found the decision to surrender far from easy:

I discussed the situation with the last UnterofŽ zier. The Fu ¨hrer order was very much in my mind: ‘If a superior ofŽ cer no longer appears in a position to lead, he is to hand over command to the 103 H. Mommsen, ‘The Dissolution of the Third Reich: Crisis Management and Collapse, 1943–1945’, German Historical Institute Bulletin x x vi i (2000), pp. 9–24, p. 17.

104 S.K. Padover, Psychologist in Germany: The Story of an American Intelligence OfŽcer (London, 1946), p. 169.

105 Op. cit., p. 166.

106 G.K. Koschorrek, Blood Red Snow: The Memories of a German Soldier on the Eastern Front , trans. O.R. Crone-Aamot (London, 2002), p. 309.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 176 Niall Ferguson nearest rank below.’ Personally, I was ready to surrender – me, who had been a paratrooper from the very Ž rst day of the war. Yet although the struggle was completely hopeless, men came to me in tears. ‘As paratroopers, how will we be able to look our wives in the face, if we surrender voluntarily.’ A phenomenon, incredible . . .

Then, after long silence, they said that if the ‘Old Man’ [Po¨ppel was 24] . . . thought we should surrender, then they would follow me.

107 One American corporal noted that ‘the Krauts always shot up all their ammo and then surrendered’ – unlike (by implication) American soldiers, who would surrender when in a hopeless situation. It was exceedingly hazardous to try to parley with Germans who still had bullets left to Ž re, even if they were surrounded.

108 In the Ž nal analysis, however, it was not only the fear of disciplinary action or of dishonour that deterred German and Japanese soldiers from surrendering. More important for most soldiers was the percep- tion that prisoners would be killed by the enemy anyway, and so one might as well Ž ght on.

V Though tolerated by a few senior ofŽ cers, as we have seen, the ‘take no prisoners’ culture of the Western Front was never legitimized by any government during the First World War. Even during the Russian Civil War, the Bolsheviks – draconian in their treatment of their own deserters – drew the line at sanctioning prisoner killing. Trotsky explicitly forbade it in an order of 1919.

109 It was Nazi Germany which Ž rst adopted an ofŽ cial policy of prisoner killing. The decision to shoot Red Army prisoners systematically – fore- shadowed by the brutal way the war in Poland had been fought – was taken on the eve of operation Barbarossa and subsequently elaborated on during the campaign. The ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Troops in Russia’ issued on 19 May 1941 called for ‘ruthless and vigorous meas- ures against the Bolshevik inciters, guerrillas, saboteurs [and] Jews’.

110 The ‘Commissar Order’ of 6 June 1941 required any captured political commissars to be shot out of hand. The justiŽ cation for this was that:

107 M. Po ¨ppel, Heaven and Hell: The War Diary of a German Paratrooper , trans. L. Willmot (Staplehurst, 2000 [1998]), p. 237.

108 S.E. Ambrose, ‘The Last Barrier’, in R. Cowley (ed.), No End Save Victory: New Second World War Writing (London, 2002), p. 548.

109 Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 185. On the other hand, the new regime never expressly acknowledged the 1895/1907 Hague Laws of Land Warfare; nor did it adhere to the Geneva Convention of 1929. Only in July 1941 did Stalin propose a reciprocal adherence to the Hague Convention, but the German government pointedly ignored the suggestion: Burleigh, Third Reich, pp. 512f.

110 J. Fo ¨rster, ‘The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union’, G. Hirschfeld (ed.), The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (London, Boston and Sydney, 1986), p. 20.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 177 hate-inspired, cruel, and inhumane treatment of prisoners can be expected on the part ofall grades of political commissars . . . To act in accordance with international rules of war is wrong and endangers both our own security and the rapid paciŽ cation of conquered territory . . . Political commissars have initiated barbaric, Asiatic methods of warfare. Consequently they will be dealt with immediately and with maximum severity. As a matter of principle, they will be shot at once.

111 The Wehrmacht high command reiterated this by decreeing that the army was to ‘get rid of all those elements among the prisoners of war considered Bolshevik driving forces’; this meant handing them over to the SS Einsatzgruppen for execution.

112 ‘Politically intolerable and suspicious elements, commissars and agitators’ were to be treated in the same way, according to an order issued by Army Quartermaster General Wagner.

113 In September 1941 the high command issued a further order that Soviet troops who had been overrun but then re- organized themselves should be regarded as ‘partisans’ and hence shot on the spot.

114 Such orders were passed on by front-line commanders in less euphemistic terms. Troops were ‘totally to eliminate any active or passive resistance’ among prisoners by making ‘immediate use of wea- pons’.

115 The commander of the 12th Infantry Division told subordi- nate ofŽ cers: ‘Prisoners behind the front-line . . . Shoot as a general principle! Every soldier shoots any Russian found behind the front-line who has not been taken prisoner in battle.’ 116 In the confusion that reigned after the huge German advances into Soviet territory, this could be interpreted as a licence to kill. According to Omer Bartov, the Germans may have summarily executed as many as 600 000 Soviet prisoners; by the end of the Ž rst winter of the campaign some 2 million were dead.

117 As we have seen, German soldiers themselves were subject to dracon- ian discipline; in return, however, they were licensed to treat the sup- posedly ‘subhuman’ enemy without pity. The recollections of one Landser , Guy Sajer, give a avour of the attitudes that quickly took hold:

Sometimes one or two prisoners might emerge from their hideout with their hands in the air, and each time the same tragedy repeated itself. Kraus killed four of them on the lieutenant’s orders; the Sudeten two; Group 17, nine. Young Lindberg, who had been in a state of panic ever since the beginning of the offensive, and who 111 Kershaw, Hitler, p. 358.

112 Fo¨rster, ‘German Army’, p. 20.

113 Op. cit., p. 21.

114 Bartov, Hitler’s Army , p. 84.

115 Op. cit., p. 83.

116 Op. cit., p. 84.

117 O. Bartov, ‘Savage War’, in M. Burleigh (ed.), Confronting the Nazi Past: New Debates on Modern German History (London, 1996), p. 131. Cf. Bartov’s Mirrors of Destruction:

War, Genocide and Modern Identity (Oxford and New York, 2000), pp. 25–30.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 178 Niall Ferguson had been either weeping in terror or laughing in hope, took Kraus’s machine gun and shoved two Bolsheviks into a shell hole. The two wretched victims . . . kept imploring his mercy . . . But Lindberg, in a paroxysm of uncontrollable rage, kept Ž ring until they were quiet. . . .We were mad with harassment and exhaustion. . . . We were for- bidden to take prisoners. . . . We knew that the Russians didn’t take any . . . [that] it was either them or us, which is why my friend Hals and I threw grenades . . . at some Russians who were trying to wave a white ag.

[Later] . . . we began to grasp what had happened. . . . We sud- denly felt gripped by something horrible, which made our skins crawl. . . . For me, these memories produced a loss of physical sen- sation, almost as if my personality had split . . . because I knew that such things don’t happen to young men who have led normal lives. . . . ‘We really were shits to kill those Popovs . . .’ [Hals said.] He was clearly desperately troubled by the same things that troubled me. . . . ‘[That’s] how it is, and all there is,’ I answered. . . .

something hideous had entered our spirits, to remain and haunt us forever.

118 Quite apart from its illegality, some Germans saw the folly of prisoner killing, and not just because of the value of prisoners as intelli- gence sources.

119 Wolfgang Horn, who admitted to shooting ‘cowardly’ Russians himself if they were too slow to raise their hands, nevertheless deplored the decision of the lieutenant commanding his unit to shoot prisoners. It was not only ‘unchivalrous’ but also ‘stupid’, because ‘Russians hiding in the forest might have seen the prisoners being shot and so they might Ž ght better the next time’.

120 Alfred Rosenberg, Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, identiŽ ed as ‘an obvious consequence of [the] politically and militarily unwise treatment [of prisoners] . . . not only the weakening of the will to desert but a truly deadly fear of falling into German captivity’.

121 The 18th Panzer Division came to the same conclusion: ‘Red Army soldiers . . . are more afraid of falling prisoner than of the possibility of dying on the battle- Ž eld.’ 122 So did the commander of the Grossdeutschland Division, who appealed to his men to ‘understand that the ultimate result of the maltreatment or shooting of POWs after they had given themselves up in battle would be . . . a stiffening of the enemy’s resistance, because every Red Army soldier fears German captivity’.

123 Such views went largely unheeded by soldiers on the ground, however, and orders 118 Fritz, Frontsoldaten , pp. 53f.

119 Beevor, Stalingrad , p. 60.

120 Rees, War of the Century , p. 67.

121 Fo¨rster, ‘German Army’, p. 21.

122 Bartov, Hitler’s Army , p. 87.

123 Op. cit., p. 88.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 179 against ‘senseless shootings’ of POWs by commanders such as General Lemelsen were simply ignored.

124 Nor did the suspension of the Commissar Order have much impact. Indeed, the practice of prisoner killing became routine: ‘We take some prisoners, we shoot them, all in a day’s work.’ 125 This kind of experience explains why some Germans found the pros- pect of surrender once their own position had become patently hope- less so unpalatable: fear of retaliation. Even while they were advancing, the Germans were plagued by fear ‘of falling into the hands of the Russians, no doubt thirsty for revenge’.

126 When things started to go wrong, therefore, many Germans were willing to Ž ght to the death rather than surrender. By no means exceptional was the intransigent ofŽ cer who declared after the capitulation at Stalingrad: ‘There’ll be no surrender! the war goes on!’ and then shot a Russian ofŽ cer.

127 In July 1944 the lieutenant in charge of Eduard Stelbe’s unit shot himself rather than fall into the hands of the Red Army.

128 Eight months later Edmund Bonhoff’s commanding ofŽ cer – who for months had exhorted his men to ‘stick it out’ until the French and British belatedly joined the German war against the Soviets – simply ‘ran away, just leav- ing us there [in Courland]’.

129 Gottlob Bidermann’s description of the 132nd Infantry Division’s surrender to the Russians provides further evidence of the extreme reluctance of some front-line ofŽ cers to obey direct orders to capitulate, even as late as 8 May 1945. One ofŽ cer shot himself through the head; another ran back screaming ‘No surrender!

I refuse to surrender!’ to the next German line, where he tried to force the commander of a self-propelled gun to engage the enemy. He had to be knocked out by a ri e butt. ‘Why did you continue to Ž ght?

Hitler is long dead,’ asked the Red Army colonel who accepted Bidermann’s surrender. His answer was: ‘Because we are soldiers.’ 130 But this was not a sufŽ cient explanation. A part of the reason was that, having committed war crimes themselves, Wehrmacht troops expected no quarter from the Red Army if they surrendered. ‘If we should lose tomorrow,’ wrote Guy Sajer, ‘those of us still alive . . . will be judged without mercy . . . accused of an inŽ nity of murder . . . spared nothing.’ 131 This dread of defeat was, of course, compounded by the involvement of the Wehrmacht in massacres of civilians, particularly Jews. One soldier who witnessed the slaughter of thousands of Jews at Paneriai in Lithuania could say only: ‘May God grant us victory because if they get their revenge, we’re in for a hard time.’ 132 124 Op. cit., pp. 85f.

125 Fritz, Frontsoldaten , p. 55.

126 Beevor, Stalingrad , p. 59.

127 H. Dibold, Doctor at Stalingrad :The Passion of a Captivity (London, 1958), pp. 24, 31.

128 Carruthers and Trew, Servants of Evil, pp. 231f.

129 Op. cit., p. 235.

130 Bidermann, In Deadly Combat , pp. 282–93.

131 Bartov, Eastern Front , p. 38.

132 Quoted in Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction , p. 236n.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 180 Niall Ferguson In many cases retribution was indeed swift. German prisoners were routinely shot after interrogation if not before, a practice explicitly justiŽ ed as retaliation for German treatment of Soviet prisoners.

Zinaida Pytkina, a Smersh interrogator, recalled how she executed a German ofŽ cer with a shot in the back of the neck:

It was joy for me. The Germans didn’t ask us to spare them and I was angry. . . . When we were retreating we lost so many 17-, 18-year olds. Do I have to be sorry for the German after that? This was my mood . . . As a member of the Communist Party, I saw in front of me a man who could have killed my relatives. . . . I would have cut off his head if I had been asked to. One person less, I thought. Ask him how many people he killed – he did not think about this?

133 In turn, German troops on the other side were ‘told that the Russians have been killing all prisoners’.

134 Ruthenians drafted into the Wehr- macht would have deserted in larger numbers had they not ‘believe[d] the ofŽ cers’ stories that the Russians will torture and shoot them’.

135 Eduard Stelbe was genuinely surprised when the Ž rst words of the Rus- sian ofŽ cer to whom he surrendered were simply: ‘Does anyone have a cigarette?’ When some female soldiers pointed their pistols at him and his comrades as they trudged to captivity, he fully expected them to Ž re; in fact the pistols had been emptied. It was just, he recalled, ‘a little show of sadism’.

136 It was not only on the Eastern Front that such a cycle of violence manifested itself. In the PaciŽ c theatre too, the ill-treatment and mur- der of prisoners were commonplace. It is clear from many accounts that American and Australian forces often shot Japanese surrenderers during the PaciŽ c War.

137 It happened at Guadalcanal, especially after 20 Marines fell victim to a fake Japanese surrender that turned out to be an ambush.

138 The Marines’ battle cry on Tarawa was ‘Kill the Jap bastards! Take no prisoners!’ 139 In his diary of his experiences in New Guinea in 1944, the celebrated aviator Charles Lindbergh noted:

It was freely admitted that some of our soldiers tortured Japanese prisoners and were as cruel and barbaric at times as the Japs them- selves. Our men think nothing of shooting a Japanese prisoner or soldier attempting to surrender. They treat the Japs with less respect than they would give to an animal, and these acts are condoned by almost everyone.

133 Rees, War of the Century , p. 167.

134 Op. cit., p. 369.

135 Beevor, Stalingrad , p. 182.

136 Carruthers and Trew, Servants of Evil,p. 232.

137 Mackenzie, ‘Treatment of Prisoners of War’, p. 488.

138 J.W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the PaciŽc War (London and Boston, 1986), pp. 63f.

139 Op. cit., p. 68.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 181 This behaviour was not merely sanctioned but actively encouraged by Allied ofŽ cers in the PaciŽ c theatre. An infantry colonel told Lindbergh proudly: ‘Our boys just don’t take prisoners.’ 140 The testi- mony of Sergeant Henry Ewen conŽ rms that Australian troops killed prisoners at Bougainville ‘in cold blood’.

141 When Indian soldiers serv- ing with the British in Burma killed a group of wounded Japanese prisoners, George MacDonald Fraser, then serving in the 14th Army, turned a blind eye.

142 As in the First World War, the practice of killing prisoners was some- times justiŽ ed as retaliatory. At Okinawa in May 1945, the orderly of a popular company commander who had died of his wounds ‘snatched up a submachine gun and unforgivably massacred a line of unarmed Japanese soldiers who had just surrendered’.

143 However, there is evi- dence that ‘taking no prisoners’ simply became standard practice. In the course of the battle for the island, 75 000 Japanese soldiers were killed; less than a tenth of that Ž gure ended up as prisoners.

144 ‘The [American] rule of thumb’, an American POW told his Japanese captors, ‘was “if it moves, shoot it”.’ 145 Another GI maxim was ‘Kill or be killed.’ The war correspondent Edgar L. Jones later recalled: ‘We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats . . .

Ž nished off the enemy wounded.’ 146 War psychologists regarded the killing of prisoners as so commonplace that they devised formulae for assuaging soldiers’ subsequent feelings of guilt.

147 Roughly two-Ž fths of American army chaplains surveyed after the war said that they had regarded orders to kill prisoners as legitimate.

148 This kind of thing went on despite the obvious deterrent effect on other Japanese soldiers who might be contemplating surrender.

149 Indeed, it is far from easy to distinguish the self-induced aversion to surrender discussed above from the rational fear that the Americans would kill any prisoners. In June 1945 the US OfŽ ce of War Information reported that 84% of interrogated Japanese prisoners had expected to be killed by their cap- tors.

150 This fear was clearly far from unwarranted. Two years before, a secret intelligence report noted that only the promise of ice cream and three days’ leave would sufŽ ce to induce American troops not to kill surrendering Japanese.

151 140 Op. cit., p. 70.

141 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 184.

142 Op. cit., pp. 185f.

143 G.L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (New York, 1994), p.

695.

144 B.I. Gudmundsson, ‘Okinawa’, in Cowley, No End Save Victory, pp. 637f.

145 Carson, My Time in Hell , p. 231.

146 Dower, War without Mercy , p. 64.

147 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 255.

148 Op. cit., p. 293.

149 Dower, War without Mercy , pp. 63, 70.

150 Op. cit., p. 68.

151 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 184.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 182 Niall Ferguson To the historian who has specialized in German history, this is one of the most troubling aspects of the Second World War: the fact that Allied troops often regarded the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians – as Untermenschen . The Australian General Blamey, for example, told his troops that their foes were ‘a cross between the human being and the ape’, ‘vermin’, ‘something primitive’ that had to be ‘exterminated’ to preserve ‘civilisation’.

152 In May 1944 Life magazine published a picture of a winsome blonde gaz- ing at a human skull. A memento mori perhaps, in the tradition of the Metaphysical poets? On the contrary:

When he said goodby [ sic ] two years ago to Natalie Nickerson, 20, a war worker of Phoenix, Ariz., a big, handsome Navy lieutenant promised her a Jap. Last week Natalie received a human skull, auto- graphed by her lieutenant and 13 friends, and inscribed: ‘This is a good Jap – a dead one picked up on the New Guinea beach.’ Natalie, surprised at the gift, named it Tojo.

153 ‘Boil[ing] the esh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts’ was a not uncommon practice.

154 VI Thus, when American met German in the battleŽ elds of Western Eur- ope after the invasion of Italy, both sides had experience of lawless racial war, even if the scale of the German experience was vastly greater. Not surprisingly, prisoner killing was carried over into the new European theatres. Perhaps the most notorious example was the mur- der of 77 American prisoners at Malme ´dy by the SS Battle Group Peiper on 17 December 1944.

155 That taught Allied troops to fear Waffen SS units more than regular Wehrmacht units.

156 Yet such atroci- ties were committed by both sides. On 14 July 1943, for example, troops of the American 45th Infantry Division killed 70 Italian and German POWs at Biscari in Sicily.

157 Sergeant William C. Bradley recalled how one of his comrades killed a group of German prisoners captured in France.

158 On 7 June 1944 an American ofŽ cer at a SHAEF press conference declared that US airborne forces did not take pris- oners but killed them ‘as they hold up their hands coming out. They 152 Op. cit., p. 71.

153 Life, 22 May 1944.

154 Dower, War without Mercy , pp. 64f. Ears, bones and teeth were also collected. In April 1943 the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a mother who petitioned the authorities to let her son post her a Japanese ear so that she could nail it to her front door.

155 S. Hart, R. Hart and M. Hughes, The German Soldier in World War II (Staplehurst, 2000), p. 186.

156 Spiller, Prisoners of Nazis , pp. 87, 149; Rolf, Prisoners of the Reich, p. 21. For incidents of massacres of British and American troops by SS units see Garrett, P.O.W., p. 142.

157 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 183.

158 Spiller, Prisoners of Nazis , p. 11.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 183 are apt in going along a road with prisoners and seeing one of their own men killed, to turn around and shoot a prisoner to make up for it. They are tough people.’ 159 Stephen Ambrose’s history of E Com- pany, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, suggests this was not wholly without foundation.

160 As one Foreign OfŽ ce ofŽ cial noted:

American troops are not showing any great disposition to take prisoners unless the enemy come over in batches of twenty or more.

When smaller groups than this appear with their hands up, the American soldiers . . . are apt to interpret this as a menacing gesture . . . and to take liquidating action accordingly. . . . there is quite a proportion of ‘tough guys’, who have experienced the normal peace-time life of Chicago, and other great American cities, and who are applying the lessons they learned there.

161 As in the PaciŽ c theatre, American troops often rationalized their con- duct as retaliation. The tenacity of German troops – their reluctance to surrender, and their ability to in ict casualties until their supplies of ammunition were exhausted – was intensely frustrating to Americans, certain of victory, who saw their resistance as futile. However, prisoner killing continued to be overtly encouraged by some American ofŽ cers.

Patton’s address to the 45th Infantry Division before the invasion of Sicily could not have been more explicit: When we land against the enemy . . . we will show him no mercy.

. . . If you company ofŽ cers in leading your men against the enemy Ž nd him shooting at you and, when you get within two hundred yards of him, and he wishes to surrender, oh no! That bastard will die! You must kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs.

You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick it in. He can do no good then. Stick them in the liver.

162 Major-General Raymond Hufft ordered his troops to ‘take no prisoners’ when he led them across the Rhine.

163 And, as in the PaciŽ c, American troops were encouraged to regard their foes as subhuman.

One American interrogator described an 18-year-old parachutist captured after the Ardennes offensive as a ‘fanatical Hitler youth’, a ‘totally dehumanised Nazi’ and a ‘carefully formed killing machine’:

159 Moore, ‘Unruly Allies’, p. 190.

160 S.E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest (London, 2001 [1992]), pp. 150, 206, 277. It is nevertheless worth noting that Ambrose could obtain only second-hand accounts of the most agrant story he heard about prisoner killing, when Lieutenant Ronald C.

Spiers allegedly gunned down ten German POWs who were at work digging a ditch.

No one actually saw it happen.

161 Moore, ‘Unruly Allies’, p. 191.

162 Bourke, Intimate History , p. 183.

163 Op. cit., p. 184.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 184 Niall Ferguson I wondered why the M[ilitary] P[olice] had not fulŽ lled his wish [to die in battle], particularly after he had killed one of their comrades.

They had merely knocked him out cold. Hard-eyed and rigid of face, he was arrogant with an inner, unbending arrogance. He aroused in me an urge which I hope never to experience again, an urge to kill.

I could have killed him in cold blood, without any doubt or second thought, as I would a cockroach. It was a terrible feeling to have, because it was without passion. I could not think of him as a human being.

164 German soldiers also came to fear falling into the hands of Australians (‘because of the way the Aussies treated their prisoners’), New Zealanders (‘We were told they would cut the throat of every POW’) and French North African troops, whose ‘reputation for fairness was bad’.

165 Such behaviour might have been expected to encourage retaliation.

When Corporal Donovan C. Evers found himself trapped by a German tank in a basement near Hamburg in March 1945, he:

started up the steps to surrender. I had a lot of thoughts walking up those steps about all the atrocities that we had committed on the German soldiers. We didn’t know what to expect from the Germans. When I walked out the door of the house with my hands up, a young German soldier about sixteen years old stuck an auto- matic pistol in my stomach and said, ‘For you the war is over.’ I thought that was it, that he was going to shoot me.

166 Yet the scale of prisoner killing – the extent to which soldiers fought to the death – was far less in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe.

Throughout the war, the Germans tended to treat their Anglophone foes relatively well when they surrendered, certainly far better than their Soviet counterparts. One New Zealander taken prisoner in Italy was plied with schnapps, pork and potatoes by his Anglophile captor.

167 John Verney, captured in Sardinia by the Italians after a successful commando mission, feared that he would be shot if handed over to an incandescent German ofŽ cer, but his anxiety was probably over- done.

168 Massacres of POWs were the exception, not the rule, in the West. Likewise, only a minority of American soldiers regarded prisoner killing as legitimate. In March 1945 Major John Cochran very nearly killed a 16-year-old German boy – a Hitler Youth ofŽ cer candidate – who had surrendered only after killing one of his men:

164 Padover, Psychologist in Germany , p. 166.

165 E. Bull, Go Right, Young Man (Hornby, 1997), p. 19; J.E. Geiger, German Prisoners of War at Camp Cooke, California: Personal Accounts of 14 Soldiers, 1944–1946 (Jefferson, NC, and London, 1996), pp. 13, 18f.

166 Spiller, Prisoner of Nazis , p. 174.

167 Begg and Liddle, For Five Shillings a Day , p. 327.

168 J. Verney, Going to the Wars (London, 1955).

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 185 I was very emotional over the loss of a good soldier and I grabbed the kid and took off my cartridge belt. I asked him if there were any more like him in the town. He gave me a stare and said, ‘I’d rather die than tell you anything.’ I told him to pray, because he was going to die. I hit him across the face with my thick, heavy belt. I was about to strike him again, when I was grabbed behind by Chaplain Kerns. He said, ‘Don’t!’ Then he took the crying child away. The chaplain had intervened not only to save a life but to prevent me from committing a murder. Had it not been for the chaplain, I would have.

169 This was the kind of restraint absent on the Eastern Front, where Christianity was overridden by what Michael Burleigh has called the totalitarian ‘religions’ of National Socialism and Stalinism.

170 VII The crucial determinant of an army’s willingness to Ž ght on or surren- der was, as we have seen, soldiers’ expectations of how they would be treated if they did lay down their arms. In the case of prisoner killing in the heat of battle, information about enemy conduct in this regard was relatively easy to obtain: eyewitness accounts of prisoner killings tended to circulate rapidly and widely among front-line troops, often becoming exaggerated in the telling. By contrast, news of the way prisoners were treated away from the battleŽ eld was slower to spread, depending as it did on testimony from escaped POWs or the letters from POWs to their families relayed by the International Committee of the Red Cross. It should be borne in mind that both of the latter channels were effectively closed between Germany and the Soviet Union. It was exceedingly difŽ cult for POWs to escape from camps on either side because of the geographical distances between enemy camps and safe territory, the harsh discipline of camps and the refusal of the Germans to acknowledge Stalin’s belated signing of the Geneva Conventions. The extent to which treatment of prisoners varied is set out in Table 4. A British prisoner in German hands had a reasonably good chance of surviving the war, as only 1 in every 29 died in captivity, but a Russian prisoner was more likely to die than survive. More than 57% of the 5.7 million Russians captured by the Germans expired in captivity; sig- niŽ cantly, the Ž rst prisoners to die in the Auschwitz gas chambers were Red Army POWs.

171 169 Ambrose, ‘Last Barrier’, p. 547.

170 M. Burleigh, ‘Political Religion and Social Evil’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions III (2002), pp. 1–60.

171 Y. Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (eds), Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, IN, 1994), pp. 159f.

172 Garrett, P.O.W., pp. 182f.; M. Gilbert, Second World War(London, 1989), p. 745.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 186 Niall Ferguson Table 4Prisoners of war: percentage and chances of dying in captivity Percentage Chance British POW in German hands 3.51 in 29 British POW in Japanese hands 24.81 in 4 American POW in Japanese hands 33.01 in 3 Russian POW in German hands 57.51 in 2 German POW in British hands 0.031 in 3333 German POW in American hands 0.151 in 683 German POW in French hands 2.581 in 39 German POW in East European hands 32.91 in 3 German POW in Russian hands 35.81 in 3 Sources:B. Moore and K. Fedorowich, ‘Prisoners of War’, in B. Moore and K. Fedorowich, Prisoners of War (Oxford and Washington, DC, 1986), p. 1; M. Burleigh, Third Reich(London, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2000), pp. 512–13; S. Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale(New York, 1997), p. 242; S.P. Mackenzie, ‘Treatment of Prisoners of War’, Journal of Modern HistoryLXVI(1994), pp. 516–17; J. Keegan (ed.), Times Atlas of the Second World War (London, 1989), p. 205; R. Overmans, ‘German Historiography’, in G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs (Baton Rouge and London, 1992), p. 155.

The notorious Japanese maltreatment of prisoners during the Second World War (which stood in marked contrast to their conduct towards captured Russians in 1904–5) was partly a consequence of the stigmatization of surrender per se mentioned above. Because the Japanese despised capture for themselves, they despised those who surrendered to them in equal measure.

172 Physical abuse of prisoners – including slaps in the face and beatings – was a daily occurrence in some camps.

173 Executions without due process were frequent. OfŽ cial policy encouraged such brutality by applying the Geneva Convention only ‘mutatis mutandis’, which the Japanese chose to translate as ‘with any necessary amendments’. In practice, POWs were used as slave la- bour.

174 And because the Japanese regarded prisoners as having been spared and expected submission in return, they treated them with extreme harshness. Some prisoners set to work on notorious railways such as the Burma–Thailand line were made to wear armbands bearing the inscription: ‘One who has been captured in battle and is to be beheaded or castrated at the will of the Emperor.’ 175 Attempting to escape – which the Western powers regarded as a prisoner’s duty – was treated by the Japanese as a capital ofŽ ce, though the majority of Allied prisoners who died were in fact victims of malnutrition and disease exacerbated by physical overwork.

176 In addition, as a wartime British 172 Garrett, P.O.W., pp. 182f.; M. Gilbert, Second World War(London, 1989), p. 745.

173 Begg and Liddle, For Five Shillings a Day , pp. 404f.

174 P. Towle, ‘Introduction’, in Towle et al., Japanese Prisoners of War, p. xv; Kinvig, ‘Allied POWs’, pp. 17–57.

175 Hynes, Soldier’s Tale , p. 246.

176 For mortality rates of prisoners in Japanese hands, see Kinvig, ‘Allied POWs’, p. 47n.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 187 report noted with good reason, there was ‘an ofŽ cial policy of humiliat- ing white prisoners of war in order to diminish their prestige in native eyes’.

177 (That said, the Japanese used even more extreme violence towards the indigenous populations of the territory they occupied, undermining their specious claims to be the liberators of Asia.) 178 A substantial proportion of the large number of German troops taken prisoner at the end of the war also died in captivity, though the numbers remain controvers ial. Barely one in ten of those who surrendered at Stalingrad survived their time in Soviet hands, and only around two-thirds of all German prisoners captured on the Eastern Front. Figure 6 shows that the mortality rate for German POWs in Soviet hands reached a peak of over 50% in 1943.

Although the Canadian historian James Bacque claimed that as many as 726 000 who fell into American hands died of starvation or disease, his calculations grossly exaggerate both the number of Germans the Americans captured and their mortality.

179 Table 4 gives Figure 6 Axis prisoners of the Soviet Union: numbers and mortality rates, 1941–1945.

Source: S. Karner, ‘Die Sowjetische Hauptverwaltung fu ¨r Kriegsgefangene und Interniente (GUPVI) in ihr Lagersystem, 1941–1956’, in K.D. Mu ¨ller, K. Nikischkin and G. Wagen- lehner (eds), Die Trago ¨die der Gefangenschaft in Deutschland und der Sowjetunion, 1941–1956 (Cologne and Weimar, 1998), p. 152.

177 Y. Kibata, ‘Japanese Treatment of British Prisoners: The Historical Context’, in Towle et al., Japanese Prisoners of War , p. 143.

178 P. Towle, ‘The Japanese Army and Prisoners of War’, in Towle et al., Japanese Prisoners of War , pp. 1–16.

179 J. Bacque, Other Losses: An Investigation into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners at the Hands of the French and Americans after World War II (Toronto, 1989), esp. pp. 173– 203. For problems with Bacque’s statistics of the mortality of Germans in Allied hands, see S.P. Mackenzie, ‘On the Other LossesDebate’,International History Review x i v (1992), pp. 661–731; Overmans, ‘German Historiography’, passim. Cf. the Ž gures in A.L. Smith, Die ‘vermisste Million’: zum Schicksal deutscher Kriegsgefangener nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg, Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahrshefte fu ¨r Zeitgeschichte, 65 (Munich, 1992), cited in U. Jordan (ed.), Conditions of Surrender:Britons and Germans Witness the End of the War (London and New York, 1997), p. 151.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 188 Niall Ferguson Overmans’s more plausible estimates. The most that can be said is that those Germans who preferred to surrender to the Americans than the British made a miscalculation, since the mortality rate for German POWs in American hands was more than four times higher than the rate for those who surrendered to the British (0.15% to 0.03%).

180 Just like the way men expected to be treated if they laid down their arms, the way they expected to be treated once they were captives could and did have a profound effect on their conduct. There is no question that British, Australian and American attitudes towards the Japanese hardened as reports Ž ltered out about the way the Japanese were treating POWs. Even the relatively rare occasions when the Germans shot British POWs – notably the Ž fty men who had attempted to escape from Stalag Luft III in March 1944 – caused the mood of British servicemen to harden in advance of D-Day. In the same way, Russian wives wrote to their husbands at Stalingrad: ‘Don’t let them capture you, because prison camp is worse than death.’ 181 If prison camps were merely death camps then there was every reason to Ž ght to the death, and little reason to show mercy to German prisoners.

The Germans, too, soon formed a clear enough idea of what their fate would be if they survived surrender and became prisoners of war:

Siberia became the shorthand for incarceration in conditions of barely imaginable harshness. Gu ¨nter Koschorrek knew full well that the Soviets did not ‘treat their prisoners in accordance with the terms of the Geneva convention . . . We have fought against the Soviets – we can imagine what awaits us in Siberia’.

182 VIII Precisely for this reason, the key to ending the war lay in psychological warfare: in persuading German and Japanese soldiers that, contrary to their own expectation, it was safe to surrender. Accordingly, the many lea ets Ž red by Allied artillery onto German positions – as well as radio broadcasts and loudspeaker addresses – emphasized not only the hope- lessness of Germany’s military position but also, crucially, the lack of risk involved in surrendering.

183 Key themes of ‘Sykewar’ were the good treatment of POWs – in particular, the fact that German POWs were given the same rations as American GIs, including cigarettes – 180 This was largely due to the high mortality in the notoriously primitive Rheinwiesenlager. See Overmans, ‘German Historiography’, pp. 163ff.

181 Beevor, Stalingrad , p. 199. One might of course ask how Russian wives knew that German prison camps were ‘worse than death’, given the much more limited news available to them. The answer is, of course, that their government told them so.

182 Koschorrek, Blood Red Snow , pp. 309f.

183 D. Lerner, Psychological Warfare against Nazi Germany :The Sykewar Campaign, D-Day to VE-Day (Cambridge, MA, 1971 [1949]), pp. 23, 43, 101, 133, 136, 184, 208, 216.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 189 and Allied observance of the Geneva Convention.

184 Typical was the lea et which read simply:

EINE MINUTE, die Dir das Leben retten kann ZWEI WORTE, die 850 000 Leben retteten DREI ARTEN, nach Hause zu kommen SECHS ARTEN, das Leben zu verlieren.

185 The ‘two words which had saved 850 000 lives’ were of course ‘I surrender’ – or rather ‘Ei Sso ¨rrender’, spelt out phonetically.

Though it is not easy to assess its effectiveness – POW questionnaires revealed persistent trust in Hitler and belief in the possibility of victory until as late as January 1945 – W.H. Hale was probably close to the mark when he concluded that ‘Sykewar . . . implanted in many enemy minds facts and arguments that speeded individual disaffection or sur- render’.

186 According to Janowitz and Shils, once primary group soli- darity began to break down in the Wehrmacht in the last months of the war, Allied propaganda began to be effective; indeed, it cannot be ruled out that the line of causation went the other way.

187 Perhaps the best evidence of the effectiveness of such psychological warfare was the evident preference of German troops to surrender to American units.

‘God preserve us!’ one German soldier wrote in his diary on 29 April 1944, ‘If we have to go to prison, then let’s hope it’s with the Ameri- cans.’ 188 That was a widespread sentiment. Until the third quarter of 1944, more than half of all German prisoners were held in the East.

But thereafter, the share captured by the Americans rose rapidly, as Figure 7 shows. It is clear that many German units sought to surrender to the Americans in preference to other Allied forces, and particularly the Red Army. With the beneŽ t of hindsight, they would have done better to look for British captors, since the British treated German prisoners better than the Americans did, and were also less willing to hand them over to the Soviets.

189 But successful psychological warfare led the Germans to expect the kindest treatment from US forces.

184 Op. cit., pp. 174, 279, 358, As one ‘Sykewar’ veteran commented, ‘Much casuistical effort was expended to make surrender compatible with soldierly honour.’ Note the case of Generalmajor Elster, who was reluctant to surrender to the American 39th Infantry without a token exchange of Ž re. Notions of military honour were remarkably persistent even in the face of inevitable defeat: G.W. Ramsey (ed.), ‘Germany Surrenders: Surrender of Gruppe Elster’, After the Battlex lvi i i (1985), p. 4.

See also Jordan, Conditions of Surrender , p. 130.

185 Lerner, Psychological Warfare , p. 216.

186 Op. cit., p. 311.

187 M. Janowitz and E.A. Shils, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration’, esp. pp. 202, 211ff.

188 Koschorrek, Blood Red Snow , pp. 309f. Cf. e.g. Geiger, German Prisoners of War, pp. 20– 3; J. Murdoch, The Other Side: The Story of Leo Dalderup as told to John Murdoch (London, 1954), pp. 138f.

189 Contrary to the terms of the Geneva Convention of 1929, a substantial number of German prisoners were transferred to other powers by those they surrendered to.

The Americans handed over 765 000 to France, 76 000 to the Benelux countries and 200 000 to Russia. In Saxony and Bohemia they also refused to accept the surrender of German troops, who were handed over to the Russians: H. Nawratil, Die deutschen Nachkriegsverluste unter Vertriebenen, Gefangenen und Verschleppter: mit einer U ¨ bersicht u ¨ber die europa ¨ischen Nachkriegsverluste (Munich and Berlin, 1988), pp. 36f.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 190 Niall Ferguson Figure 7German prisoners by principal captors, 1943–45 (quarterly Ž gures).

Source: E. Maschke et al., Die deutschen Kriegsgefangenen (Munich, 1974), pp. 194f., 200f. (Tables 2, 5); R. Overmans, ‘German Historiography’, in G. Bischof and S. Ambrose (eds), Eisenhower and the German POWs (Baton Rouge and London), p. 145.

Similar efforts were made to encourage Japanese soldiers to surren- der. ‘Surrender passes’ and translations of the Geneva Convention were dropped on Japanese positions, and concerted efforts were made to stamp out the practice of taking no prisoners. On 14 May 1944 General MacArthur sent a telegram to the commander of the Alamo Force demanding an ‘investigation . . . of numerous reports reaching this headquarters that Japanese carrying surrender passes and attempting to surrender in Hollandia area have been killed by our troops’.

190 The Psychological Warfare Branch representative at X Corps, Captain William R. Beard, complained that his efforts were being negated ‘by the front-line troops shooting [Japanese] when they made an attempt to surrender’.

191 But gradually the message got through, especially to more experienced troops. ‘Don’t shoot the bastard!’ shouted one vet- eran when a Japanese emerged from a foxhole waving a surrender lea et.

192 By the time the Americans took Luzon in the Philippines, ‘70 percent of all prisoners surrendering made use of surrender passes or followed exactly the instructions contained in them’. The Philip- pines had been deluged with over 55 million such lea ets, and it seems plausible to attribute to this propaganda effort the fall in the ratio of prisoners to Japanese dead from 1:100 in late 1944 to 1:7 by July 1945 190 Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets , p. 60.

191 Op. cit., p. 61.

192 Op. cit., p. 66.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 191 (Figure 8). Still, the Japanese soldier who emerged with six surrender lea ets – one in each hand, one in each ear, one in his mouth, and one tucked in a grass band tied around his waist – was wise to take no chances.

193 IX The importance of encouraging the other side to surrender was a lesson not everyone learned from the First World War. On the con- trary, a number of the combatant countries in the Second World War elected to elevate the practice of killing and mistreating prisoners to the status of ofŽ cial policy. The effect was to create cycles of violence, particularly in the East European and PaciŽ c theatres of war which tended to prolong hostilities. Of course, there were many reasons why the death toll of the Second World War was so much higher than that of the First, not the least of which was simply the superior destructive power of weaponry. But another important reason was that, particularly on the Eastern Front but also in the PaciŽ c theatre, men on both sides of the con ict were reluctant to surrender. No doubt this reluctance had something to do with stern military discipline and codes of martial honour. But quite apart from these, there was the very good reason Figure 8 Japanese casualties in the Philippines, 20 October 1944 – 4 July 1945.

Source: A.B. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets (Lincoln and London, 1998), p. 154.

193 Op. cit., p. 137. The Russians too sought to undermine enemy morale through psychological warfare. Stalin’s order no. 55 was speciŽ cally designed to encourage Germans to desert, and, although the stark injunction – ‘If German soldiers and ofŽ cers give themselves up, the Red Army must take them prisoner and spare their lives’ – was not exactly reassuring, Red Army propaganda did become more sophisticated in the course of the battle of Stalingrad, thanks to the efforts of German Communists such as Erich Weinart.

War in History2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from 192 Niall Ferguson that prisoners were routinely killed or subsequently treated so badly that their chances of survival could be as bad as one in two.Only quite late in the war was it remembered – and only on the Allied side – that prisoner killing was in fact counterproductive, and that the best way of bringing the war to a swift end was to make surren- der seem a more attractive option for enemy soldiers than Ž ghting on.

It was a lesson of the First World War that Adolf Hitler was not alone in failing to learn. It is a lesson that bears repeating.

War in History 2004 11 (2) at University of Victoria on May 14, 2012 wih.sagepub.com Downloaded from