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(1,500 words) History article review
Article AND guidelines to follow for article in attachement. 3rd year university level. Need A+
Article Review Guidelines
The review should be no more than 1,500 words; and should provide both an overview and a critique, asking the following questions.
If you like you can do a bit of research on the author and find out her/his interests, leanings, and possible biases.
1. An article review should be a dialogue between the article and yourself; thus you do not need to cite or read other materials.
2. Please focus on the article. Don’t talk about contemporary affairs or wider historical events with which the article does not deal.
3. You don’t need an introduction, which explains the general facts – cut down on your words and save space for your own argument. Start your essay with the author’s main points.
4. Don’t make moral statements. Imperialism, colonialism, and racism, for example, had some negative impact worldwide; but the purpose of this essay is not to apply contemporary standards to the past. Your job is not to say “good” or “bad” about the historical events, but to analyze the article.
5. Whenever you cite the article that you are reviewing, indicate the page number in parentheses.
6. When you write a review essay, think about the following questions: (You don’t have to answer them in your essay. These questions are to assist you come up with ideas.)
a. What is the author’s main argument? You can summarize the article in one paragraph. What is the purpose of this article? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
b. What sorts of theories / sources / evidence does the author use?
c. Is the article analytical or too much based on narrative?
d. What sort of facts does the author overlook? Does he/she include everyone’s perspectives?
e. Is the author logical? Does the author accomplish what he/she has set out to do?
f. Did the article improve your knowledge of the topic?
7. If possible, identify what sorts of contributions the article makes to historical knowledge.
8. When you answer the questions above, do not just say: “the author is not logical.” Remember that whenever you criticize the article, you need to explain why you have adopted a particular viewpoint. Just as historians need evidence to support their arguments, you will need to provide reasons and evidence for your argument.
9. A good way to organize your review is to identify the main argument, then point out the merits and flaws of the article, and finally evaluate the article as a whole. While all the articles on the list are published in prestigious journals, it does not necessarily mean that they are “perfect.”
10. Do not simply summarize the article.
Prisoner Taking and Prisoner
Killing in the Age of Total
War: Towards a Political
Economy of Military Defeat1
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.
‘Pochemu? Why did you continue to Ž ght?’ This was the question oneRed 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 difŽcult 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 History for 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
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)
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 Wara
Allied military deaths 5.4 11.3
Central Powers/Axis military deaths 4.0 4.6
Difference: the ‘net body count’ 1.4 6.7
Percentage differenceb 35 145
aIt 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 proportion was smaller than in previous wars because of improved
medical provision.
bThe 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 BattleŽeld 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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 Conict: 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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
154 Niall Ferguson
the individual captor come to the fore. One possibility, as we have
seen, is that the supposed surrenderer may be blufŽng. Accepting sur-
render is therefore itself risky. It may also be quite difŽcult 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-
oners15 – 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. ShefŽeld, 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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
156 Niall Ferguson
Table 2 Prisoners 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 total of total
casualtiesa mobilizeda
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
Romaniab 80 000 80 000 17.8 1 000 000 8.0
Serbia 70 423 150 000 14.6 750 000 9.4
Greecec 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
aPercentages calculated using minima.
bRomanian Ž gures are very approximate.
cGreek 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)
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 highlights of American war propa-
ganda in 1918.22 Nevertheless, 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 Étaples:
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)
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 Kriegsugblätter
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, Kriegsugblätter, 29 Jan. 1915.
38 J. Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1993), p. 50.
War in History 2004 11 (2)
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 History iii (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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 ofŽcers 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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
164 Niall Ferguson
Table 3 Prisoners of war, 1939–1945a
Troops mobilized Prisoners of war POWs as
percentage
of troops mobilized
Allies
UK 5 896 000 172 600 2.9
Canada 1 100 000 9 000 0.8
Australia 1 340 000 26 400 2.0
New Zealand 150 000 8 500 5.7
South Africa 250 000 14 600 5.8
India 2 582 000 79 500 3.1
France 4 600 000 1 456 500 31.7
Belgium 653 500 200 000 30.6
Poland 1 490 000 787 000 52.8
Yugoslavia 3 740 000 125 000 3.3
USSR 34 476 700 5 700 000 16.5
USA 16 354 000 139 700 0.9
Axis
Germany (and Austria) 17 893 200 11 094 000 62.0
Italy 4 500 000 430 000 9.6
Japan 9 100 000 42 543 0.5
aThe table shows only those countries for which data could be found. On 22 June 1945
SHAEF headquarters announced that 7614794 POWs and DEF/SEP (disarmed enemy
forces, surrendered enemy personnel) were in British and American camps, of whom
4 209000 were said to be soldiers captured before the German capitulation. According to
Zabecki, however, the Western Allies captured only 630000 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 PaciŽc Area between 1942 and 1945. But Hata suggests that
no more than 50000 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 25000 men to the Czechs and 70000 to the Poles. The US handed over 5000 to
Luxembourg, 667000 to France, and 31000 to Belgium. The British handed over 33000
to the Belgians, 7000 to the Dutch and 25000 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 oags et les kommandos, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1987).
Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 165
Another German ofŽcer 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 Pétain 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 débâcle, 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 ofŽcer:
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
oags et les kommandos, 1939–1945 (Paris, 1987).
52 Op. cit., p. 23.
53 M. Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts: The Tirailleurs Sénégalese in French West Africa, 1857–
1960 (London, 1991), pp. 92–6.
54 M. Bloch, Etrange défaite: témoignage écrit en 1940 (Paris, 1946).
55 E. May, Strange Victory: Hitler’s Conquest of France (New York, 2000).
War in History 2004 11 (2)
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 Céline’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 287704 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)
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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 110000 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)
Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 169
Figure 2 German 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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)
Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War 171
Figure 4 Japanese 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, Gewöhnliche Soldaten: Desertion und Deserteure im
deutschen und britischen Heer 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 Battle xxxii
(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)
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)
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 lxvi (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)
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, Gün-
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
Pöppel, 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 Führer
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 xxvii (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 History 2004 11 (2)
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’ [Pöppel 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. Pöppel, 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. Förster, ‘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)
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 of all 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 Förster, ‘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 History 2004 11 (2)
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, identiŽed 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 Förster, ‘German Army’, p. 21.
122 Bartov, Hitler’s Army, p. 87.
123 Op. cit., p. 88.
War in History 2004 11 (2)
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 inŽnity 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 ofŽcer 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)
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 OfŽce 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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 Malmédy 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)
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 OfŽce 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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)
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 difŽcult 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)
186 Niall Ferguson
Table 4 Prisoners of war: percentage and chances of dying in captivity
Percentage Chance
British POW in German hands 3.5 1 in 29
British POW in Japanese hands 24.8 1 in 4
American POW in Japanese hands 33.0 1 in 3
Russian POW in German hands 57.5 1 in 2
German POW in British hands 0.03 1 in 3333
German POW in American hands 0.15 1 in 683
German POW in French hands 2.58 1 in 39
German POW in East European hands 32.9 1 in 3
German POW in Russian hands 35.8 1 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, ‘Treatmentof Prisonersof War’, Journal of Modern History LXVI (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)
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 controversial. 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 für Kriegsgefangeneund Interniente
(GUPVI) in ihr Lagersystem, 1941–1956’, in K.D. Müller, K. Nikischkin and G. Wagen-
lehner (eds), Die Tragödie 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 Losses Debate’, International History Review
xiv (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 für 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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. Günter 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)
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 Ssörrender’, 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 Battle xlviii (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 765000 to France, 76000 to the Benelux countries and
200000 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 Übersicht über
die europäischen Nachkriegsverluste (Munich and Berlin, 1988), pp. 36f.
War in History 2004 11 (2)
190 Niall Ferguson
Figure 7 German 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)
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 speciŽcally 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 History 2004 11 (2)
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)
