Prisoner of war

• 1. Introduction

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  A prisoner of war is a person held captive by a belligerent power during or immediately after an armed conflict. The phrase itself dates to at least 1610, but the reality it describes is as old as organized warfare. From ancient Mesopotamia to the trenches of Flanders to the prison yards of Hanoi, the question of what happens to an enemy soldier who lays down his arms has never had a simple answer. Some captors have ransomed their prisoners. Others have enslaved them. Others have killed them. And in the twentieth century, the international community tried, with mixed results, to build a legal framework that would protect them. This is the story of that struggle, measured in millions of lives.

• 2. Ancient and Medieval Captivity

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  Homer's Iliad describes Trojan and Greek soldiers offering wealth to opposing forces who had defeated them on the battlefield, begging for mercy in exchange. Those offers were not always accepted. For most of antiquity, the fate of a captured enemy was grim: slaughter or enslavement. Early Roman gladiators could be prisoners of war, classified by their origins as Samnites, Thracians, or Gauls.

  The Roman Empire and Persia fought wars that created prisoners on both sides. In the fourth century AD, St Acacius of Amida was so troubled by the condition of Persian prisoners held in his town under appalling conditions that he sold his church's gold and silver vessels to ransom them. He was later canonised for it.

  The Middle Ages brought a partial evolution. Noblemen could hope to be ransomed, their families expected to send sums proportional to the captive's social rank. But for ordinary soldiers, mercy remained scarce. King Henry V's English army killed many French prisoners at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, a decision made after Henry misread a French raiding party's movements as reinforcements and feared the prisoners would rejoin the fight.

  Religious wars pushed captive-taking toward outright elimination. During the Albigensian Crusade, when a crusader asked how to distinguish Catholics from Cathars before the projected capture of Beziers in 1209, the papal legate Arnaud Amalric allegedly replied, "Kill them all, God will know His own." In feudal Japan, no custom of ransoming existed; prisoners could expect summary execution. The Aztecs, by contrast, did take prisoners alive, but for the re-consecration of the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan in 1487, between ten thousand and eighty thousand four hundred persons were sacrificed.

  At the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, twelve thousand Christian galley slaves were freed from the Ottoman Turks when the Ottoman fleet was defeated. For those men, captivity had meant years chained to an oar.

• 3. Law Takes Shape

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  The 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War, established something genuinely new: prisoners of war should be released and allowed to return to their homelands without ransom after hostilities ended. That rule emerged from decades of Europe tearing itself apart, and it marked the beginning of treating POWs as a state's responsibility rather than a captor's personal property.

  Alongside this evolved the right of parole, the word drawn from the French for "discourse." A captured officer surrendered his sword and gave his word as a gentleman. If he swore not to escape, he gained better accommodations and freedom within the prison. If he swore to cease hostilities entirely, he could be repatriated, though he could never serve against his former captors.

  The earliest known purpose-built prisoner-of-war camp was established at Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire, England in 1797, created to hold the growing number of prisoners from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The average population ran to about five thousand five hundred men. The British government went to some lengths to provide food of a quality at least equal to what local people could obtain, and senior officers were permitted to inspect deliveries. Despite this, some prisoners gambled away their rations and died of starvation.

  The Brussels Conference of 1874 began a new phase of international effort, with nations agreeing that inhumane treatment of prisoners had to be prevented. No agreements were immediately ratified, but the work continued. Chapter II of the Annex to the 1907 Hague Convention IV covered the treatment of prisoners of war in detail. The 1929 Geneva Convention expanded these provisions further, and the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 revised them substantially.

  Under Article 17 of the Third Geneva Convention, POWs can only be required to give their name, date of birth, rank, and service number. Article 4 protects captured military personnel from the moment of capture until release or repatriation, and violations can constitute a war crime.

• 4. The American Civil War's Reckoning

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  At the start of the American Civil War, a parole system allowed captives to agree not to fight until officially exchanged, housed in camps run by their own army. The arrangement collapsed in 1863 when the Confederacy refused to exchange Black prisoners.

  In the late summer of 1864, a year after the Dix-Hill Cartel was suspended, Confederate officials approached Union General Benjamin Butler about resuming prisoner exchanges. Butler contacted Ulysses Grant for guidance. On the 18th of August 1864, Grant rejected the offer, stating in essence that the Union could afford to leave their men in captivity, while the Confederacy could not.

  The consequences were severe. About fifty-six thousand of the four hundred nine thousand POWs died in prisons during the war, accounting for nearly ten percent of the conflict's fatalities. Of the forty-five thousand Union prisoners confined at Camp Sumter near Andersonville, Georgia, thirteen thousand, or twenty-eight percent, died. At Camp Douglas in Chicago, ten percent of Confederate prisoners died during a single cold winter month. Elmira Prison in New York state recorded a death rate of twenty-five percent, claiming two thousand nine hundred sixty-three lives, nearly matching Andersonville.

• 5. The Scale of Two World Wars

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  During World War I, about eight million men surrendered and were held in POW camps. Individual surrenders were uncommon; usually a large unit surrendered all at once. At Tannenberg, ninety-two thousand Russians surrendered during the battle alone. When the besieged garrison of Kaunas surrendered in 1915, twenty thousand Russians became prisoners.

  The survival rates varied drastically by location. In Germany, food was short but only five percent of prisoners died. In Russia, conditions were far worse: a quarter of the over two million POWs held there died, and nearly three hundred seventy-five thousand of the five hundred thousand Austro-Hungarian prisoners taken by Russia perished in Siberia from smallpox and typhus.

  At the end of the war in 1918, the first British prisoners were released and reached Calais on the 15th of November. Plans were made for a reception camp at Dover capable of housing forty thousand men. By the 9th of December, two hundred sixty-four thousand prisoners had been repatriated, but a very large number were released en masse without food or shelter, and many died from exhaustion. Each returning officer and soldier received a personal message from King George V, written in his own hand: "The Queen joins me in welcoming you on your release from the miseries and hardships, which you have endured with so much patience and courage."

  World War II dwarfed what came before. Historian Niall Ferguson and figures from Keith Lowe calculated that sixty percent of Chinese POWs held by Japan died, and sixty-two percent of Soviet POWs held by Germany died. Of the one hundred thirty-two thousand one hundred thirty-four Western Allied prisoners held by Japan, thirty-five thousand seven hundred fifty-six died, a death rate of twenty-seven percent, seven times that of Western POWs under the Germans and Italians. By comparison, the death rate for American prisoners in German camps was one point two percent.

  Between 1941 and 1945, the Axis powers took about five point seven million Soviet prisoners. Of these, the remaining three point three million, or fifty-seven point five percent, died during captivity. Between the launch of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and the following spring alone, two point eight million of the three point two million Soviet prisoners taken died in German hands.

• 6. Japan and the Pacific War

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  The Empire of Japan had signed but never ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War. Japan did not treat prisoners in accordance with international agreements, in part because the Japanese military viewed surrender as dishonorable. A directive ratified on the 5th of August 1937 by Emperor Hirohito explicitly removed the constraints of the Hague Conventions from Chinese prisoners of war.

  Prisoners from China, the United States, Australia, Britain, Canada, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, and Japanese-occupied Asia were subject to murder, torture, medical experiments, starvation, and cannibalism. The most notorious use of forced labour was in the construction of the Burma-Thailand Death Railway. After the 20th of March 1943, the Imperial Navy was ordered to kill prisoners taken at sea.

  According to the Tokyo Tribunal, Japan captured three hundred fifty thousand POWs, of whom one hundred thirty-one thousand one hundred thirty-four came from Britain, the Netherlands, Australia, the United States, Canada, and New Zealand. Of those, thirty-five thousand seven hundred fifty-six died in detention. While thirty-seven thousand five hundred eighty-three prisoners from the United Kingdom were released after Japan surrendered, along with twenty-eight thousand five hundred from the Netherlands and fourteen thousand four hundred seventy-three from the United States, the number released from China was only fifty-six.

  Artists inside the camps recorded the conditions at great risk to themselves. Jack Bridger Chalker, Philip Meninsky, Ashley George Old, and Ronald Searle used human hair for brushes, plant juices and blood for paint, and toilet paper as canvas. Some of their works were later used as evidence in the trials of Japanese war criminals. Female prisoners at Changi Prison in Singapore recorded their ordeal through seemingly harmless quilts embroidered in captivity.

• 7. After the War, Before Justice

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  When Germany surrendered in May 1945, the formal end of hostilities did not bring immediate freedom for all prisoners. In 1946, the United Kingdom held over four hundred thousand German POWs, many transferred from camps in the United States and Canada. By 1947, the Ministry of Agriculture argued against repatriating German prisoners, since they made up twenty-five percent of the land workforce, and wanted to keep them working until 1948.

  The United States handed seven hundred forty thousand German prisoners to France, a Geneva Convention signatory. Judge Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, told President Harry S Truman in October 1945 that the Allies themselves, in his words, "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for."

  András Toma, a Hungarian soldier taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1944, was discovered in a Russian psychiatric hospital in the year 2000, likely the last prisoner of war from World War II to be repatriated. The last German POWs, including Erich Hartmann, the highest-scoring fighter ace in the history of aerial warfare, were not released by the Soviets until 1955, two years after Stalin died.

  The Korean War produced a different kind of record. From the 15th to the 27th of November 1952, the Inter-Camp POW Olympics were held in Pyuktong, North Korea, with some five hundred POWs from eleven nationalities competing in football, baseball, basketball, boxing, and other events. The prisoners had their own photographers, announcers, and reporters, who published a newspaper called the "Olympic Roundup" after each day's competition.

  At the end of the First Indochina War, of the eleven thousand seven hundred twenty-one French soldiers taken prisoner after the Battle of Dien Bien Phu and led on death marches to distant POW camps, only three thousand two hundred ninety were repatriated four months later.

• 8. Rights, Violations, and the Continuing Record

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  The United States Military Code of Conduct was promulgated in 1955 via Executive Order 10631 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was created primarily in response to the breakdown of leadership and organization among US forces held as POWs during the Korean War.

  The Code of Conduct requires service members to resist giving information beyond "name, rank, serial number," and prohibits accepting special favors or parole. Since the Vietnam War, the official US military term for enemy POWs has been EPW, or Enemy Prisoner of War. In the year 2000, the US military replaced the designation "Prisoner of War" for captured American personnel with "Missing-Captured," though the term POW remains widely used, including at the Pentagon's own POW/Missing Personnel Office.

  The Third Geneva Convention specifies clear rights: humane treatment with respect for persons and honour; the ability to inform next of kin and the International Committee of the Red Cross of capture; regular communication with relatives; adequate food, clothing, housing, and medical attention; payment for work performed; and prompt release after conflicts end. When a country breaches these rights, those accountable are to be punished. The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials remain the most prominent examples, with German and Japanese commanders prosecuted for murder, ill treatment, deportation, and genocide, most of them executed or sentenced to life in prison.

  Violations have continued regardless of these standards. During the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, Serb paramilitary forces killed POWs at Vukovar and Srebrenica. During the Gulf War in 1991, American, British, Italian, and Kuwaiti POWs were tortured by Iraqi secret police. Major Rhonda Cornum, a thirty-seven-year-old US Army flight surgeon captured when her Blackhawk UH-60 was shot down, was among those subjected to abuse. In 2001, reports emerged that two POWs India had taken during the Sino-Indian War, Yang Chen and Shih Liang, had been imprisoned as spies for three years before spending the following thirty-eight years in a mental asylum in Ranchi under a special prisoner status.

  The last prisoners of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War were not exchanged until 2003, fifteen years after fighting stopped.