Killing After Surrender in WW2: Parachutes and Submarines May 5, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary , trackback
The laws of war dictate that if someone puts up their hands then they are prisoners and must be treated as such. However, despite the traditions of ages and now the strictures of various conventions mercy is ignored at times even by civilised armies. Two striking examples from the Second World War where the opposition had effectively surrendered. First, it was sometimes argued that pilots parachuting from their planes were fair game for murder, at least in certain circumstances. For example, in the Battle of Britain a British pilot bailing out over the UK would be back in plane the day after; a German or Briton falling into the sea might do the same; a German parachuting onto British soil would most certainly not fly again until the end of hostilities. Contemporaries made a great deal of these distinctions: not least because pilots mattered more than planes. Dowding, for example, said that it was understandable that a German pilot shoot at Britons parachuting towards English soil. Others kept to the highgound: Churchill, for example, who had a lot of decency in the marrow of his backbone said that any such thing would be disgusting. International law is, incidentally, unambiguous. It is a crime to shoot aircrew descending from a plane and it was so well before the Second World War.
Another example from the Second World War is submarine warfare and is even more unpleasant. Submarines had torpedoes but they also had a surface gun. If a submarine got a kill on a lone ship and the ship’s crew fled to rafts would it be fair to attack the crew escaping in their lifeboats? The vast majority of all submariners from all nations (Japan made an interesting exception) would have answered with a horrified ‘no’: the weight of deaths was already heavy on these ‘sea wolves’, and sooner or later they might be the ones thrashing around in the water. However, there was one circumstance where submarine crews often (though by no means automatically or enthusiastically) made exceptions. If you destroyed a troop carrier and found boats with tens of invaders in rafts, invaders who would be picked up and then be rerouted towards the destination, wouldn’t it be justifiable to destroy those craft? Again many answered with an emphatic ‘no’. But others elected for massacre. The Polish submarine Sokol, for example, killed many German soldiers in cold blood – the Poles it will be remembered were German-haters post 1939: one WW2 log entry is headed ‘massacre of 200 Huns [sic] off Mirabella Bay’.
These are uncomfortable matters without easy answers: though this blogger would be strongly inclined towards enforcing the simple morality of the sea and air in both cases, while recognising that the enemy might not. However, as a matter of curiosity are there other instances were surrender has been rejected even by ‘decent’ nations in modern times? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com The problem in both scenarios above is essentially the inability to take prisoners. If there had been some way of sucking parachutists into the fuselage or soldiers in a lifeboat into the submarine hold then perhaps… But these were and are non-solutions.
5 May 2014: ML writes: First of all, a quotation from the First World War from the astonishing and wonderful James Ira Thomas “Taffy” Jones DSO, MC, DFC & Bar, MM: ‘My habit of attacking Huns dangling from their parachutes led to many arguments in the mess. Some officers, of the Eton and Sandhurst type, thought it was ‘unsportsmanlike’ to do it. Never having been to a public school, I was unhampered by such considerations of form. I just pointed out that there was a bloody war on, and that I intended to avenge my pals.’ And another, possibly apocryphal – my father who served inter alia in Burma in WWII, used to remark that when the Allies reoccupied Burma in 1944/45 they took no prisoners. I know that the Japanese weren’t very keen on surrendering but it is hard to believe that they all fought to the death and therefore hard to escape the conclusion that many Japanese PoWs must have been simply disposed of. Southern Man: The Coldstream Guards essentially ‘failed’ to take German prisoners in WW1, American Marines rarely took Japanese prisoners on their island assaults, and the Germans took, in ww2, Soviet prisoners only to effectively murder them. There was bloody murder on all sides. Perhaps the closest I can come with a comparison is the habit of not taking prisoners in resistance groups. There too, as with submarines and planes, there was the inability to do so.’ Thanks ML and SM!
7 May 2014: Wolland writes: Your post on the murky, bloody boundary between legitimate combat and war crimes reminded me of your earlier post on possible pictures of Allied atrocities. On the 4th of March 1943, the 3rd day of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea (a massive air attack on a Japanese troop convoy, there is a pretty good Wikipedia article covering the particulars of the battle), Allied aircrews were ordered to strafe around 1000 Japanese survivors who were in life boats, on rafts, or floating in the water. The justification was, of course, that these survivors would be returned to combat as soon as they reached land, although it’s hard to imagine any Japanese commander would have avoided the gallows after the war in similar circumstances. There is newsreel footage of the attacks, available on Youtube, apparently released with different commentaries for American, British and Australian audiences. The Australian commentary is particularly and embarrasingly gleeful.’ TF writes in with a reference to details of killing surrendering prisoners in the Falklands and an MA thesis.The MA thesis includes the following passages pp. 91-21 on the heat of battle, I’ve deleted references though these are there in the original. ‘Before entering combat, GIs unknowingly harbored a host of illusions about warfare and demonstrated little animosity towards enemy soldiers. Once they entered the battlefield, however, they quickly learned that their civilian mindset did not fit the reality facing them. In this adjustment stage, soldiers became acclimated to the sound of gunfire, the sight of dead and wounded bodies, and the act of killing. Nevertheless, their attitude towards the enemy in this early period remained relatively unchanged. ―It took time to get angry, to hate, John Babcock of the 78th Infantry Division remembered, ‘my first feelings were awe confusion, fear. Of course, soldiers in the adjustment stage were still capable of killing POWs during the heat of battle even though Article 23 of the Hague IV Convention specifically prohibited killing an enemy soldier who having laid down their arms, or having no longer means of defense, has surrendered at discretion. In the heat of battle, the violent and desperate nature of close-quarters combat could cause a primal desire to kill without discretion even among inexperienced soldiers. While attacking the summit of Mount Belvedere, Morley Nelson of the 87th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division experienced this transformation as he fired at the fleeing Germans defenders. ―I began to feel one of the great highs that one can feel in the world…an intellectual high that comes only with such a wild outlandish opportunity of being involved with life and death to such a point where your ability to shoot and to move reaches a new height of perfection. Guy Charland of the 357th Regiment, 90th Infantry Division experienced a similar ―high in Normandy after surviving a shoot-out with a lone German soldier. ―I became hysterical and began laughing like I had heard a good joke, like a hunter—the best shot I ever made….He was a bloody mess and I was ecstatically joyful. In order to abide by the rule during the heat of battle, soldiers would have to make the difficult ―emotional turnaround from killer to captor. More often than not, the emotional state created in a desperate fight for survival precluded any such process. William Foley of the 302nd Infantry, 94th Infantry Division was unable to make this change as his company fought its way out of a German encirclement near the Saar River: Without ever a thought of self-control, I fired into every German I saw, wounded or not. A shape rose directly in my path—a face white with terror, gasping words that I could not or chose not to hear or understand. No adjectives can describe the alien pleasure of driving my rifle butt into that hated face under that hated helmet. Then on the ground, that face crumbled under repeated beatings of my rifle butt. I was aware of being on the edge of a red-black void that replaced my sight…44 Such behavior was not limited to fights for survival. The adrenaline rush of a storming a defensive position also drove GIs into the ―red-black void. In Italy, Medic Charlie Keen watched the paratroopers of the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team wildly rush a German position and kill several Germans holding white flags. ―What could you expect, Keen lamented, ―from eighteen- or nineteen-year-olds told for months they were invincible?’ It is depressing stuff but very credible and, I think, understandable. Thanks TF and Wolland!
31 May 2014: James writes ‘In Nam it was policy for the NVA not to take infantry (exception: high rank, which to my knowledge never happened) prisoners. Needless to say this was very unpopular with US forces who on occasion returned the favor, but always unofficially.’ Nathaniel, meanwhile, writes: I’ve heard at second hand from a late relative who served in the U.S. Army in Europe during WW 2 that in his unit there was a coded order that was given if German POWs were to be killed rather than sent back to prison camps. It was not an explicit order to do so but everyone knew what it meant. I doubt that the U.S. Army was worse than other ones in this respect, so it seems likely that even if a soldier was actually captured his survival after that was a chancy thing. Thanks James and Nathaniel!
