09-14-2008, 06:15 PM
Wars tend to bring out the worst in people. Long wars always do. People who employ generous clemency and chivalric gestures at the beginning of a war will usually have dispensed with all such foolishness after a year or two. Our Civil War was full of chivalric illusion in its early months. By its third year there was unrestrained warfare against civilian populations. By the end of WWII all restraint was gone and whole cities were bombed into oblivion. People just wanted the war to be over, whatever it took.
POWs were usually taken in big enveloping movements where entire divisions were surrounded and surrendered as a whole. There was very little of this sort of fighting in the Pacific. Instead, you had small-unit actions on a massive scale. When you are out in the jungle with a squad of 10 or 12 men, you can't spare any to watch over prisoners. So you don't take any.
The Eastern Front of WWII was unusual in that it was decided at the highest levels of German command that this was to be a war to extermination between races, unlike the comparatively lawful warfare in France and Poland. Soldiers were not encouraged to take prisoners and when Russians began to surrender in large numbers, they were not killed simply because the ammunition was needed elsewhere. Most were simply alowed to perish through neglect. Very few survived captivity. The few who did were mostly executed upon repatriation after the war. It was a war of nearly unexampled brutality.
POWs were usually taken in big enveloping movements where entire divisions were surrounded and surrendered as a whole. There was very little of this sort of fighting in the Pacific. Instead, you had small-unit actions on a massive scale. When you are out in the jungle with a squad of 10 or 12 men, you can't spare any to watch over prisoners. So you don't take any.
The Eastern Front of WWII was unusual in that it was decided at the highest levels of German command that this was to be a war to extermination between races, unlike the comparatively lawful warfare in France and Poland. Soldiers were not encouraged to take prisoners and when Russians began to surrender in large numbers, they were not killed simply because the ammunition was needed elsewhere. Most were simply alowed to perish through neglect. Very few survived captivity. The few who did were mostly executed upon repatriation after the war. It was a war of nearly unexampled brutality.
Pecunia non olet
