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Years of Long Captivity 2 the shackling episode On 19 August 1942, a joint British-Canadian commando launched a major raid on the French port of Dieppe. Five thousand Canadians and 1,000 British troops took part in the operation, which ended disastrously with more than 1,000 of the Allied soldiers killed and about 2,000 taken prisoner, most of them Canadians. The Germans lost no more than 345 men; 4 Germans were taken prisoner and brought to Britain.∞ Two weeks later, on 2 September, the okw ordered all British Commonwealth soldiers who had been taken prisoner at Dieppe to be shackled as of 2 p.m. the following day. This measure would be canceled only when the British government withdrew an operational order that the Germans had found on the British troops: ‘‘Wherever it is possible, the prisoners have their hands bound so that they cannot destroy their papers.’’≤ Reacting quickly, the British War Office announced on the very same day that investigations were ‘‘being made as to whether in fact any such order was issued. It is categorically denied that any German had his hands tied. Any such order if it was issued, will be cancelled.’’ The British War Cabinet recognized that although the Geneva Convention said nothing about shackling , tying the hands of prisoners, if only to prevent them from destroying documents, could be construed as running against the convention.≥ Declaring itself satisfied with the British assurance, the okw had the reprisal measures lifted the following day, that is, even before they had been carried out.∂ Matters might have rested here had it not been for a second incident one month later. On the night of 3 October a small British commando force raided the Channel island of Sark (Operation Basalt). After landing on the island, the commandos succeeded in making their way to the annex of a hotel building, from which they abducted five German engineers who were sleeping there. The prisoners’ hands were tied so that their captors could link arms with them while moving past some barracks where German troops were quartered. At this point the five Germans tried to escape, and years of long captivity 41 four of them were shot in the attempt; when the Germans later discovered the bodies, the prisoners’ hands were tied behind their back.∑ Again, the German response was unambiguous. Berlin informed London that as of twelve o’clock noon on 8 October, all British officers and soldiers captured at Dieppe were to be laid in irons until the British War Office ensured that German prisoners of war would not be fettered.∏ Taking these German threats seriously, the War Cabinet quickly issued a public statement explaining that the British force at Sark had been forced to kill the four Germans so as to prevent detection. The War Office reiterated that none of the German pows brought back to Britain after the Dieppe raid had ever claimed that their hands had been tied, and the office suggested that representatives of the protecting power, that is, Switzerland, be invited to con- firm this with the prisoners.π In discussing the appropriate reaction to the German reprisal measures, the War Cabinet recognized the weight of the fact that the Germans were holding more British prisoners than vice versa. The total number of German pows interned in the British Commonwealth at that time (excluding merchant seamen) amounted to 26,682. Of these, 16,540 were held in Canada, 7,843 in the Middle East, 1,398 in Australia, and 569 in the United Kingdom, and 332 were in transit to the United States.∫ At the same time, if Italian prisoners were taken into account, then the number of Axis pows held by Britain was substantially higher than the number of British pows held by both Germany and Italy. The War Cabinet thought that Berlin could ill afford to ignore the possibility of retaliation against Italian prisoners and therefore decided to adopt a firm stand. (As it turned out, the Italians refused to join the Germans in the shackling issue.)Ω Repeating that it did not and would not countenance any orders to tie up pows taken in the field, the War Cabinet denounced the reprisals the Germans threatened as acts expressly forbidden by Article 2 of the Geneva Convention. Should the German government persist, the cabinet warned, the British government would see itself ‘‘compelled, in order to protect [its] own Prisoners of War, to take similar measures...

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