A Moral Military

5. Prisoners of War

5 Prisoners of War E arlier chapters made regular reference to the modern conception of prisoner of war (POW) and used the concept in various ways. However, the subject is so important that it calls for special consideration . In the Army’s FM 27-10, the chapter on POWs is by far the longest. Here, we will give merely an outline of a few of the many aspects of the POW status. A History of the POW The British Manual on Military Law gives a helpful bit of history: Few of the customs of war have undergone greater changes than those relating to the treatment of prisoners. In ancient times captured soldiers were killed, mutilated or enslaved. In the Middle Ages they were imprisoned or held to ransom. It was only in the 17th century that they began to be regarded as prisoners of the State and not the property of the individual captors. Even during the wars of the 19th century they were often subject to cruel neglect, unnecessary suffering and unjustifiable indignities. After the Second World War a great number of German and Japanese officers were tried and convicted for the murder or maltreatment of prisoners of war. (Examples: The Dachau Concentration Camp Trial was concerned with the murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war on a large scale, . . . and the Belsen Trial where the charges against the accused specifically referred to a British prisoner of war who was murdered in Belsen concentration camp. Other British and many thousands of Russian prisoners of war were murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, the staff of which were tried and convicted by the Russians at Oranienburg in 1948, for these and other war crimes.)1 The modern rules for dealing with POWs were formulated in the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention in 1929 and then reformulated in 1949. We start with the generally accepted definition of prisoner of war given in the Geneva Convention on POWs. Defining the POW The question of who is and is not a POW can be a matter of life and death. Someone caught at hostile action can be shot as a spy (after a trial), unless that person is accepted as a POW. Those who are POWs must be given a certain minimum level of food, clothing, and safe shelter and have other privileges, as we will see. Their impressive privileges or rights are that they may not be attacked after they have surrendered and that they may not be wounded or killed after being captured. So, the matter of membership in the class of POWs is hardly trivial. Article 4 of the “Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, 12 August 1949” (GPW), reads as follows: Prisoners of war . . . are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy: 1. Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces. 2. Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating inside or outside their own territory . . provided that such militias or volunteer corps fulfill the following conditions: a. that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates ; b. that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance; c. that of carrying arms openly; d. that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war. 3. Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power. 88 / Chapter 5 4. Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card. . . . 5. Members of crews . . . of the merchant marine . . . and civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit by more favourable treatment under any other provision of international law. 6. Inhabitants of a nonoccupied territory, who on the approach of the enemy spontaneously take up arms...