No quarter?

[Guest Guest]

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[bitchen frizzy]

Originally posted by Adam1:

For lack of anything else to do for the fans of this mythic beast, could someone share their opinion on what affects offering no quarter to the enemy might have on a campaign?

Historically it's made the enemy in a given battle fight harder - no reason to surrender.

Would one side have a higher unit fanaticism? (- In CM)

I doubt the game mechanics will - or can - incorporate that specifically. It would be abstracted into fanaticism settings.

Basically is this the situation when fighting Al Qaeda?

To my knowledge, Al Qaeda will not be included in CMC.

I can't think of a reason why you would want to avoid accepting prisoners (and thereby respecting the law.)

Governments or generals sometimes get the idea that this will discourage enemy recruits or diminish a country's will to fight. It may be counterproductive to refuse quarter in the battle at hand, but the theoretical benefits are long-term. This would be outside the scope of the game.

[Guest Guest]

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[costard]

Without the infrastructure in place to manage prisoners, plus the means of establishing a dialogue with the end result of trading them in for some meaningful concession, it would seem unlikely that AQ would be giving quarter. At least, this would appear to be the case when your leadership claims not to negotiate with terrorists, ever.

It might have the happy result of leading to fewer fraggings in the allied armies - fewer instances of grunts supposing that they value their lives more highly than their leiutenant does (a given) combined with the supposition that the enemy might also value their lives more than their leiutenant appears to.

I suspect that it would be difficult to establish the practice of systematically killing the captured enemy survivors of a battle - the US had to go through a number of nasty lessons in the Pacific in WWII before it became common. Note that the surrender of Japanese became more common as the war went on; their mythologies, established by saturation propaganda, were ablated by the realities of experience. The difference between shooting someone shooting at you and shooting someone with their hands up would be too close to the difference between lawful killing and murder for most civilised peoples (for a given value of civilised - how about recognising a concept of unlawful killing).

[C'Rogers]

To narrow down the key point of costard's post:

Giving no quarter would likely make your own troops less inclined to fight. IE. I'm a solider, not a murderer.

[Antman]

In ancient and medieval times the slaughter of the enemy - and his women and children- was often

carried out, quite cheerfully and at the direction of higher command.

Eisenhower planned at one point for the shooting

out of hand of the entire German General Staff once the war had been won.

My point? Um........

[Robert Goldsmith]

Experiences in WWII showed that when soldiers commit atrocities, such as killing non-combatants and prisoners, their future effectiveness as combat troops is seriously eroded.

On another thought, the situation with Japanese POWs is interesting. Propoganda told the Japanese soldiers that they would be tortured and killed if captured. On the rare occasions when they were captured, they were often treated better by U.S. soldiers than they were by their own officers. The realization that the progadanda was lies, and the culture of obeying authority, often made the Japanese prisoners particularly easy to manage.

[Antman]

History shows that very often elite units evolve an ethos that can best be described

as a Death Cult; in which the acceptance

of one's own death in the service of the

unit is twinned with a self-image as

dealers-out of death and destruction.

These kinds of religious-military cults

often commit atrocities; their fighting

effectiveness is, if anything, increased by

such acts.

[costard]

An elite cult of death - perhaps the non-combatant's translation of the effective trooper doing his job - surviving. Eliminate every threat, make the decision and judgement of that threat with maximum effect. Only targets, no people. Enjoy the experience - if you're good at a job, you enjoy doing it well.

Eisenhower was probably simply enraged - how dare these men kill more of his troops through simple stupidity, an unwillingness to accept defeat or surrender. With that in mind, Antman, do you have the reference for Ike's intentions? It'd be interesting to place it in context.

These men - and don't forget that they are men - are recruited from a society that has required them to belong, to identify with the rest of the mob, share its hopes, aspirations and values. The common behaviors of the members of that society are represented by the rules: laws, taboos, conditioned responses. If there is hope of peace, then these people need to be able to "rejoin", be other than efficient killers and victorious soldiers. It's hard enough to do without the lasting effects of some extremely stressful conditions in the arena of modern battle. The modern male has 150 000 years of development as an efficient killer/survivor - how many times have you needed to control your rage at an ineffective piece of technology, for DARING to not function? I mean, the odds are stacked against us.

Unless, of course, you have 100 million spare men - with no prospect of having a child through a lack of available women. A cult of death makes some sense with that scenario.

[Antman]

When I said 'elite units', I meant certain formations that have a sense of their own 'specialness' and 'separateness' from society...not the general soldier, either professional or conscript, who although he

has been trained to kill, still sees himself as part of society, no matter how much he may feel that those at home or in the rear areas don't

understand what it's like to be a combat soldier.

Historical examples of the 'Death Cult' in action would include some of the orders of crusading knights, the Mamelukes,some units

of Waffen-SS and the French Foreign Legion,

to name just a few.

Note that these formations are known for their fighting effectiveness.

Regarding Eisenhower, and plans for the execution

of German war leaders and the General Staff;

I can't put my hands on the source(embarrassingly) since I moved 2000 books down to the garage, but any good book dealing with the wartime Allied plans for post-war Germany willcover this. The original sources (from memory)are the diaries of Bedell Smith and Harry Butcher, and perhaps Kay Summersby.

Eisenhower himself omitted a great deal fom his diaries when it came time to publish his memoirs.

In fairness, I would point out that Eisenhower

several times investigated the deaths of German POW's in Allied custody (there were quite a few incidents in Normandy of the killing of prisoners

en masse, as well as several cases of whole railroad cars of German POWS suffocating to death

through overcrowding).

Another thing to remember (and any honest book by

a combat veteran will confirm this) is that surrendering on the battlefield is one thing;

whether the enemy accepts your surrender is another thing- itchy trigger fingers can cause

an instant massacre of soldiers who are genuinely

trying to give up, and many times there is simply not the time or extra men to guard prisoners- so they are killed.

Read about this, if you want, in:

"Visions From A Foxhole: A Rifleman In Patton's Ghost Corps" by William A. Foley Jnr,

an ordinary infantryman who several times executed groups of prisoners during the push into Germany,for reasons both vengeful and practical.

[Antman]

Arggghhh! Wordwrap!!! I hate that!

[Wisbech_lad]

Interestingly, the late Burma campaign (West Africans, Shan, Chinese, Americans, Indians, Nepali's, British, plus probably some more) the one thing that united an extremely diverse bunch, who had no love for one another, was a mutual hatred of the Japanese, because of the Japanese cruelty to captured troops.

Fubar'ed up the Japanese hope of being welcomed as liberators of colonial peoples too.

Were the waffen-ss known for their fighting prowess, or their spiffy uniforms...? Chicken and egg really. If you give some units top tier of recruits and priority for equipment, well, duh they will be amongst your more effective combat units. Whether you call them waffen-ss, or a shock army like what the Russians did (or RAF, which tended to get the best UK recruits)

[costard]

Apologies for the embarrassment Antman - it wasn't my intention to snipe. God forbid I be called for references: um, er, I think, maybe... hours of work trawling through texts.

Losing a good library to the garage sounds familiar - either congratulations are in order or your mother-in-law had her mortgage foreclosed on, in which case commiserations. I'll check out the foxhole book - I've also been reccommended "India's China War", by Gavin Maxwell as an interesting read.

I remember reading an account of a WWI British soldier being court martialled for executing a prisoner on the way back from the lines. It came out that his reasons were along the lines of "It was cold and wet, I was tired, and peeved that this bloody hun was getting out of it, back to safety."

Cheers.

[Antman]

No problem, costard; controversial claims

require referencing

From memory, Eisenhower said during a meeting

that it would be best if the German war leaders were 'shot while trying to escape' and that

the Russians should be allowed to do the dirty work of executing most of the German General Staff.

This needs to be understood in the context of

the Morgenthau plan for reducing Germany to an agricultural nation, and the whole concept of

'unconditional surrender'....in the end things didn't go the way Morgenthau and his backers wanted, but Hitler made enormous political capital from both Morgenthau's ravings and from

the Allied policy of unconditional surrender.

I had to move books down to the garage because I've just got too many:) No room

I can't recommend "Visions From A Foxhole"

too highly; the author (Foley) was a graphic artist, and his sketches of combat soldiers

are included in the book.