¹ For a brilliant discussion of the problem of statelessness, see Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1958), Ch. 9Google Scholar.

² See Pugh, G. S., “Prisoners at War: The P.O.W. Battleground,” 60 Dickenson Law Review 123–138 (1956)Google Scholar, and “The Code of Conduct,” 56 Columbia Law Review 678–707 (1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The best book on the nature and laws of captivity is Flory, William E. S., Prisoners of War: A Study in the Development of International Law (Washington, 1942)Google Scholar.

³ Hugo Grotius, writing in the early seventeenth century, still defended the right of enslavement, De Jure Belli ac Paris, Book III, Chapter 14, Section 9. The decisive theoretical critiques of this idea are by Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book IV, Chapter 2, and Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book I, Chapter 4.

⁴ Lorimer, James, Institutes of the Law of Nations (London, 1884), Volume II, p. 72 Google Scholar. The whole passage is excellent and should be consulted.

⁵ The Code of Conduct is the most important official statement on how U.S. soldiers are to behave when overpowered by an enemy, and I will refer to it frequently below. At the time it was issued, its legal status was unclear (see Pugh, “The Code of Conduct”), but it has recently been described, in the aftermath of the Pueblo incident, as “only a guideline.” Violations of the articles of the Code do not constitute a criminal offense: New York Times, December 29, 1968. It is presumably still the opinion of the authorities that they constitute a moral offense, and the Code continues to play a very important part in the training of US soldiers.

⁶ Something must be said here about the difficult problem of coercion, though to deal with it in even a minimally adequate way would require another essay. The common and plausible view is that no man is morally bound to fulfill a contract or commitment he was coerced into making. Since the word “coerced” is usually taken to mean “forced by violence or the threat of violence,” surrender would appear to have no moral validity. But it might be argued against this that the definition of coercion depends or ought to depend on the situation of the individual said to be coerced, and that in the context of war, violence exercised in accordance with the laws of war is not coercive. Surrender is a social practice designed to accommodate the human difficulties of war; it can't be judged by conventions appropriate to other, and very different, settings. This calls into question the dictionary definition and ordinary usage of the word “coercion.” But there are only two alternatives, neither of them attractive: either to suggest that no morally binding agreements are possible in wartime, or to accept Hobbes' argument that “Covenants entered into by fear … are obligatory” (an argument Hobbes explicitly applied to prisoners of war—see Leviathan, Chapter XIV).

⁷ See the discussion in Pugh, , “The Code of Conduct,” pp. 682–683, 690n.Google Scholar, and Williams', Eric introduction to The Escapers (London, 1953), p. 15 Google Scholar.

⁸ Lorimer, op. cit., II, 72.

⁹ See the British Manual of Military Law (1884): “A State has no power to force its subjects to act contrary to their parole.” Quoted in Flory, op. cit., p. 123.

¹⁰ Geneva Convention I, Article 21; for a discussion of contemporary law on parole arrangements, see Greenspan, Morris, The Modern Law of Land Warfare (Berkeley, 1959), pp. 108–110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Pugh, , “The Code of Conduct,” p. 683nGoogle Scholar.

¹² Geneva Convention I, Articles 42, 91–93; see Greenspan, op. cit., pp. 135–137.

¹³ Burgess, Carter L., “Prisoners of War,” 56 Columbia Law Review 676–677 (1956)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Pugh, , “The Code of Conduct,” p. 690 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ But see Burchett, W., Koje Unscreened (Peking, 1953)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Pugh, , “Prisoners at War,” citing UN Command Reports, p. 131 Google Scholar. A complete account of the Koje mutiny, from the American point of view, can be found in Vetter, Hal, Mutiny on Koje Island (Tokyo, 1965)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Quoted in Vetter, , Mutiny, p. 10 (emphasis added)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Report by the Secretary of Defense6s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, August, 1955.

¹⁹ Rebecca West reports on the trials of several British prisoners of war for treason in The Meaning of Treason (London, 1947)Google Scholar. For a complete review of judicial treatment of prisoner misconduct, see “Misconduct in the Prison Camp: A Survey of the Law and an Analysis of the Korean Cases,” 56 Columbia Law Review 709–794 (1956)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ The courts must say something, however, and what they have said is discussed in “Coercion: A Defense to Misconduct while a Prisoner of War,” 29 Indiana Law Journal 603–621 (1954)Google Scholar. In passing judgment on prisoners who have given military information, it is worth noting the finding of army experts after World War II: ”It is virtually impossible for anyone to resist a determined interrogator.” Cited in “P.O.W.—The Fight Continues After the Battle,” p. 61. For a full discussion of this problem, see Albert D. Biderman's careful study of the behavior of American prisoners in Korea, , March to Calumny (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

The whole question has recently been reopened because of the Pueblo case, and considerably complicated by the fact that the sailors of the Pueblo were imprisoned by a state with which the United States was not at war. They were thus formally unprotected by the Geneva Conventions and entirely without any sense of when or whether they might be returned to the United States. Perhaps for this reason, but also because of increased American sensitivity to the plight of prisoners, their “confessions” were not thought by the Secretary of the Navy to warrant court martial proceedings.

²¹ Geneva Convention I, Article 79. Resistance groups within the camp can also be organized democratically; thus an American group in Korea, one of whose members is quoted in Biderman, , March to Calumny, p. 171 Google Scholar: “We … agreed there would be no such thing as a leader. Before we would do anything, it would go before a vote and the majority would rule.”

²² These decisions can be informally made, as in the camp described by Evans, A. J. in his memoir of World War I, The Escaping Club (London, 1922), pp. 180–181 Google Scholar: “Escaping came before everything, and was an excuse for any discomforts which one or two members might bring on the rest of the community. If you wished for help, almost any man in the fort would have helped you blindly, regardless of consequences.”

²³ P. R. Reid discusses some of the problems that arose in the multi-national camp that the Germans ran for confirmed escapers at Colditz in World War II, in Escape from Colditz (New York, 1956)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Sometimes prisoners set up their own courts in the camp, but these are not encouraged by the authorities on either side. See Pugh, , “The Code of Conduct,” pp. 683n. and 702 Google Scholar.

²⁵ “… nearly everyone was working in some way on the X (escape) organization,” Brickhill, Paul, The Great Escape (New York 1967) p. 42 Google Scholar; “… we pooled our knowledge. The camp was nothing less than an escaping club,” Evans, op. cit., p. 68. (The best books on escape are almost invariably written by British officers.)

²⁶ Brickhill, op. cit., pp. 211–223.

²⁷ Escape from Germany (New York, 1956), p. 8 Google Scholar.

²⁸ Reid, op. cit., p. 35.

²⁹ Op. cit., p. 7.

³⁰ Exactly what this means and how such a community can be built are the main concerns of Ketchum's, J. Davidson fine sociological study, Ruhleben: A Prison Camp Society (Toronto, 1965)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his postscript to this book, Robert MacLeod argues that the “prevalence of the idea of escape” may be a sign of group disintegration (or, presumably, of social underdevelopment), p. 353. But it is important to note that Ruhleben was a camp for enemy aliens, not soldiers.

³¹ Op. cit., pp. 9-10.

³² They are forced, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, to build a bridge which is of military value to the enemy.

³³ “Introduction” to Brickhill, op. cit., p. 9.