Though their experience was in no way typical of American service in the Vietnam War, American prisoners of war have dominated American perceptions of the conflict. A small, strikingly homogenous group, the POWs were important because of, not despite, their unusual character. As most were pilots captured while waging air war against North Vietnam, they were subjected to harsh treatment by Vietnamese authorities, who sought to make them confess and repent their aggression against the Vietnamese people. But because aviators tended to be older, well-educated, white, career officers who identified deeply with the United States and its mission in Vietnam, American POWs were determined to resist Vietnamese coercion. In enduring torture rather than admit guilt, they inverted the wars moral framework, representing themselves as victims of Vietnamese aggression. Because they so neatly embodied the nation as its white majority wished to imagine it, their suffering and sacrifice worked to redeem the American cause in Vietnam and restore national honor. This chapter explains this phenomenon through close attention to the POW experience in North Vietnams prisons.

This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

This is a general introduction to the book, explaining that the purpose of the book is to provide a concise but detailed explanation of the core rules of international humanitarian law. The contents of each chapter are summarised. It explains that the book looks at the major areas of IHL, putting them in historical context, so as to better understand how the law has evolved. This book also examines the current challenges for and pressures on the existing law, as IHL rules adopted in the time of cavalry and bayonets must adapt to deal with issues like drones, cyber warfare and autonomous weaponry. It notes that the third edition has been updated to reflect new developments in the law of armed conflict up to May 2023.

Chapter 4 looks at the concept of combatants and non-combatants, and its connected status, that of prisoner of war (POW). It examines who is entitled under IHL to combatant status, and examines those persons who have been denied combatant and POW status under IHL. Particular attention is paid to the status of resistance fighters, national liberation and guerrilla fighters, those participating in a levée en masse, and participants in non-international armed conflicts. The chapter outlines those categories of participant not entitled to combatant status such as spies, mercenaries, so-called unlawful combatants, and private military and security contractors. Chapter 4 also explores the current legal thinking regarding a contentious area of the law – that of civilians taking direct part in hostilities. The rules regarding POW status and the treatment of POWs are described. The chapter concludes by examining another developing area of the law: the power of detention in non-international armed conflicts.

The book closes with some early observations about the international armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, from February 2022 until summer 2023 when this book was finalized. The Epilogue focuses on civilian Protection, prisoners of war, and ICRC communications policy. This approach allows one to begin to understand the complexities and difficult decisions facing the organization. The author’s necessarily tentative observations note, for example, the difficulties of getting ICRC activities properly underway, the sizable civilian assistance and protection provided, the grave difficulties involved in trying to get proper access to prisoners of war on both sides, and the debate surrounding the ICRC communications policy – which was much more open about civilian dangers and destruction than about the status of diplomacy for prisoners of war (not to mention interned and restricted Ukrainian civilians on the Russian side). As the book was going to press, the ICRC had major reputational problems in Kyiv despite its great effort to aid Ukrainian civilians severely affected by the fighting. And despite many bridge-building efforts in the past, it faced Russian policymakers whose priorities clearly did not include great attention to the rules of IHL, as had been true of Russian actions in the Syrian internal war and violent unrest in the Russian area of Chechnya – not to mention controversial Russian mercenary action in the Sahel. Despite over 150 years of persistent ICRC efforts, it was evident that in general the laws of war remained a fragile restraint on armed conflict and other major violence.

This chapter demonstrates how, whilst classical theatre was largely side-lined by the necessities and appetites of a new wartime culture, Shakespeare, followed an entirely opposite trajectory, rising even higher following a century of increasing British bardolatry. In considering the popularity of Shakespeare during the war the chapter considers the context of the Tercentenary, the Shakespeare Hut, and the use of Shakespeare for fundraising. It shows how throughout the war Shakespeare was used as a patriotic tool in performances both at home and at the front. In examining these performances the chapter also emphasises how Shakespeare would mix with comedy skits, and classical themes of royal demise or the rise and fall of empires would appear in snappy one act-ers. In considering classical theatre more broadly, the chapter shows how classical themes and narratives were drawn on to make sense of war. It focuses in particular on new plays which took up classical themes or modes such as Drinkwater’s X=0 and Masefield’s Philip the King and shows how the use of the classics changed as the war progressed. Overall the chapter shows how the war catalysed already changing attitudes to the divisions between high and low culture

This interview offers Iqbal Khan’s directorial perspective on his influential production of Othello (2015). The casting of Hugh Quarshie as Othello and Lucian Msamati as Iago made Othello a play more about intra-racial than inter-racial relations. However, Khan explains how the inclusion of references to the torture of prisoners of war by the allied forces during the Iraq War helped him highlight the ways in which Othello is more than a play about its protagonist’s doubt about his place as a person of colour in a world dominated by people with different traditions that exclude him. According to Khan, the play is equally (if not more) invested in exploring the nature of Othello’s work and the nature of his experience as the leader of mercenary forces. Besides, as Khan points out, the questions that haunt Othello haunt all of us. Some of these questions – including what makes up one’s systems of loyalty, what makes up one’s systems of justice and judgement, or whom one is accountable to – are especially problematic at times of war, because they often reveal a slippage between lack of control (and victimhood) and abuse of power (and complicity).

Chapter 7 reassesses our understanding of the social history of naval crews, by looking at their members’ degrees of geographical displacement. Being foreign ‘by provenance’, a transnational immigrant or refugee, conferred completely different weight and meaning to the terms of service: wages and victuals were evaluated by comparison with other fleets, and pensions and family remittances were only possible for those resident within British administrative reach. This chapter then reframes the historiographical debate on naval living and pay standards, situating the Navy in a transnational seafaring labour market. Some motivations for enlistment also elude the relatively neat dichotomy between ‘volunteer’ and ‘pressed man’ that has dominated British naval historiography: being ‘loaned’ by another monarch, or enslaver; escaping a British war prison, or enslavement; exile and contested loyalties. These personal circumstances only become visible when we look at Navy crews as ‘motley crews’, social and cultural mixtures of mobile and uprooted individuals often transcending the traditional image of the British ‘Jack Tar’, and very different from the modern model of citizen-serviceman. Labels of foreignness based on birthplace, subjecthood, or cultural difference were easily bypassed by naval efficiency and manpower maximisation, but the material aspects of social and geographical displacement were not.

This chapter examines siege surrender rituals and the obstinate defence of practicable breaches during the Napoleonic Wars, with a particular focus on French obstinacy in the Peninsular War, which triggered the British general storms of Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz and San Sebastian. Whereas a century earlier Louis XIV’s fortress governors had surrendered at the point of a practicable breach or beforehand, Napoleon’s now fought on. This chapter explores how this had come to pass, the extent to which eighteenth-century siege surrender conventions were disrupted during the Peninsular War and Napoleonic Wars more generally, and British attitudes and practices towards siege defences taken to the last extremity. On the one hand, French garrison commanders were adhering to Napoleon’s orders to defend practicable breaches, which became the subject of an instructional treatise by Lazare Carnot. On the other hand, this was the culmination of a much broader and long-term evolution in cultures of war and honour codes – that encouraged a cult of obstinacy. The chapter concludes by comparing siege surrender in Spain with siege defences and capitulation throughout other regional theatres of war and campaigns during the Napoleonic Wars.

This chapter explores the fate of obstinate enemy garrisons who chose to withstand British breach assaults in the Napoleonic era. Under customary laws of war, British soldiers had the right to put such garrisons to the sword. In the sieges of the Peninsular War, British soldiers generally gave mercy to their French counterparts, part of a consistent pattern of self-regulating restraint that characterised Anglo-French combat during the war. A shared Anglo-French martial culture of honour and civility prevailed. Amongst other national enemies, however, in other contemporary global theatres of war, a very different picture emerges. British soldiers put defending Spanish and Indian troops to the sword at the sieges of Montevideo, Seringapatam and Gawilghur, raising important questions about the complex ways in which military and cultural factors coalesced, in shaping patterns of restraint and excess. These comparative case studies reveal the paradoxical Janus-face of enlightened ‘civilized war’ in action, with moderation and protections accorded to those enemy soldiers who fell firmly within its self-defining and self-limiting boundaries, and a dramatic lowering of restraints towards those combatants deemed to be on its margins or beyond.

Prisoner-made objects held immense monetary, national, and emotional value for their makers and consumers. In Britain and its colonies, partially dismantled wooden warships known as hulks were employed to ease prison overcrowding. Between 1775 and 1815, they housed both prisoners of war and convicts, often in neighboring ships. Although operating under different systems of administration, both types of prisoner crafted objects from whatever materials could be stolen, scavenged or bartered, and they concealed, smuggled, and hid them from authorities. This chapter begins by examining the intricate bone- and straw-work models made and traded by French prisoners of war, who altered their handicrafts to reflect shifts in consumer culture, before moving to focus on the personal and religious mementoes crafted by convicts in England and the penal colony of Bermuda, established in 1824. It concludes by illuminating the risks and rewards of illicit industries by considering the shared practices of gambling and forgery. This comparative chapter argues that the act of making – and selling – items provided both prisoners of war and convicts with the means to gain some small freedoms on board. Ultimately, it shows that objects of confinement represented sociability, human resilience, and adaptability in the face of hardship.

As resistance to British legislation grows in the American colonies, song intensifies as a political force. Amidst continued white perplexity over the meanings of African music, Occramer Marycoo – also known as Newport Gardner – inaugurates Black American formal composition with his “Promise Anthem” of 1764, a resounding condemnation of slavery. Meanwhile, the Stamp Act, Tea Act, and other British “Intolerable Acts” produce more than riots and organizations like the Sons of Liberty: they produce a store of protest song fronted by the likes of John Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, and the balladeers of the “Boston Massacre.” Loyalist songwriters fight their own losing battles through balladry, and the defeated British troops depart with the strains of “Yankee Doodle” ringing in their ears. The War of Independence may be over; but the songs of class war, women's rights, abolition, and Indigenous lament continue to infiltrate the soundscape of the newborn USA.

This chapter investigates how military psychiatrists have analyzed the “waiting wife.” In 1968, an Air Force psychiatrist lamented that colleagues, faced with many “modern Penelopes who are unsuccessful in adapting to their husbands‘ absence,” had neglected this “important clinical problem.” This soon changed. Clinicians probed the “syndromes” they diagnosed in servicemen‘s wives during the latter years of the Vietnam War. Wives of POWs came under particular scrutiny, with researchers developing algorithms to forecast which POWs‘ marriages would survive. Media interest in POW spouses peaked with “Operation Homecoming” in 1973. When several returned prisoners‘ marriages collapsed soon thereafter, “Penelope” was again found wanting. This chapter links national anxieties about POWs‘ wives to broader figurations of female disloyalty. Dr. Emanuel Tanay‘s hypothesis of a “Dear John Syndrome” in Vietnam had already proposed in 1969 that women were sending more, and more vicious, Dear Johns to American men in southeast Asia than in any prior war. Veterans would soon amplify the charge that treachery on the home front, spousal and federal, had been unprecedentedly pervasive and injurious.

Chapter 4 brings the student fully into today’s LOAC with details of 1977’s Additional Protocol I and Protocol II. It explains why there was a need to update the 1949 Geneva Conventions and why A.P.s I and II, initially favored by the US, turned out not to be what the US and her allies had anticipated. There were positive changes and additions in both Protocols, as well as regrettable LOAC modifications. Both sides of that coin are examined, with discussion of the lasting results of both the positive and negative changes. It is significant to note that US self-interest did not always prevail, and to explain the basis of that lack of international consensus. Relaxing the requirements for prisoner of war status continues to block US ratification of either Protocol. In the A.P. negotiations the US paid a price for its somewhat ill-advised Vietnam venture but America has, by and large, learned to live with the AP I and II provisions it initially fought. Additional Protocol III (2005), far less significant than the earlier Protocols I and II, is also discussed, if briefly.