When did the parole of prisoners of war become unacceptable?

score:14

Accepted answer

The officers were paroled, and without any ransom as late as at start of WW1. For example the later marshal Tuchachevsky was a "poruchik" (senior lieutenant) then and was taken as a prisoner by Germans. As with all other officers, he was allowed to walk into the town and had his freedom, only he gave his honest word that he'll return into the barracks.

But he tried to escape. 5 times! The fifth attempt was successful. You can imagine the "strictness" of the guard! Only after the first attempt to escape and a mutiny he was forbidden to have walks in the town!

So, the parole system worked. But for officers only.

As for the system "free for a promise not to fight", the last war that used it, as far as I know, was the Russian-Japan war of 1904/5. And it worked these times.

The same system was tried for use by Chechens in the first year of the first Russian-Chechen war (1995-98). But then it didn't work. The fact of "word" was irrelevant to the contemporary Russian state machine.

So, the question is not in acceptability, but in usability of the practice.

Upvote:0

In summer 1940, the German Wehrmacht had captured 2 million Dutch, Belgian and French soldiers. All of the Dutch and Flemish and about a third of the French POWs were released on parole because the Germans coulnd't supply them and already had half a million Polish POWs as workforce (de facto: slaves). Mark Mazower, Hitlers Imperium: Europa unter der Herrschaft des Nationalsozialismus. C.H.Beck, Munich 2009. Page 152

Upvote:4

Military paroles became impractical when mass conscription led to the formation of armies of tens or hundreds of thousands of men that were too hard to keep track of.

Military parole was used as late as the American Revolution. This was when "armies" typically numbered in the thousands, and both sides spoke the same language (English). Also, the British armies contained a number of pro-British Americans, who could often identify and recognize their "countrymen" on the other side. The American military paroled a whole army, the one that they captured at Saratoga (although Congress reversed this parole). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_of_Saratoga#Convention_of_Saratoga

Paroles typically preceded prisoner exchanges. The prisoner was set free, on the condition that he refrained from fighting, unless exchanged as a prisoner of war.

During the Napoleonic Wars, which followed the American Revolution, armies were ten times as large, making parole impractical. It was not generally practiced after the 18th century, although there were some attempts in the "smaller" conflicts.

The reasons that nobles were "paroled" (for ransom) in the Middle Ages was because there were only a few hundred of them, and they were well known internationally. So they were easy to keep track of.

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