Abstract
When General Yamashita wrote advising General Percival to surrender Singapore to Japanese forces in February 1942, he introduced himself as ‘the High Commander of the Nippon Army based on the spirit of Japanese chivalry’, and spoke of the ‘honour’ he had in presenting his note to the commander of British forces on the island. If highly selective and partial, the persistence of honour-based behaviours in the conduct of fighting and the treatment of enemy prisoners in the middle years of the twentieth century has left many historians perplexed. While early studies tended to assume commanders and their civilian leaders were influenced largely by reciprocity, self-interest and considerations of power and mutual advantage, more recent research has emphasised the influence exercised by legal and other ‘norms’. In his wide-ranging study of the use of parole – the practice of trading honour for temporary privileges or permanent release from captivity – Jasper Heinzen enriches the debate by exposing the way in which individuals and military institutions reflected on the deeply rooted mediaeval concepts of ‘military honour’ and ‘chivalry’.
Heinzen uses the concept of ‘honour’ as a foil to unpack how contemporaries understood and practiced ‘parole’ across the ‘long’ nineteenth century. Typically associated with the social elite, ‘honour’ became attached to institutions – the ‘military’ – and the nation state, at precisely the moment at which European societies came to embrace mass armies and accept – with varying degrees of enthusiasm – ‘humanitarian’ responsibilities for those conscripted to fight on their behalf. Instead of focusing on the debates surrounding successive attempts to codify state practice – at Brussels (1874), The Hague (1899 and 1907) or Geneva (1864, 1906, 1929, 1949, 1977) – Heinzen invites us to view the process from the position of Europe's military, and shows how these institutions sought to recast traditional values to accommodate broader societal and political changes, and reflect them in the various military handbooks, field manuals and military commissions of the period.
Drawing on an impressive array of primary sources and contemporary writings from Germany, France and the UK (while not neglecting important states such as Russia), Heinzen balances his central discussion with a broader understanding of the social, cultural and institutional histories of these three countries. What comes across strongly in his analysis is the transnational aspect of his subject; similar conceptions of honour and honour-based martial codes were evident across the three countries, despite some variations here and there.
Prisoners of War & Military Honour consists of four chapters spanning the French revolutionary wars of the 1790s to the total wars of the early twentieth century. Though each chapter is necessarily rather chunky, Heinzen holds the readers’ attention by introducing a series of cases that draw out the way in which contemporaries wrestled with the often implicit tension between balancing personal and national honour. The escape of General Ducrot from German captivity in 1870, after allegedly accepting parole – one of 158 French ‘parole breakers’ according to the Prussian authorities – illustrates the situation well. To the French Government of National Defence, Ducrot's defence of the patrie was entirely laudable and justified his immediate reinstatement as an army commander in the defence of Paris. By contrast, Otto von Bismarck insisted that Ducrot's conduct cast a stain on French honour and confirmed his suspicions that the French government could not be trusted to enter peace negotiations in good faith. The efforts that the subsequent French Republican government went to, in defending Ducrot's actions, and others like him, showed how keenly such accusations were felt. As Heinzen notes, the fact that, barely 2 days after signing the armistice, Paris asked Berlin for copies of the parole agreements signed by French prisoners, to support preparations for a parliamentary inquiry into parole-breaking, underscored the importance attached to the problem and the sense of unease provoked by Ducrot and others like him. It is telling that some commentators in Germany pointed to French parole-breaking, and its alleged abuse of the red cross emblem during the war, in dismissing post-war attempts to forge a consensus around the laws and customs of war.
Heinzen shows how, by the early decades of the twentieth century, governments of all hues had become increasingly less willing to allow their servicemen to secure release or special treatment on their ‘word of honour’ if, in the process, they besmirched the ‘honour’ of their uniform or the nation they served. Far greater constraints were placed on the use of parole in the First World War than had been the case in earlier conflicts. The World War nevertheless threw up numerous instances that confirmed one of Heinzen's key themes, namely that context, rather than nationality, was frequently the determining factor in shaping policy decisions. Mounting evidence demonstrating the psychological impact of long-term captivity and concerns relating to specific conditions of captivity, such as that facing western prisoners in Asia Minor, saw authorities walk back from their previous red lines and agree to privilege the humanitarian interests of their servicemen in enemy hands. This suggests that ‘the transnational currency of honour adapted better to war than other embodiments of nineteenth century cosmopolitanism resulting from geographical mobility, urbanization, and global commerce’. Whereas many humanitarian provisions fell by the wayside in 1914–1918 under the pretext that the enemy did not live up to his side of the bargain, honour-based agreements involving an element of trust lingered on in one form or another.
If the central focus of Heinzen's analysis is on the experiences of the German, French and British militaries, he does not entirely neglect the extra-European dimension, especially when these European institutions encountered foes beyond Europe's shores: Napoleon III's expeditionary war in Mexico, Britain's encounter with Russia in Crimea or, as briefly mentioned in the final chapter, Japanese attitudes towards parole for their British captives in Singapore. More perhaps could have been said about the distinctly European roots of parole, and whether its adoption outside Europe was largely due to a desire to mimic the behaviours associated with civilised powers, or whether it resonated with deeper belief systems within these societies. Be this as it may, Prisoners of War & Military Honour is an exciting addition to the corpus of scholarship. In demonstrating the resilience of honour-based practices well into the twentieth century and exposing the complex and unexpected interactions that played out between individual and collective conceptions of ‘honour’, Heinzen has shed critical light on a hitherto neglected angle of modern European history and the history of war. In the process, he has provided fresh insights into the evolution of European military culture and has challenged historians and lawyers to reconsider traditional assumptions about how individuals and states framed considerations of power and norms in addressing questions around military captivity. Prisoners of War & Military Honour has something interesting to say for anyone interested in the evolution of military institutions, the history of ideas, international law and humanitarianism.
