This chapter addresses the challenges of reintegrating returned service personnel into civilian life across three interconnected contexts. In the United States, the Veterans Administration committed significant resources to constructing new hospitals and training psychiatrists to confront the problem of returning neuropsychiatric casualties. In Britain, Civil Resettlement Units for repatriated prisoners of war sought to guide these returned men towards a successful civilian adjustment. Finally, in Australia, John Cade’s discovery of lithium’s therapeutic properties for mania emerged from both his work with patients in a veterans’ psychiatric hospital and his own wartime experiences in the Changi prisoner-of-war camp. In all three contexts, psychiatric expertise revealed tensions between therapeutic goals and practical limitations, as well as the status of veterans’ wartime suffering against the difficulties of their post-war adjustment.

The First World War both established and altered norms for the treatment of prisoners of war across the globe. In the Pacific, Japan had already been internationally celebrated during the Russo-Japanese War for its supposed exemplary treatment of prisoners, a practice which continued, albeit with some notable alterations, when the Japanese took some 4,800 German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war in 1914. The other main holder of prisoners of war in the Pacific was the British Empire, with camps dotted around its various colonies and dominions, many of which would be reused in the Second World War. These camps served as sites for containing undesirables, spaces to dispatch the spillover from other colonies, or, in the case of Tanglin camp in Singapore, a site of anti-imperial rebellion. This chapter looks at captivity within these two empires during the First World War, not only to highlight differences and similarities with captivity in Europe, but also to trace how a camp network in the Pacific region was developed and modelled on broader patterns of internment.

At the crossroads of international law and global military history, this chapter revises the traditional story of violent encounters between Japanese guards and American prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War. It resituates those relationships within the shifting contours of international humanitarian law, highlights their position within a broader transnational dynamic of captivity that evolved between the two nations, and recontextualizes them within the Japanese Empire’s management of prisoners throughout the wider Asia-Pacific region before and during the conflict. It shows that there was nothing inherent to “Japanese” character or culture that led to the inhumane treatment of POWs. Although Japan increasingly disregarded international legal protections for POWs throughout the 1930s, it was ultimately institutional inadequacy and deteriorating material conditions in the besieged Japanese Empire that explained prisoners’ mistreatment.

This chapter examines international humanitarian law or the laws of war or the laws of armed conflict. Its development is briefly traced and its substance based upon the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 examined. These cover the principles concerning the wounded and sick on land and on sea, the treatment of prisoners of war, and the protection of civilians in times of war. The scope and meaning of occupation is examined, ranging from the start of such occupation, the rights and duties of the occupying power and its cessation. In this context, the principles of self-determination and non-annexation of territory are noted. The relationship between international humanitarian law and international human rights law is then examined, followed by an analysis of the rules governing the conduct of hostilities. The status of non-international armed conflicts is considered, and then follows a survey of the pertinent principles governing cyber warfare. The chapter concludes with a look at the enforcement of international humanitarian law.

A framing case study compares military action involving two hospitals in two different wars: an Israeli raid on Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza in November 2023, and Russia’s bombing of Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital in Ukraine in July 2024. Then the chapter examines the law of armed conflict. The chapter first discusses major principles of armed conflict and the historical evolution of treaty law. It next discusses protected people by describing how international law distinguished between civilians and combatants, and how this law provides certain protections to each group. The chapter then discusses various laws regulating military conduct, including: how states choose targets; methods of war; weapons; and the rules of belligerent occupation. Finally, the chapter briefly surveys the specialized rules that apply to non-international armed conflict.

Collective memory of a historical event does not depend on its contemporary and historiographical significance alone. Germany’s selective memory of the Eastern Front is a case in point. It has been influenced by four developments. The problem of the prisoners of war that had remained in the Soviet Union, the ‘returnees’, and the veterans underlined the importance of the Eastern Front among the West German public. The Stalingrad myth, in particular, had a decisive influence on an image of war (in the East), according to which the Germans considered themselves first and foremost victims of that war. The critical discussion of the war and its nexus with the Holocaust after 1970 led to a turning point wherein the victims of the Germans became the focus of remembrance in West Germany. In the socialist satellite state of East Germany, the heroization of the Red Army was a characteristic feature of public war memories. Commemorations of the Eastern Front changed again in unified Germany after the Cold War – from the early years of Russia’s rapprochement to the dramatic deterioration of the German-Russian relationship.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941 marked a fundamental change in both the scope and systematic nature of Nazi mass violence. Over the course of the next three years, German warfare and rule in the occupied Soviet territories caused death and suffering on an unprecedented scale. It is particularly the death toll among civilians and other non-combatants that stands out here. The majority of Soviet war dead comprised civilians and unarmed, captured soldiers. In deliberate policies of mass murder, German forces killed 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war, 2.6 million Jews, more than 2 million residents of Soviet cities, 30,000 Roma, at least 17,000 psychiatric patients, and up to 600,000 rural-dwelling civilians in so-called anti-partisan operations. The military operations of the German-Soviet War cannot be addressed independently of mass murder in this theatre, where 10 million Wehrmacht soldiers were stationed at one time or another between 1941 and 1944. The number of Wehrmacht divisions deployed on the Eastern Front in which no war crimes were committed was low, and members of the Wehrmacht may indeed have made up the majority of those responsible for large-scale crimes committed here by the German Reich.

One distinctive feature of the Peloponnesian War is the intimacy of its violence. The war is characterised by the sacking of cities, civil war and the impoverished existence of vulnerable communities living their lives as refugees in exile. In every other recorded conflict, this is a recipe that leads to high rates of sexual violence against women and children. Yet our historical sources are almost entirely silent about the occurrence of such abuse. This chapter explores the implications of the premise that there was a significant rate of unrecorded sexual violence during the Peloponnesian War. It details all the various circumstances in which such abuse was likely to occur and draws upon comparative material from other conflicts to show the strong likelihood of sexual violence. It also explores ways in which the topic of sexual abuse was addressed indirectly in art and drama through the metaphor of the sacking of Troy and the sexual violation of women in myth. The messages of these cultural products gain greater resonance and vitality when placed against a backdrop in which sexual violation is a regular occurrence as part of the nature of war.

The treatment of the law of war and neutrality during the interwar era was dominated by two trends. Scepticism was voiced at the relevance and utility of these fields in light of poor compliance during the First World War and the emergence of jus contra bellum. This did not prevent others from engaging with the most pressing issues, including the challenges posed by technological developments (submarines, asphyxiating gases and military aviation); the protection of civilian populations, especially against the risks of aerial bombardment; and the need to expand the application of the law of war in cases of insurrection and civil war. Later events show that the international community did not address these challenges satisfactorily. Initiatives failed due to ‘technological determinism’ and concern for national interest. However, several developments clearly foreshadowed the transition from a law of coexistence to one of co-operation that would come to fruition with the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Indeed, many of the fundamental tenets of modern international humanitarian law emerged, as the law of war began to afford more importance to the rights of the individual.

This chapter provides conceptual models of state surrender and military-unit surrender, as well as commenting on individual surrender through time. The models also explain and define the process and consequences of surrender, including the phenomenon of surrender taking the form of withdrawal since World War II. In dealing with the surrender of individual soldiers, the chapter disputes the idea that classifying something as “surrender” depends on the surrendering party making a voluntary choice to yield, a usual part of dictionary definitions of the term. Combatants, most combatants it can be argued, become prisoners of war not because of their own decision but because of the decisions of their commanders. The chapter also discusses prisoners of war and detainees, distinguishing the former from the ladder. It also lists the possible fates of those held by the enemy. Beyond this, the chapter introduces the evolution of the laws of war as a major theme of the volume, from medieval customary practices to modern international conventions.

The major European adversaries who fought World War I began by following offensive plans designed to win victory quickly, but all these failed. The war became one of grinding attrition, and by 1918, the European adversaries were exhausted. That year, the desperate Germans launched one last offensive to win the war on the Western Front, but it stalled. After the Allies drove the Germans back, fighting ended with the Armistice of November 11. This armistice was a German surrender in all but name. It disarmed German forces, demanded immediate withdrawal from all conquered territory, and imposed an Allied occupation of Germany west of the Rhine. The Treaty of Versailles elaborated the details, imposing staggering war reparations and German acceptance of guilt for the war itself. Much of the German population believed that German forces had not been defeated in battle, instead blaming German liberal politicians and Jews for undermining the war effort. This misconception contributed to the onset of World War II. World War I was the first war in which belligerents adhered to the Hague Conventions concerning the treatment of prisoners of war. There were abuses, but nothing like those that occurred in World War II.

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.