1 Dennis Showalter has termed this “command surrender,” but he is talking about entire “commands” entire large units including garrisons, divisions, and corps. For me the command can be much smaller, since I am concerned with the fact the that soldier surrenders because of a choice ordered by his superiors.
2 See the treatment of forced surrender in Holger Afflerbach and Hew Strachan (eds.), How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 2, and many other pages. There are also situations – exhaustion of ammunition or sustenance, or being hopelessly outnumbered – in which individuals or commanders may believe their choice to surrender as compelled by circumstance. This may be counted as “forced surrender.”
3 Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Secret Wisdom of the Samurai, Tokyo, Tuttle Publishing, 2014, p. 111. The Hagakure itself was written in the Tokugawa period, ca. 1716.
4 Oki Hyobu quoted in Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: Selections from the Way of the Samurai, s.l., EasyRead Edition, 2006, p. 53.
5 Mohammad Siddique Khan, quoted by Oliver Roy, “Biographies of ‘homegrown’ European terrorists show they are violent nihilists who adopt Islam, rather than religious fundamentalists who turn to violence.” The Guardian, 13 April 2017. This can be found on the web at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis. Roy also attributes this to Mohamed Merah, who murdered four four people, including three children in a Jewish school in Toulouse, 2012. Another form is “We love death more than you love life.” Osama bin Laden is reputed to have claimed: “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two.” See the book Raffaello Pantucci, “We Love Death as You Love Life”: Britain’s Suburban Terrorists, London, Hurst, 2015.
6 Cathal Nolan, The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017.
7 Wayne E. Lee, Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
8 Of course, crediting Napoleonic “decisive victories” as war-ending comes down to a certain conception of the Napoleonic Wars. Were they individual wars or part of a longer struggle, a kind of “Twenty-Three Years War”? See my treatment of Napoleonic Warfare in my “International Rivalry and Warfare, 1700-1815,” in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Short Oxford History of Europe: Eighteenth-Century Europe, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 178-217. For a reconceptualization of the recent decades of American wars as one conflict, see Andrew J. Basevich, America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History, New York, Random House, 2016.
9 Edward Luttwak, “Give War a Chance,” Foreign Affairs, No. 78/4, July/August 1999, p. 36-44.
10 There are different reported versions of the Gettysburg Address. This is known as the Bliss Copy, which is inscribed on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC. This text and four others can be found on the web at http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm.
11 Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984 (1832), p. 90. In this sense will is what one wants to do or achieve. It is a calculation of interest and an assertion of desire. When Clausewitz spoke of “the will to overcome the enemy and make him powerless”, he is adding determination and resolution to the formula. (Ibid., p. 80).
12 Ibid., p. 184.
13 When Clausewitz spoke of “the will to overcome the enemy and make him powerless”, he added determination and resolution to the formula. Ibid.
14 John A. Lynn, “The Intersection of Military History and the History of Emotions: Reconsidering Fear and Honor in Ancien Regime Warfare,” British Journal for Military History, vol. 6, issue 2, July 2020, p. 23-40.
15 There is a huge literature on WWI war plans and the first months of the war, during which the plans failed. See, for example Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds.), War Planning 1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009. On the causes and first year of the war see Hew Strachan, The First World War, vol. 1, The Call to Arms, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001 and on the most famous of the war plans consult Hans Ehlert, Michael Epkenhans and Gerhard P. Gross (eds.), The Schlieffen Plan: International Perspectives on the German Strategy for World War I, Lexington, University of Kentucky Press. 2014.
16 For my treatments of unconditional surrender demanded of Germany and Japan, see my Surrender: A Military History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, projected for 2022. For my treatment of the surrender of Japan, see my Battle: A History of Combat and Culture, Boulder, Westview Press, 2004. Thomas Fleming, Unconditional Surrender: The Policy That Prolonged World War II, Columbus, New Word City Inc., 2011 provides a harsh condemnation of the unconditional surrender policy announced by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Casablanca Conference, one with which I disagree. The immensely knowledgeable and wise historian Gerhard Weinberg takes a very different tack in his A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005 (1994). He refutes that unconditional surrender prohibited Germans from trying to mitigate the war or to topple Hitler, and he explains that Japanese willingness to pursue the war was not the product of allied demands, but of Japanese belief that they could gain acceptable terms by sufficiently bloodying the Americans. See as well Ian Kershaw, The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945, New York, Penguin, 2011 for a discussion of Hitler’s intransigence late in the war.
17 For a strong and concise argument stressing the importance of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria played into the Japanese decision to surrender, see Ward Wilson, “The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did,” 20 May 2013, at https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did. Wilson rejects the atomic bomb as decisive, but it is reasonable to credit both the bomb and the Soviet invasion as making the Japanese resolve to continue fighting untenable.
18 Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Address, 7 January 1943, available at https://www.infoplease.com/homework-help/us-documents/state-union-address-franklin-d-roosevelt-january-7-1943.
19 G. Gerhard Weinberg, op. cit., p. 438-439.
20 On the medieval origins of honorable surrender and its early modern development within Western military practice and culture, see the chapters in H. Afflerback and H. Strachan (eds.), op. cit., p. 41-110 and 141-183. See as well, John Lynn, Surrender: A Military History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, to be published in 2022.
21 See Chapter V, article 36 in each convention on the web at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/hague02.asp#art36 and http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp#art36. Italics mine.
22 Bullitt Lowry, Armistice, 1918, Kent, Kent State University Press, 2013, p. XII. The historian Michael Neiberg put it succinctly, “If the armistice was an agreement between soldiers, then the peace treaty [of Versailles] was an agreement between politicians.” Michael S. Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 5.
23 Clemenceau quoted in B. Lowry, op. cit., p. 121.
24 H. Strachan, The First World War…, op. cit., p. 324.
25 For the Allied concern with the spread of Bolshevism in Germany see, for example, chapters 4 and 7 of B. Lowry, op. cit., p. 59-76 and p. 117-146.
26 George S. Vascik and Mark R. Sadler (eds.), The Stab-in-the-Back Myth and the Fall of the Weimar Republic: A History in Documents and Visual Sources, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2016, p. 86.
27 Concerning the stab-in-the-back in the German culture of defeat, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, New York, Picador, 2003, p. 189-288. Foch despaired that the Versailles Treaty left Germany too strong: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Foch quoted in Williamson Murray, “Versailles: the Peace without a Chance,” in Williamson Murray and Jim Lacey, The Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 209.
28 On Japanese intransigence and its influence on the American decision to drop the bomb, see Richard B. Frank, Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, New York, Random House, 1999 and D. M. Giangreco, Hell to Pay: Operation Downfall and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947, Annapolis, Naval Institute Press, 2017. For representatives of contrary arguments see John Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York, Pantheon, 1996 and Ronald Takaki, Hiroshima, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 1995. I have discussed this debate in my battle, chapter 7 and Surrender, chapter 6.
29 For the complete text of the Potsdam Declaration see the final section on the Potsdam meeting on the Yale, Avalon Project site at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decade17.asp.
30 R. Frank, op. cit., p. 235-236. The noted diplomatic historian Akira Iriye argues that the government should have accepted the Potsdam Declaration, “for it gave them just what they were seeking, ‘a peace on the basis of something other than unconditional surrender.’” Akira Iriye, Power and Culture: The Japanese-American War, 1941-1945, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 263.
31 On the attempted coup, see Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, New York, Dutton, 1995, p. 567-603; R. Frank, op. cit., and Kazutoshi Hando, Japan’s Longest Day, New York, Kodansha America, 2002.
32 John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, New York, W. W. Norton, 2000, p. 24.
33 Much has been written on each surrender. See Brian Farrell, The Defence and Fall of Singapore, Stroud, Tempus Pub Ltd, 2005; Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943, New York, Penguin, 1999.
34 Dennis Showalter sees the turning point as the German failure at Kursk, not Stalingrad. Dennis E. Showalter, Armor and Blood: The Battle of Kursk, the Turning Point of World War II, New York, Random House, 2013.
35 For accounts of both wars and the exploits of Chamilly and Boufflers see John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714, London, Routledge, 2013 (1999).
36 For a more thorough discussion, see my Another Kind of War: The Nature and History of Terrorism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2019. I use the history of American white supremacy through 1968 as my example of social terrorism.
37 It should be recalled that Grant had become famous for insisting on unconditional surrender of Confederate forces at Fort Donelson in February 1862. This caused some to claim that the initials U and S in his name stood for “Unconditional Surrender Grant.” This reputation for harshness stuck with Grant even though when he successfully concluded the siege of Vicksburg in July 1863, he released the entire garrison of 30,000 men on parole to await exchange. Hardly an unconditional surrender.
38 Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, The Passing of the Armies: An Account of the Final Campaign of the Army of the Potomac, Based upon Personal Reminiscences of the Fifth Army Corps, New York, Putnam’s Sons, 1915, p. 260-267. Chamberlain became a legitimate American hero and the governor of Maine, 1867-1871, and the president of Bowdoin College, 1871-1883. Gordon would reputedly become the head of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
39 Jay Winik in his much-praised April 1865: The Month That Saved America, New York, HarperCollins, 2001, sees the stately surrenders of Confederate forces that month as being the start of national reconciliation. To me, this is a superficial judgement. It is true that Lee resisted those around him who opposed surrender and wanted the Confederates to disperse as guerrilla fighters to continue the fighting. However, terrorism and insurgency came hard on the heals of peace.
40 The Chicago Tribune labeled the riot, “The Memphis Massacre.” The Chicago Tribune in Patrick Riddenberger, 1866: The Critical Year Revisited, Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 1979, p. 181.
41 Sheridan in ibid., p. 199.
42 For the continuation of the conflict as social terrorism targeted at African-Americans see my Another Kind of War…, op. cit.
43 On the Korean War see the classic T. R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War, New York, Macmillan, 1963; Max Hastings, The Korean War, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1987; and the multi-volume history of the war by Allan R. Millett, the first two volumes of which are The War for Korea, 1945-1950: A House Burning, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2010 and The War for Korea, 1950-1951: They Came from the North, Lawrence, University of Kansas Press, 2010.
44 On the indoctrination and coercion of POWs during the Korean War, see Charles S. Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number: Exploiting Korean War POWs at Home and Abroad, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014; Allan R. Millett, “War Behind the Wire,” MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History, No. 21/2, Winter 2009, p. 46-51; Samuel M. Meyers and Albert D. Biderman (eds.), Mass Behavior in Battle and Captivity: The Communist Soldier in the Korean War, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968.
45 Speech by the Chief, Field Operations, CIE, 1951 quoted in Samuel M. Meyers and William C. Bradbury, “The Political Behavior of Korean and Chinese Prisoners of War in the Korean Conflict: A Historical Analysis,” in ibid., p. 219.
46 A. Millet, art. cit., p. 52.
47 C. S. Young, op. cit., p. 48.
48 Arden Rowley interviewed and quoted by ibid., p. 49.
49 On the Vietnam War see the older work Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History, New York, Viking, 1983 and new and excellent Max Hastings, Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975, New York, Harper, 2018.
50 September, Nixon stated: “I am doing my damnedest to end the war… I will not be the first President of the United States to lose the war.” Nixon in Larry Berman No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam, New York, Touchstone, 2002, p. 56.
51 Kissinger used this terminology in briefing book for a meeting with the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in July 1971. M. Hastings, op. cit., p. 598-599. Concerning the complexity of the negotiations that eventually produced the Paris Accords, see Robert K. Brigham, Reckless: Henry Kissinger’s Responsibility for the Tragedy of Vietnam, New York, Public Affairs, 2018 and L. Berman, op. cit.
52 The transcript of this taped conversation can be found on the University of Virginia Press site at https://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4006748.
53 L. Berman, op. cit., p. 5.
54 In fairness, it should be pointed that in his No Honor, No Peace, Larry Berman argues that Nixon intended the Peace Accords to serve as a legal, political, and moral rationale to reapply crushing American airpower when the North Vietnamese inevitably violated the terms of the Accords. So for Berman, the Accords were not simply a way out of the war for American ground forces but a way to reassert American power by bombing. Berman’s work is impressive, but ultimately unconvincing. Even Berman writes: “Nixon was thus deceiving the public, but perhaps also himself. It seemed obvious to [Admiral] Zumwalt [Chief of Naval Operations, at the time] that America would never go back to bombing.” (Ibid., p. 206).
55 On medieval and early modern European surrender, see my own Surrender…, op. cit. chapters 2 and 3, Battle…, op. cit., chapters 3 and 4, and my introductory piece on early modern honorable surrender in H. Afflerback and H. Strachan (eds.), op. cit., p. 99-110. And, of course, see the section on medieval surrender in ibid., p. 41-95.
56 Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle, New York, Free Press, 1985, p. 382.
57 Tim Cook, “The Politics of Surrender: Canadian Soldier and the Killing of Prisoners of War in the Great War,” Journal of Military History, No. 70/3, July 2006, p. 638. Noted historian Dennis Showalter sounds a similar note, “The greatest risk a soldier can take in combat is surrendering. It involves a primal act of trust towards ‘others’ who directly seek your death.” Dennis Showalter, “By the Book? Commanders Surrendering in World War I,” in H. Afflerback and H. Strachan (eds.), op. cit., p. 279. Alan Kramer says much the same, “The most dangerous time for prisoners was the moment of surrender.” Alan Kramer, “Surrender of Soldiers in World War I,” H. Afflerback and H. Strachan (eds.), op. cit., p. 276.
58 Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 83-134. Lord John Moran, in his classic study, The Anatomy of Courage, observed that “[S]ometimes the shadow of fear drove men in just the opposite direction, into sheer recklessness” (Lord Moran, The Anatomy of Courage, London, Constable, 1947, p. 56). Jan Pamper, in his article about the expression and treatment of fear among Russian troops, reports that General Mikhail Dragomirov, soldier and military theorist, praised similar frenzied and mindless behavior of Russian troops before World War I, as going berzerk, and argued that it was born of love of country and czar, which was probably a misconception of an irrational execution of fear (Jan Plamper, “Fear: Soldiers and Emotion in Early Twentieth-Century Russian Military Psychology,” Slavic Review, No. 68/2, Summer 2009, p. 269-271).
59 W. Schivelbusch, op. cit., p. 7. Naill Ferguson, writing on individual surrender states, “[W]hen it happens on a sufficiently large scale, surrender is what ends wars.” Niall Ferguson, “Prisoner Taking and Prisoner Killing in the Age of Total War: Towards a Political Economy of Military Defeat,” War in History, No. 11/2, 2004, p. 149.
60 Erich Ludendorff, Mein Kriegserinnerungun 1914-1918 quoted in A. Kramer, art. cit., p. 271. Troops might do this as a strategy of surrendering safely. A group of German soldiers hoping to better their chances of surviving surrender might yield to a single enemy, thinking that the captor was so outnumbered that he could not risk abusing or killing his captives.
61 Von Einem quoted by A. Kramer, art. cit., p. 272.
62 Hew Strachan, “Introduction: Surrender in Modern Warfare since the French Revolution,” in H. Afflerback and H. Strachan (eds.), op. cit., p. 213.
63 N. Ferguson, art. cit., p. 149.
64 Ibid. p. 152.
65 I came up with this Respect/Contempt continuum after reading an op-ed in the New York Times by Arthur Brooks, “Our Culture of Contempt,” 2 March 2019, on the web at https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/political-polarization.html.
66 Figures here based on Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker, Der Kriegsgefangenen Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland, Berlin, Tafel G, 1921, p. 28-29, presented in the online International Encyclopedia of the First World War at https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/prisoners_of_war_germany.
67 Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 20-23.
68 Ibid., p. 101.
69 The text of the Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929, can be found on the website of the Avalon Project, Yale Law School, at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/geneva02.asp.
70 Figures on death rates in World War II are from N. Ferguson, art. cit. For World War I figures, see Tables 1 and 2 in H. Jones, op. cit., p. 20.
71 Hitler in Franz Halder, The Halder War Diary, quoted in Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, A War to be Won: Fighting the Second World War, Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 114. Stalin quoted in Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, Chap. 9, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939-1945,” in M. Geyer and S. Fitzpatrick (eds.), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 309.
72 For example, see M. Edele and M. Geyer, art. cit., p. 350.
73 James D. Morrow, Order within Anarchy: The Laws of War as an International Institution, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 221. See as well the same from a German officer in February 1942: “Red Army soldiers … are more afraid of falling prisoner than of the possibility of dying on the battlefield. … [O]nly a few POWs were taken.” Comment from 18th Panzer Army, Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 87.
74 J. Lynn, Another Kind of War…, op. cit.
75 Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorism Campaigns, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2009.
76 Marc Sageman, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008; Daniel Koehler, Understanding Deradicalization: Methods, Tools and Programs for Countering Violent Extremism, London, Routledge, 2016; Tore Bjørgo and John Horgan (eds.), Leaving Terrorism Behind: Individual and Collection Disengagement, London, Routledge, 2009.
77 M. Sageman, op. cit., p. VIII.
78 These are the words of retired Admiral John Kirby, former spokesperson for the Department of State, made on CNN’s New Day in June 2017. He went on to say “We can hit these guys as often as we want and as aggressively as we want, but we are never going to kill the problem of terrorism.” Available on the web at https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/337403-retired-admiral-you-cant-kill-your-way-out-of-a-terrorism-problem. See as well the Terry Gross Fresh Air interview of December 2015, on the web as “Top CIA ‘Spymasters’ Agree: We Can’t Kill Our Way Out of Terrorism,” on the web at https://www.npr.org/2015/12/03/458300917/top-cia-spymasters-agree-we-cant-kill-our-way-out-of-terrorism. Koehler, in his very important book, Understanding Deradicalization: Methods, Tools and Programs for Countering Violent Extremism, writes (p. 294): “[I]t would be impossible to ‘bomb’ and ‘arrest’ one’s way out of the terrorist threat.” (p. 1), and “Killing or arresting one’s way out of violent extremism will in itself not be effective in defeating the ideas or, more precisely, the ideology behind these movements and milieus.”
79 To Koehler it “denotes the mere behavioral role change (from offending to non-offending), while leaving the ideological or psychological aspect aside.” (Ibid., p. 2).
80 Ibid., p. 146.
81 Ibid., p. 126 and 260.
82 Ibid., p. 260.
83 Ibid., p. 146.
84 Maddy Crowell, “What Went Wrong with France’s Deradicalization Program?”, The Atlantic, 28 September 2017, available on the web at https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/france-jihad-deradicalization-macron/540699/.
85 T. Bjørgo and J. Horgan, op. cit., p. 1.
86 Horgan preface to D. Koehler, op. cit., p. XI.