World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF EUROPE: Men in Manacles

A Commando raid on the wild and beautiful Channel Island of Sark last fortnight started the combatant armies of World War II around the vicious circle of reprisal.

A German officer and four soldiers were trussed to their captors for safekeeping. Berlin let out a self-righteous yelp: this was inhumane treatment and would have to be answered in kind by ordering the shackling of Canadians and Britons caught in the raid on Dieppe. Berlin had raised the yelp before—after Dieppe, where the Canadians had been ordered to truss up their German captives to keep them from destroying valuable information.

The British denied that they had violated anything. They offered to prove it, but added that if the Germans went ahead with their threats, Britain would have to take appropriate action. Wrathfully the Germans spurned this counter-threat, announced that 1,376 Canadians and Britons had now been shackled, warned that three times that number of prisoners would be trussed up if the British persisted in any pigheaded effort at counter-reprisal.

The British did. At week’s end, in Britain and Canada, officials scoured jails and courthouses, grimly looking for 1,376 handcuffs.

Where it would end was anybody’s guess. The World War I record of German treatment of prisoners was not reassuring. German brutality increased as German pride suffered. In the grim trading in this war the Germans have the best of it. They hold some 90,000 British prisoners; the British hold only 23,000 Germans. Though the British also hold some 262,000 Italians (against 25,000 Britons held by Italy), this was not likely to be a deterrent to Nazi vengeance.

Italy voiced a weak little echo of Berlin’s loud bellow. Italy, too, had found evidence of British violations, she mumbled. Only Japan, of the Axis powers, maintained a noble tolerance. Despite “almost incredibly bad” treatment suffered by Japanese prisoners, said Tokyo, Japan would not strike back. Prisoners would receive “generous and merciful” treatment.

How generous and merciful that would be was suggested by J. B. Powell, onetime editor of an English-language newspaper in China, whose two feet had been nearly eaten away by gangrene in a filthy Jap prison. Writing in the Nation last week, Powell recalled:

“And, to my surprise, there were many Japanese prisoners among us, too—soldiers hauled up for drunkenness, former employes of foreign firms from whom the police were trying to get information. They were treated no better than the rest of us. I saw a gendarme beat a Japanese soldier senseless.”