Operation Thunderhead Read Free Page B

of security after their capture. But excesses still happened on a regular basis. During the American Civil War, the brutality of prisoner-of-war camps was well-known. Nearly a quarter-million prisoners were taken on both sides of the conflict. Thousands died from malnutrition, disease, and a form of organized neglect, particularly at some of the larger camps. At the hellhole known as Andersonville, Georgia, more than 10,000 prisoners died while incarcerated. The commander of that camp, Captain Henry Wirz, was later hanged after being tried and convicted on charges of murder and conspiracy. He was the only Confederate soldier convicted of war crimes after the Civil War.
    While the Civil War was still raging in the United States, in Europe, representatives from twenty-six governments of the world gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, to try and limit some of the suffering of war. For the warrior, the conference resulted in a convention that at least respected the rights of wounded soldiers on both sides of a conflict.
    The first Geneva Convention also had close ties with the founding and recognition of the International Committee of the Red Cross. One of the successes of the meeting was the international agreement to respect the neutrality of hospitals and other buildings bearing the symbol of the Red Cross.
    With the beginnings of a new century, the world tried again to control at least the worst excesses of war. At The Hague Peace Conference of 1899, the leader of the Russian Empire, Tsar Nicholas II, called representatives of the world together to try and establish a “real and lasting peace.” Additionally, the tsar wanted to limit the development of the weapons of war and restrict the world to the armaments that existed at that time. It was a worthwhile effort that is remembered today for outlawing the use of expanding bullets (soft-nosed or “dumdum” ammunition) for military use. The intent was to try and limit the pain and suffering that had been so prevalent just a few decades earlier when soft lead bullets had smashed into soldiers, shattering bones and causing numberless amputations to save a soldier’s life.
    Most of the other declarations of that first Hague Peace Conference didn’t last the lifetime of the tsar. The prohibition on the use of poison gases was ignored inside of fifteen years. The other prohibition, outlawing the firing of projectiles from balloons, wasn’t ignored as much as rendered obsolete. Balloons as military aircraft were soon overshadowed by the invention of the powered airplane. The dropping of bombs from the air, from aircraft or balloons (zeppelins), hadn’t been really considered at the conference.
    A second Hague Peace Conference, held in 1907, also tried to limit the destructive capability of military weapons. Again, it to failed to reach that goal. There was a greater range of rules of war established at The Hague, but any form of peace conference was doomed as the world hurtled toward the biggest war mankind had conducted to date.
    The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria on June 28, 1914, at the hands of Bosnian Gavrilo Princip was the spark that ignited the Europe powderkeg. The resulting explosion of combat was known to the combatants at the Great War. To history, it was World War I, to those who lived through it; it was the War to End All Wars.
    Nearly every country in Europe clashed during World War I, the bulk of the fighting happening across France. There were more than 40 millions casualties from the fighting and bombardments of the war that lasted from 1914 to 1918. Those casualties included the nearly 20 million dead among both the military and civilian populations. As the lines of the war ebbed and flowed, prisoners were captured on all sides of the conflict.
    The nearly 500,000 prisoners of war on both sides of the American Civil War paled in comparison to the almost 8 million men held in prison camps during World War I. The United