prisoner of war exchange
 

Any thoughts as to if this would happened?

Yes I think
 

Only question is When or more to the point when at what levels?

Shoot them.

It would depend on the officers of the units making the exchange, the prisoners being exchanged, and why.

er ah hmmm
 

shhh not so loud, and did you take yer meds today GI?;)

Only if you are willing to have yours shot. Always.

Then of course, you have the issue of your troops being willing to risk themselves, knowing that if they are captured, they will be shot.

Then, when they figure out that it's because of you, perhaps they will stop following you.

Uncle Ted

In the us civil war, confederate spec ops were considered bushwhackers and not entitled to be treated as pows and were executed by the north.
This promptly ended when an equal number of northern officers were killed by the CO of this unit. (Can't remember if the officers were shot or hanged)
The operational lesson is don't kill pow unless you are willing to suffer the same. Or have another very good reason.

Adi

If memory serves, it was Mosby who hanged some of Custer's men following the execution of several Confederate prisoners. Mosby then promised Custer that it would be repeated if the Yankees wanted to continue.

How are you going to exchange them without the transportation to move them?

How are you going to feed them with a famine coming on that with kill half or more of your civilian population?

Where are you housing them and guarding them in numbers great enough to reduce your own manpower draw, but small enough that they do not create a security risk themselves?

With civilian governments standing on shaky ground some nations with "Governments in exile" others relocating frequently due to security concerns, and an inability to maintain embassies due to capitals getting nuked......... how are these State level talks being arranged or even occurring?

That's why I imagine most pow exchanges would happen on the local level, not actually between governments. The pows would be marched to the exchange site.

The answer is not very much and you would probably treat them as slave labor.
i.e. feed them just enough to keep them immediately useful but slowly starving to death.

In the more inhospitable climates there are plenty of examples
of gulags where very few guards managed to keep a large prisoner population in check.

Probably the most common solution in such a post-apocalyptic setting.

Well, near post-Apocalyptic setting.

I'll grant you I was being flippant, but I just don't see keeping EPWs around. They are a drain on resources and personnel. If your players are a small group, they just don't have the resources to keep EPWs around. Thus, my remark.

Now, here's a possibility that has been used successfully in past games: flip them. If you say the right things, and show them kindness, you have one or more NPCs that can beef up your group numbers, and are reasonably reliable (I've stung players with unreliable NPCs, but if they do it right, you may have a friend for life). Acting skill and high CHA will definitely help here.

Ask my players how much of a pain in the ass it can be to march a bunch of prisoners across Africa to a UN camp for internment.

If your not keeping EPW around what are you doing with them? letting them go? what would happen to EPW in CONUS or Canadian Camps?

This is much more in line with my understanding of the world by 2000.

In a small group, sure, keeping EPWs may be pointless.

But then deaths for no good reason seem pointless to me, too.

Getting a reputation for killing all EPWs may be hazardous to your health - they start hunting you in particular.

You can always strip them of equipment and leave them tied to a tree (this is one of the ways of making contacts).

It depends on the situation

• are you passing through an area, soon to leave?
• are you inbound on a specific mission and will soon have to transit back through the same area?
• is this part of your area of control in which you found intruders?
• are these enemy soldiers or marauders known for killing anyone and anything they come across?
• how long do you expect to have to operate as a small detached group?

To me, these are all factors in deciding what to do with enemy EPWs.

For a larger group, having a labor source for less soldierly aspects of cantonment can be useful. 50 EPWs watched by 5 soldiers while they work in the field is a net gain of 45 men that are then available for soldiering.

Another option - sell them (or their labor). There are active slave markets in Poland, and probably elsewhere.

And you can always remind them that as much as they may not enjoy being slaves, permanently or temporarily, you could have killed them, and chose not to... (but if they are really unhappy, you can fix that for them).

Uncle Ted

If the other side has someone you want back, it could probably be arranged.

Interesting philosophical discussion - is slavery less morally repugnant that murder? I'd find it difficult to reach an opinion on that one personally.

In Fusilier's PbP, the party recently freed a party of about 7-8 NATO POWs from a small Red Army guard detachment not too far from Elblag. The prisoners were put to work maintaining a recently-repaired road bridge over a small river. Seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

I see nothing unrealistic in POWs as being used as labor, especially late in the Twilight War. Armies in 2000 don't have the manpower to maintain the support and logistics infrastructure of modern armies. They're going to use whatever they can get their hands on. I hate to use these examples, but look at how the Soviets, Japanese, and Nazi Germans used prisoners in WWII (think Bridge Over the River Kwai). I think using POWs as labor would be the norm in T2K. The only consideration would be the imprisoning force's ability to feed its prisoners.

Yes, I see small-scale local prisoner exchanges happening from time to time.

Let's say some local partisans nabbed some soldiers from the nearby cantonment. The cantonment is using a few captured partisans to dig a well or something. A prisoner exchange seems perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, if the local cantonment commander has partisans hung, the local partisans will probably do something nasty to its prisoners. The dreaded reprisals cut both ways.

It really depends on the local circumstances and the commanders involved. I'm sure that some commanders are going to have prisoners killed pretty much out of hand. Others might stress that EPWs are cared following the mandates in the Geneva Conventions. In any war, you're going to find humanitarians and sociopaths in the military.

It's worth noting that POWs are a great way to add new PCs to a campaign.

My Uncle Lou was a Plutonowy (corporal) in the Polish Army, survived the Blitzkrieg, was captured and survived mainly because he had been a butcher/sausage maker pre-war. He and other prisoners were farmed out--literally-- to farmers to assist them in food production for the Reich. The slave laborers would then cajole the farmer for more food ("We could make you such delicious sausage, but we are so weak. If only we had a little more food....") He at other times was assigned to construction details--with a gleam in his eye he used to tell us how they'd mis-mix the concrete so that they would stir and stir, but it just wouldn't congeal.
Years later he called me and was very upset. It seems that the German Embassy was trying to contact him and he didn't want any part of "those dam' Nazis!" Turns out, they were trying to pay him reparations for the labor he performed under duress during the war!:D

The Geneva Conventions do allow the use of POWS for certain types of labour; for example German POWs laid electrical cables after the war.