Thread: CONUS Factions
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Old 04-16-2024, 10:17 AM
castlebravo92 castlebravo92 is offline
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Once the nukes fly and civilization breaks down, literally no one is going to be worried about the plight of POWs other than the POWs themselves.

Let's say you are in charge of a POW camp at Camp Mabry near Austin, Texas. You have a company (150-200) of third tier soldiers guarding some 20,000 Warsaw Pact (mostly Russia) POWs. You need 20 tons of food and water to feed them each day.

San Antonio to the south and Houston to the East get nuked. You lock down the camp. While your men might be really useful to help control social unrest in nearby Austin or help with disaster relief in San Antonio, you have 20,000 POWs to tend to.

The attacks and the panic completely disrupt the distribution of food to your camp. While there's a fair amount of land, and there is a bit of gardening and even some light farming, it's woefully insufficient to feed the entire population, and besides, it's December, there's no harvestable crops right now anyway. You have maybe 7 days worth of food on-hand, and 2 weeks worth of fuel. Comms are disrupted by the EMP, so you are initially out of contact with any higher HQ other than what else is at Camp Mabry (being a re-activated infantry basic training base). So you lock down the POW camp to barracks except for essential POWs (like most prisons, the POWs actually run most of the camp, not the guards). All leave for soldiers is canceled and all soldiers are restricted to camp. Prisoners go on half rations.

After a week or two, things settle somewhat. Some food deliveries restart. Contact is re-established with higher HQs. Prisoners are brought back up to 3/4 rations.

But then the desertions start. Worried about their families, some soldiers abandon their posts and disappear into the night, taking their guns, gear, and food. Soon you go from 200 soldiers, to 150, to 100. Catching and shooting some deserters "to make an example" barely stops the flow. You try to get the army to feed you some of the basic training graduates, but things are getting bad everywhere. Classes "graduate" early, and are sent to various urban centers undertrained and underequipped to defend vital infrastructure from rioting mobs or to deal with the mobs using "extreme" measures. And the mobs are rioting because they are starving. Literally. Where soldiers had local families, they move onto the Camp so that they can be better protected from the effects of a collapsing civilization.

Meanwhile, here you are feeding 16,000 of the enemy (it's been a hard winter).

And then one day, say around May, the last basic training class graduates and is marched off to join some hastily raised light infantry division. Some general in Maryland, Virginia, or Colorado marks the camp off their map.
Time to triage and concentrate resources on the important parts of the country, not Texas. Austin and San Antonio have descended into total Hobbesian chaos. Refugees - thousands of them start migrating towards the camp because of open fields, and the perceived safety your meager garrison provides. And then the supply trucks - already becoming less and less frequent - stop coming altogether. And now you have 15,000 of starving enemy inside the wire, and who knows how many thousands of starving Americans outside the wire. And it's just you and 80 soldiers and their families. With not enough food, not enough fuel, and not enough ammo.

The value of hostile slave labor where there are too many people and not enough food is zero. After WW2, German women were selling their bodies for a potato.

So yeah, I think atrocity would be the norm, not the exception with POWs. Most of them would either be worked to death gular or concentration camp style, or killed outright, either by guards, or a hostile population. There may be some infrequent scenario where the POWs overpower the guards or the guards simply walk away and abandon the POWs one day (like what happened to some of the concentration camps at the end of WW2).
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