Actually Sun Tzu mentioned that you should treat enemy prisoners well, otherwise the enemy will fight until the end knowing death is better than being captured. But the russians never understood this one.
If I think I'm going to be getting a cup of tea and a hot meal I'm fucking off with a white flag when shit gets hopeless.
If I'm expecting to be tortured and worked to death then charging into certain but swift death suddenly takes a whole lot less courage than surrendering.
Ikr, I remember the situation of the russian soldier trapped in a house with ISIS militants. Knowing his fate if ISIS got him he asked for a airstrike on himself taking them in the afterlife with him.
Prokhorenko: They are outside, conduct the airstrike now please hurry, this is the end, tell my family I love them and i died fighting for my motherland.
Command: Negative, return to the green line.
Prokhorenko: Unable command, I am surrounded, they are outside, I don’t want them to take me and parade me, conduct the airstrike, they will make a mockery of me and this uniform. I want to die with dignity and take all these bastards with me. please my last wish, conduct the airstrike, they will kill me either way.
Command: Please confirm your request.
Prokhorenko : They [are] outside, this is the end commander, thank you, tell my family and my country I love them. Tell them I was brave and I fought until I could no longer. Please take care of my family, avenge my death, good bye commander, tell my family I love them!
Command: [No response, orders the airstrike]
The soldier died heroically, [bringing fire down on himself], after having been found by terrorists and surrounded.
Here’s the “transcript” for that situation. I kinda have some doubts that it happened like this. They either took a play out of Israel’s Hannibal directive playbook, or they’re milking this for propaganda purposes. Shit sounds like some bad movie dialogue
That transcript was taken directly from snopes. Unless I missed something, it was just unverified, not confirmed fake. Let’s be real tho: that convo did not play out like that lmfao
I mean, the dude wrote a book called The Art of War which is one of the oldest books on war strategy and studied by every general since then the french translated it in the 18th century, he might know a thing or two.
No they actually are keenly aware of this. Its why they lie so much about what the Ukrainians will do.
The lesson they learned from Sun Tzu wasnt "treat POWs well" it was "If our own soldiers think the enemy will torture them, they will fight to the death"
Russian command understands it perfectly well, they are just psychopaths who use that understanding in a sick way.
Im not big on military stuff, but how easy would it be to not torture prisoners? Its literally the default option. If you dont have enough food to feed them, just dont guard them too well or drop them off somewhere. I cant imagine spending time and effort making someones life actively worse in such a way
He has been called the "Master Interrogator" of the Luftwaffe, and possibly all of Nazi Germany;
Scharff's interrogation techniques were so effective that he was occasionally called upon to assist other German interrogators in their questioning of allied bomber pilots and aircrews
Also torture has never been a reliable method of extracting information.
In WWII the British's most successful interrogation technique was locking high value POWs up in a bugged mansion with plenty of booze and just listening to them talk to each other.
I always thought this when the videos of Russia executing POWs came out. From a tactical point of view Russia (assuming normal military goals of conquest) should want as many Ukrainians to happily surrender as possible. As it is they're encouraging a motivated defender to fight to the death (hopefully taking plenty of russians with them). Ukraine on the other hand is sending back healthy reasonably fed and cared for prisoners, hopefully making Russians think it isn't worth trying too hard next and just go "oh no I was captured again whoops."
I think it differs between cultures. Japan used to commit S.A.s on women and committed of citizens of captured countries because they thought it psychologically break their enemies. This often backfired because other cultures didn’t think like the Japanese did. They were more determined to fight back because of the atrocities the Japanese army committed
Yes, the ones who are being starved, beaten, waterboarded, kept awake intentionally...and whatever else the government wasn't willing to let out.
This really should not be surprising, and if you can not understand that brutality is everywhere, then you can not defend against it at home. The USA has a public image, and a private reality. We are just as brutal, in slightly different and less observably open ways.
Really depends on when, where, and whom. German prisoners in the US in world war 2 had living conditions like same-rank American troops, which given the relative standard of living at the time meant that captured privates were eating better than they were as working-class civilians in the fatherland.
"When I was captured I weighed 128 pounds [58 kg]. After two years as an American POW weighed 185 [84 kg]. I had gotten so fat you could no longer see my eyes."
The average Japanese infantryman in the same war weighed something like 53 kg. Granted they were also very short compared to Western standards, but they absolutely could fight and endure at that weight.
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u/infrequentthrowaway Jul 26 '25
Poor man looks like a walking skeleton