One imagines it’s a fantasy among high-up American military officials. The self-anointed caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — or whoever’s running Beheading Inc. these days — drives up slowly in a pickup truck to a long table set out in the Syrian desert, the usual fivesome of gunmen milling about in the back.
Waiting at the table, surrounded by aides and backed up by scores of U.S. military vehicles, stands Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, head of U.S. Central Command.
Baghdadi exits the pickup truck, a makeshift fighting vehicle of the sort we’ve seen thousands of times before, except this time with white napkins tied to the door handles and antenna. He unsheathes his ceremonial sword — or maybe it’s a machete, considering the kind of warfare his minions favor — and hands it to Austin the way Chinese professionals offer their business cards: both hands clasping the object, palms turned upward, in a gesture of mixed politeness and deference.
“We, the warriors of Daesh, surrender,” he says in clipped English. In a deluxe version of this fantasy, American journalistic ineptness in settling on a name for our diehard foes adds pizazz. Baghdadi is joined by three other representatives of the vanquished. One surrenders for IS. The next surrenders for ISIL. The third surrenders for Islamic State.
Granted, none of the declarations resound with the immortal eloquence of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce when he surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles on October 5, 1877, in Montana territory: “From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”
But who cares? In such fantasies, old-fashioned surrender is back. And oh, the civilized world misses it.
We’ve recently been overwhelmed by memories of momentous surrenders. April 9 marked the 150th anniversary of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s tête-à-tête with Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam surrendered to North Vietnam following the frenetic U.S. evacuation of Saigon. On May 7, 1945, Germany officially capitulated to the Allies, ending World War II in Europe.
We’ve made progress over the centuries, at least until the Third Reich, World War II-era Japan, suicide bombers, IS, and Boko Haram.
All of that happened a long time ago. Which makes one wonder, why don’t combatants surrender anymore? Why does every politicized world conflict — IS vs. Iraq, Taliban vs. the Afghan government, Assad vs. everyone in Syria, Nigeria vs. Boko Haram, Kenya vs. al-Shabab — seem to become the Never-Ending War?
The more we think about surrender, the more questions multiply. Are we better off without surrender? Maybe not, if the alternative is massacre of captives, and even genocide. Maybe yes, if the alternative is quiet withdrawal of one party from battle. (The IRA? The Basque Separatist movement?). Maybe yes, as well, if the alternative is surrender’s cousin: truce. North and South Korea remain “at war” 60 years after signing their official truce. Is the status quo so bad?
Why did soldiers, combatants, and countries ever surrender? Loss of faith in one’s cause? A desire to escape certain death on the verge of defeat? A will to survive in order to fight again?
As with any core notion in warfare, legal, political, and historical scholars own this conceptual scene, reporting, assessing, and contextualizing, providing the details and precedents we need to scrutinize surrender. For an overarching history of the subject, the gold standard is How Fighting Ends: A History of Surrender (Oxford University Press, 2012), co-edited by Holger Afflerbach, professor of Central European history at the University of Leeds, and Hew Strachan, professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews. The insights and examples in their eye-opening collection of scholarly essays, which cover Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America, don’t replace common-sense judgments about surrender but do help explain why it’s on the wane.
“In prehistoric times,” Afflerbach and Strachan write, “most warriors who fell into enemy hands were killed without mercy.” Usually it was “forced surrender,” as when — fast forward to the Middle Ages — a fighter ended up “trapped under his dead horse.” By contrast, “unforced surrender,” or “giving up” despite having alternatives other than death, “arrived yet later in the history of warfare.” It marks war’s modern era, aligning with the view expressed by Clausewitz, in On War, that “there is a point beyond which persistence becomes desperate folly, and can therefore never be condoned.”
According to anthropologist Lawrence Keeley, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, those tribal societies who “seldom” took prisoners also began a long Western tradition of killing adult males and taking women and children as slaves. In ancient Greece, surrender often bore the stigma of dishonor. King Leonidas I famously refused to surrender to Xerxes of Persia at the Battle of Thermopylae (480 B.C.), sacrificing all his men. The Spartans told their soldiers to return “with your shield or on your shield” — dead, that is — “but not without your shield.”
The Spartans also, in the person of their admiral, Lysander, helped launch the kind of brutality toward prisoners that put a brake on surrender for many centuries. Lysander ordered the right arms of his Greek captives amputated. Why surrender if you’re going to be killed or maimed anyway?
Things didn’t change much in Rome, a culture dominated by notions of honor and shame. “Any Roman who did surrender,” writes German historian and politician Loretana de Libero in her chapter, “chose ignominia, disgrace for himself and his family.” At the same time, Rome gladly accepted deditio (“surrender of an enemy”), which was “absolute, total and unconditional.” Deditio discouraged surrender because, in Roman law, as “soon as the vanquished party had surrendered to the victorious party, it ceased to exist as a body politic.”
Rome drove the point home. Accounts of its military behavior toward opponents often contain the same three words: urbs direpta est, “the city has been destroyed.” Yet Rome also inconsistently introduced an incentive to surrender in the idea of deditio in fidem, the notion that victors should not carry their victory to extremes.
By medieval times, University of Regensburg historian Hans-Henning Kortüm tells us, surrender remained an exception, but the taking of prisoners for ransom grew, especially with knights and elite warriors worth something to their families. Contrary to legends of brave knights fighting to the last breath, many fled the battlefield when all was lost. Vanquished common soldiers would still typically be killed because there was no money to be made off them, and victors felt no obligation to maintain them as prisoners. By the 12th century, writes John Gillingham, an emeritus professor of medieval history at L.S.E., the “discontinuance” of the “ancient practice of enslaving prisoners,” and “the emergence of an effective notion of non-combatant status,” helped push Europe toward modern honorable surrender.
How Fighting Ends teems with stunning concrete examples of surrenders over the centuries as it examines logical nuances between surrender and connected notions such as capture, escape, morale, desertion, cease-fire, and armistice. Afflerbach, Strachan, and their contributors discern patterns from one period to another.
Surrender has always been difficult when victor and vanquished lack common values and trust.
Symbolism always matters. The Greeks practiced dexiosis, “the mutual grasping of right hands to indicate non-aggression.” They also erected battlefield trophies, and the losing side would concede defeat by being the first to request return of the bodies of its dead. White flags go back to the Romans.
But symbolism can also aim deeper. Sometimes the goal was humiliation, as in Hitler’s demand that Germany and France use the same Pullman car for the 1940 cease-fire agreement between them as was used in 1918. Or it might be providing dignity to a vanquished opponent, as in Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s decision to let Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia return home from Appomattox, as the editors write, “with full honors, their horses, and their weapons.”
In general, Afflerbach and Strachan argue, we’ve made progress over the centuries, at least until the Third Reich, World War II-era Japan, suicide bombers, IS, and Boko Haram. From those prehistoric take-no-prisoners types, we moved forward, especially after 1650, formulating civilized rules to govern such issues as honorable surrender, decent treatment of prisoners, recognition of the protected status of noncombatants, and ransoming of the defeated. To be sure, combatants often ignored laws of war that they officially endorsed: “Under the strain of war,” writes John Childs, emeritus professor of military history at the University of Leeds, “gentlemanly behavior did not always prevail.” But “sensible surrender,” the idea that surrender makes sense when all is lost, or one can no longer do harm to one’s enemy, came to eclipse surrender as shameful conduct.
Why, then, so few surrenders today? According to the book’s contributors, surrender has always been difficult when victor and vanquished lack common values and trust — e.g., Christians and pagans, or Christians and Muslims. Classical theorists of war, such as Grotius, writes Edward Spiers, professor of strategic studies at the University of Leeds, expected that rules of surrender “could apply within Christendom or between ‘civilized’ adversaries, but not in wars against ‘savages,’ where the nature of the combat and the likelihood of reprisals precluded the likelihood of restraint.”
Another reason for our surrender drought: Only losers surrender. With the big contemporary battles mentioned at the outset, no one appears to be a clear winner, and neither has either party turned hopeless about victory. Co-editor Strachan, who remarks that “the readiness to surrender has rarely been weaker,” floats another provocative explanation: Many political and military leaders today hold that “force protection is a principle of war,” that “casualties are either avoidable or even unnecessary,” and so “casualty avoidance” arguably becomes more important than victory.
F.D.R. felt differently at the January 1943 Casablanca conference, where the Allies agreed that they would accept nothing from the Axis powers but “unconditional surrender.” To Roosevelt, the demand meant “a reasonable assurance of future world peace. It does not mean the destruction of the populations of Germany, Italy and Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and subjugation of peoples.”
Ultimately, Afflerbach writes, surrender is “a device for containing death and destruction in our culture of war. … It does not abolish the evil of war but mitigates and contains it.”
Of course, one can avoid the dilemma of surrender by doing as the Romans did, even when not in Rome. According to de Libero, they always behaved as if they’d won, regardless of the facts on the ground. The satirist Lucilius observed that “the Roman people has often been defeated by force and overcome in many battles, but has never lost a war — and that is all that matters.” It could be that’s where George Aiken, the late anti-Vietnam War senator from Vermont, derived his famous solution: Just declare victory and come home.
In the political lingo of the 21st century, some might suggest Aiken’s strategy should remain in the “tool kit” of the president of the United States and other Western leaders faced with a new breed of “Never Surrender” dead-enders. The only problem there — it would look like surrender by our side. As for the other possible solution to the problem of surrender — don’t go to war in the first place — well, it’s a little late for that.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle and a professor of philosophy and humanities at Ursinus College, is the author of America the Philosophical (Knopf, 2012).
