CougarGA7: "Not marking a prison ship is a war crime. "
CougarGA7: quoting from Article 46 of Geneva Convention:
"The Detaining Power shall take adequate precautions especially in case of transport by sea or by air, to ensure their safety during transfer..."
From just this, I'd say any claim that Brits committed a "war crime" is based solely on anti-British animus.
The Geneva Convention does not here spell out what "adequate precautions" consist of.
Surely it would be entirely "adequate" to provide as much protection for those prisoners as the Brits provided their own sailors?
So I'll put it in the form of a challenge: can you cite a country, besides the United States, which treated its prisoners better than Brits treated theirs?
Yes, I think we can say that Brits are sometimes risk takers, and less concerned with safety than we Americans think appropriate (again cite the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, for recent example).
But that is a far cry from calling them "war criminals," imho.
The Germans. The German military behaved correctly toward POWs from countries that were parties to the Geneva convention.
And, more to the point here:
Descriptions of some US internment camps
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/quwby.html
Description of an internment camp in Germany that housed a batch of whiny American journalists.
http://www.traces.org/americaninternees.html
As as a side note, observe proper markings on the ship used for the repatriations at the bottom link - above the map, and at the bottom of the page.
I think you are missing the point here. I’m not concerned with how the Germans treated their prisoners or who was the best steward of their prisoners. That’s not the issue at hand here.
Leaving a ship loaded with prisoners marked in a state that would make it appear as an armed merchant or even just a regular merchant that is already a target of enemy submarine warfare would constitute a case of not providing “adequate precautions” in my opinion and I think it would prove to be the case in a war crime tribunal as well. PAR if you know the specific cases on the Japanese hell ships can you point me towards them since that would help my point here.
The Germans committed some heinous war crimes during the war, and some of the perpetrators got off Scott free as well for varying reasons, some of which would not put us in the best of light as well. But that doesn’t mean we can just ignore other missteps by other governments just because they were on our side. It’s like saying its OK that my buddy robbed a 7-11 because my enemy robbed a large bank. We were fighting a terrible foe during the war, but it didn’t make us (the Allies) Saints because of that fact.