James Crossland

Britain and the International Committee of the Red Cross, 1939–1945

In 1946 Winston Churchill was preparing to journey to Switzerland for one of his many post-war speaking tours. Included in the events on his itinerary was a visit to Geneva, where he was to be the guest of honour at a luncheon hosted by Max Huber, the international lawyer, academic and occasional advisor to the Swiss Federal Council, who had been the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) during the Second World War. Although the ICRC’s members had carried no arms and its main base of operations on the tranquil banks of Lake Geneva, the Villa Moynier, had suffered no air raids, many carried scars from the conflict not unlike those of the man whose decisive contributions they were honouring. The 179 delegates recruited by the ICRC during the war — Swiss volunteers whose only protection from harm in the field was a white armband emblazoned with a Red Cross and the willingness of belligerents to adhere to International Humanitarian Law (IHL) — exerted themselves tremendously on behalf of Allied and Axis soldiers, and the many civilians caught between their clash of arms. The delegates’ status as neutral, impartial humanitarian actors having been codified in the 1929 Geneva Convention, the men and women of the ICRC traversed the globe throughout the conflict and its aftermath, delivering food and medical relief to Prisoners of War (POWs) and civilian internees, inspecting the camps in which they were detained and reporting on the status of their health and well-being to belligerent governments...

The Mutiny That Never Was: The Special Operations Executive and the Failure of Operation ‘Kitchenmaid’

This article analyses the development and failure of a plan by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to use a small-scale mutiny by German troops in Greece in 1944 to engender a widespread uprising within the Reichsarbeitsdienst and the ranks of non-German troops serving in the Wehrmacht. Through an analysis of this operation, codenamed ‘Kitchenmaid’, an assessment will be made of the capabilities and motivations of SOEs Greek section (Force 133); the problem of its cooperation with Greek communist guerrillas in relation to British foreign policy towards Greece; and the strategic and political value of ‘Kitchenmaid’.

The Korean War and the Post-war Prisoner of War Regime, 1945–1956

This paper examines the framework for the treatment of prisoners of war that emerged after 1945. It focuses on one of the key elements of the post-war prisoner of war (POW) regime, the role of neutral bodies – state authorities acting as ‘protecting powers’ or humanitarian agencies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross – in supervising the implementation of the 1949 POW convention. It examines the importance of neutral supervision for the POW regime, and shows how the events of the Korean War affected the willingness of states to comply with their obligations under the new convention.

Prisoners and Parcels, 1940–1

The author of the ICRC’s official history took an unusually blunt tone when he conceded that, for all its preparations and good intentions, the sudden difficulty in obtaining information on the tens of thousands of Allied prisoners captured during the fall of France and the pressing need to organize relief on a massive scale left the Committee thoroughly ‘over-whelmed’.1 This was despite the fact that, amidst the tumult of June 1940, Jacques Cheneviere emerged as one of the first, in either Geneva or Whitehall, to grasp fully the scale of the humanitarian disaster engendered by the German conquest of Western Europe. Although CheneviA¨re’s dour nature probably had him prepared for the worst, it is clear that he had also learnt much from his experience of the war’s first weeks when, following the influx of Polish POWs into Germany, the Agency’s system of reporting captures was beset by the same disruptions to transport and communications as would occur in the summer of 1940. In the case of Poland, the destruction wrought to postal systems and the ill-preparedness and unwillingness of the Germans to report POW captures efficiently, if at all, rendered obsolete the Agency’s preferred method of using the information given them by the detaining power to compile long lists of prisoner details for periodical forwarding to the detainees’ government.2

Britain and the Red Cross, 1864–1929

The 8 August 1864 was an ostensibly momentous day for those gathered at the Hotel de Ville, in the heart of Geneva’s old town. It was the final day of an international conference, attended by twenty-four beribboned representatives of sixteen European states, at which the First Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded Armies in the Field would be signed. The occasion was presided over by the conference’s proud instigators, the fledgling International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, the first incarnation of the organization that, in 1876, would be renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). For the founders of this Committee — five Swiss private citizens — the signing of the First Geneva Convention marked the end of an eighteen-month-long road of negotiations, the aim of which was to call together the heads of the most powerful states in Europe to sign a document that would outline regulations on how to care for wounded soldiers and protect those who tended them on the battlefield. Although the ICRC’s founders could lay claim to having these practices codified in such grandeur, the idea of establishing such a set of rules for states to abide by in times of conflict was not a radical one. Informal codes that regulated the practice of war had developed over the course of the preceeding centuries and, in the immediate decades prior to the signing of the First Geneva Convention, several quasi-formal codes were put into practice on American and European battlefields.

Prestige and Credibility, 1942–3

Since its inception, the ICRC’s prestige and credibility have been decisive in its ability to present itself to belligerents as an impartial and neutral humanitarian actor.1 As Max Huber himself opined in 1936, the ICRC ‘must always afford all parties the guarantee of as unbiased a judgement as possible’ and ‘avoid every suspicion of partiality, political or other’.2 Neutrality, as understood and practised by Huber, was a means of detaching the ICRC from the political and strategic concerns of states, for whose soldiers and citizens it sought to provide succour. Through this approach the ICRC could present itself to belligerents as a reliable service agency — one that would abstain from recourse to partisan attitudes; maintain discretion; and carry out its humanitarian duties without interfering in the conduct of military matters. Neutrality in this sense, manifested as a form of operational restriction, confined the ICRC to the role of independent agent for relief work. It did not, as has been argued elsewhere, provide the medium through which the Committee could become an anti-war agitator or promoter of pacifism.3

Dependence and Divergence, 1941–2

On 20 April 1941, Greece — having resisted the invasion launched by the Italians in October 1940 and the arrival of the Germans in the spring of the following year — finally capitulated to the Axis. In the days that followed, the Wehrmacht rounded up the remaining British and Colonial soldiers that had been sent to Greece’s defence, taking, by the time of the fall of Kalamata on 29 April, a grand total of 11,000 British POWs. A little over a month later, these were joined by an additional 12,000 of their comrades who, following evacuation from the mainland, had fought on in the subsequent battle for Crete, only to surrender on 1 June. Though the total number of POWs taken in the Greek campaign was less than the intake in Western Europe in 1940, the same problems of transportation, housing and food soon emerged. The two main transit camps in the region — Dulag 183 (Salonika) and the ‘Corinth Cage’ Frontstalag — were ramshackle facilities in which prisoners were beset by dysentery and untreated infections and, in some cases, shot by overzealous guards for such trivialities as attempting to use the open-ditch latrines at night. The experience of capture for Allied prisoners taken in North Africa during the same period was little better. The main transit camp at Benghazi — ‘The Palms’ — was little more than a dust-choked, barbed-wire-ringed enclosure, in which the sanitation was non-existent and the rations consisted of watery macaroni and hard tack biscuits, supplied in measly quantities.

Grandeur, Tribulation, Apocalypse, 1919–40

In the years after the First World War, the ICRC was beset by a number of challenges, both internal and external, that greatly shaped the character and composition of the organization that would attempt to bring humanity to the twentieth century’s bloodiest conflict. The first such challenge came in 1919 from within the Red Cross family itself, when a rival body — the League of Red Cross Societies — emerged to claim leadership of the movement and in doing so question the past record and future effectiveness of the ICRC. The seeds of this split had been sown decades earlier by the Committee’s founders. Although Dunant’s talk in the 1860s of the need for ‘societies in each country’1 had been fulfilled in the years after the signing of the First Geneva Convention, the process by which these National Red Cross Societies were created and their relationship to the ICRC were never clearly defined. It was not until 1876 that the notion of the ICRC having to officially recognize and endorse new National Societies became systematic. By that time, however, the independent character of and distance between the first National Societies and the ICRC had become deeply entrenched and the former was bound to the latter by little more than a ‘community of principles’ well into the first decades of the twentieth century.2 In some cases this estrangement grew to open schism.

Civilians and Ships, 1940–3

Having resolved upon a policy of ‘no surrender’ in the months after the fall of France, the British Government was faced with the problem of how to continue the fight against Germany until, as the architect of the ‘no surrender’ policy intoned, ‘the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old’.1 The loss of the British Expeditionary Force removed the capacity for terrestrial military engagement in Europe, and the North African theatre, though strategically important, was at the time viewed as too peripheral to carry the full weight of Churchill’s favoured policy of striking at the heart of the enemy. Though embraced by some in Whitehall as a war-winning strategy, aerial bombing on a scale required to deliver the fabled ‘knockout blow’ to Germany was a relatively untested means of engagement and it did not take long for the Royal Air Force’s limitations to become apparent. Another means of continuing the fight was to harness one of Britain’s clear strengths in 1940 — the Royal Navy — to tighten the blockade that had first been imposed on Germany in September 1939 further. Unlike bombing, there was precedent enough for a blockade to be implemented at the outset of the conflict with a clear conscience and an expectation, albeit slender, of success.2

Relief and Redundancy, 1945–6

Europe in the spring of 1945 was a desperate place — short of food, lacking infrastructure, awash with the displaced, the wounded, the homeless and the starving. As this state of troubled peace emerged from the maelstrom of the war, Max Huber — newly returned to the post of ICRC president following Burckhardt’s acceptance of the position of Swiss Foreign Minister to Paris — took to his pen, as he had in September 1939, to sketch out the tasks that awaited the ICRC in its next epoch.1 Huber was very mindful of the fact that, fraught though it had been, the ICRC’s war had engendered the greatest expansion in the organization’s history and increased its capabilities and resources such that it could lay claim to being the humanitarian agent par excellence of the post-war world. Fortified by this belief in April 1945 he made an impassioned call to arms to the Red Cross faithful, in which he both pressed the need for the ICRC to sustain its relief effort following the cessation of hostilities and sought to remind his audience of the uniqueness and value of ICRC delegates at a time when a host of relief agencies representing all manner of outside interests was converging on Europe: as long as there are prisoners of war and occupied territories there will be circumstances in which an institution independent of both victors and vanquished, acting only for humanitarian purposes and hampered by no political ties, can be of service.