Graham Stewart: A harsh fate awaits all collaborators
[Graham Stewart has written the Past Notes column for The Times since November 2005. He is the author of Burying Caesar: Churchill, Chamberlain and the Battle for the Tory Party and The History of The Times: The Murdoch Years.]
Will the British Army’s Iraqi interpreters be left to swing when we withdraw from Basra?
Those deemed to have collaborated with an occupying power are invariably at the mercy of summary justice when the occupiers leave. This was the case for America’s South Vietnamese helpers when the Vietcong closed in. Their desperate attempts to scale the US Embassy gates and clamber on board the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975 were among the most harrowing images of the Vietnam War.
There were similar scenes at the fall of Yorktown in 1781. Imminent defeat in the American War of Independence was not a total disaster for the 7,000 British soldiers preparing to lay down their weapons. After a period in captivity, they had the prospect of returning home to Britain. But for those Americans who had loyally fought with them, it was an unmitigated catastrophe. They faced being lynched.
Although George Washington allowed his British opponent, Lord Cornwallis, honourable surrender terms at Yorktown, he refused to extend the same generosity to the American Loyalists in the defeated garrison. While the British troops were accorded prisoner-of-war status, the Loyalists were to be treated as criminals who had committed terrorist acts.
Unable to improve on the surrender terms, Cornwallis did make an effort to spirit away many of the Loyalists on the naval sloop, the Bonetta. Many, however, were left to their fate. As the ship set sail, these Loyalists tried to row out to it, but the Bonetta did not wait to pick them up. Only 14 made it....
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Will the British Army’s Iraqi interpreters be left to swing when we withdraw from Basra?
Those deemed to have collaborated with an occupying power are invariably at the mercy of summary justice when the occupiers leave. This was the case for America’s South Vietnamese helpers when the Vietcong closed in. Their desperate attempts to scale the US Embassy gates and clamber on board the last helicopters out of Saigon in 1975 were among the most harrowing images of the Vietnam War.
There were similar scenes at the fall of Yorktown in 1781. Imminent defeat in the American War of Independence was not a total disaster for the 7,000 British soldiers preparing to lay down their weapons. After a period in captivity, they had the prospect of returning home to Britain. But for those Americans who had loyally fought with them, it was an unmitigated catastrophe. They faced being lynched.
Although George Washington allowed his British opponent, Lord Cornwallis, honourable surrender terms at Yorktown, he refused to extend the same generosity to the American Loyalists in the defeated garrison. While the British troops were accorded prisoner-of-war status, the Loyalists were to be treated as criminals who had committed terrorist acts.
Unable to improve on the surrender terms, Cornwallis did make an effort to spirit away many of the Loyalists on the naval sloop, the Bonetta. Many, however, were left to their fate. As the ship set sail, these Loyalists tried to row out to it, but the Bonetta did not wait to pick them up. Only 14 made it....