WI prizes, hostages, loot/plunder were part of 20th C warfare?

WI there was some sort of reward for capturing enemy officers, supply dumps/convoys and ships for those who did it during the wars of last century. I understand that prize money for capturing enemy ships persisted until WW2 and was extended to the RAF for their assistance, but by then it was in a very diluted form. For example the men of OConnors offensive in Africa captured huge numbers or men and materiel. WI this achievement was tallied up and these men paid a cash bonus for the high officers, high-end equipment and bulk supplies (a huge amount of exellent tinned tomatoes at Tobruk made bully beef edible, and at no cost to the British taxpayer).

Would the wars of this century be fought differently if there was the prospect of rewards for notable capture?
 
WI there was some sort of reward for capturing enemy officers, supply dumps/convoys and ships for those who did it during the wars of last century. I understand that prize money for capturing enemy ships persisted until WW2 and was extended to the RAF for their assistance, but by then it was in a very diluted form. For example the men of OConnors offensive in Africa captured huge numbers or men and materiel. WI this achievement was tallied up and these men paid a cash bonus for the high officers, high-end equipment and bulk supplies (a huge amount of exellent tinned tomatoes at Tobruk made bully beef edible, and at no cost to the British taxpayer).

Would the wars of this century be fought differently if there was the prospect of rewards for notable capture?

I think the first two were part of WWI. Certainly German actions against insurgents in Belgium were an indication the second one was.

And looting and plunder basically describes the MO of the Germans in Russia and Imperial Japan in China....
 
I don't mean ad hoc looting/souveneiring of prisoners and civilians, but capture of supplies and troops as an objective of units with the promise of material reward. For example Operation Compass captured 22 Generals, 130000 troops, 400 tanks, 1300 guns and a shitload of supplies. For example a tank could be valued at 100 pounds, a gun 20, so on and so forth. So the men in Op Compass may have gotten the equivilent of a months pay extra due to their success in capturing the stuff intact rather than destroying it.

Would such a system see a reduction in interdction shelling and air attacks? Or tightly focus such attacks in order to secure these rewards rather than destroy them?
 
i think the armed forces would seem like a better carrer.

also i dont think there would be a reduction to attacks like that, because the govenment would need to pay the soldiers more that way. anyways 1 in the hand is worth 2 in the bush right?
 

CalBear

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The behavior, if followed, would result in far higher casualties, especially at sea.

The reason that prize-taking went out of fashion was that, with the advent of the large caliber shell gun, navies had, for the first time in several centuries, the ability to sink enemy vessels regardless of size. The many years of naval gunpowder warfare prior to the introduction of the shell gun, especially the rifled shell gun, rarely resulting in the sinking of a well made warship, unless some bizarre accident involving the powder magazines occurred. This was something that worked both ways, the ship taking the prize had little concern of an enemy ship luring it into range for a barrage since any such act would allow the aggrieved ship's captain to eliminate those responsible and any such barrage would be exceptionally unlikely to alter the outcome of an engagement. The explosive shell gun changed the reality at sea forever, the further advances in weaponry just made this more obvious.

On land, prize taking had fallen out of fashion by the mid-1500s for the same reason, with the additional element of loss of control of combat units. Even in the Second World War it was surprisingly common for troops to get so involved in inventory and requision (i.e. looting) that they were caught by counter attacking forces and wiped out. Aircraft clearly had no place in a prize-taking scheme at all.

Taking of prizes is only possible when the enemy is willing to play by the same rules. As war became increasingly lethal, and as the price of defeat became increasingly severe, that sort of genteman's agreement had no place on the battlefield.

All the loot on Earth won't help to to survive The Somme, or Tarawa, or Stalingrad. On the other hand, trying to raid the other sides baggage might well get you sniped or cut off by an enemy armored column.

Money is surprignly worthless once you get killed.
 
What CalBear said. Unless you have some sort of catastrophic super-plague which kills 90% of humanity and keeps humanity in the 15th century more or less, warfare is going to become impersonal and deadly enough that this sort of thing is going to be impossible.
 
I suppose in the modern age merely to get and use enemy equipment and supplies is a handy bonus in itself; the Tobruk tomatoes livening up British rations, or Patton capturing a German fuel dump and using it on his own. It's just that I've read that war had the potential to be quite lucrative for its practitioners, way back when and wondered why it couldn't be the case today.
 
I think the posters above are right but want to add that most wars put a large strain on the economy and thus there where less money to pass around in this way. Plus they had medals to revard behaivour like this when it was smart risk taking, giving the benefits of the idea but avoiding the problems mentioned.

However, the US constitution still allows congress to issue a letter of marqe...
 
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