Effort to obtain POW recognition

[armyaviator24]

Hello, I just wanted to spread awareness of an issue that I have been working on for several years now. During World War II, over 1,500 Army Air Force aircrew were forced to land or shot down over Switzerland. Many of these men were thrown into military prisons for trying to escape, and often treated worse than their counterparts in German POW camps. I have been working with Army Personnel Command to obtain POW Medals for these men, but the effort is bogged down due to the fact that the United States was never at war with Switzerland. The regulations still allow the POW Medal to be awarded to internees, detainees or hostages of terrorists if their treatment was comparable to that generally experienced by POWs during periods of armed conflict. What many Swiss Internees went through easily meets this burden of proof, but the subjective nature of the regulation leaves it open to interpretation. Currently, the Judge Advocate General of the Army is reviewing this case, but their office has had my application for 7 months now (and PERSCOM has had it over year and half). I believe that the best course of action in the meantime is to let as many people know about this as possible, since public opinion often drives changes in policy. Most of those within the military are ignorant of this segment of history because the government classified the treatment of the Swiss Internees for nearly 30 years. In many ways this is similar to the experience of the Russian Internees, Army and Naval Aviators who crashed in neutral Russia and spent the remainder of the war in camps in Siberia. These men were not allowed to disclose that they were held in Russia until the late 1980s, and in the early 1990s the Air Force awarded them POW status.

Here is the website of the Swiss Internees Association: http://swissinternees.tripod.com/

Sincerely,

Dwight S. Mears