What is a POW?
A POW or Prisoner of War is an enemy combatant captured and held during wartime. Very specific rules govern who exactly is defined as a POW, and how POWs are to be treated by their captors. For example, governments must notify each other when they capture POWs. Many governments maintain a POW/MIA office for families of service members who have been captured or who have gone missing in wartime. Humans have been making war for thousands of years, but the concept of prisoners of war is actually fairly recent. For the bulk of human history, enemy combatants were either slaughtered on the battlefield by the victors, or taken and enslaved for use as a source of cheap labor. Sometimes, former enemies were integrated into the society of the winners, especially if they had valuable skills, but they were typically still treated as second-class citizens. By the 1600s, the concept of taking prisoners of war and ransoming them to their home governments was widespread enough that there were calls fo
