On December 17, 1944 a group of 84 American soldiers was taken captive by a German SS unit near the town of Malmedy in Belgium. The Germans assembled their captives in the snow on the field, then slaughtered them

On December 17, 1944 a group of 84 American soldiers was taken captive by a German SS unit near the town of Malmedy in Belgium. The Germans assembled their captives in the snow on the field, then slaughtered them. Word spread rapidly among the American GIs about how the SS treated their prisoners, and the practice of taking SS soldiers as POWs was abandoned.

There are loads of stories like this from the war, and they changed life in the army completely. For instance, German soldiers fighting the Russian front were told to shoot all the captured Russians as soon as possible, which led to the death of millions of Soviet prisoners of war, by starvation. In turn, Russian infantry carried one last hand grenade for the inevitable. And late in the war, even the Germans would fight to the death against the Americans and the British, scared of ending up in the Soviet forced labor camps.

The US Marines heard so many rumors of the events that took place in the Bataan Death March that it built up fears of what captivity might be like. In Japan there's a culture where surrender is not only disgraceful, it's shameful to the point where some soldiers even established fake surrender positions so that they could kill incoming medics with disabled mines. This fostered a complete lack of faith between all parties over the white flag.

This the human mind can suffer from the affects of such anxiety. The front-line troops would often have the (blank face of the thousand-yard stare). For the vast majority however, the best method of dealing with such horrors was simply to believe that you were dead already. When you know there will be nothing but loathing from your enemies, the best thing to do is to give them nothing.