Basic Trope: In a story focusing on military warfare, one commander is shown ordering his soldiers not to spare enemy combatants who surrender or attempt to flee or are otherwise in a helpless position.
- Straight: General Bob orders his soldiers to kill open fire on a group of enemy soldiers who have laid down their arms and raised the white flag in an attempt to surrender.
- Exaggerated: General Bob's ENTIRE ARMY has the standing order to "Take No Prisoners! Show No Mercy!". Any soldier who breaks this order can expect to be court marshaled.
- Downplayed: General Bob never explicitly orders his soldiers to shoot surrendering enemy soldiers ... but he won't try all that hard to punish those that do. When Private Walter shoots a surrendering enemy Sergeant, General Bob only punishes him with a week in the brig (instead of execution or life imprisonment).
- Justified:
- The story takes place in a time when armies didn't take prisoners (or at the very least enough people think this is the case), and the author wants to be realistic.
- General Bob normally DOES take enemy soldiers prisoner ... but in this particular battle the enemy Division he is fighting against Raped and Slaughtered it's way across the countryside, massacred six heavily-populated cities (one of which was the city General Bob grew up in), torturing children to death for fun, and utilize rape as a campaign tactic. So when General Bob fights this Division in battle, he is determined to punish those mass-murderers by ensuring none of them leave the battlefield alive.
- The enemy has already pulled an "I Surrender, Suckers" gambit. General Bob wants to make sure it doesn't happen again.
- General Bob's mission is top secret and he is under orders to Leave No Witnesses.
- The more enemies taken down, the better. The more enemies that escape and live to fight another day, the worse. It's only normal for General Bob to ensure that the enemies' numbers dwindle no matter the method.
- Inverted:
- Enemy Soldiers commit suicide to avoid being taken prisoner.
- General Bob orders his soldiers to sink their own lifeboats to ensure their brutal efficency.
- Subverted: One of the soldiers is about to unload his machine gun on a large group of surrendering enemy soldiers, but his superior officer tells him to stand down and the enemy soldiers are taken prisoner.
- Double Subverted: At which point they are promptly taken to a pit and mass-executed.
- Parodied: "Kill them all! Leave no survivors!", shouts General Bob to his subordinate Charly - about the dust particles they are cleaning out while cleaning Bob's house.
- Zig Zagged: General Bob sometimes orders to shoot surrendered enemies immediately, but sometimes orders that surrendered soldiers must be kept alive, and this is a seemingly random order for no apparent reason.
- Averted: The battle happens in a place, where for some reason soldiers of the enemy never are in a position where they try to surrender or flee, and never are in a situation where General Bob can decide their fate.
- Enforced:
- General Bob is evil and the author needed a way to demonstrate this.
- General Bob is a gritty Anti-Hero and the author needed a way to demonstrate this.
- Lampshaded: "Let me guess, now that we sunk their ship and they're sitting in the liveboats, you want us to sink the liveboats, commander?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: High Command use this tactic to ensure that resources are not "wasted" on feeding Prisoners Of War and that enemy combatants can't live to fight another day.
- Defied: The world leaders get together and sign into international law an accord which makes killing enemy POWs a War-Crime and which permits the UN to try and punish leaders who do or allow this.
- Discussed: "They are our enemies, why should we allow them to continue living?" - "Because not doing so would make us the bad guys?"
- Conversed: Two soldiers under Bob's command discuss wether their enemy is so inherently evil that they should shoot his soldiers at every opportunity, even when they surrendered or can't defend themselves for some reason, or wether this would make them just as bad as the enemy.
- Implied: Nobody who surrenders in battle is ever seen or heard from again.
- Deconstructed:
- General Bob orders his troops to shoot enemy soldiers who surrender. This infuriates the enemy so much that they launch a vicious attack against Bob's army and refuse to show mercy.
- Due to the fact that this trope is probably common during wartimes, this causes engineers to start attaching machine guns to the life boats to make sure this trope never happens again.
- Played For Drama: Alice's brother Henry died on the front ... he tried surrendering but a sniper on the other side would have none of it.
Back to Sink The Life Boats
