Theisman, and Chin

So I'm rereading my Honor Harrington series (again) and I'm on "The Honor Of The Queen" and I'm wondering one thing. How did Thomas Theisman get back to Haven after being captured by Honor's ships? By the same token in "The Short Victorious War" Admiral Chin is also captured by Manticoran forces, yet she also apparently was repatriated into Haven's forces as well. Both Theisman and Chin have major parts in later books, but how, or why, were they allowed to get back into Haven's forces? There is mentioned at least once that there wasn't any prisoner exchanges (at least in the early part of the war) and yet they are both somehow back in Havenite service in later books.

I can almost see how Theisman might have managed to be released, especially if he received some sort of deal for being willing to testify against the Masadans, and especially seeing as how hostilities have yet to openly break out between Manticore and Haven. But I can't see any way for Admiral Chin to have somehow gotten back to Haven, especially after having played such a major part in the sneak attack on Hancock base.

So what's the deal? Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation for their being able to return to Havenite service in later books after having both been captured in early books? Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the Mad Wizard Weber would have made some hand waving sleight of hand and have both Theisman, and Chin just "happen" to be able to be captured in one book, and then somehow be able to "reappear" in later books. Ideas? Anyone?

BTW, this wasn't the first time that I've wondered about this, at the time, I just happily ignored it all and kept on with my reading. That was before I had access to the forum as a registered member and being allowed to start a new thread that will hopefully give me some insight into how this could have come about.

In HotQ they are not at war.

Mycall4me wrote:So I'm rereading my Honor Harrington series (again) and I'm on "The Honor Of The Queen" and I'm wondering one thing. How did Thomas Theisman get back to Haven after being captured by Honor's ships? By the same token in "The Short Victorious War" Admiral Chin is also captured by Manticoran forces, yet she also apparently was repatriated into Haven's forces as well. Both Theisman and Chin have major parts in later books, but how, or why, were they allowed to get back into Haven's forces? There is mentioned at least once that there wasn't any prisoner exchanges (at least in the early part of the war) and yet they are both somehow back in Havenite service in later books.

I can almost see how Theisman might have managed to be released, especially if he received some sort of deal for being willing to testify against the Masadans, and especially seeing as how hostilities have yet to openly break out between Manticore and Haven. But I can't see any way for Admiral Chin to have somehow gotten back to Haven, especially after having played such a major part in the sneak attack on Hancock base.

So what's the deal? Can anyone give me a reasonable explanation for their being able to return to Havenite service in later books after having both been captured in early books? Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the Mad Wizard Weber would have made some hand waving sleight of hand and have both Theisman, and Chin just "happen" to be able to be captured in one book, and then somehow be able to "reappear" in later books. Ideas? Anyone?

BTW, this wasn't the first time that I've wondered about this, at the time, I just happily ignored it all and kept on with my reading. That was before I had access to the forum as a registered member and being allowed to start a new thread that will hopefully give me some insight into how this could have come about.

If I remember correctly, he was repatriated to the Peeps because he had testified against Masadans who’d murdered all the Manties they’d captured at blackbird.

Chin I’m not sure about either and always wondered myself. I would assume it’s because the manties had not declared war for a while immediately following short victorious war.

ywing14 wrote:
Chin I’m not sure about either and always wondered myself. I would assume it’s because the manties had not declared war for a while immediately following short victorious war.

The tricky bit is the wiki claim (haven't checked my books) that Chin shows up a bit later during the 1st war -- commanding a battleship force in the La Martine Sector.

If correct that means she made it back before the combat was over.

If she'd only shows up for the BoM I'd think that would be perfectly explainable. High Ridge probably pushed for a full prisoner exchange as soon as he accessed Saint Just's ceasefire proposal. For one thing it's good domestic PR -- bringing the 'boys' home. For another dumping all those Peep POWs back onto Haven saves his government money -- money that could be better used in his domestic vote buying schemes.

Jonathan_S wrote:The tricky bit is the wiki claim (haven't checked my books) that Chin shows up a bit later during the 1st war -- commanding a battleship force in the La Martine Sector.

If correct that means she made it back before the combat was over.

That means there may have been prisoner swaps during the first war. It's hard to believe that, though, and in particular for flag officers who were part of the start of the war, under Adm. Parnell. That means they were likely Legislaturalists, so the CPS wouldn't want them back.

If she'd only shows up for the BoM I'd think that would be perfectly explainable. High Ridge probably pushed for a full prisoner exchange as soon as he accessed Saint Just's ceasefire proposal. For one thing it's good domestic PR -- bringing the 'boys' home. For another dumping all those Peep POWs back onto Haven saves his government money -- money that could be better used in his domestic vote buying schemes.

Makes sense.

The La Martine scene is in an anthology short story, the one introducing Victor Cachat. So it may be slightly non-canonical.

There's also a question of timing. Could Chin be representing the post-OSJ navy already? It's a bit too quick though for a POW swap, her assuming command of a task force, and arriving in La Martine.

As Sherlock Holmes says, "once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, most be the truth." That means she must have been returned during the war. And if she was commanding a force in La Martine, she must have been returned early enough to clear the cobwebs. My guess is this was after Operation Icarus, when the Alliance had had a setback and McQueen was the supreme military commander in the PRH, so she'd have taken Chin back.

Either that or she was never a POW in the first place. She did surrender in First Hancock, but she may have been immediately sent to Haven with the declaration of war from the Alliance side, like Adm. O'Cleary later was sent back to Sol after the Battle of Spindle.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

Jonathan_S wrote:The tricky bit is the wiki claim (haven't checked my books) that Chin shows up a bit later during the 1st war -- commanding a battleship force in the La Martine Sector.

If correct that means she made it back before the combat was over.

That means there may have been prisoner swaps during the first war. It's hard to believe that, though, and in particular for flag officers who were part of the start of the war, under Adm. Parnell. That means they were likely Legislaturalists, so the CPS wouldn't want them back.

Well, we know of at least one; well I think it was a unilateral return rather than a swap. Honor arranged for Caslet and his crew (including Shannon Foraker) to be returned immediately after the end of her Silesian mission.

Though up until that point it doesn't seem like there had been any; because in that same book, HAE, Caslet muses

Honor Among Enemies wrote:The People's Republic had refused to exchange POWs for the duration. There were precedents for and against prisoner exchange, but the Manties had a far smaller population than the Republic . . . which had no intention of returning trained personnel to the RMN. Besides, he thought with a flash of bitter humor, we'd have to trade them twenty to one just to hold even!

(Though, FWIW, the merchant captain Sukowski thought that after the Peep commerce raiding in Silesia his crew would be exchanged back to Manticore because "civilian prisoner exchange conventions are pretty straightforward.")

If that is correct then Chin must have been returned unilaterally at some point; either before the war or as a token for some dispatch or offer sent during the war.

ThinksMarkedly wrote:

If she'd only shows up for the BoM I'd think that would be perfectly explainable. High Ridge probably pushed for a full prisoner exchange as soon as he accessed Saint Just's ceasefire proposal. For one thing it's good domestic PR -- bringing the 'boys' home. For another dumping all those Peep POWs back onto Haven saves his government money -- money that could be better used in his domestic vote buying schemes.

Makes sense.

The La Martine scene is in an anthology short story, the one introducing Victor Cachat. So it may be slightly non-canonical.

There's also a question of timing. Could Chin be representing the post-OSJ navy already? It's a bit too quick though for a POW swap, her assuming command of a task force, and arriving in La Martine.

As Sherlock Holmes says, "once you remove the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, most be the truth." That means she must have been returned during the war. And if she was commanding a force in La Martine, she must have been returned early enough to clear the cobwebs. My guess is this was after Operation Icarus, when the Alliance had had a setback and McQueen was the supreme military commander in the PRH, so she'd have taken Chin back.

Either that or she was never a POW in the first place. She did surrender in First Hancock, but she may have been immediately sent to Haven with the declaration of war from the Alliance side, like Adm. O'Cleary later was sent back to Sol after the Battle of Spindle.

Also, while looking for "prisoner exchange" (now that I'm back on the computer with my ebook text files) I do see a couple of references saying that High Ridge did in fact organize a general prisoner exchange after the ceasefire. (Now, whether Saint Just would have agreed I don't think we know, but clearly the new Pritchart government would have been happy to do that as a goof faith offering to try to move towards a permanent peace treaty)

House of Steel wrote:Terekhov, Sir Aivars Aleksovitch [...] After the truce, he returned to Manticore as part of a prisoner exchange and spent an extended period at Bassingford Medical Center rehabilitating and regenerating

Shadows of Saganami wrote:And after that, he'd survived almost a full T-year as a POW in the Peeps' hands until the general prisoner exchange the High Ridge Government had engineered.

The later quote also about Terekhov.


But as for the timing of La Martine -- I just reskimmed the beginning of that short story, Eric Flint's Fanatic, and it has Admiral Genevieve Chin in charge of her task force of 14 battleships in the interval while Saint-Just was in charge.

It clearly states that it is after the McQueen attempted coup. But also after Manticore had begun Buttercup

The Service of the Sword - Fanatic wrote:Ironically, Genevieve suspected, she owed her life to the Manticorans. If the Star Kingdom's Eighth Fleet hadn't begun their terrifying onslaught on the People's Republic of Haven, State Security probably would have decided just to destroy her chunk of the Navy. But . . . Oscar Saint-Just was between a rock and a hard place, and he'd probably decided he simply couldn't afford to lose any part of the Navy that he didn't absolutely have to lose.

And she was clearly assigned to that duty while his StateSec was still ascendant; so it has to be before the ceasefire. (He didn't long survive that; being killed himself before he could purge the navy's officer corps. Certainly by the time a POW could have returned from Manticore, been assigned a fleet, and dispatched to take control of it he'd be dead and the StateSec SDs that were said BB fleet's potential executioners wouldn't have still been there and in charge)

So this has to fall after December 1914 (as Buttercup kicked on on the 25th), but presumably before March 1915 when Saint-Just sent the truce offer -- though he wasn't killed until early May; after word had gotten back that it was accepted.

So Eric somehow has her back and in command well before the general prisoner exchange. (Which honestly is likely to have been a timeline goof; where Eric wanted a known character on the Peep side to introduce his new [ed]Cachet[/ed] character against and it just got missed in the collaboration process that, by the timeline, she should likely still be a POW. However it can easily be retconned as her having been returned unilaterally at some point - whether that's before Manticore's formal declaration of war or at some point after that)

Jonathan_S wrote:So Eric somehow has her back and in command well before the general prisoner exchange. (Which honestly is likely to have been a timeline goof; where Eric wanted a known character on the Peep side to introduce his new Caslet character against and it just got missed in the collaboration process that, by the timeline, she should likely still be a POW. However it can easily be retconned as her having been returned unilaterally at some point - whether that's before Manticore's formal declaration of war or at some point after that)

She'd lost her entire force of DNs against nothing bigger than battlecruisers and minelayers, and kicked off the war early (though Rollins was in overall command). Parnell wouldn't have retained her services any more more than the CPS did. But she may have arrived back home early enough that Parnell was still in charge and simply shuffled her to a backwater, desk position that she survived the CPS purge of the Navy top brass. And not having done anything during the entire war, she wouldn't have had to have warranted execution by the CPS.

Whether it was McQueen or Theisman that gave her the opportunity for redemption is unknown. She may have come back to the good graces any time before the short story... but I actually find it more likely that it was Buttercup that caused her to be reactivated as a field commander. At that time, the PN would have been losing competent admirals by the droves to White Haven, so Theisman sent her with a battleships (less than what she'd commanded in 1906!) to a backwater sector that wasn't seeing war.

How she went from that to commanding Fifth Fleet in 1921 is another story. Theisman didn't seem to lack for competent fleet commanders. So my guess is that, despite her two very public punches to the chin, Chin was actually pretty good.

Jonathan_S wrote:
So Eric somehow has her back and in command well before the general prisoner exchange. (Which honestly is likely to have been a timeline goof; where Eric wanted a known character on the Peep side to introduce his new Caslet character against and it just got missed in the collaboration process that, by the timeline, she should likely still be a POW. However it can easily be retconned as her having been returned unilaterally at some point - whether that's before Manticore's formal declaration of war or at some point after that)

Cachet, not Caslet </pedant>

As already mentioned, Tom Theisman wasn't - officially - acting as a Peep when he was captured [he'd been sold to Masada along with his ship], so when he decided he wanted to go home after he was let off the hook, no one could stop him. Come to think of it, I'm not sure there was a hook for him to be on in the first place. The state of war between Masada and Yeltsin was real enough that he had done nothing that could justify piracy charges, so - again, officially - at worst he was a mercenary whose employer had just gone rather permanently out of business. Something that is no more illegal in the Honorverse than it was in early-modern Europe.

Sorting out Chin's history is slightly more complicated, since I can't seem to find the reference, but around the time Fanatic was published Himself did explain how she got to La Martine: given that the PRH didn't declare war on people, the PN personnel captured in the period covered by SVW and FoD, that is, before _Manticore_ declared war on the PRH, weren't POWs in the strict sense. Nor were the few Manties the Peeps had managed to collect, for that matter. I don't recall what, if any, reasons Himself gave for it happening, but there was an exchange in that interval that saw the survivors of 1st Hancock being shipped home. When Chin was returned the CPS, I believe to demonstrate its own justice and magnanimity, chose to treat her as a victim of Legislaturalist injustice and duplicity and, since she clearly couldn't have had a role in the Harris Assassination [after all, she was a Manty prisoner at the time it was plotted and carried out], put her back to work at her old rank. And promptly parked her at the back of beyond on border security duty. And left her there for the rest of their part of the war because she was never regarded as remotely trustworthy.

Jonathan_S wrote:

ywing14 wrote:
Chin I’m not sure about either and always wondered myself. I would assume it’s because the manties had not declared war for a while immediately following short victorious war.

The tricky bit is the wiki claim (haven't checked my books) that Chin shows up a bit later during the 1st war -- commanding a battleship force in the La Martine Sector.

If correct that means she made it back before the combat was over.

If she'd only shows up for the BoM I'd think that would be perfectly explainable. High Ridge probably pushed for a full prisoner exchange as soon as he accessed Saint Just's ceasefire proposal. For one thing it's good domestic PR -- bringing the 'boys' home. For another dumping all those Peep POWs back onto Haven saves his government money -- money that could be better used in his domestic vote buying schemes.

Louis R wrote:As already mentioned, Tom Theisman wasn't - officially - acting as a Peep when he was captured [he'd been sold to Masada along with his ship], so when he decided he wanted to go home after he was let off the hook, no one could stop him. Come to think of it, I'm not sure there was a hook for him to be on in the first place. The state of war between Masada and Yeltsin was real enough that he had done nothing that could justify piracy charges, so - again, officially - at worst he was a mercenary whose employer had just gone rather permanently out of business. Something that is no more illegal in the Honorverse than it was in early-modern Europe.

I'd say that he was there as part of the technology transfer team, teaching the Masadans to operate the two ships they had acquired from the PRH. He wasn't in command, he was simply ensuring that the Masadans were learning. And then he got carried to the Yeltsin's Star system by those mad Masadans and thrust into the war that wasn't his.

That could have been a nice excuse, but for the fact that it was actually true. He didn't know the exact details of the payment for the two ships, but given that the PRH was getting something out of it (basing rights?), the acquisition may have been actually legal. He wasn't in command and neither was Yu. At some point, he became as much a prisoner as any one else, as the Masadans had the weapons and were responsible for security. And as soon as he could no longer hide behind the orders, he did what he could to stop the Masadans.