Posted on 05/30/2015 11:22:38 PM PDT by Michael.SF.
I disagree. Do you have any documentation of an issued policy by MacArthur, Nimitz, or any other ranking officer or government official on that? That is unequivocally NOT true.
The soldier they used as an advisor for the movie spent 28 months in combat in the European theater. How can you say he is wrong, unless you were there? I take at face value what he says, because he was there.
You may say that there were allied soldiers who didn't take prisoners, and that is true. It has always been true in every war and in the heat of combat, that is the way it sometimes goes down. But tying up the hands of soldiers and machine-gunning them as was done at Malmedy was not done. Did we kill Japanese soldiers from sunk ships that were anywhere they could be picked up by their own military? We sure did.
But it was not, and has never been official policy, such as that delivered by the Japanese High Command in their "Kill All" order, and as practiced throughout the war by Japanese troops at all levels from the basic infantryman up to the highest levels of the Japanese military.
As for the German troops being executed at Dachau, do you know the context of that photo? Were they prison guards who surrendered to the allied troops? Were they rounded up in the countryside and brought back to Dachau to be fingered by the prisoners? Unless you can definitively answer that question, then you cannot comment on it.
That said, I have no problem in saying that every guard was guilty of murder who worked at that camp where tens of thousands of people were murdered. Each of them is tried and convicted by that evidence they found inside those gates when opened in a time of war. If you want to say they were following orders, that is most likely 100% true, but that is not exculpatory.
It was war, and that doesn't make it right to murder in cold blood an unarmed combatant who has surrendered, but there are circumstances in ALL wars where that has happened and individual soldiers on all sides have done just that. But that does not a moral equivalence make.
By the way, this is a discussion that comes up quite often on FR, and I have read and participated in enough of them to understand that this is a philosophical issue that more often that not evades a middle ground.
If you have any further discussion, I certainly don’t mind continuing the discussion (if we can do so without further hijacking this excellent and informative thread!) but we don’t need to get antagonistic about it going forward, as experience has shown me that one or both of us may get.
We can continue and agree to disagree.
it’s ok. i’m just an amateur military historian and when i talk about subjects like these, it’s done from a place of dispassion. i have a fascination with the fighting men and machines of WWII (all sides), but don’t care one iota about rehashing the politics of the war. as far as i’m concerned, the good guys won (minus the Soviets who were definitely also the bad guys).
Good. It is a difficult place to have discussions on occasion on FR. We sometimes lose valuable discourse in the process, and I am as guilty as anyone else of having done it.
But, one must always try to do better.
Yesterday 8/23/15 on YouTube saw:
Coming In On A Wing And A Prayer -
Wing and a Prayer (also known as The Story of Carrier X) is a black-and-white 1944 war film about the heroic crew of an American carrier in the desperate early days of World War II in the Pacific theater, directed by Henry Hathaway and starring Dana Andrews and Don Ameche.
Very Good !
Mark number 24
Love “We Were Soldiers”.
Enemy at the Gates
“My name... is Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev. I’ve come to take things in hand here. This city... is not Kursk, nor is it Kiev, nor Minsk. This city... is Stalingrad. *Stalingrad*! This city bears the name of the Boss. It’s more than a city, it’s a symbol. If the Germans... capture this city... the entire country will collapse. Now... I want our boys to raise their heads. I want them to act like they have *balls*! I want them to stop shitting their pants! That’s your job. As political officers... I’m counting on you...”
Here is a list of movies that conservatives would like if you have not seen them.
“When We Were Soldiers”
“The Patriot”
“Fury”
“American Sniper”
“Enemy At The Gates”
“Saving Private Ryan”
“Lone Survivor”
“Brave Heart”
“300”
“Rescue Dawn”
“Downfall”
“The Pianist”
“Gladiator”
“Top Gun”
“Red Dawn”
The Pianist?
In my grandfathers last days, he began telling us around him some of his memories from his time in the European Theater, he was a frontline NCO in the Army--he had never spoken about it before according to my Grandmother and aunt. We believe he was asking the lord to forgive him for the sins in his life. We also believe he wanted his family to know how he became the man he was. My Grams said he was a very different man when he came back at the end of WW2.
He had some pretty horrifying stories, but the one which had us all in complete shock was when he described some of the things they did to get information for captured enemy. He said they would take them in groups of four or five, and line them up according to rank. Then starting at the lowest rank, ask them questions, if that first soldier, who likely didn't know squat, hesitated or didn't/couldn't answer, they would execute him right there and move to the next in line. He said that usually, the ranking soldier would start blurting out answers, right then, but sometimes would hold out till the 2nd was killed. He said that was the worst thing he ever had to do in his life, and that he's seen those faces in his dreams ever since.
He also said participated in hunting down Nazi officers and party officials for a few months after, and said they ended up executing some of them as well.
Heh, I had to look back, didn’t realize this was an older thread...
This, to me, is one of the most odious aspects of human warfare, and one of the saddest.
I have heard it said that in war, the people who are most affected by it mentally are people who have a degree of sensitivity. I forget where I read it (Possibly “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa”) but he said that less sensitive people weathered the terrible things they had to do with less mental trauma and seemed to skate through it, and people who had a degree of sensitivity were more vulnerable to emotional trauma, which makes a lot of sense to me.
My heart goes out to good men who have had to do things in war to survive (such as shooting prisoners, because there was no way to process them in the middle of a battle and they couldn’t let them go) and they live with that the rest of their lives. Or men who became so unsensitized in the middle of it all that they stopped feeling anything about human life or individuals they fought against, then when they are released from it and the war ends, they come back to reality and they suffer with it.
Good men who suffer because of it. It breaks my heart.
It is one of the reasons I try so hard to reserve judgement on soldiers in warfare unless it is clearly a heinous or sadistic act.
Many men came back from WWII as changed men. My dad was on a destroyer out in the Pacific near the end of the war, and for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t go into water deeper than his knees. We used to joke about it, but after he passed, I wondered if he had seen something that gave him that aversion to swimming. I know that he knew how to swim, but he never even went into the swimming pool he had built, beyond getting his legs wet.
Thank you for your post. It made me contemplate this kind of thing.
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