> No one likes to think about their ‘good guy’ killing captured or surrendered enemy soldiers. But it happens like it or not is happens. <
A friend of the family was in the US Army during WW II. He served in the Italian campaign. And one day he told us this story. It bothers me still.
It was early in 1945. The Germans were retreating northward towards Germany.. The Allies pursued them. Our friend’s unit took no prisoners. Any German who surrendered was shot.
Our friend explained. If we took prisoners, we would have to detach men to escort them to the rear. They would weaken our unit, and perhaps fatally so. So we shot the prisoners instead.
Gen. Sherman was right. War is hell.
War is hell, and this sort of thing happens more than many understand.
Paratroopers often found themselves in the same situation. Out numbered scattered behind enemy lines shorthanded you just could not expanded the man power to guard prisoners and you could just let them go
And until very recently our western sterilized version of history claimed only the axis shot POWs.
For example ww2…
I think many secrets exist. For example the how advanced was the German development of the a-bomb?
Why did we abandon Chang Kai Shek and the nationalists at the end when the civil war with communist Mao started in earnest?
Did Roosevelt know of the coming attack on Pearl Harbor?
Why was the drunk enlisted man who was driving the stolen truck that hit Patton released without any charges or even a thorough investigation? Why was Patton not sent to a 3rd Army hospital (his army) and instead sent to an old hospital that was nearly empty and barely guarded (almost as if to allow his assassination)?
What really happened to the German POWs in the huge concentration camps after the war? (Other losses)
Did MacArthur really get a horde of Gold from Japanese general Yamishita in the PI in 1945 that he used to pay off Japanese crime lords to keep peace post war?
And more….are they all true, of course not. do secrets exist…of course they do.