Amazing story. Thank you for sharing it.
Posted on 03/18/2013 10:18:04 AM PDT by robowombat
With all due respect, the bomber was in no condition to be a threat any longer. It's kind of like if a mugger assaults me and I respond properly. With him laying wounded at my feet, it would feel good to finish him off, but the threat has been neutralized.
Everyone hates the nazi's but not everyone who lived in or fought for Germany were nazi's. The nazi's were a political party, just like our democrats were the political party that got us into the Vietnam war.
The majority of the German soldiers, just like our Vietnam vets, were merely following the orders of their government.
And not all of us Vietnam veterans were democrats........
What that pilot did was an act of chivary and mercy. Too nad there weren’t more of them on both sides.
In scenario # 2 i would hope I would have the moral courage to resign my commission and insist on being discharged regardless of consequences that could indeed include prosecution for refusing to execute lawful orders. In this case conscience would dictate that the orders while technically correct were not in the most profound sense lawful.
The medal can be a model of Donkey-Kong throwing a barrel! PERFECT!
If Franz Stigler carried a rosary into battle, he was no Nazi.
you have to read the whole story- the bomber was not bombing his cities, it was reatreating and already heavily damaged.
That was the entire point of the story. It would have been like shooting an unarmed man literally in the back
There is also a practical reason for not bayonetting the enemy’s wounded survivors.
Your enemy has to spend time and resources taking care of them.
Resources that would be used against you if they were not tending their wounded, and they would be filled with vengeance too.
In 1943 whatever the average German felt about ‘’final victory’’ and Germany winning the war is the subject of endless academic and historic debate. But among the professional soldiers in the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe the feeling was either a kind of military/political stalemate might be effected at best but as most knew it was obvious Germany was going to lose the war. Those German soldiers who knew only of Germany’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian population centers, the merciless U-boat campaign, the atrocities of the Russian campaign and the few who knew the darker secret of the genocide and the Holocaust knew the Allies, especially the Russians, would extract a terrible vengeance on the German military and the German people and tried to do no more than their ‘’duty’’, that is only the most basic of fighting to satisfy ‘’honor’’ or satisfy their commanders and perhaps buy mercy from their enemies. Others were motivated by a hatred of Hitler and his criminal regime and did little more than that or surrendered outright when they could. Others, at many levels from the ordinary ‘’landser’’(German for “GI Joe’’) to high ranking officers directly or indirectly disobeyed orders from Berlin or simply, to use an old boxing adage ‘’took a dive’’. I often feel the Wehrmachts, not the Waffen SS performance during The Battle of the Bulge, particularly it’s attacks on Bastonge was proof of this.
Is it really? By whose definition of morality, yours?
Is shooting a paratrooper who bailed out of a disabled B-17 while still in the air a moral and ethical thing to do? Mr. Stigler didn't think so.
So you would have had no problem with the Confederacy in killing all the Union soldiers it had captured? And conversely, you would have had no problem with the Union killing all the Confederate soldiers it had captured?
If I'm not mistaken, Japan was condemned for killing their prisoners, many of whom were tortured. Forget the torture, do you support their immediate killing of the others?
Sorry kid, but there is more to war than just killing everyone in your sights, especially those who are no longer a military threat. Hopefully one day you'll be able to experience it for yourself rather than pontificate about it in the comfort of your nice New York Jewish neighborhood.
There is something about these stories that tug at one’s heart and that goes beyond the pragmatic. Not being a warrior - I don't understand it fully.
But where they showed all of the slides of American grandchildren, etc. that now existed because he didn't shoot down the bomber. I wonder how many German children and grandchildren were never born because the American pilot was able to (presumably) carry out his 20 additional bombing runs (or whatever the number was).
Although I guess it wouldn't have mattered. I recall some German saying “We would shoot down 1, and you would send 10 more”.
I am not a serious student of history but have always found it interesting. One thing I am basically certain of is that bombing civilians whether Germans bombing England, the Allies bombing Germany or Japan did nothing to win the war. It basically only hardened them.
Now military targets are completely the opposite. Having air supremacy was pretty much a necessity for winning.
I read where, near the end of the war in Europe, an American ambulance full of wounded, strayed into German territory and ran into a roadblock.
The Germans stopped the truck, checked out the inside, and told the terrified driver to turn around and go back. About a hour later another truck headed towards the roadblock and the Germans get ready to open up, but the truck stops short, throws out a couple of boxes and takes off.
The Germans watch the boxes for a half hour suspecting a bomb or a trick. The Sgt sends out a couple of men to check ‘em out and they bring back two boxes filled with cartons of American cigarettes.
I never read of anything along that line in the Pacific campaigns.
“Is shooting a paratrooper who bailed out of a disabled B-17 while still in the air a moral and ethical thing to do?”
I read somewhere (maybe FR) recently about an American WWII fighter pilot who said he was a “parachute ace.” That meant he had killed five enemy (Luftwaffe) pilots who had bailed out of their aircraft and were hanging from parachutes. The rationale was that they would be given new fighters and be back in the air the next day. If the guy was coming down over allied territory where he would be captured, he was allowed to live.
I understand the chivalry party of it, but I understand the cold hard reality of it, too.
I don't and I don't accept it.
Look, I'm not going to get into any escalating pissing contest with anyone here, especially you.
If you think you could have shot a defenseless parachutist from your fighter plane or execute the survivors of a VC camp you just overtook, then so be it.
You have to live with that, not me, I couldn't...........
Scenario 1. The US has prbably been nuked as has the USSR. Game over either way. That said, shoot it down
Scenario 2 Israel doesn’t have the capability to hit us. And would not be taking out our cities either way. There is a significant moral difference between precision bombing and city busting.
I didn’t say I could or would do it. I just said I understood the math.
The last time we won wars so decisively that the losers haven’t bothered anyone since was WWII when we bombed enemy cities flat without regard to civilian casualties. We can’t really say that about any of the conflicts we’ve been in since 1945.
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