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Post by wild on Mar 26, 2012 13:04:42 GMT -6
Ian The German forces on the Eastern front engaged in a war of extermination.They killed millions of men women and children combatants,noncombatants.They did not waste bullets on children but buried them alive with their dead parents.They would enter a village,round up the inhabitants,place them in their church and set it alight.They gave savagery a bad name.The only difference between the wehrmacht and the SS is that the SS were specialists. Regards
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 26, 2012 15:17:13 GMT -6
The Germans did the same in Belgium in 1914. They feared and resented guerrilla warfare, the franc tireurs of the French, and deliberately engaged in terrorism of the civilian population. If anyone from a village shot at a soldier, never mind hit him, the village was burned to the ground and people lined up and shot, including infants. Their boilerplate cover story was that the Burgemeister's son/daughter had killed a kind officer approaching under a flag of truce to explain the Germans were going to march through the town while singing and wished nobody ill, when suddenly the mayor's child killed him! The evil Belgians!
They seriously thought civilians were soldiers because they had weapons, which the French and Belgian citizens had in abundance and Germans seemingly did not. This was the same brain trust that thought the US could be conquered with a few battalions after invading Philadelphia on the way to the capital, I think was the invasion site. Hardly any civilian guns, of course, here.
Also, it didn't matter if we sided with the Allies because 1.) they'd have starved England and won by then and 2.) democracies had bad soldiers. Something. This all came to blossom when Arthur Zimmerman, Foreign Minister, assured them that Mexico would join them against the US. He knew all about America. He'd taken a train from San Francisco to New York once for three full days. All about us. In the pocket. Germany had sectors of deep stupidity, military and civilian. In both wars, their codes were broken and they could not believe it and kept using them. Who could be as smart as we Germans?
Also, they burned the Library of Louvain and dynamited historic castles to no point as demonstration of Superior Values. Nazis did not plow virgin ground.
But more important, soldiers in combat for years go bad. Some sooner than others, but you cannot keep armies in the field for years without institutional sadism taking over. Not all of them, but in increasing numbers. Pain, suffering, and terror numb them. We know this. This is apparently true of any Army. This why, I suspect, our Army likes to go in BIG and whip the hell out of whoever, keep control, and get out. No incremental stuff. The violence and horror can stay in the combat column and not under something else. This doesn't excuse it, but if we keep people in the Middle East for five tours or whatever, we don't get to slap our foreheads in surprise and we don't escape culpability ourselves.
This guy who just shot up civvies in Afghanistan I'm willing to bet is just out of his mind. They keep trying to find some 'key' incident to his shooting as if this was a civilian campus shooter, but tally up his number of days in combat. I don't know how ANYbody can keep it together, but the longer the war goes on, the more this stuff happens.
If it's fueled by racism, it happens sooner and worse. If it's ordered by the very top, you have the Holocaust.
The SS was pure race based personal protection for Hitler and they were exempted from worry about any terrorism they committed. What isn't chatted up are the number of US units, paratroopers and other elites mostly, who never took Wafen SS prisoners either and just shot them. They admitted it, and yes, the SS started it, but when these guys - drafted, a lot of them - have to come home could problems be predicted? I'd think. Why weren't they? What have we done to them?
Our Navy machine gunned enemy survivors periodically. It's apparently the salve for chronic fear.
You understand that Wilson and Prince formed Blackwater and want it to be a paramilitary force like the SS and included in 'total force' assessments, right? That's their goal, to have an elite force sorta with the Armed Forces but not quite with the same allegiances. It's an issue.
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Post by lew on Mar 26, 2012 22:05:58 GMT -6
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Post by Yan Taylor on Mar 27, 2012 3:44:45 GMT -6
Yes Richard I know that the German forces carried out various atrocities even before WW2 (Von Blomberg purged the army of all its Jewish personnel in 1934), the most savage unit being the Einsatzgruppe (SS), I won’t go into detail here, and no words I can write can ever explain their crimes so I will decline.
I remember a man from the 1970s, John Kirkham was his name, he was a 2nd Lt in Normandy, his unit captured a German soldier and his Co ordered Kirkham to shoot him, Kirkham refused, after a dressing down by his Co John was sent back to his men and on his way back he heard a shot, someone else carried out his Co.’s order.
I also remember a discussion in which one of my friends said ‘’what is the difference if you stand a bunch of civilians up against a wall and shoot them, or drop bombs on them while they sit in their own homes’’, I suppose he had a point, from Guernica to Dresden (and the many in between) civilians were killed, and that was before the atomic bomb.
Thanks Lew, I have not seen that series before, maybe it’s due over here soon.
Ian.
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Post by wild on Mar 27, 2012 6:19:44 GMT -6
Hi Ian ’what is the difference if you stand a bunch of civilians up against a wall and shoot them, or drop bombs on them while they sit in their own homes’’ Very interesting point. Bomber command was never issued with a service medel. There was a difference between US bombing strategy and British bombing strategy in that the US went for precision daylight bombing as against British night time carpet bombing. I don't know if that was the based on moral grounds or if the US planners just thought bombing civilians was a waste of time. Nagasaki and Hiroshima would indicate otherwise unless the US had a racist agenda? I'v read that the US spared these two cities from routine bombing in order to better see the results of atomic bombs.They also sent single bombers over at high altitude without dropping any kind of ordnance in order to lull the population into a false sense of safety.This provided perfect clinical conditions for what was in fact a first live test. I don't think either country have a moral case to answer.It was total war and the civilian population were a vital part of the sinews of that war. Regards
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Post by benteen on Mar 27, 2012 8:13:17 GMT -6
I think what is an atrocity and what is justifiable action is determined by who wins.
Be Well Dan
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 27, 2012 8:37:02 GMT -6
The Germans invented bombing of civilians. They did it in WWI from blimps over Belgium and France and eventually England. Most civvie deaths were because they lived near railroad lines. The Japanese did it next in China in the next war. Then the Spanish Civil War had German planes dropping bombs.
Precision bombing was a joke until recently. On many WWII bombing raids, the majority of German bombs didn't even hit land, much less a precision target. The Norden Bomb Sight was mostly a propaganda entity, since Allied bombing at night missed the mark by miles and in daylight not much better. Bomber crews joked about their strike against German agriculture.
Why it's somehow worse to be vaporized instantly by nuclear bomb rather than die in firestorms by normal bombs isn't actually answered within these hackneyed arguments. The radiation burns were new and awful, but why worse than normal burns? Having admitted the SS gave sadism a bad name, Wild is stuck with his nation's neutrality against them, and now has to install his defense that everyone else was institutionally just as bad as the Germans and as institutionally cowardly as the Irish government during that war.
At the end of the war, the Japanese had no air force or navy. American planes rarely met opposition of any sort over Japan. There were single planes every day, naval and long range bombers, so a single plane wouldn't denote anything one way or the other.
’what is the difference if you stand a bunch of civilians up against a wall and shoot them, or drop bombs on them while they sit in their own homes’’ Easy. Those against the wall were citizens of a neutral country invaded, whereas the Germans and Japanese had cheerfully declared war against us, the former after already attacking us. They had newsreels in the movie theaters of beheadings of Chinese civvies (whom the Japs called Chinks) and of numerous people being shot by the Nazis for looking at them wrong.
The problem is that when you fight such, you often have to become just as vicious over time to survive. I have no such experience, but the volume of literature by vets is pretty convincing.
"I think what is an atrocity and what is justifiable action is determined by who wins." Really? Lot of argument about these incidents in public forums in this nation from near the git go. Also, an atrocity can be a justifiable action to win a war and prevent others and worse or, rather, that can be the assumption.
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Post by wild on Mar 27, 2012 13:27:36 GMT -6
Ian,Dan ’what is the difference if you stand a bunch of civilians up against a wall and shoot them, or drop bombs on them while they sit in their own homes’’ Another attempt to answer the above. Society cannot function without a moral code, without the recognition,protection and guarentee of basic human rights.There are exceptions but they prove the rule. The problem even today is that States do not guarantee these basic rights to citizens of other states.The UN with it's treaties and protocols and various branches has greatly improved the situation. But in the years 1939 to 1945 the world, Europe in particular [based on numbers effected] was a moral wasteland.Both the axis and allied forces inflicted on each other destruction and brutality on an apocalyptic scale. I think what is an atrocity and what is justifiable action is determined by who wins. Rather what atrocity will be brought to justice. There is no difference between bombing and shooting noncombatants but it might take a Jesuit like Fred to apply the balm of justification. Regards
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Post by quincannon on Mar 27, 2012 13:59:27 GMT -6
Bushwa (said respectfully) There is a difference and the difference is in the circumstances.
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Post by Dark Cloud on Mar 27, 2012 14:37:30 GMT -6
What crap, wild.
It takes courage to have a moral code and live by it. England went to war against its immediate interests in 1914 and 1939 in defense of a signed treaty in both cases about neutral nations being invaded by Germany: Belgium and then Poland. That's living by a moral code. Witnessing the horrors of the Nazis, what did Ireland do? It mourned Hitler's death. Moral code, that.
Even though Wild can now say in safety how horrible Germany was, he won't fault Ireland for ignoring blatant evidence and staying neutral for profit and ......well, something. In truth, so did the US until we were attacked despite FDR's intent to fight Hitler, but we went in whole hog. Wilde will equate this Isolationism with Ireland, the nation that officially mourned Hitler's death. He has equated the Axis with the Allies because both were violent.
See? Bring everyone down to the level of the Irish, we're all so alike!
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Post by wild on Mar 27, 2012 15:43:15 GMT -6
Colonel There is a difference and the difference is in the circumstances. Yes and the circumstance is that you cannot defeat evil with morals.You fight fire with fire,Coventry with Dresden,Warsaw with Berlin,Bataan with Hiroshima, aggression with rape and ethnic cleansing,pow camps with the gulags. And for the greater good you sell out your allies. Regards
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Post by quincannon on Mar 27, 2012 17:47:14 GMT -6
Richard: When you strip away all of the flowery words, the objective of war, any war, is to defeat, destroy, obliterate the war making potential of your adversary. If as an example you must bomb a factory that employes, persons who would ordinarily be thought of as non-combatants, that factory, containing those people, engaged in activities that could well do harm to you, your assaociates, your military force, your country is a legitimate target and I for one would not hesitate one second in ushering them into a new world of peace and eternal contentment.
On the other hand, and again as a example, were I to capture, detain, or occupy the territory of the enemy, and have in my charge and custody non-combatants who were given the circumstances posing no threat whatsoever, then I am obligated by international law, and basic morality to feed, care for, shelter, provide medical support for, and generally administer the welfare of such persons until the end of the present conflict, and beyond until such time as my services are no longer required.
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Post by wild on Mar 27, 2012 21:03:49 GMT -6
Agree absolutely Colonel---page one Geneva convention. What I'm saying is that morality and basic human rights sacrosanct within the borders of the democratic States among the allies did not apply to the strategic planning for the defeat of the nazis and the following carve up of Europe. And as a general rule military and political strategy take priority over the human rights of the enemy noncombatants.Very evidient in conflicts since the 2nd WW. Regards
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Post by Yan Taylor on Mar 28, 2012 3:21:23 GMT -6
Here is a bit of our local history for you guys, Zeppelin Attack at Bold. www.suttonbeauty.org.uk/suttonhistory/suttonwar.html#zeppelinI was surprised when I found out that the Germans bombed the Manor of Bold which is about 10 minutes’ drive from my home, I know Widnes got hit on a regular basis in WW2 because of it's Chemical factories and Railway bridge, but it must have been a daring feat to travel across the North sea then cross the width of England to hit a target in a Zeppelin. Ian.
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Post by wild on Mar 28, 2012 5:53:24 GMT -6
Ian The Zeppppelin released a plumb bob as it approached the target.When the weight touched the target it dropped it's ordnance. Forerunner of the smart bomb. Regards
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