Honour in Combat

[MrJingles]

I wasn't sure exactly where to put this thread, so I apologize in advance if this is the wrong place.

I am about to write my undergrad dissertation on chivalry and honour in combat during World War 2, and specifically I will be looking into North Africa with the writings of Rommel and von Luck and contrasting it to the brutal combat that took place on the Eastern Front.

Does anyone have any opinions about chivalry and honour in combat during the war? I'm just trying to get the gears going in my head and start brainstorming, so any input or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! I'll make sure i'll post a link on these forums once everything is all done.

[stoat]

How do you list "grogs" on a works cited page?

As to your topic, the first thing that comes to my mind is the absence of SS units in Africa. I know that many SS units didn't perpetrate atrocities, but the SS seemed to be more atrocity-prone than other formations.

But what do you really mean by "chivalry and honor?" As far as I know, in Africa there were no large scale prisoner exchanges, and no major minglings in no-man's-land. The battles could be just as fierce as those on the Eastern Front, with no quarter being given by either side. Incidents involving civilians were very low due to the very low number of civilians found in the desert.

[MrJingles]

I'm not asking for scholarly sources or anything, I have several resources available to me. I'm just asking for opinions on the issue.

Several articles and monographs I have read show countless examples of 'old-world chivalry' present on the battlefields of North Africa. Probably the most memorable is Hans von Luck's accounts in his memoires of the war, where he mentions the gentlemen's agreement that he worked out with the C.O. of the Royal Dragoons.

Essentially they had an agreement at 17:00 everyday they would cease any combat, and then would contact each other by radio to list the prisoners they had taken, and assure that they were safe and healthy. He also lists exchanges of prisoners for medical supplies and food.

I'm not suggesting that North Africa was a desirable experience by any means, but it was distinctly different from the Eastern Front. Quarter was often shown, and enemies had a great deal of respect for each other.

An example of the quarter that was given was when his column was on patrol and came under attack by RAF fighters. One pilot flew at a very low level and signalled von Luck and his crew to clear off their armoured car, before making a second pass and destroying it with strafing fire.

[Sergei]

One could ask, was it chivalry or cameraderie with the enemy - treason, essentially? Weren't soldiers supposed to put killing enemies even above helping friends?

[Holman]

One enabler of "chivalry" in the North African theater was the relative lack of a civilian population to worry about. It's hard to commit atrocities against civilians when you can't find any. (This is the same reason why sailors rarely feature in atrocity stories...)

More to the point, the NA theater was "foreign territory" to both sides--they didn't have much incentive to blame the locals for siding with the enemy when the locals had little opinion (or effect) either way. Contrast this with the partisan issue on the Eastern Front.

Just some thoughts...

[MrJingles]

I have found lots of evidence in regards to what you are mentioning Martyr, and I definetly think the foreign territory issue enters into the whole equation.

Sergei, I can see how 'chivalry' could possibly be interpreted as treason, but I think many soldiers have an immense amount of compassion and empathy with what the enemy is experiencing, because they too could see themselves in that position.

[JasonC]

Numerous German accounts note the contrast between war on all of the western fronts, not just North Africa but also Italy and France once those became fronts, and the war in Russia. A frequent motif is the respect accorded the red cross, medics, requests for parley under white flags, etc. These were almost always respected in the west and it was noticed and commented on as unusual, by Germans who had fought in the east. They usually reciprocated, for obvious reasons.

One can occasionally find units or commanders who deliberately violated these norms and tried to import east front no quarter fighting, in the certainly unwarranted belief that it would confer some kind of advantage. 12SS early in the Normandy fighting and 1SS in the Bulge are examples. It never did - if anything it improved morale and tenacity among their opponents. It was also reciprocated, in spades.

[Sergei]

Originally posted by MrJingles:

I have found lots of evidence in regards to what you are mentioning Martyr, and I definetly think the foreign territory issue enters into the whole equation.

Sergei, I can see how 'chivalry' could possibly be interpreted as treason, but I think many soldiers have an immense amount of compassion and empathy with what the enemy is experiencing, because they too could see themselves in that position.

Yes. But it was, from the point of view of the wiser people, unacceptable - just consider the WWI Christmas fraternizing and even playing of soccer along the front.

But it is very understandable that sometimes these rules were broken. For example, it would have been a bad form for a victorious pilot to target the enemy's parachute after he had abandoned his plane. It would have been smarter to kill him right away, but it was a matter of insurance policy... Just as compassion was shown by seamen to the surviving opponents (but I believe the law supported them on that).

The environment of North Africa had some similar elements - once your enemy had lost his tank and artillery support and was just a bunch of isolated footmen, he no longer was a risk that had to be fought by all means necessary.

[NameUsedBefore]

Well, to start, there was a lot of hate between ideologies alone on the Eastern-front. That by itself can go a long way (and did, as we all know).

[MrJingles]

Very valid point Sergei regarding North Africa. Well I'm about to dive headlong into this essay and the result should be about 30 pages or so I hope, but I'll be sure to post it for you grogs to look over Thats a lot so far for the insight.

[Folbec]

Originally posted by MrJingles:

Very valid point Sergei regarding North Africa. Well I'm about to dive headlong into this essay and the result should be about 30 pages or so I hope, but I'll be sure to post it for you grogs to look over Thats a lot so far for the insight.

Have a look at this map : http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/ww2-loss.htm

N.A. (and most of the western front) were sideshows.

[Stoffel]

Stoat,

I suggest you read Charles Sydnor's Soldiers of Destruction.

He has given a lot of links to other books and official documents,some of which I have read personally.

Attrocities were committed by most SS soldiers.

A lot of these crimes are well documented.

There was a (recorded/documented)exchange of personel from the armed units to the einsatzgruppen and the camps and vice versa.

henk

[wunwinglow]

Also consider german soldiers had been educated to consider the peoples of Eastern Europe and beyond as "Untermensch" or sub-human, whereas they viewed Brits as much closer to their "Aryan" roots.

Amazing what you can do to the mind of a child...

wunwinglow

[MrJingles]

The sub-human view of the Russians wasn't necessarily a Nazi induced opinion, but was also prevalent just as a general German opinion. This was pointed out to me by my professor and he made the point that to the average German, who lives in the well maintained cities with everything clean and orderly, Russia must have seemed like a backwards hell (which unfortunately was reflected upon the Russian people). The British on the other hand shared many traits with the Germans and a relatively similar standard of living, and were generally viewed to be equals.

[Bigduke6]

Mr Jingles,

Great subject.

I think the desert itself had a lot to do with promoting chivalry in North Africa. The Sahara made people nicer to each other, if you will.

The logic is that if you lose your vehicle out in the middle of no where, survival is an immediate problem. If you or one of your buddies is wounded, sun and lack of water can be deadly. There are no civilians, or civilian structures, to hole up in. There are no farms to loot for food, no wells or streams. Just rock, sand, and spikey bush. You can't ask directions.

Then there's distance. Every one and their uncle is motorized, and that meant, a lot of times, if the enemy doesn't take your prisoner, you are dead. If the "front" shifts and you get caught on the wrong side on foot, you can't walk back to your own lines - they are not a few kilometers but dozens and sometimes even hundreds of klicks away.

The lack of decisive terrain was another factor, I think. Most of the time, it didn't really matter who held a particular piece of ground. The point was destruction of enemy force, particularly armored vehicles. So that's a psychological pre-disposition towards chivalry: the point to war in North Africa isn't killing, but knocking out vehicles. And it's a lot easier to be chivalrous to a person who is out to break your vehicle, than to one who is out to kill you dead.

(BMW owners are exempted from the last paragraph, obviously)

[John Kettler]

MrJingles,

ROMMEL'S WAR IN AFRICA, by Wolf Heckmann, has some great material (right up at the beginning IIRC) pertinent to your effort, as does the CMAK Companion book. I believe there was also some sort of cease fire at Cassino to allow retrieval of wounded and the like.

There's a most interesting example in a book called THE INTERROGATOR (by Raymond Toliver?) about master Luftwaffe interrogator Hans Scharff. He asked what the red tracers were that Luftwaffe fighter pilots were reporting seeing and learned this meant the American fighter planes doing this were about to run out of ammo. He passed this info on, but Luftwaffe pilots refused to act on it, deeming it unsporting to shoot down a defenseless foe. Certainly, no such courtesy was extended to returning (gliding) powder keg Me-163s or Me-262s waylaid at takeoff or in the landing pattern!

Robert S. Johnson's THUNDERBOLT describes an all out effort by a FW-190 pilot to down him. After giving it his all and burning through all his ammo, leaving a very shot up, but still flying P-47, the German escorted Johnson through the flak belt, to the Channel, then waggled his wings and went home.

You may also wish to look at a famous case in which a U-boat, burdened with merchie survivors and towing more in lifeboats, was attacked by aircraft and submerged, leaving its former charges

to die in mid ocean. Skipper was charged with war crimes at Nuremberg, but was found innocent when American sub skippers described that and worse that they did in the Pacific. At least one U.S. skipper ordered survivors machine gunned! Believe that last was not entered into the testimony.

German commerce raiders offer rich prospects, too. It was common for them to stop vessels and evacuate whole crews (or crews minus if the radio shack started sending, bringing shellfire to silence the transmission). See SHIP 16 by Mohr for extensive examples. Ship 16 was the Atlantis.

There is a stack of literature on the behavior of men in battle, and as much as the Americans, British and Commonwealth countries like to cloak themselves in not being like "those people," and fighting cleanly and obeying the Laws of War, there are plenty of blots on their respective escutcheons,too. Among other things, vigorous defense followed by surrender tended to be a lousy path to the POW cages, and many SS were simply executed on the spot. Ditto for snipers. The U.S. did a masterful job of hiding an epidemic of rapes and other crimes in Germany, too.

Another fine example of the Laws turned inside out was the British use of Q ships in both wars. German raiders and subs alike following the prescribed stop and search for contraband rules found themselves under all out attack without warning--when at the same time Churchill in particular was pillorying the Germans for occasionally violating the rules.

A particularly fine example of the double standard was the Lusitania, an ocean liner and auxiliary merchant cruiser carrying ammo and other war materiel and allowed to sail despite formal notification to the U.S. from the German government that it was aware of the cargo, would act accordingly, and despite German efforts (mostly quashed) to warn the public in newspaper ads. This was bad enough, but the vessel was ordered into a known U-boat zone, at deliberately reduced speed, then the naval escort was ordered away, leaving her naked to subsequent and deadly U-boat attack. See Griffin's THE CREATURE FROM JEKYLL ISLAND and Simpson's LUSITANIA for the disgusting details. Same playbook was used to gin up a simiar "incident" before the U.S. came into WW II.

Somewhere around here I have Bacque's controversial OTHER LOSSES, which I haven't read yet but as I understand it argues that the Americans deliberately left some 250,000

German POWs to freeze, starve and die in tents during the bitter winter after the War. I have seen interviews with survivors of that event, and I was frankly appalled by what they had to say.

Leaving POWs on starvation rations, with minimal, hard to get to and unclean water, in a sea of mud, in holed tents and without medical care despite rampant disease and many wounded is NOT my idea of honoring the Geneva Convention. Nor do the Allied

cremations of Hamburg, Dresden, etc., and practically every major Japanese city strike me as being shining moments for the "good guys."

Regards,

John Kettler

[ February 02, 2006, 05:42 AM: Message edited by: John Kettler ]

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

There is a stack of literature on the behavior of men in battle, and as much as the Americans, British and Commonwealth countries like to cloak themselves in not being like "those people," and fighting cleanly and obeying the Laws of War, there are plenty of blots on their respective escutcheons,too.

Obviously true, at least until mankind attains god-like perfection. One needs, however, to exercise a certain level of critical thinking when considering these "blots". There are a number of neo-Nazis who are not above deliberately fabricating allegations of war-crimes, apparently in an attempt to convince the feeble-minded that "both sides were as bad as each other", as for example the accusation that 47 Commando murdered German coastal gunners on Walcheren.

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Another fine example of the Laws turned inside out was the British use of Q ships in both wars. German raiders and subs alike following the prescribed stop and search for contraband rules found themselves under all out attack without warning--when at the same time Churchill in particular was pillorying the Germans for occasionally violating the rules.

And, aside from the infamous Barralong incident, what rules do you imagine the Q ships were violating? One only needs to run up the colour at the instant of starting the attack, not before, and the use fo false colours has been accepted as "legitime ruse de guerre" since almost forever.

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Somewhere around here I have Bacque's controversial OTHER LOSSES,

"Controversial" only in the sense of "outrageous tommyrot", I think. "The crackpot Bacque" (as John Keegan described him) has also written "Crimes and Mercies", and the sequel is every bit as dishonest as the original, if not more so. There is no doubt that a lot of Germans suffered greatly in the aftermath of the war, but it shows little respect for their experience to distort and misrepresent it in order to create phantasmagorical and mendacious allegations against Eisenhower, the US Army and (how did you guess they were going to feature?) the Jews.

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Nor do the Allied cremations of Hamburg, Dresden, etc., and practically every major Japanese city strike me as being shining moments for the "good guys."

But not, if one is concerned about war crimes, actually illegal, at the time.

To return to the original poster's theme, it might be interesting to consider what made bomber crews, willingly participating at great personal risk in a campaign to "de-house" German civilians, on occasion jettison their bombs in open fields on the way home because they could not get a clear view of the target.

All the best,

John.

[ February 02, 2006, 04:05 PM: Message edited by: John D Salt ]

[Michael Dorosh]

Bacque has been seriously discredited in serious historical circles.

[JasonC]

Nazi apologetics never sleep.

[John Kettler]

Under the Laws of War, I believe that deliberate bombing of civilian targets was, in fact,

a violation. From a moral standpoint, as analyzed nicely in such works as WAR & MORALITY, even what the U.S. was doing in Europe (the so-called precision daylight bombing) ran so squarely into Catholic doctrine that many priests refused absolution for bomber crews, and the British campaign was in a league well beyond that. In both cases, the moral defense based on the doctrine of unintended consequences was carefully considered and rejected.

I'm not arguing that Allied war crimes were on the same scale as those of the Germans and Japanese, but I am arguing that our own shields are sullied and that we need to be aware of the rank stench of

hypocrisy emanating from our "shining mantle of righteousness" in which we're so fond of wrapping ourselves.

Indeed, despite a pile of books, numerous TV programs and articles, this nation has yet to soberly and officially address the fact that it actively recruited and protected hundreds and hundreds of Nazi mass murderers under Paper Clip and in building its intel capabilities around Gehlen's organization, uses to this day the fruits of hideous Nazi biomedical experimentation, and cut a deal with the Japanese who brought deliberate biowarfare death to tens of thousands of Chinese, plus U.S., British, ANZAC and Dutch POWs. The net effect of these activities, as expressed in books such as BLOWBACK, has been to act as a terrible internal cancer to our society, while at the same time devastating our credibility in dealing with the rest of the world, not to mention the untold human misery spawned since the War by the vipers we hold so firmly to our national bosom and the billions spent in response to their self-serving lies.

Regards,

John Kettler

[JonS]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

Under the Laws of War, I believe that deliberate bombing of civilian targets was, in fact, a violation.

You'd be wrong.

From a moral standpoint, as analyzed nicely in such works as WAR & MORALITY, even what the U.S. was doing in Europe (the so-called precision daylight bombing) ran so squarely into Catholic doctrine that many priests refused absolution for bomber crews, and the British campaign was in a league well beyond that.

Not to go all moral-relativistic, but could you please explain the practical difference between the two approaches. I know what the theoretical and intended differences were. That isn't my question. In what practical way did to two approaches produce different results?

Regards

Jon

[John Kettler]

JonS,

Concerning the former, I'll have to go back and check. Concerning the latter, it's not merely a question of intention, but of means and proportionality. When the stated goal is destroying German war industry, you don't get to lay waste to entire cities and still claim doing so is moral, the unintended consequence being both foreseeable and wholly disproportionate.

The Operations Research findings on this matter are emphatic, as described by Prof. R.V. Jones in THE WIZARD WAR. Most of the British bombers weren't putting their ordnance within 5 miles of the desired aimpoint. The dehousing campaign, under Catholic doctrine at least, is fundamentally immoral out of the starting gate, since it automatically targets women and children, long objects of special concern and protection, their dwellings and property.

By contrast, the Americans were explicitly going after well defined industrial, military and transportation targets with the B-17s and B-24s in daylight strikes. Compared to the British at night, the American bombardiers were phenomenally accurate, typically putting their bombs within, I believe, hundreds of feet of the aimpoint. Were bombs released too soon or too late, hitting civilians and their structures? Yes. Did bomb patterns overlap such areas? Yes. Were innocents killed within the properly targeted areas? Yes. Is that the same as what was done to Hamburg? No!

Mind, I do so charge the Americans regarding Dresden and several other locales in Germany. Equally truly, the deliberate rubbling of Caen can't possibly be deemed an unintended consequence. Civilians died wholesale, and historic buildings dating back to Norman times were simply wiped out. The French are bitter about this to the present, understandably so, in a nasty foreshadowing of the notorious Ben Tre, RSVN incident--"It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it."

To the Allied blots should also be added the systematic failure to do anything about the Holocaust and related matters. Nor is the Church

without blame--the Concordat, failure to speak up for the Jews (even the ones on its doorstep), then helping Nazis escape during and after the War.

Regards,

John Kettler

[JonS]

ok, well, you have huge slabs of selective use of sources in there, so I'm going to drop it as a waste of time. Suffice it to say that your 'argument' is utterly unconvincing.

[Chelt]

Originally posted by John Kettler:

The Operations Research findings on this matter are emphatic, as described by Prof. R.V. Jones in THE WIZARD WAR. Most of the British bombers weren't putting their ordnance within 5 miles of the desired aimpoint.

You take Dr. Jones' statement out of context. The five-mile figure applies to night raids early in the war, with crews navigating by dead reckoning and occasional celestial sights. Jones later describes a 1944 night attack, aided by electronic navigational devices and improved tactics, that put the bombs almost all into the same farmer's field.

[Vossiewulf]

Mr. Jingles, I look at the matter from a slightly different perspective; in my mind, all you are talking about is the nature of tribalism, which is just as alive today as it was three million years ago.

British, Americans, and Germans are relatively closely related. Not enough that they won't fight each other, but close enough that when they see the other guys across the lines, they don't see aliens.

On the other hand, the peoples of Eastern Europe and Russia are mostly Slavs...from a totally different family of tribes.

Put it this way: had the Americans and Russians turned the cold war hot at any point, do you think there would have been much quarter granted on either side? I think not.

The rate of atrocity in war is almost a direct function of how alien the enemy is to you, on a primal, tribal level. Compare the fighting in Western Europe vs. the fighting in the Pacific. I don't think you could argue much for the Americans having committed atrocities, but the grunts sure didn't go out of their way to give quarter.

Multiply the alien factor by a modifier representing the basic militancy of a people and how strongly they believe they are the master race, chosen people, holy ones (all the same thing in the end), and you could predict atrocity level in a war fairly accurately. At least in my opinion;)