Somewhat o/t recommendation

[Childress]

Interesting, mjk. I'll bring this up next time I see Delton- he lives several blocks away- although I confess to understanding only half of what he says. . I seem to recall that it was his very first mission. Recounting the events to seemed to amuse him more than anything else.

Edit: That landing gear stunt was despicable, lol. Thank God one side lived by an honour code.

[JonS]

Troll, troll, troll your post,

Gently down the feed.

Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily

A life is what you need!

[Childress]

Haha! I knew that last line would draw you out of your crawl space! Why did you think I edited it?

[Apocal]

Haha! I knew that last line would draw you out of your crawl space! Why did you think I edited it?

You sound extremely silly attributing honorable behavior to the side practicing genocide.

[Childress]

All facetiousness aside, the Germans got what they deserved: a massive defeat. The Nazi regime constitutes a monument to malevolence. There were bad Germans and Germans guilty of passive complicity. There were Germans in denial. But one can still pause and admire the occasional rose blooming among the rocks.

[dieseltaylor]

AFAIR Patton in Sicily saying the only good German was a dead one. Some of his troops took him at his word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_Massacre

You sound extremely silly attributing honorable behavior to the side practicing genocide.

Apocal

Seems a bit petty not to give credit to those who did fight with honour simply because the nation as a whole was complicit with the war. If you are American we might ask about the Indian Wars and others. I doubt many large nations are guiltless sometime during their history of having done the very things that we now bring up to say how awful the Germans were in the 30's-40's.

And yes it is awful and horrific what occurred. Perhaps more galling is post-war we have seen Western democracies guilty of promoting or prolonging wars and revolutions.

Genocide by remote meddling?

[Sgt Joch]

AFAIR Patton in Sicily saying the only good German was a dead one. Some of his troops took him at his word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_Massacre

well again, there is the issue of relative scale and how each organisation dealt with it.

In 1941, the German Army captured about 3,500,000 Russian prisoners. By the spring of 1942, 2,800,000 were dead, either through mass executions, exposure or starvation.

Now lets look at the so called "Biscari massacre".

1. the Compton incident: capt. Compton's 2nd platoon received sniper fire all day. The snipers targeted wounded GIs and the medics sent to help them. 12 of 34 men in the platoon were casualties. When Compton 's men finally reached the

spot where the sniper fire was coming from, the enemy soldiers promptly surrendered. Compton had all 36 shot.

2. the West incident: Sgt West gunned down 37 prisoners he was escorting to the rear.

obviously not acceptable behavior, but the U.S. Army court martialed both Compton and West for the unlawful killings. West was sentenced to life in prison. Compton was acquitted, but Compton is a harder case since it is on the ragged edge between a lawful killing in the heat of the action and an unlawful killing after prisoners have been taken into custody.

The important point is that the U.S.Army court martialed both Compton and West for their actions.

No one in the German Army was punished for the death of the 2,800,000 Russian POWs.

[dieseltaylor]

Sgt Joch

This is an informative thread about the massacres that occurred

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=24614

Note how long West was jailed in reality - less than a year and drawing full-pay. That for massacring 37 people in cold blood.

I don't quite see the point of dragging in the Russian prisoners and also the German prisoners that died in captivity when those two were fighting. They were appalling. The thrust of my points is that no army was really clean. The democracies were best by a huge margin but then again at no stage where their homelands being invaded and the country short of food. It is a good thing that the problem never arose as choosing to starve your prisoners or your workforce is a tricky one.

The point is whether the democracies having set themselves a very high standard then failed . That it is understandable in the heat of battle is very not acceptable when it is cold blood and High Command colludes in cover-ups - or possibly incites the troops.

When we land against the enemy, don't forget to hit him and hit him hard. When we meet the enemy we will kill him. We will show him no mercy. He has killed thousands of your comrades and he must die. If your company officers in leading your men against the enemy find him shooting at you and when you get within two hundred yards of him he wishes to surrender – oh no! That bastard will die! You will kill him. Stick him between the third and fourth ribs. You will tell your men that. They must have the killer instinct. Tell them to stick him. Stick him in the liver. We will get the name of killers and killers are immortal. When word reaches him that he is being faced by a killer battalion he will fight less. We must build up that name as killers. – George S. Patton[

Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men. Kill off the Goddamned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men

Patton

Seems to be a believer in eugenics!

[Childress]

. An interesting point is that in certain societies the killing of newborns is an accepted act if there are deformities etc. Quite understandably in primitive times when all bodies were needed to work for the survival of the people. Think Sparta for an extreme version.

It's very difficult criticizing eugenics if proponents restrict you to objections based on utilitarian or biological principles. In a heartless way, it's all very logical.

[Childress]

AFAIR Patton in Sicily saying the only good German was a dead one. Some of his troops took him at his word.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biscari_Massacre

There were two incidents. 107 POWs were, well, murdered. 103 Italians and 4 Germans.

[dieseltaylor]

I admire your grammatical style but I think you have doublecounted the Biscari figures as the total was 71. The other thread I linked to has another couple of Sicilian cases but for the fuller story:

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewforum.php?f=6

where they have separate forums for the various sides. All horrific.

[Apocal]

Apocal

Seems a bit petty not to give credit to those who did fight with honour simply because the nation as a whole was complicit with the war.

Not nearly as petty as Childresses' comment implying that the Germans had honor that the Americans lacked. At any rate, trying to ascribe the notion of honor to something as large and diverse as a nation of many millions is a bit silly.

[Michael Emrys]

It's very difficult criticizing eugenics if proponents restrict you to objections based on utilitarian or biological principles. In a heartless way, it's all very logical.

It's not even necessarily heartless. If one considers how much misery is involved in those utilitarian and biological principles, and actually cares about what people suffer through who either have to raise a crippled and deformed child or the child itself, then anyone with a heart would at least take into consideration the early ending of such a painful life. Not an easy choice or one without its emotional costs, but still the lesser of evils.

Michael

[Sgt Joch]

Sgt Joch

This is an informative thread about the massacres that occurred

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=24614

all I see are innuendos, rumours and hearsay which even posters in that thread contest. You are not really going to submit a forum thread as evidence, are you?

Note how long West was jailed in reality - less than a year and drawing full-pay. That for massacring 37 people in cold blood.

SS General Kurt Meyer was sentenced to death by a canadian military tribunal for ordering the killing of 18 canadian soldiers. This was later commuted to life imprisonment and he was released by the Canadians after serving 5 years.

What is your point, that Allied justice was too lenient?

Perhaps you prefer Nazi military justice, this is what happened to the German officers in charge of the Remagen bridge:

A Nazi German "flying court-martial" chaired by Lt. General Rudolf Hübner found five officers guilty of "cowardice" and "dereliction of duty" and sentenced to death. Four of these, Maj. Scheller, Lt. Karl Heinz Peters, Maj. Herbert Strobel, and Maj. August Kraft, faced the firing squad on the day of their sentencing in the Westerwald (two in Rimbach, two in Oberirsen).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludendorff_Bridge

I don't quite see the point of dragging in the Russian prisoners and also the German prisoners that died in captivity when those two were fighting. They were appalling. The thrust of my points is that no army was really clean. The democracies were best by a huge margin but then again at no stage where their homelands being invaded and the country short of food. It is a good thing that the problem never arose as choosing to starve your prisoners or your workforce is a tricky one.

Entirely relevant. If we are going to compare how each side treated prisoners, we have to see how Germans treated prisoners and it was not a question of Germans "not having enough food", there were clear orders to "liquidate" the Soviet POWs as quickly as possible. This was done by only giving them a starvation diet or no food at all, leaving them exposed to the elements or when that was too slow, shooting them:

The executions did not take place in the prisoner-of-war camps or their immediate area. Instead, prisoners were transferred to a secure area and shot. The concentration camps proved an ideal location for executions. In Gross-Rosen concentration camp, for example, the SS killed more than 65,000 Soviet POWS by feeding them only a thin soup of grass, water, and salt for six months. In Flossenbürg, SS men burned Soviet POWs alive. In Majdanek, they shot them in trenches. In Mauthausen, Austria, so many POWs were shot that the local population complained that their water supply had been contaminated. The rivers and streams near the camp ran red with blood. Estimates of the numbers of victims of this operation range from at least 140,000 up to 500,000.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007183

Now if you want an example from the western front, you also have the killing of 5,000 italian POWs by German Army and SS troops in september 1943. There were so many that it took the Germans a week to kill them all. The order to kill the POWs came directly from the German High command.

The massacre started on 21 September, and lasted for one week.[18] After the Italian surrender, Hitler had issued an order allowing the Germans to summarily execute any Italian officer who resisted "for treason", and on 18 September, the German High Command issued an order stating that "because of the perfidious and treacherous behaviour [of the Italians] on Cephalonia, no prisoners are to be taken."[5][13][19] The Gebirgsjäger soldiers began executing their Italian prisoners in groups of four to ten.[7] The Germans first killed the surrendering Italians, where they stood, using machine-guns. When a group of Bavarian soldiers objected to this practice they were threatened with summary execution themselves.[10] After this stage was over, the Germans marched the remaining soldiers to the San Teodoro town hall and had the prisoners executed by eight member detachments.[10]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_the_Acqui_Division

The point is whether the democracies having set themselves a very high standard then failed . That it is understandable in the heat of battle is very not acceptable when it is cold blood and High Command colludes in cover-ups - or possibly incites the troops.

There is no evidence that the U.S. Army ever ordered or covered up the killing of prisoners as a policy. The closest anyone has found is an order given by the 328th regiment HQ right after the Malmedy massacre that "no SS troops or paratroopers" were to be taken prisoners. However, that order was rescinded after a few days once cooler heads prevailed.

So, let us look at the evidence:

1. were prisoners shot if the heat of combat or right after surrendering? No doubt, every veteran will tell you that surrendering is very dangerous. This has happened in every war, including WW2. However, the evidence is pretty clear that the worst offenders were the Waffen SS and even regular German units were generally worse that U.S. units in this regard;

2. were prisoners shot in cold blood some times after surrendering? of course, however again, the vast majority of such cases were Germans units killing Allied prisoners. There are very few documented cases of Allied units killing German prisoners;

3. were orders given to kill prisoners? On the German side, there are many very well documented cases of officers at all levels, going all the way up to the high command ordering the killing of prisoners. On the U.S. Army side, there is nothing other than the Malmedy order.

4. were POWs in camps maltreated? Not on the Allied side, all were treated in accordance with the Geneva convention. On the German side, 2,800,000 Soviet POWs were killed in 1941-42 alone.

5. were soldiers punished for the unlawful killing of POWs? Never on the German side. The U.S Army generally investigated and prosecuted every known case of unlawful killing of prisoners.

So, to summarize, no matter what standards you use, the U.S. Army in Europe fought a very clean and professional war.

That is the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

[Childress]

It's not even necessarily heartless. If one considers how much misery is involved in those utilitarian and biological principles, and actually cares about what people suffer through who either have to raise a crippled and deformed child or the child itself, then anyone with a heart would at least take into consideration the early ending of such a painful life. Not an easy choice or one without its emotional costs, but still the lesser of evils.

Michael

You mean people like Stephen Hawking, Lord Byron, Frida Khalo and Walter Scott? All born with birth defects. Troy Aikman, the Dallas QB, was born with a club foot.

[dieseltaylor]

Childress - perhaps you should know Hawkings was born normal!

In any event I think we are talking of children born with serious defects. Regrettably we are now moving to the weird end of things with the advent in the UK of a National Health Service paying your costs people are removed from the practicalities of the situation.

The report said it was "very difficult" to predict whether babies born between 23 and 24 weeks would live, die, be healthy or have disabilities later on in life.

Because of this uncertainty, it recommended that parents, after a thorough discussion with doctors, should have the final say in whether intensive care was given. Around 11% of babies born at this age survive to leave hospital, although around two-thirds of those have moderate or severe disabilities.

Babies born between 24 and 25 weeks should normally receive intensive care, unless the parents and the doctors agreed that there was no hope of survival, or if the level of suffering outweighed the baby's interest in continuing to live, the council recommended. Just over a quarter (26%) of babies born at this age survive to leave hospital.

Intensive care should normally be given to babies born after 25 weeks because they had a sufficiently high chance of surviving and low risk of developing severe disability, according to the report. More than two-fifths (44%) of babies born between 25 and 26 weeks survive to leave hospital, of whom two-thirds suffer no or mild disabilitie

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2006/nov/15/health.uknews

No logically we know women can have multiple babies, we also now that the world is not short of humans so my take is that as far as possible the odds should be stacked for healthy children to be born. I have two fine children after two still-births so I have some interest in the matter.

[dieseltaylor]

all I see are innuendos, rumours and hearsay which even posters in that thread contest. You are not really going to submit a forum thread as evidence, are you?

Oh Sgt Joch I expect you to sift what is written and asses the probabilities like any thing else you read.

The U.S Army generally investigated and prosecuted every known case of unlawful killing of prisoners.

So, to summarize, no matter what standards you use, the U.S. Army in Europe fought a very clean and professional war.

Does that include Patton's speeches? They certainly embarrassed other officers. And this seems an odd phrasing:

Patton wrote Beatrice, ‘Some fair-haired boys are trying to say I killed too many prisoners. The more I killed, the fewer men I lost, but they don’t think of that.’

However I am not really interested in it as a pissing contest as there is no doubt who killed more prisoners unlawfully. One of the Axis Countries or Russia : )

The point I made was no side was completely clean of non-combat murders and I think you seem to accept that now - even if bizarrely you use the phrase "very clean".

[sburke]

It's not even necessarily heartless. If one considers how much misery is involved in those utilitarian and biological principles, and actually cares about what people suffer through who either have to raise a crippled and deformed child or the child itself, then anyone with a heart would at least take into consideration the early ending of such a painful life. Not an easy choice or one without its emotional costs, but still the lesser of evils.

Michael

This is the story of my next door neighbor's kid. Saturday we had a baby shower for my neighbor on the opposite side who just adopted their third child from some lousy drug addict mother who can't seem to remember to use birth control. Emmanuel came walking into the party as if he has had the use of his legs all along. Seeing what this poor kid and his parents have gone though and knowing the progress he has made gave me a better appreciation of costs and benefits.

[Sgt Joch]

Does that include Patton's speeches? They certainly embarrassed other officers.

Patton was Patton. It seems pretty clear that the fact that he may have unwittingly encouraged his soldiers to kill prisoners was one of the reasons why he was relieved of command. However, his attitude was disavowed by everyone else in the Allied high command:

Among the many myths that swirl around the life of General George S. Patton is that he was relieved of command of the Seventh Army in Sicily for slapping a battle-fatigued GI while visiting an evacuation hospital.

Like most of the stories surrounding the famed WW2 general, there was much more involved with his dismissal from command than commonly known. There were, for instance, more than one slapping incident. Other factors involved with his removal from command included the massacre of German POWs and Italian civilians by American troops, and a plan to make the Germans think the Allies were planning landings in northern Italy.

A month before the July 10, 1943 invasion of Sicily, then-Lt. Gen. Patton began rousing his troops with a series of hell-fire speeches. These speeches – a composite of which opened the movie "Patton" – unnerved Col. Homer. W. Jones, Seventh Army’s judge advocate officer.

According to witnesses, Patton “made it very plain … we were to kill the enemy wherever we found him. … He said that there was only one good German, and that was a dead one.”

Jones asked Patton to clarify his comments, “otherwise, we might have remarks misinterpreted and have violation of international law.”

Undoubtedly, Patton never meant his words to be taken as an order to execute prisoners. As soon as he was told they had been, he immediately ordered his troops to desist. But he never took responsibility for the impact his words may have had on his troops. And he had to be pressured by his friend and subordinate, Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, to have West and Compton arrested.

Though he was never implicated in the atrocities, Patton’s reputation was blackened throughout the Allied high command. Even at this early stage of the campaign, Patton knew his rising star had been slowed.

“Some fair-haired boys are trying to say that I killed too many prisoners,” he wrote his wife, Beatrice. “The more I killed, the fewer men I lost…”

http://suite101.com/article/relieved-of-command-how-patton-lost-the-seventh-army-part-i-a408468

[Wodin]

You mean people like Stephen Hawking, Lord Byron, Frida Khalo and Walter Scott? All born with birth defects. Troy Aikman, the Dallas QB, was born with a club foot.

Or me..had an illness since birth which has meant I've been in chronic pain since I was 11..

[Childress]

Not nearly as petty as Childresses' comment implying...

You're American, Apocal, right? You've heard the expression 'tongue in cheek'? I was just tweaking Jon. (he loves it...) I will say that the Germans had the coolest looking uniforms, however.

[Sublime]

However, the evidence is pretty clear that the worst offenders were the Waffen SS and even regular German units were generally worse that U.S. units in this regard;

completely agree with your post except for this part. I'd argue that the worst treatment of PoWs by any one side in ww2 as a matter of course and policy was Japan. However in ETO I think you.re completely right. Soviets next but nowhere near as systematic on the actual killing and torturing of prisoners as ordered policy. On the fly troop actions? Starving slave labor to death? Rape? Thats all Red Army. The Germans win hands down though, and upon reflection now I'd be really interested to see a comparison of the figures for Soviet PoWs killed by the Nazis and Japanese PoWs for the war (including China) Of course Japan may come out looking worse since they were in China so much longer than Germany fought the SU, but on the other hand the Germans look all the worse because they treated Western PoWs so much better. And then of course there's the whole Holocaust thing. Too bad Steiner14 isnt here, lol.

[dieseltaylor]

So, to summarize, no matter what standards you use, the U.S. Army in Europe fought a very clean and professional war.

That is the difference between the good guys and the bad guys.

I have wrestled with whether to add anything further and on balance I think it is fair to give everyone the chance to link this site:

http://pictureshistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/when-american-and-british-soldiers-went.html

It makes unpleasant reading as one reads the various topics. One suspects that if we were there at the time perhaps we would not be so holier than thou in certain instances.

Arguably rape and torture are less terrible than murder, but in I am not attempting to make any value judgements, or minimise anyones excesses before , during and after the war. I do believe that there was a degree of cover-up and our view of what really happened is perhaps a little tinted by the victor writes the histories and generally glosses over the nasty bits.

Read it and discard what you like. If you want a thread tied to this then start in the General Discussion forum.