When I had Dr. Hans Sennholtz at Grove City College, nobody questioned the idea he had served with the Luftwaffle. True?
I recall hearing a story in Alabama during the war where a deputy pulled over a car that was acting suspiciously. The people had German accents, were drunk, and told the deputy they’d gotten lost and needed directions back to the POW camp. Somebody back at the camp gave them car for good behavior. IIRC, I think I read it in a Time-Life book about WWII.
Yes; he flew one of these.
I see. There have never been any civilized people who senselessly sent millions of their young off to die, and the acts of men in war define a country and its values.
I’m going to go punch out a Brit for the Battle of the Somme.
One of Dad’s bosses was in the Wehrmacht during WWII, and emigrated to the Chicago area after the war. I met him once or twice in the early 1970s, and he seemed pretty normal; then again, I was in grade school at the time, so my awareness of any weirdness would have been suspect.
Agreed. What a weird thing to say. Ferocity in battle and the use of (what may seem) extreme tactics don’t necessarily mean that a people don’t love their children.
I think he missed your point entirely, TP.
Or he failed to read Alfred Lord Tennyson
Dad was a member of an old timers WWII pilot group who met weekly for breakfast. When dad passed, many of them came to his funeral and then to the get together following the services. One of the members was a WWII German Me109 ace. A very interesting fellow to talk to.
1)The British didnt start WWI
2)The Japanese put their Emperor before the lives of their children
3)As seen in the vid I posted, some Japanese mothers would rather kill their children than let them fall into the hands of Americans…
4)A ‘civilized’ peoples also dont commit the heinous war crimes the Japanese committed in China, Korea and the Philippines; they dont force women into prostitution. They dont do all they can to deny these crimes.
Oh yeah. Forcing your troops to fight to the death when a battle/war is lost shows what love and compassion the Japanese held for their children. You two are trying to force a western philosophy on the Japanese; it doesnt fit.
Oh yeah, whatever.
This is IMHO, in a thread about meeting axis veterans. This has been a fun hijack, and it gave me the opportunity to reread one of my favorite poems.
The Pit would be an excellent place to bitch about them Japanese, or GD would be an excellent place to start a thread if there is anything fundamentally different about this particular country, in a world history filled with war and atrocities.
And don’t forget the Rape of Nankin, the Bataan Death March and Unit 731, some of the grizzliest and most horrible things which one group of humans can do to another. The capacity of depravity within the human soul is a caution to us all.
Unless we just want to simply; and I’ll go out and punch out my neighbor’s six-year-old. Damn Japanese.
And now we return you to the regularly scheduled program.
My grandpa was a Bataan Death March survivor. He was a very sweet & loving man but he hated the Japanese and anything Japanese related until the day he died. Extra care was taken by the family on Christmas & birthdays to make sure no gifts were marked ‘made in Japan’.
I met a Bataan Death March survivor in Alaska in the late '70s. He was working on the Alaska Pipeline. Your Grandpa must have been one tough-beyond-common man. Kudos to him.
Yes, I have visited my Mom’s brothers. All four of them lived in Germany. They are all dead now. My mom was the youngest child, and she’s now 85 years old.
Yes.
When I was a young buck in college and worked in a warehouse I was put with an older guy. It took him a couple months to open up to me. It helped that I was half German. It helped that I was interested in WWII and it helped that I seemed non-judgemental and curious.
Turns out he fought for the German Army 1941- 1945. He didn’t even live in Germany at the time…lived in the Soviet Union but flocked to join the German Army at first opportunity (He had German citizenship)
He had many interesting stories.
My wife and I both have (or had) family members in the Wehrmacht.
My grandfather was a radio operator, first in occupation France, and then across the Eastern front into the Crimea. Eventually he was captured and worked in a Polish coal mine until around 1950…other than telling me some details about the capture, he didn’t want to talk about it much. He did take a lot of pictures along the way, and I have those. [ETA: I’ll note that twice a year he was allowed to trade packages with his family in Germany…they’d send him paints, and he’d paint little wildlife or still life scenes that he’d send back…I have some of those as well, but the whole idea always seemed oddly genteel to me]
Last year I also met one of my wife’s relatives, who was in the League of German Maidens, and worked in her late teens as a driver in a shoe (boot?) factory that used POW labor. She was grabbed near the end of the war, and released from reparations work around 1955. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but since it was something like her 87th birthday I managed to restrain myself.
I met a kamikaze pilot. This was back in the late '80’s in California. I was taking tai chi and he was brought in by the neighboring taikwondo school to teach iaido. He talked to our group for a little bit before class. He had been in the samurai class, of course, and was brought up on dulce et decorum est. His plane had been shot down short of the target and he had been fished out of the water. His knee was messed up in the crash.
He did not talk too much about it but my take was that he felt he had been doing his duty, and he did it the best that he could.
Interesting man, from a different world. Pretty sure he loved children and kittens.
Ah, yes. That class of Japanese who could kill any common person at any time.
For you out there who want to romanticize the Japanese; and for those others who havent been informed about extent and brutality of Japanese war crimes…look at this.
This sure sounds a hell of a lot like the policy of the Germans in the East.
Whereas the Germans were forced to confront their criminality at the end of WWII and denazify, the Japanese were allowed to keep their Emperor and didnt have to confront the evil they had unleashed on Asia.
Douglas MacArthur had war crimes trials and hanged some convicted Japanese.
Some war crimes trials..the biggest war criminal of them all Hirohito not only wasnt tried but was allowed to keep his post, in a ceremonial role. Woulda been like capturing Hitler and allowing his to serve as German President. Also, the Japanese people werent forced to acknowledge and accept their war guilt. Why these women Comfort women - Wikipedia have yet to be compensated by the Japanese government.