Lest we think such conduct was confined purely to the Pacific, Max Hastings in his book on Normandy estimated that a soldier in that campaign attempting to surrender had at best a 50% chance of not being shot dead on the spot. This was regardless of nationality ie Germans, Americans, British, Canadians they would all commonly kill men in the act of surrendering, that’s just how it was in the bitter close quarter fighting in the hedgerows. Yes a man in the act of surrendering isn’t a prisoner yet but we are talking shades of grey. Many potential prisoners just dont ever get to be prisoners
Very true, and atrocious behavior post surrender, or completely disallowing surrender, occurred in Europe with the Western Allies as well. Not on anything like the scale that occurred in the Pacific, but it still did occur. The numerous accounts of German massacres are well known. I had mentioned earlier that 73 Italian prisoners were summarily killed by Americans in Sicily, it occurred in two separate instances. Carlo D’Este’s Bitter Victory recounts it in brief detail in an appendix. I seem to recall that Canadians in Normandy by and large stopped taking SS prisoners after discovering that a group of their prisoners had been lined up against a wall and murdered by the Hitlerjugend division, Hastings might have mentioned it. No doubt German soldiers had a harder time having their surrender accepted after Malmedy as well.
Am I the only one here who had relatives in ww2? My relatives did no such thing, tortured no one, shot no surrendering prisoners, and did not mistreat pows. Are my relatives the only ones who commtted no war crimes?
I want to hear from others who had relatives in ww2 who will admit that their own relatives committed war crimes. Nearly every american familiy had relatives in ww2, so I expect to hear from lots of folks admitting that their relatives commited war crimes if what you say is true.
If I am not the only one who had relatives in ww2 and vietnam who did not commit any war crimes, then lets hear from you too.
Here is another instance. In March 1943 the battle of the Bismarck Sea as it was called was fought. It was an attack by Australian and American forces on a Japanese troop convoy taking reinforcements to New Guinea. The troopships were sunk but most of the Japanese soldiers aboard the ships survived the initial attacks and took to the water. Allied forces spent the next two days hunting down and destroying the Japanese survivors, in the water, clinging to wreckage,and in lifeboats. By night the lifeboats were attacked by USN torpedo boats and by day they were machine-gunned by American and Australian aircraft. Japanese rescue craft were also sunk.
Battle of the Bismarck Sea, 2-4 March 1943
This killing of the Japanese survivors while they were helpless in the water was filmed by the Australian cameraman Damien Parer who was aboard one aircraft and is pretty grisly to watch. His footage appeared in newsreels during the war, but vanished for many years after the war until it was rediscovered in the 1980s and made the news again here. Australian participants were interviewed and while they justified it militarily they had never forgotten what they had been ordered to do.
I was in the Royal Regina Rifles years ago, one of the Canadian units that landed on Juno beach on D-Day. The regimental historian told me that on D-Day and the days immediately following, our regiment didn’t take any prisoners, which amounted to shooting anyone trying to surrender. Part of that was executing “several hundred” SS soldiers trying to surrender.
How do you know that? Without intending any disrespect for your relatives, what makes you think that they would talk about it if they had participated in atrocities? Each of my relatives who were in actual combat would refuse to discuss any of their actions. They found it painful to discuss any aspect of their experiences. I know more about the heroism of one relative than his children do, because his actions were reported in the paper and my mom kept the clippings. He would never talk about any of it with his kids. If they are reluctant to discuss their moments of pride, why would they blurt out their moments of shame?
Note that no one is accusing every serviceman in WWII of atrocities. The sheer logistics of manpower and battle indicates that few soldiers even among the Japanese and Germans could have actually had an opportunity to torture anyone or kill anyone in cold blood. There are far too many U.S. servicemen who survived for every enemy to have tortured someone.
We are only talking about the mindset that allowed men to set aside their humanity in battle and perform actions that would horrify themsleves under other circumstance–and noting that U.S. personnel had no magic immunity against such barbarism.
The treatment of prisoners who had already been removed from the front and processed as POWs would tend to show U.S. personnel in a better light. The persistent cruelty found in German and, especially, Japanese POW camps was not a hallmark of U.S. POW camps. Nevertheless, in the field, the U.S. troops could be as barbaric as any other and the fact that they did not come home and brag about it does not indicate that they never participated in horrific actions.
Sunanann, I personally know four people off the top of my head, two of them close relatives, who served in WWII (both theaters), Korea, and Vietnam, who admit to having witnessed firsthand violations of the Geneva Convention as well as what can only be called atrocities committed by their own fellow soldiers. They would not discuss whether or not they participated, and I prefer to think they didn’t, but they all confessed that they could have done more to protest matters.
To pretend that US soldiers have some sort of internal purity or nobility which protects them from barbarism is about like sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming lalalalalalala.
(And before you accuse me of being unamerican and insulting to our brave and pure boys in the service, I trace my family’s military history from the Alamo to Basra. I am in the National Guard and my SO works as a civilian contractor for the US Army. I’ll see your GI rose-colored glasses and raise you a shitload of anecdotes.)
This is a disgusting attitude. Are you not at all sorry about civilian deaths in Afghanistan because their government harbored Al-Qaeda? Would you be completely cool with the fire-bombing of Basrah or Baghdad for the crimes committed by the Saddam Hussein regime? Was any suffering that those civilians DID undergo “well and truly deserved” because of what that regime did to the Kurds?
All of the events you listed were horrible crimes against humanity that killed hundreds of thousands of people, if not over a million, combined. Now, perhaps those goverments and militaries brought it upon their people (the people they are responsible for protecting, no less), but the dropping of those bombs was NOT an act of God. The actions of the Nazi and Japanese government may have allowed the Allies to think that it was justified, or even “necessary,” but it was the United States and our allies that pulled that trigger, NOT the Japanese and Nazis, and with that action comes a fair portion of the responsibility for those terrible mistakes.
Finally, if you can justify the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the firebombing of Tokyo and the razing of Dresden and the deaths of all those civilians, you can justify any act of terror committed against the United States. The citizens of those cities were as responsible for the actions of their governments as the people in the World Trade Center were for the economic exploitation of the middle east and the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel.
ALL of the belligerents involved are responsible for the horror of war, and to attempt to drop it all on the “bad guy” is irresponsible and cowardly. Some actions can NEVER be justified, and to see some attempting to do so sickens me.
Grelby I’m having some trouble with your equivalence of the World Trade Center with WWII allied bombings. I think my issue is substantive although certainly there is a visceral reflexive component to it.
The allied bombings of the WWII certainly accepted as a consequence the deaths of many civilians. But I do not think that at their core that was their goal.* For most targets of aerial bombardment in World War II were of some military value. By their nature cities will almost always have military value. Dresden, for example, had major railyards and the date of the raids were chosen to coincide with the (subsequently cancelled) transhipment of a Panzer Division through Dresden. The firebombing of Tokyo is somewhat harder to justify. The figleaf generally given is that the nature of Japanese industry scattered a number of small machine shops throughout residential neighborhoods - rendering them legitimate targets.
I think that the WTC was about killing civilians. Okay, perhaps better phrased the WTC attack was a strike at what was seen as a symbol of American prosperity/financial power, which happens to be civilian in nature. Other than inducing horror/terror/shock there is no value to attacking the WTC. Given the lack of military utility to Al Qaeda of the destruction of the radio and TV antennas on the WTC or the destruction and interruption of transportation (subways and PATH) there is not even a farfetched military reason for the attack. If you wished to say that the attack on the Pentagon has some parallel with WWII strategic bombing I wouldn’t like it but I would have a much harder time arguing against it. They certainly could have taken the other 3 planes and struck at military targets, probably with some success (because on 9/10/03 people just didn’t fly planes loaded with civilians into any kind target). (Of course, had they struck purely military targets the outcry against their perfidy would have been not much quieter and would still be termed terrorism).
OTOH I guess the other question to ask is “was there any conceivable chance of the WTC bombing having the desired effect of getting the US of SA in particular and MENA in general?” Any American, the Japanese post WWII, and probably anyone in the industrialized world could easily answer that no, such an act would be considered such dire provocation that almost no retaliatory measure would be considered by Americans too severe a response. However, from OBL’s perspective it can easily be shown that as often than not the American government bugs out rather than face further future casualties. So you can argue that the decision to attack the WTC was rational (from a poorly informed viewpoint) but not legitimate from a military POV.
*In all of the slew of threads concerning war crimes, atomic bombings and what not I have been on the fence as to whether to distinguish between USAAF and RAF strategic bombing practices (and USAAF European and Japanese theatre policies as well). I have not distinguished between them as it would tend to distract from the topic at hand and could start a nasty hijack within the thread. As a result I speak in generalizations, for which many exceptions can be found. I am certainly more comfortable and more knowledgeable with respect to USAAF side, moreso in Europe. I think the whole ethics, morality, and necessity of strategic bombing during WWII (and I guess by extension nuclear deterrence) deserves a thread on its own ( I have not started it as I will be out of town for a week so I could not participate).
Do a search on GD for “harris AND lemay” (or maybe just “dresden”) to find a thread in the last year or so where it was pretty well established that the RAF fire attacks on Germany were deliberate efforts to kill off the people (with Dresden only getting so much publicity because it had less industry to rationalize the attacks than did Hamburg and other cities where equally savage atacks were made). In fact, it was shown that the “ring of fire” tactic was developed for the purpose of creating fire storms. Lemay was impressed by the notion and took the general firebombing tactic to the Pacific when he was transferred there.
Or you could do a search perhaps on the expression ‘dehousing’ as the British euphemistically labelled the aim of their night-time area bombing. The aiming points were explicitly built up areas and not industrial installations.
Following is the intent of area bombing as Harris wanted to describe it, and he is quite clear about what he is doing:
The British government was reluctant however to openly describe the intent of the bomber offensive as killing civilians and preferred for political reasons:
Note that this was purely a matter of description, the tactic itself did not change. So in theory the German civilians were only ‘collateral damage’ to use the current euphemism, and suffered the unfortunate side effects of ‘dehousing’. In reality they were the explicit target.
Good discussion on area bombing from which above quotes were taken here
Yeah, I knew Bomber Harris, dehousing, and area bombing were out there. My bad. As my footnote noted I was reluctant to separate the USAAF and RAF strategies even though the night area bombing and daylight “precision” bombing had different approaches. It seemed inappropriate somehow to cut the RAF loose and say, sure, THEY deliberately bombed civilians in Germany but WE (or rather the USAAF) always aspired to do better. Different time, different perspective, different capabilities.
But, the comparison is to WTC so I will limit myself to US as bomber to counterbalance the US as bombee.
W.r.t Europe/Germany I think that the willingness of USAAF to take fairly horrific casualty rates rather than switch from daylight raids (whose precision might be a joke by today’s standards) does suggest that killing miltary/strategic targets without unduly harming civilians was a list on the priority list. (It may be that increased accuracy/effectiveness of daylight missions was also a counterbalancing factor to the higher casualty rates, but I don’t recall reading that this was the case.) How was the number of missions a bomber crew had to complete to go home set? At a level where a crewmember had a 50% chance of completing the missions intact (not dead, wounded, captured)
With Japan it is different (not gonna go into atomic bombs here - that’s the job of the bazillion dedicated threads) there was less discrimination certainly - the switch to low level bombing was to increase accuracy but the switch to incediaries was definitely in an effort to increase general devastation in Tokyo. As I noted above there have been justifications for bombing of residential areas (small machine shops interspersed with the houses) though I did use the term “figleaf” to indicate the less than impressive nature of that rationalization. (I am going to recommend War without Mercy again, as IIRC it does go into possibly racial/racist motivations to the difference in bombing strategies in Europe/Japan)
Do you feel that Grelby’s equivalency is a valid one - the bombing of the World Trade Center is the same morally as the USAAF strategic bombing campaigns in Europe and Japan during the second world war? If my objection to his equation is simply misplaced nationalist/patriotic blinders, please let me know. If you disagree with Grelby please express it more clearly then I have.
Another little known fact is that the morning after the Dresden bombing, P-51 Mustangs straffed people crowding on the quays and refugee collumns fleeing the inferno.
I must have some residual nationalist blinders of my own still dammit as I cant equate them yet my rationalisations seem like just that. Intellectually I know that to target civilians is to target civilians and dead is dead but my heart resists the conclusion its the same. I feel differently about an event that occurred in the middle of a total war.
Forgot to add that I thought you misjudged Grelby. His post didnt come across to me as comparing WW2 bombing to WTC in terms of criminality. I took it as he was comparing them in terms of innocence of the victims and that in neither case did they deserve to die for the respective misdeeds of their national governments:
It was in response to Evil Captor saying this:
The children of Dresden weren’t responsible for the Holocaust etc.
I would have to say that a comparison of the World Trade Center to strategic bombing during World War II is at the least on very shaky ground. Much as I am loathe to pull out the word ‘terrorist’ as the be all and end all condemnation of a group, the WTC attacks were conducted by terrorists against a nation at peace by using planes full of civilians as weapons against a buildings full of civilians. It isn’t simply the fact that they were targeting civilians or for that matter American civilians. For example, I don’t find German strategic bombing of England or for that matter the almost completely futile Japanese attempt at firebombing the Pacific Northwest via balloon-bombs any more repugnant than Allied strategic bombing. I must admit that being an American may have some bearing on my feelings on the matter, but at least it isn’t a reflexive patriotic knee-jerk at the though of American civilians being killed (though of course civilians of many nationalities died in the WTC).
Regarding the USAAF in Europe, while designated strategic targets were of some military or industrial nature, it was well known to all involved that most bombs were not going to end up on pinpoint targets. Most were going to end up all over the cities being bombed. The USAAF also worked in conjunction with the RAF dehousing campaign, for example during the bombing of Hamburg in July/August 1943 which resulted in a firestorm, the USAAF kept up the pressure by conducting daylight raids on the city while the RAF kept pounding it at night. Tactical bombing wasn’t any more discrimitory than strategic bombing, for example interdiction targets frequently were village crossroads behind the lines. While they were legitimate military targets as far as it goes, it was still HE being dropped in the center of towns. While the USAAF didn’t make enemy civilians a deliberate target in Europe, the technology and tactics used didn’t allow them not to become a major ‘collateral’ target either.
The targeting of small machine shops in Japanese cities, while it did in fact have truth behind it, was more a whitewash for those with qualms about it, since these small machine shops and feeder factories producing parts were Japanese houses. The USAAF’s own Strategic Bombing Survey doesn’t pull any punches in what it was targeting: urban areas.
And yeah, I’m not completely sure that Grelby really meant to compare the WTC to Dresden/Tokyo/Etc so directly in terms of criminality.
I hope I’m not hijacking the thread too far into strategic bombing, but I probably should have thrown this in from the Strategic Bombing Survey as well, it describes the accuracy of late war B-29 daylight raids; accuracy of daylight bombing of Europe was almost certainly no better and probably was worse:
Hmm. You may be right. I think I did misread Grelby (I will say misread rather than misjudge or misinterpret as upon rereading it it seems obvious). Unfortunately I am having a hard time working out a reasonable difference especially as I like to think of my government as being far more responsive and representative than any of axis countries (old axis or new, Hitler’s Willing Executioners or not). Therefore collective guilt should apply more to us, rather than less. My kneejerk “but they’re EE-VIL” while true of the regimes, is not very useful. (And “but Dresden is a nit compared to the Japanese rampage in China or the Holocaust”, while useful in maintaining a certain amount of perspective, is failing me completely)
Actually I am not sure Grelby is only comparing victimization - both the “crimes against humanity” and “justify” paragraphs still bug me - he does go over into responsibility (which is why I tried to bring in intent).
Definitely stuff to think about. I’ll get these dang blinders either completely off or locked tightly in place at some point. 
Err my response was to Eolbo’s last two posts.
I have no doubt that some U.S. servicemen acted in a barbaric fashion during war time. I have serious doubt though that the scale of U.S. atrocities matches that of the German SS or the Japanese regular army. Is anyone in this thread seriously proposing that the actions of U.S. service people match the scale and severity of the Germans and Japanese during WW II ?