Patton and War Crimes

[Azathoth]

There's certainly some interesting parallels between that war and the Vietnam War.

• Guerrilla War in Southeast Asia
• Americans + Collaborators vs Revolutionaries
• America Asked by Revolutionaries For Aid Against Colonial Oppressors (Spanish)
• Previous War of Independence Against Said Oppressors
• Similar War Crimes on Both Sides (killing of civilians by Americans, collaborators by Filipinos, the old "bury-them-neck-deep-in-dirt-and-leave-them-for-the-ants" trick)
• Exposure of Brutality of War by American Media
• Anti-war Activism by Well-Known Figures/"Celebrities"
• Ridiculously High Native Casualties (Philippines - up to 1.2 million (~15%), Vietnam - up to 5 million (~12%)

I guess America technically beat the Filipinos, but they had to give up the islands 30 years later.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

There's certainly some interesting parallels between that war and the Vietnam War.

• Guerrilla War in Southeast Asia
• Americans + Collaborators vs Revolutionaries
• America Asked by Revolutionaries For Aid Against Colonial Oppressors (Spanish)
• Previous War of Independence Against Said Oppressors
• Similar War Crimes on Both Sides (killing of civilians by Americans, collaborators by Filipinos, the old "bury-them-neck-deep-in-dirt-and-leave-them-for-the-ants" trick)
• Exposure of Brutality of War by American Media
• Anti-war Activism by Well-Known Figures/"Celebrities"
• Ridiculously High Native Casualties (Philippines - up to 1.2 million (~15%), Vietnam - up to 5 million (~12%)

I guess America technically beat the Filipinos, but they had to give up the islands 30 years later.

Actually, Max Boot does lump them into the same category -- small wars -- but uses Vietnam as proof that the USA was able to ignore lots of lessons on how to fight such a war effectively (he notes that Vietnam was not a small war numerically by any means, only its limited war concept).

We conquered Cuba, Peurto Rico, Guam, and the Phillipines. All but Guam were either granted independence or given the option to do so. America's "imperialism" has never really been whole-hearted. Heck, we even paid Mexico for the land we took at the end of that war. I'm sure the Europeans of the time thought we were idiots for buying land that we'd conquered fair and square.


RE: Patton and "take no prisoners"

Sounds like Patton's variant on the "too late chum" rule from WW1. Soldiers throughout history have enforced (informally) variations on that one. Shouldn't have applied to a group who'd already managed to get their surrender accepted, though. Bradley was a straight shooter and wanted that sort of thing stopped. Patton probably couldn't care less save to minimize the potential distraction.


Remember, at its core, there is nothing elegant or particularly noble about war. The basic model of warfare goes back to the bronze age if not earlier: win by any means fair or foul, murder all those capable of bearing arms against you or who are too weak/frail/whatever to sell, then take all their stuff, take all their women, and sell the kids as slaves. Any result that is less brutal reflects some degree of civilization.

[Brenus]

“Where is the moral superiority?” In the fact that it was not an order issued by the President of the United States of America.
Did the engineers give the POW? No soldier of the Wehrmacht would have resisted a SS order…
Question: I thought the101 Airborne was inland (St Marie de la Mer)… How did they arrive on the beaches to ask for the prisoners? It is a long walk...

Now, about the make-no-prisoners things, it is a reality of war that the assault troops don’t do them.
I do remember when in training it was this kind of sentences we were told as you have no time to waste and men to spent for guards…
I know as well it is this kind of things that are said to galvanise the troops, as fixing bayonet…

The difference of PZ example of allies’ war crimes is that they were done during or directly after the battle, and in small scales.
Nothing compare with Oradour Sur Glane where the village was picked at random as the released SS was not able to point out in which of the Oradour he saw armed Partisans…

Now, after a long though I have to say that one PZ argument is quite valid.
The SS and soldiers of the Heer were raised in a universe of violence and des-humanisation of the enemies. So for them, killing was not a problem as such.
An Allies soldiers from Democratic Countries, they knew in theory the right from the wrong…

“Totenkopf (death's head) insignia”: Probably the letters SS did the job as the Skulls and Bones were also on the Tank Crew uniforms, heritage from the Ulhan.
And as Allies Propaganda for the SS, I think the German Propaganda was largely responsible for the well earned reputation of brutality and merciless conduct in war of the SS troops.
So, the SS have only Goebbels and Himmler to blame for the US soldier to know who they were...

[PanzerJaeger]

“Where is the moral superiority?” In the fact that it was not an order issued by the President of the United States of America.

I don't think anyone is claiming that FDR was on the same moral level as Adolf Hitler. The point that I've been making throughout the thread is that the average Allied soldier was not morally superior to his Axis counterpart; and the scale of the crimes is a function of their leadership, not superior ethics. Just as the Germans did, the Allied soldiers had no qualms about following immoral orders, whether they were to drop fire bombs on hundreds of thousands of innocent woman and children or to kill POWs; and just as the Japanese engaged in independent horrible acts of savagery that necessitated no orders, so to did the Allied troops in the Pacific.

The illusion of the "Good War" is just that - an illusion. Not even the legacy of the Normandy campaign is safe anymore from the truth about Allied war crimes.

Did the engineers give the POW? No soldier of the Wehrmacht would have resisted a SS order…

Why do you say that? The Waffen SS was subordinated to Wehrmacht commanders throughout most of the war. Such a situation would have depended on the ranking officer, not the branch.

Now, about the make-no-prisoners things, it is a reality of war that the assault troops don’t do them.

Many of the SS were assault troops, as well.

The difference of PZ example of allies’ war crimes is that they were done during or directly after the battle, and in small scales.

It is hard to say that the firebombing of cities was small in scale. And if you put any stock in primary sources, the killing of German POWs was not small scale either.

"I've interviewed well over 1000 combat veterans. Only one of them said he shot a prisoner... Perhaps as many as one-third of the veterans...however, related incidents in which they saw other GIs shooting unarmed German prisoners who had their hands up."

So, the SS have only Goebbels and Himmler to blame for the US soldier to know who they were...

And if they were killed after surrendering, they have no one to blame but their killers.

[Strike For The South]

Amborse Sucks as a historian.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Amborse Sucks as a historian.

Well, quite. He and his family business of plagiarised popular history.

[PanzerJaeger]

Oh I agree. What he did to the legacy of the Fallschirmjäger in his rendition of the battle of Brecourt was nothing short of a travesty.

However, he did conduct thousands of primary source interviews with veterans and I have no reason to doubt his findings. His distortions are in his unwillingness to fact check those findings and his flair for the dramatic, not in the alteration of the interviews themselves. As an Allied cheerleader, he would be more prone to downplay Allied war crimes.

[Pannonian]

The difference of PZ example of allies’ war crimes is that they were done during or directly after the battle, and in small scales.
Nothing compare with Oradour Sur Glane where the village was picked at random as the released SS was not able to point out in which of the Oradour he saw armed Partisans…

It says much that Oradour Sur Glane was but a minor incident in the overall picture of German atrocities. For the western armies, an incident like that would be a major cause for shame, and a permanent black mark on their military. For the Germans, an entire village, men, women, elderly, children, all massacred, mown down in a building or locked in a church and burned to death, is but another small detail in the devastation of Europe and the systematic extermination of certain of its peoples. Not even the most murderous of ancient civilisations ever got close to the levsls of barbarity which the Germans and Japanese set in WW2.

[PanzerJaeger]

I would disagree on this part: The average Allied soldier was morally superior to his Axis counterpart, and the scale of the slaughter shows it.

This is where it gets tricky. For example, the biggest indictment against Germany is certainly the concentration camp system, yet only an extraordinarily tiny percentage of German soldiers actually had anything to do with them. IIRC, Treblinka, the site of the killing of nearly 1,000,000 people, was operated by no more than 25 SS officers and 100 guards of mixed nationality. What people often fail to realize is just how few people it took to kill so many, and how much of an effort the Nazis made to hide what they were doing.

I don’t know if the book, Lieutenant de Panzers, from August von Kageneck is translated in English. Read it, and you will see that the average German soldier was aware of what happened in the name of Germany as they witnessed the slaughter from their eyes. Thanks to their officers’ apathy, they didn’t react then participate to it.
“I saw, several times, corps of men with long hair in the ditches. They had been executed. So the German Army was drawn down the rank of witches hunters” (p125).
Here, it is not the result of a revenge due to battle, but the cold blood operation, the same than the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto of Tarnopol (p123) by the SS.

I appreciate the depth such anecdotal commentary brings to the discussion, but I'm not sure it makes much of a point. I can produce accounts of Allied soldiers witnessing Allied crimes.

You can gather hundred of case of Germans POW killed by allies’ soldiers. However you hardly find complete Germans villages and populations killed or burned alive by Allied Soldiers, even when the Werewolves tried in vain to conduct a guerrilla war fair. Temptation was there, especially in the French side, but it didn’t happened.

You can certainly find plenty of German villages and populations killed by Allied soldiers. Think about that.

Now, about war veterans (1 on 3) saying they saw somebody else killing at list one prisoner: Absurd.
“As an Allied cheerleader, he would be more prone to downplay Allied war crimes.” Not in you want to sell nowadays.

That would apply to someone like James Bacque, but Ambrose is on the other end of the spectrum. He made his living glorifying Allied soldiers, so I'm not sure what he would gain from falsifying such a claim - which leads me to believe there may be some merit to it.

Do you have the proof that the killed POW in following orders? No, because it was none.

Well, such a case was the genesis of this thread. Another example would be Major-General Raymond Hufft, who admitted to ordering his troops to take no prisoners during the crossing of the Rhine. That wasn't very hard.

And about the killing of innocent by bombing, it was a war that the German started (and the Italians as my grand mother would have testified being under their bombs).

And that gave the Allies carte blanche to dump millions of tonnes of bombs on civilian centers with the intent of killing and terrorizing as many as possible? Again, where is the moral superiority in that?

It says much that Oradour Sur Glane was but a minor incident in the overall picture of German atrocities. For the western armies, an incident like that would be a major cause for shame, and a permanent black mark on their military. For the Germans, an entire village, men, women, elderly, children, all massacred, mown down in a building or locked in a church and burned to death, is but another small detail in the devastation of Europe and the systematic extermination of certain of its peoples.

It must require some great measure of cognitive dissonance to highlight with such righteous indignation an incidence of a church with people inside being burned down to show how horrible the German soldiers were, considering the Allies burned down entire cities full of people with the expressed purpose of inflicting terror and death on the civilians inside.

The aim of the Combined Bomber Offensive...should be unambiguously stated as the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany. It should be emphasized that the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale, and the breakdown of morale both at home and at the battle fronts by fear of extended and intensified bombing, are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories.

Not even the most murderous of ancient civilisations ever got close to the levsls of barbarity which the Germans and Japanese set in WW2.

That is, of course, patently false. Ethnic cleansing has been around as long as humanity has. Ironically, the earliest genocide that comes to my mind was committed by the Jews.

[Alexander the Pretty Good]

For example, the biggest indictment against Germany is certainly the concentration camp system

Not the race war on the Russian front?

[Cyclops]

Excellent thread, well argued with reference to sources, its very stimulating to see.

I'd observe war is all hell as W. Tecumseh Sherman said. You start groups of people killing and tell them to stop at certain arbitrary points. Its all horrible.

As an Australian I was raised with the view "we were good and they were bad" whoever they were. Japanese "revisionism" is still derided, Italian cowardice is a byword and WW2 is seen in clear terms of good vs evil. In fact WW1 is still largely seen as good vs evil (yay the justice of Aussies attacking Turks so the Romanovs can rule Greece...wtf?).

A mate of mine met an old German Wehrmacht veteran OS and they chatted (he had broken english) about his serrvice in WW2 and the german was not impressed that my mate was Aussie. We, like our American allies, have a reputation for shooting prisoners. I suspect it stems from our distance from the formal military traditions of the continent. A French or German soldier might expect "one fights hard but when the opponent raises the white flag then the rules of war apply", whereas I can easily imagine an Aussie thinking "ten seconds ago that Jap/Kraut/Turk was machine gunning my mates so cop this". Thats a war crime and I'm sure we are as guilty of it as any other country-in fact more guilty of it than countries with a more formal military tradition.

On the matter of "reputation" the Australians copped some blame for disorder in Singapore and later a lot of rape in Japan. I read (but where is the source? can't recall) an English journalist's diary recording he heard the screams of Japanese women in an occupied town in Japan in 1945 as the Australian occupation troops headed out for an evenings "recreation": the editor noted the date was a month before any Australians arrived in Japan, so it appears some Englishmen were in the habit of blaming British crimes on wild colonials.

Its very shameful to contemplate the alleged cowardice and disorder of Australians at Singapore (specifically deserters throwing women off escaping ships at gunpoint) but most likely it happened and AFAIK we downplay or deflect it in our histories, refuse to aknowledge it or punish the offenders. I actually find it hard to type that last sentence.

As losers the Germans and Japanese and Italians will never receive justice for crimes committed against them in WW2, crimes my country either participated in or applauded eg bombing civilian targets.

I understand Japanese reluctance to accept the western version of WW2 where our crimes are left out: they most likely think why shouldn't they whitewash if we do (and I think we do at least to some extent). I think our American allies do the same, for the same reasons we do.

Germans (writers, historians, tourists I have met, my friends GF) seem to take a great deal more responsibility for their nation's actions in war than any other example I can think of. They are a leading european culture, a major force of western civilisation so their crimes seem more shocking somehow.

The episode of Nazi rule is a lesson to any country that the fall from civilisation to mass murder is a very quick one. All you need are unscrupulous leaders, an economic crisis and an atmosphere of terror.

[drone]

This is where it gets tricky. For example, the biggest indictment against Germany is certainly the concentration camp system, yet only an extraordinarily tiny percentage of German soldiers actually had anything to do with them. IIRC, Treblinka, the site of the killing of nearly 1,000,000 people, was operated by no more than 25 SS officers and 100 guards of mixed nationality. What people often fail to realize is just how few people it took to kill so many, and how much of an effort the Nazis made to hide what they were doing.

So few at the tail end of the disassembly line, but so many more dealing with the infrastructure. The Economic and Administrative Department, General Government, RSHA, various corporations, etc. It takes a lot of logistical planning, organization, and manpower to round up, rob, transfer, rob more invasively, temporarily house, kill (outright, or through starvation/overwork), and dispose of a few million people.

And that gave the Allies carte blanche to dump bombs on civilian centers with the intent of killing and terrorizing many as possible? Again, where is the moral superiority in that?

No, I think the Blitz did that.

Not the race war on the Russian front?

Shhhhh. The godless commies don't count, even the planned extermination via starvation of about 25 million of them. And since they only accomplished about half that, it counts as a failure and doesn't advance the notion of German efficiency. No one must know.

On-topic, for the most part PJ has been arguing that US troops treated Axis troops about the same as the other way around. Probably a fair assessment at the individual level, but I think his moral equivalency argument falls apart due to the treatment of civilians by the armed forces, as well as the organizational acceptance of the war crimes. I'm more interested in this aspect.

[PanzerJaeger]

Not the race war on the Russian front?

You mean the race war inspired in part by America's actions against the indians and British and French colonial policies?

So few at the tail end of the disassembly line, but so many more dealing with the infrastructure. The Economic and Administrative Department, General Government, RSHA, various corporations, etc. It takes a lot of logistical planning, organization, and manpower to round up, rob, transfer, rob more invasively, temporarily house, kill (outright, or through starvation/overwork), and dispose of a few million people.

I think you have to use a bit more specificity when dealing with crimes of such magnitude. Lots of perceived enemies were rounded up and sent to camps during WW2 in both Germany and the US by soldiers who had no real idea what would happen to them and probably didn't care. It was war and they were the enemy. But can you then say that the German private at the beginning of the disassembly line was complicit in the murder of those people? Unknowingly, yes. But there is a reason so few Germans actually spent time at the death camps and why the Nazis made such efforts to keep the final part of the final solution a secret. While standing idly by as the government rounds up your fellow citizens and ships them off to camps during wartime in the name of final victory is certainly immoral (although by that point the Nazis had unquestioned control of the country), it is on a completely different moral level than willfully supporting the gassing of said fellow citizens.

No, I think the Blitz did that.

I think we may have different definitions of moral superiority. To me, moral superiority is not responding to immoral behavior in kind (or in a far greater magnitude). That would be... moral equivalency.

Shhhhh. The godless commies don't count, even the planned extermination via starvation of about 25 million of them. And since they only accomplished about half that, it counts as a failure and doesn't advance the notion of German efficiency. No one must know.

The Allies certainly weren’t above forced starvation of POWs. But really, all mocking aside, your statement highlights the point I was making above. German food policy was planned at the highest levels of the Nazi regime. How many German soldiers knew Germany was intentionally thinning out Soviet POWs through starvation and how many simply thought the dangerously thin food rations simply weren’t enough to go around? (they weren’t) And how many on the front lines had any real knowledge of what was going on in the POW camps at all?

Don’t get me wrong. Plenty of German soldiers were involved in war crimes against Russian POWs. It was a barbaric war on both sides. My point is that when generalized statements attributing things to a collective group are more deeply analyzed, often the reality turns out to be different than what was presented. The knowledge and complicity in Nazi war crimes deviated greatly among German soldiers and the German people, but it is a fundamental misconception to assume that the vast majority of Germans had full knowledge of and supported the worst of those policies. There was no free press, no internet, no real way of knowing the full extent of what the government was doing other than what the government told them.

On-topic, for the most part PJ has been arguing that US troops treated Axis troops about the same as the other way around. Probably a fair assessment at the individual level, but I think his moral equivalency argument falls apart due to the treatment of civilians by the armed forces, as well as the organizational acceptance of the war crimes. I'm more interested in this aspect.

Again, I do not understand how one can favorably compare the Allies to the Axis based on their treatment of civilians. There is no question that the massive bombing of German cities was a war crime of epic magnitude. The commander of the Royal Air Force himself stated that the bombing of cities was an intentional targeting of German civilians meant to kill and terrorize as many as possible, not collateral damage from targeting military facilities. Unlike the Holocaust, for example, this widespread, targeted killing of civilians was widely known, accepted, and even celebrated throughout the Allied armed forces and greater populations. They even made movies celebrating the heroics of dropping bombs on defenseless civilians.

The only valid argument supporting your point I have seen in this thread is based on scale. There is certainly no doubt that the scale of Axis crimes was greater than those of the Allies – although not by as much as some here seem to believe.

However, as I’ve said before, I’m just not convinced that scale has as much weight as some here would like. Once the collective group accepts and even celebrates the intentional killing of civilians, does it matter how big the final body count turns out to be from a moral perspective? Does murdering 5 people make one morally superior to someone who murdered 10?

I just don’t view the morality of mass killing as a sliding scale. I see it more as two pieces of land separated by a river and connected by a bridge. Once you cross that bridge, once you knowingly accept that your government is killing innocent people in your name, the body count is just a sad function of the means and length of the killing.