Patton and War Crimes

Originally Posted by Sarmatian

Excuse me, PJ, but are you trying to say that there was no difference between Allies/Soviets and Nazis? If so, you really shouldn't bother...

Don't you think you should separate the Western Allies from the Soviets?

Originally Posted by Centurion1

Are you attempting to take a **** on my family history.

I'm attempting to depict history accurately, which, surprisingly, doesn't always fall in line with The Sands of Iwo Jima.

Originally Posted by Centurion1

And even if they did shoot prisoners that is NOTHING, absolutely NOTHING like physically raping thousands of women and killing thousands more civilians.

The irony is staggering. How can you take such offence and be so clueless at the same time?

Still, the villagers' tale of a dark, long-kept secret has refocused attention on what historians say is one of the most widely ignored crimes of the war, the widespread rape of Okinawan women by American servicemen.

Ah, but they didn't just rape civilians and shoot prisoners. They also ripped the gold fillings out of their heads - alive or dead. They tore them limb from limb for souvenirs. They traded Japanese ears amongst themselves for cigarettes and chocolates. They decapitated Japanese POWs with their bayonets, boiled their skulls and sent them home to their mothers and girlfriends. These actions were common and widely accepted by both grunts and officers. Do I need to make another thread?

Now, I’m sorry your American History classes have failed you in this respect, but please refrain from further righteous indignation until you figure out what really happened.

Originally Posted by The Lurker Below

Furthermore the Japanese never actually committed any war crimes because they never signed on for the Geneva Convention rights anyhow, amirite?

You may want to consider returning to lurking.

“Don't you think you should separate the Western Allies from the Soviets?” No.
Well-done PZ.
About US killings and all the others things you describe, we know the US (and others) soldiers were not exempt of cruelty. If you just watch the treatment by the US media of that time concerning the Japanese you’ve got a clue…
However, nothing match in the Allies side (including Soviet) the horrors started and launched by the Nazi and their Japanese allies…
You successfully try to twist history and I admire the job. You just illustrate what was my research when I was in University: How to modify a perception of an historical event in a manner that fits our view. You have your representation (allies = nazi, so nazi not sooo guilty if not guilty at all…).
I do enjoy this..

PJ im not saying that the US always did the correct thing. But compared to the Japanese they were far better and the same applies to the nazis as well.

i dont know how you can defend this

Originally Posted by Brenus

You have your representation (allies = nazi, so nazi not sooo guilty if not guilty at all…).

Your words, not mine.

While I did find your thesis entertaining, it is not particularly correct. I started this thread because I was asked about the topic in another thread and I felt it deviated too much from what was being discussed there. I do not believe I have mentioned Nazis or Germans yet, except incidentally in the original post.

I understand that the subject of Allied war crimes makes many people uncomfortable. It doesn't fit into the post-war narrative we were all taught in school. However, if you or anyone else has a problem with what has been said, I suggest you take it up with the historical record, instead of trying to paint me as on some sort of one man Nazi vindication campaign.

I would much rather be talking tanks and battles and such, but if people are going to make declarative statements based on 6th grade truisms like "our boys would never rape civilians" that are patently false, then I will address them accordingly.

It is funny. There are countless books, documentaries, etc. documenting Nazi and Japanese crimes during the war. I believe there was even a thread about the Wehrmacht's crimes here in the monastery a few months back. No one’s denying them. However, when that same spotlight is turned on the Allies' conduct, hostility arises. I must have some sort of revisionist agenda to even bring it up!

Originally Posted by Centurian1

PJ im not saying that the US always did the correct thing. But compared to the Japanese they were far better and the same applies to the nazis as well.

i dont know how you can defend this

And I'm not sure how you can still make that statement after reading the information I shared earlier. Let me find you some more information.

Originally Posted by Sarmatian

Possibly, but neither were nowhere near as bad as Nazis or the Japanese.

Can you expand on this a bit in regard to the Soviets? I'm trying to think of the worst things the Nazis did off the top of my head, and everything I can think of was either comparably duplicated by the Soviets or even worse.

Unfortunately, cruelty is a part of war. There hasn't been a war without it and there hasn't been an army that hasn't committed some cruel acts. The degree varies but it was never institutionalized like it was within the Wehrmacht and the Japanese army. It has never happened in the entire history of the world. And, no, Aztecs or some African tribes are not a valid comparison.

I completely disagree. It might work if you replaced "institutionalized" with "industrialized", but you certainly don't have to look back as far as the Aztecs to find widespread institutional cruelty and war crimes in human history.

Now, on the other hand, you haven't answered the question - Do you believe that there is no difference between Allies or Soviets and the Nazis or Japanese?

I appreciate the interest, but I don't think my personal beliefs have any bearing on a historical discussion.

"I'm trying to think of the worst things the Nazis did off the top of my head" Treblinka.

"I'm trying to think of the worst things the Nazis did off the top of my head" Treblinka. Kolyma.

From your own source: “Hard work in the Soviet labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health”.

Not built to kill all passengers of a train in 2 hours, time needed for the train to refuel and turn…

Still have to find a EXTERMINATION camp in Soviet Union PZ. But you had the one I was expected, as it is the most famous…

Treblinka: June,22, 1942 – November 1943: about 850,000 people were killed here - Jews from occupied Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Yugoslavia and USSR, as well as from Germany and Austria. Polish and German Gypsies were also sent to Treblinka.

Sobibor: in 18 months at least 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered. Only 48 Sobibor prisoners survived the war, thanks to an escape.

Originally Posted by Brenus

From your own source: “Hard work in the Soviet labor camp, harsh climate and meager food, poor health”.

Actually, my link said:

In 1937, at the height of the Purges, Stalin ordered an intensification of the hardships prisoners were forced to endure.[4] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn quotes camp commander Naftaly Frenkel as establishing the new law of the Archipelago: "We have to squeeze everything out of a prisoner in the first three months — after that we don't need him anymore." [5] The system of hard labor and minimal or no food reduced most prisoners to helpless "goners" (dokhodyaga, in Russian).

Robert Conquest, Yevgenia Ginzburg, Anne Applebaum, Adam Hochschild and others (see bibliography) describe the Kolyma camps in some detail. The suffering of the prisoners was exacerbated by the presence of ordinary criminals, who terrorized the "political" prisoners. Death in the Kolyma camps came in many forms, including: overwork, starvation, malnutrition, mining accidents, exposure, murder at the hands of criminals, and beatings at the hands of guards. A director of the Sevvostlag complex of camps, colonel Sergey Garanin is said to have personally shot whole brigades of prisoners for not fulfilling their daily quotas in the late 1930s.[6] Escape was difficult, owing to the climate and physical isolation of the region, but some still attempted it. Escapees, if caught, were often torn to shreds by camp guard dogs. The use of torture as punishment was also common. Soviet dissident historian Roy Medvedev has compared the conditions in the Kolyma camps to Auschwitz.

Further, it goes on to say:

In Bitter Days of Kolyma, Ayyub Baghirov, an Azerbaijani accountant who was finally rehabilitated, provides details of his arrest, torture and sentencing to eight (finally to become 18) years imprisonment in a labour camp for refusing to incriminate a fellow official for financial irregularities. Describing the train journey to Siberia, he writes: "The terrible heat, the lack of fresh air, the unbearable overcrowded conditions all exhausted us. We were all half starved. Some of the elderly prisoners, who had become so weak and emaciated, died along the way. Their corpses were left abandoned alongside the railroad tracks."

Another vivid account of the conditions in Kolyma is that of Brother Gene Thompson of Kiev's Faith Mission. He recounts how he met Vyacheslav Palman, a prisoner who survived because he knew how to grow cabbages. Palman spoke of how guards read out the names of those to be shot every evening. On one occasion a group of 169 men were shot and thrown into a pit. Their fully clothed bodies were found after the ice melted in 1998.

Anyway, you seem to be arguing that the method of killing is the distinction - that it is somehow worse to kill people with poison gas than to slowly work and starve them to death. I just don't see much distinction, other than being starved to death entails a far longer period of suffering.

Originally Posted by Sarmation

WikiChart

I was very surprised to see that you posted that chart. I would expect such sloppyness from others, but from our previous discussions, I know that you know your history better than that. Now I'm questioning my vote.

Anyway, I would think anyone who has spent any time studying the war would realize that a chart entitled "WW2 Deaths" broken down into Axis and Allied military and civilian deaths would represent data very different than a chart that depicted Axis and Allied deaths directly caused by the enemy.

And sure enough, a simple perusal of the footnotes to that chart shows that counted in "Allied Civilian Deaths" include millions who died in ways that are somewhat difficult to blame on the Axis. Here are some of my favorites:

-famine in unoccupied zones
-disease in unoccupied zones
-Nationalist Chinese repression
-Chinese Communist repression
-other Chinese repression from various warlords
-French killed during Allied air raids
-Koreans who died in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
-Micronesian war related civilian deaths caused by American bombing and shellfire; and malnutrition caused by the U.S. blockade of the islands
-Polish citizens who perished due to Soviet repression
-Stalin's repression of his own people, including deaths in the Gulag system

Now, I'll give you a gold star if you can somehow pin those who died in Stalin's Gulags on Germany.

Anyway, the reality is that the disproportionality represented in that chart - apart from Allied repression and bombing of Allied civilians - is mainly due to the Soviet and Chinese inability to feed their own people and contain disease. If you were to take those two out, and compare civilian losses between 1st world nations like Britain, France and the US - I believe the proportions would be more evenly matched. An argument could be made that by simply starting the war the Axis countries were responsible for those deaths, but such an argument would be severely undercut by the fact that those nations couldn't even feed and treat their own people before the war due to collectivist schemes in Russia and poor infrastructure due to Western repression and internal strife in China. Regardless, the facts behind that chart represent a little bit different picture than the one you were (I assume) trying to paint.

As to your point - that the Axis killed more civilians than the Allies during the war - I've never argued otherwise. Now if you want to look at the whole scope of Russian and Chinese communism, that's a different story - but that is not what is being discussed here.

Originally Posted by Pannonian

Also, are there any Allied equivalents of Mengele and Unit 731?

The London Cage comes to mind. Of course, there was no medical pretense to what went on there - just pure unadulterated torture.

Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger

Can you expand on this a bit in regard to the Soviets? I'm trying to think of the worst things the Nazis did off the top of my head, and everything I can think of was either comparably duplicated by the Soviets or even worse.

Let's put it this way, shall we - Soviets and Allies together killed less German civilians than Germany killed Russian civilians. You don't even have to add Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece... If we add Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese the difference is like comparing a glass of water to an ocean.

Now, if you have data that makes those numbers comparable, feel free to share them and then we can have a meaningful discussion. Citing incidents where Soviets or Allies or various resistance movements committed war crimes (and I agree it happened and that it shouldn't be covered up) doesn't change the big picture in the slightest.

Originally Posted by Sarmatian

Let's put it this way, shall we - Soviets and Allies together killed less German civilians than Germany killed Russian civilians. You don't even have to add Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece... If we add Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese the difference is like comparing a glass of water to an ocean.

Now, if you have data that makes those numbers comparable, feel free to share them and then we can have a meaningful discussion. Citing incidents where Soviets or Allies or various resistance movements committed war crimes (and I agree it happened and that it shouldn't be covered up) doesn't change the big picture in the slightest.

Also, are there any Allied equivalents of Mengele and Unit 731?

Originally Posted by PanzerJaeger

Don't you think you should separate the Western Allies from the Soviets?

Possibly, but neither were nowhere near as bad as Nazis or the Japanese.

Unfortunately, cruelty is a part of war. There hasn't been a war without it and there hasn't been an army that hasn't committed some cruel acts. The degree varies but it was never institutionalized like it was within the Wehrmacht and the Japanese army. It has never happened in the entire history of the world. And, no, Aztecs or some African tribes are not a valid comparison.

Now, on the other hand, you haven't answered the question - Do you believe that there is no difference between Allies or Soviets and the Nazis or Japanese?