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- Thread starter jwhc
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O'Kelly's Boys
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- Grande Prairie
I believe in war when it is required. I believe in killing the enemy to the last one of them, if necessary, to achive victory in that war. But I do not believe in the right to or complacency of the commitment of atrocities to achive that victory. That is my point.
Smellie commented that, "The Japs were shown FAR more mercy than they ever gave to ANYONE else". I understand what he is trying to say, but I feel that this is an over generalization. For example, they accepted Jewish refuges in the 10,000s when Canada and the US did not. So please address this issue.
Smellie also added, "The ships were unloaded by Canadians and Brits, starved from 200 pounds down to 85 pounds, working 12 hours a day on a handful of rice, beaten, starved, whipped, killed whenever a guard felt like it". True, but the Americans starved German PWs to death in huge numbers and also turned Germans weighing 50 kg (more than 85 lbs mind you) over to the French for slave labour. 100s of Wehrmacht and SS personnel were also summarily executed by the Americans. So what? Please explain how these actions of the enemy are war crimes while the same actions carried out by the Allies are not.
I respect Smellie's right to state his view. The Japanese and Germans don't need to be vilified any more than they already were. Canada's and the Allies' war was just, but some of their actions were not. That is my point.
I believe my comments above are valid, if not than convince me otherwise. But rather than address the issues you resort to name calling and bullying. "Nazi sympathizer, head out of my ass, posting something stupid, pro Nazi sympathy". I am deeply offended by your comments.
O'Kelly's Boys
Tal Fisher
@ O'Kelly's Boys:
Understand exactly what you are saying.
Any war is an abomination but, for a while, we at least tried. In the Old Testament, Jehovah of the Thunders was pretty up-front about war, with all that delivering My enemies into thy hands and the dashing-out of infants' brains and so forth: nasty, filthy tribal warfare, kill the men and rape the women and kill all the men-children over 6 and all that.
Sheer brutality and ethnic cleansing. Good thing is that the archaeological record doesn't support it the way the religious books do. Bad part is that the books were written much closer to the time and likely there is more truth than propaganda in them.
With the rise of the national state and professional armies, we sort of got away from that for a few hundred years. Certainly, the armies of the Thirty Years' War plundered Germany mercilessly for 48 years: 3 generations, given the early marrying-age of the times. That resulted in a national terror of future military occupations...... and a glorification of national defence when the nation came together at last for the first time in a millennium. That resulted in a nation which was easy for Hitler to rule. And the old traditions die hard; people still get together in rural Germany on Sunday afternoon to play marches. I just about jumped out of my skin one Sunday when they switched from "Alte Kameraden" to "Preussens Gloria" and going at it with a verve that you never hear on this side of the Puddle. I almost expected the old flags from the Kaiserzeit to come out and for the musicians to start goose-stepping, but, alas, such was not to be. At least it wasn't the "Badeweilermarsch"; that was Adolf's favourite. But the determination of the Germans NOT TO LOSE AGAIN goes back to the Thirty Years' War and that kind of memory dies hard.
During the Napoleonic Wars there was regular commerce, although greatly curtailed, between England and France and civilians could pass between the warring countries with comparatively little trouble even though both sides had some hideously unpleasant punishments for spies. And it was like that in most of the civilised world: the STATES might be at war, but the CIVILIANS were OUT OF IT. This attitude held through much of the 18th Century and through and into and during most of the 19th Century as well. It only began going sour for the British when they were embroiled in the Boer War, a war in which the enemy refused to put on a proper uniform and fight like gentlemen, preferring instead to use their superior hunting and marksmanship skills.... to WIN.
But the times were changing and the realisation was being made, at last, that in an all-out war of INDUSTRIAL States, industry itself became an immense factor in the outcome, as did the CIVILIANS who operated those industries. The process had begun of turning warfare back into a tribal endeavour. The atrocity PROPAGANDA of the Great War gave way in a couple of decades to the ATROCITIES of the Second World War, the privations of the TROOPS now being shared by the population at large. And so the Zeppelin over Lowestoft gave way to the Zeppelins over London which my grandparents watched being shot down and those gave way to the clouds of Heinkels just as the single Pup with its Lewis gave way to sky-darkening masses of Lancasters and Fortresses and when Hamburg was hit a bit too hard, it burned for almost a week: the first man-made firestorm in history. The second was at Dresden, the third at Tokyo. Industrial-scale production paved the way for industrial-scale destruction..... of cities, of industries, of factories, of the men who worked in them and of their homes and families.
Watch the first few minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" and you will see Germans attempting to surrender and being gunned down by Americans. Spielberg did not make that up. It happened. It happened on BOTH sides and in ALL armies. To be honest, though, it was restrained rather well in the Commonwealth forces, being kept to a retail level ("You with the Sten: take these 2 prisoners back to Division and be back here in 10 minutes. No, you can't have a Jeep; it's only eight miles.") rather than wholesale as at Malmedy. And all those belts of wooden-bulleted blanks did not help the guys running the '34s and '42s when it came time to play "Catch the Mills Bomb" with Tommy. But the propaganda machine is still running at top speed and the Second World War is the first war in history which has had its own particular brand of hate repeated and repeated and repeated for three generations after the shooting has stopped.
An instance at point is the universal condemnation of the Commissar Order given to German troops on the Eastern Front. By terms of the Order, all captured People's Commissars were subject to immediate execution. What people today do not understand is that this Order was nothing "anti-Semitic" or whatever, but good combat sense. The People's Commissars all were members of the Communist Party and all were a part of the NKVD, the Peoples' Commissariat for Internal Affairs. It was their JOB, a job for which they were TRAINED, to start and train and officer bands of Partizans BEHIND GERMAN LINES. But they were also CIVILIANS who would fight in Civilian clothes and who would NOT be bound by the Articles of War, the Hague Convention (which Imperial Russia had signed and the Soviets ignored) or the Geneva Protocols, which the Soviet Union had refused to sign. And that made them into Irregulars..... and Irregulars were to be shot..... and shot LEGALLY. If some of the Peoples' Commissars happened to be Jews, they were shot, but they were shot because they were Peoples' Commissars and thus Irregulars or Terrorists.
What ACTUALLY went on was horrid enough; it does not need to be made worse by misrepresentation, because then the TRUTH IS BURIED.
But when it came to Asia, all bets were off.
The Japanese behaved abominably, in a fashion unseen since Chingiz Khan. They deserved FAR more retribution than they ever got.
Watch "Apocalypse Now!" some time. Listen very carefully to Colonel Kurtz on the tape recorder.
It sounds amazingly brutal and vicious, but it is the ONLY way to fight an army WITHOUT EMPATHY OR ETHICS.
If it happens again, are we strong enough to DO IT again?
Or has endless political correctness and psychobabble finally emasculated us completely?
That was its original intent, you know: social engineering, brought to you during the Cold War by a Fifth Column made up of our very own political Left.
"Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
Understand exactly what you are saying.
Any war is an abomination but, for a while, we at least tried. In the Old Testament, Jehovah of the Thunders was pretty up-front about war, with all that delivering My enemies into thy hands and the dashing-out of infants' brains and so forth: nasty, filthy tribal warfare, kill the men and rape the women and kill all the men-children over 6 and all that.
Sheer brutality and ethnic cleansing. Good thing is that the archaeological record doesn't support it the way the religious books do. Bad part is that the books were written much closer to the time and likely there is more truth than propaganda in them.
With the rise of the national state and professional armies, we sort of got away from that for a few hundred years. Certainly, the armies of the Thirty Years' War plundered Germany mercilessly for 48 years: 3 generations, given the early marrying-age of the times. That resulted in a national terror of future military occupations...... and a glorification of national defence when the nation came together at last for the first time in a millennium. That resulted in a nation which was easy for Hitler to rule. And the old traditions die hard; people still get together in rural Germany on Sunday afternoon to play marches. I just about jumped out of my skin one Sunday when they switched from "Alte Kameraden" to "Preussens Gloria" and going at it with a verve that you never hear on this side of the Puddle. I almost expected the old flags from the Kaiserzeit to come out and for the musicians to start goose-stepping, but, alas, such was not to be. At least it wasn't the "Badeweilermarsch"; that was Adolf's favourite. But the determination of the Germans NOT TO LOSE AGAIN goes back to the Thirty Years' War and that kind of memory dies hard.
During the Napoleonic Wars there was regular commerce, although greatly curtailed, between England and France and civilians could pass between the warring countries with comparatively little trouble even though both sides had some hideously unpleasant punishments for spies. And it was like that in most of the civilised world: the STATES might be at war, but the CIVILIANS were OUT OF IT. This attitude held through much of the 18th Century and through and into and during most of the 19th Century as well. It only began going sour for the British when they were embroiled in the Boer War, a war in which the enemy refused to put on a proper uniform and fight like gentlemen, preferring instead to use their superior hunting and marksmanship skills.... to WIN.
But the times were changing and the realisation was being made, at last, that in an all-out war of INDUSTRIAL States, industry itself became an immense factor in the outcome, as did the CIVILIANS who operated those industries. The process had begun of turning warfare back into a tribal endeavour. The atrocity PROPAGANDA of the Great War gave way in a couple of decades to the ATROCITIES of the Second World War, the privations of the TROOPS now being shared by the population at large. And so the Zeppelin over Lowestoft gave way to the Zeppelins over London which my grandparents watched being shot down and those gave way to the clouds of Heinkels just as the single Pup with its Lewis gave way to sky-darkening masses of Lancasters and Fortresses and when Hamburg was hit a bit too hard, it burned for almost a week: the first man-made firestorm in history. The second was at Dresden, the third at Tokyo. Industrial-scale production paved the way for industrial-scale destruction..... of cities, of industries, of factories, of the men who worked in them and of their homes and families.
Watch the first few minutes of "Saving Private Ryan" and you will see Germans attempting to surrender and being gunned down by Americans. Spielberg did not make that up. It happened. It happened on BOTH sides and in ALL armies. To be honest, though, it was restrained rather well in the Commonwealth forces, being kept to a retail level ("You with the Sten: take these 2 prisoners back to Division and be back here in 10 minutes. No, you can't have a Jeep; it's only eight miles.") rather than wholesale as at Malmedy. And all those belts of wooden-bulleted blanks did not help the guys running the '34s and '42s when it came time to play "Catch the Mills Bomb" with Tommy. But the propaganda machine is still running at top speed and the Second World War is the first war in history which has had its own particular brand of hate repeated and repeated and repeated for three generations after the shooting has stopped.
An instance at point is the universal condemnation of the Commissar Order given to German troops on the Eastern Front. By terms of the Order, all captured People's Commissars were subject to immediate execution. What people today do not understand is that this Order was nothing "anti-Semitic" or whatever, but good combat sense. The People's Commissars all were members of the Communist Party and all were a part of the NKVD, the Peoples' Commissariat for Internal Affairs. It was their JOB, a job for which they were TRAINED, to start and train and officer bands of Partizans BEHIND GERMAN LINES. But they were also CIVILIANS who would fight in Civilian clothes and who would NOT be bound by the Articles of War, the Hague Convention (which Imperial Russia had signed and the Soviets ignored) or the Geneva Protocols, which the Soviet Union had refused to sign. And that made them into Irregulars..... and Irregulars were to be shot..... and shot LEGALLY. If some of the Peoples' Commissars happened to be Jews, they were shot, but they were shot because they were Peoples' Commissars and thus Irregulars or Terrorists.
What ACTUALLY went on was horrid enough; it does not need to be made worse by misrepresentation, because then the TRUTH IS BURIED.
But when it came to Asia, all bets were off.
The Japanese behaved abominably, in a fashion unseen since Chingiz Khan. They deserved FAR more retribution than they ever got.
Watch "Apocalypse Now!" some time. Listen very carefully to Colonel Kurtz on the tape recorder.
It sounds amazingly brutal and vicious, but it is the ONLY way to fight an army WITHOUT EMPATHY OR ETHICS.
If it happens again, are we strong enough to DO IT again?
Or has endless political correctness and psychobabble finally emasculated us completely?
That was its original intent, you know: social engineering, brought to you during the Cold War by a Fifth Column made up of our very own political Left.
"Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana
I know
I though it was a real picture lol, just compressed or something like that hahahaCheers
Joe
Well, since you asked O’Kelly’s Boys, my comment would be this: there is no equivalency between those who launch unprovoked wars of aggression against their neighbors and engage in systematic genocide, violate treaties they freely entered into and commit more atrocities than there are words in the dictionary. Nations who openly and deliberately spit in the face of every rule of warfare and human rights are nothing more than terrorist states and deserve no mercy. When you murder POWs in their millions by mass starvation you deserve nothing but the same. When you attempt to exterminate neighboring peoples so as to possess their lands, do you deserve the Geneva Convention?
I'll leave you with the words of Colonel General von Hammerstein-Equordt, who died of cancer in 1943. He was the only one of the German generals who openly stood up to Hitler to the extent of actually telling him to his face in the early 30s that in the event of an unconstitutional seizure of power he would use force against the Nazis. I'm going from memory here: "The behaviour of the army in the East (that is Eastern Europe and Russia) is a disgrace... I am sorry that I have ever worn the uniform....A nation and an army which has so lost all humanity deserves to be exterminated."
And Smellie, I’ll have to disagree with you about WWI atrocities being “propaganda”. The atrocities that occurred in Belgium and France, not to mention Turkey, are well-documented. From mass shootings of civilians as “reprisals”, systematic looting, burning of towns and villages for terroristic purposes, using civilians as human shields, murder of POWs, mass deportations of civilians for forced labour, stripping of industrial regions, systematic destruction of infrastructure on retreat...all of the same sort of stuff you see in WWII.
The Thirty Years War? Instead of being a causative factor of the national psychology don’t you think it is more likely a symptom?! If it was not a symptom, then what gave rise to the psychology it demonstrated? No, it goes back much further than that IMO.
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In retrospect I could have been more tactful with my retort.So to any and all that have taken offence at my bluntness I humbly apologize.I stand rebuked....
No, you were right... you just kinda said it wrong
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@RRCo:
I'm not so sure about the Great War atrocities; if anything, they were overblown to the extreme. Problem was that the War Correspondents needed to file lines daily but the military wouldn';t let them anywhere near the Front because it was moving so rapidly and unpredictably. The Warcos then sat in a couple of bars and held a competition to see who could get the most-atrocious atrocity-story actually printed and the the typewriter keys began to heat up. In actual truth, there was a photograph printed in "The Illustrated War News", first half of 1915 IIRC, of the German military commander receiving a citation from the Mayor of Brussels for the fine conduct of the German Army in its occupation of the city. In England, the Ponsonby Commission was set up to get to the bottom of the atrocity-story scandal; it resulted in the issuance of a joint APOLOGY from the House of Commons and the House of Lords..... to the Imperial German Army. One case which they brought forward was the fact that a Belgian woman had been raped by 3 German soldiers; they were shot the following morning by their own Regiment. But there were no "buckets full of soldiers' eyes", no thousands of Belgian babies with their hands chopped off, nor were there enough Nuns serial-raped to provide a rousing choir for Heaven Itself.
ALL FILTHY PROPAGANDA.
The really ugly part is this: THE TRUTH WAS HORRID ENOUGH.
I made a study of Great War atrocity propaganda many years ago. Likely it is still on file at U of M in Graduate Studies/History. Working from the only existing COMPLETE set of the "Brandon Sun", I charted atrocity propaganda during the course of the Great War. And here is a potted version of what I discovered: atrocity propaganda began about 10 days BEFORE Austria-Hungary ever set foot on Serbian soil, reached screaming proportions when the King announced a state of war with the Central Powers and remained at that pitch until after the First Contingent had sailed, fell off and then went UP again at the time of Second Ypres and Givenchy, tapered off, back UP after the next bloodbath at the Front, tapered off, back UP...... You get the idea. Whenever more manpower was needed for the Sausage Machine, the atrocity-tales were trotted out again.
I knew a number of Great War veterans and not one of them ever mentioned line-ups of nuns being raped, thousands of babies with no hands, battlefields littered with eyeless corpses. Nor did the German "CORPSE FACTORY" for rendering down the dead for glycerine to make explosives ever exist, nor did the ubiquitous Crucified Canadian so beloved of the mass media.
What Johnny Canuck and Tommy Atkins felt for Fritz was, if anything, respect for a tough and worthy opponent who was "there" for the same reason they were "there": because he was ordered to be there. What Fritz felt for our guys was much the same. My old friend Jack Snow was taken prisoner at Monchy-le-Preuex, was held by the Germans until the end of the War (apart from a 5-month vacation in sunny Russia).... and did not have a word to say against the German Army itself, only against a couple of individuals who you and I likely would class as first-class ar$eholes. They shackled him when he was captured, yes, but that was a part of "strict regime" as a protest against reports the Germans had of their guys being shackled in our camps. And this was EXPLAINED to Jack by the German officer and it was emphasized that the treatment was NOT personal. The 10 days of bread-and-water diet was ameliorated by the fact that they could have as much bread as they could eat: definitely better than what the German Army was getting at that stage of the war. When finally at Heilsburg in Ostpreussen, he was sent out to an estate to do farm work. He was PAID half a Mark a day in silver, Sunday was a day of rest...... and the Camp Commandant didn't really mind if Jack and his buddies "escaped" from the camp on Saturday night, just so long as they spent their pay at the Commandant's pub and were back in the Camp for Sunday Appel. Jack used at least part of the time to obtain working knowledges of German, Polish and Russian, bits of which he kept for a 65-year lifetime after the War was finished.
I am not saying that ugly things did not occur. What I am saying is that men at that time treated each other with more respect and decency than would have been seemly had they undergone 6 years of demonisation of their putative "enemies" beforehand.
As to the rest of the charges you make, I would really like to see some proof of it having occurred in the West.
In the Turkish war, yes, atrocities did occur. Lawrence documents several in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", ones in which he had personal involvement. At Gallipoli, entire British units disappeared and their graves, if ever they had any, still are not known. Whatever else may have happened in that far-flung war I do not know. I know only what I have read and what I was told by the men who were there.
On the Eastern Front, ANYTHING could have happened..... and likely did happen. Certainly, there was enough wholesale slaughter of prisoners and murder of civilians after the Bolsheviks became involved. The reason my friend Jack turned back to give himself up to the retreating Germans, only a few miles from Smolensk ("Tar-town", believe it or not) was that he and his Irish and Scots companions had encountered a Priest who mutely told them that they were no longer safe. The Priest was dressed in his ecclesiastical robes, hanging from a telegraph pole, gutted alive and with his "works" stuffed into his mouth. The Bolsheviks REALLY did not approve of the Church.
As to the Thirty Years' War, the fighting actually lasted 48 years. It was a horrific furball and EVERYBODY was involved. Every Army in Europe, in the total absence of modern supply channels, lived for 48 years by plundering and raiding Germany, which was a collection of more than 360 tiny countries, none of them big enough to field a decent army to combat, for example, the Swedes. So the war was HELD IN Germany, but the Germans were the VICTIMS. For the most part, they didn't fight: they simply became the victims of whatever Army might be raiding their lands at any particular time. If THAT did not have an effect upon the German people, then do you have an alternative?
In much the same manner, back in the late 1950s/early 1960s, it was said that the Americans and the Russians were ready to fight to the last Canadian. That idea scared a LOT of people. Some of us have been arguing for a national Militia, locally-based and armed to the teeth, ever since.
I'm not so sure about the Great War atrocities; if anything, they were overblown to the extreme. Problem was that the War Correspondents needed to file lines daily but the military wouldn';t let them anywhere near the Front because it was moving so rapidly and unpredictably. The Warcos then sat in a couple of bars and held a competition to see who could get the most-atrocious atrocity-story actually printed and the the typewriter keys began to heat up. In actual truth, there was a photograph printed in "The Illustrated War News", first half of 1915 IIRC, of the German military commander receiving a citation from the Mayor of Brussels for the fine conduct of the German Army in its occupation of the city. In England, the Ponsonby Commission was set up to get to the bottom of the atrocity-story scandal; it resulted in the issuance of a joint APOLOGY from the House of Commons and the House of Lords..... to the Imperial German Army. One case which they brought forward was the fact that a Belgian woman had been raped by 3 German soldiers; they were shot the following morning by their own Regiment. But there were no "buckets full of soldiers' eyes", no thousands of Belgian babies with their hands chopped off, nor were there enough Nuns serial-raped to provide a rousing choir for Heaven Itself.
ALL FILTHY PROPAGANDA.
The really ugly part is this: THE TRUTH WAS HORRID ENOUGH.
I made a study of Great War atrocity propaganda many years ago. Likely it is still on file at U of M in Graduate Studies/History. Working from the only existing COMPLETE set of the "Brandon Sun", I charted atrocity propaganda during the course of the Great War. And here is a potted version of what I discovered: atrocity propaganda began about 10 days BEFORE Austria-Hungary ever set foot on Serbian soil, reached screaming proportions when the King announced a state of war with the Central Powers and remained at that pitch until after the First Contingent had sailed, fell off and then went UP again at the time of Second Ypres and Givenchy, tapered off, back UP after the next bloodbath at the Front, tapered off, back UP...... You get the idea. Whenever more manpower was needed for the Sausage Machine, the atrocity-tales were trotted out again.
I knew a number of Great War veterans and not one of them ever mentioned line-ups of nuns being raped, thousands of babies with no hands, battlefields littered with eyeless corpses. Nor did the German "CORPSE FACTORY" for rendering down the dead for glycerine to make explosives ever exist, nor did the ubiquitous Crucified Canadian so beloved of the mass media.
What Johnny Canuck and Tommy Atkins felt for Fritz was, if anything, respect for a tough and worthy opponent who was "there" for the same reason they were "there": because he was ordered to be there. What Fritz felt for our guys was much the same. My old friend Jack Snow was taken prisoner at Monchy-le-Preuex, was held by the Germans until the end of the War (apart from a 5-month vacation in sunny Russia).... and did not have a word to say against the German Army itself, only against a couple of individuals who you and I likely would class as first-class ar$eholes. They shackled him when he was captured, yes, but that was a part of "strict regime" as a protest against reports the Germans had of their guys being shackled in our camps. And this was EXPLAINED to Jack by the German officer and it was emphasized that the treatment was NOT personal. The 10 days of bread-and-water diet was ameliorated by the fact that they could have as much bread as they could eat: definitely better than what the German Army was getting at that stage of the war. When finally at Heilsburg in Ostpreussen, he was sent out to an estate to do farm work. He was PAID half a Mark a day in silver, Sunday was a day of rest...... and the Camp Commandant didn't really mind if Jack and his buddies "escaped" from the camp on Saturday night, just so long as they spent their pay at the Commandant's pub and were back in the Camp for Sunday Appel. Jack used at least part of the time to obtain working knowledges of German, Polish and Russian, bits of which he kept for a 65-year lifetime after the War was finished.
I am not saying that ugly things did not occur. What I am saying is that men at that time treated each other with more respect and decency than would have been seemly had they undergone 6 years of demonisation of their putative "enemies" beforehand.
As to the rest of the charges you make, I would really like to see some proof of it having occurred in the West.
In the Turkish war, yes, atrocities did occur. Lawrence documents several in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom", ones in which he had personal involvement. At Gallipoli, entire British units disappeared and their graves, if ever they had any, still are not known. Whatever else may have happened in that far-flung war I do not know. I know only what I have read and what I was told by the men who were there.
On the Eastern Front, ANYTHING could have happened..... and likely did happen. Certainly, there was enough wholesale slaughter of prisoners and murder of civilians after the Bolsheviks became involved. The reason my friend Jack turned back to give himself up to the retreating Germans, only a few miles from Smolensk ("Tar-town", believe it or not) was that he and his Irish and Scots companions had encountered a Priest who mutely told them that they were no longer safe. The Priest was dressed in his ecclesiastical robes, hanging from a telegraph pole, gutted alive and with his "works" stuffed into his mouth. The Bolsheviks REALLY did not approve of the Church.
As to the Thirty Years' War, the fighting actually lasted 48 years. It was a horrific furball and EVERYBODY was involved. Every Army in Europe, in the total absence of modern supply channels, lived for 48 years by plundering and raiding Germany, which was a collection of more than 360 tiny countries, none of them big enough to field a decent army to combat, for example, the Swedes. So the war was HELD IN Germany, but the Germans were the VICTIMS. For the most part, they didn't fight: they simply became the victims of whatever Army might be raiding their lands at any particular time. If THAT did not have an effect upon the German people, then do you have an alternative?
In much the same manner, back in the late 1950s/early 1960s, it was said that the Americans and the Russians were ready to fight to the last Canadian. That idea scared a LOT of people. Some of us have been arguing for a national Militia, locally-based and armed to the teeth, ever since.
I don't want to get into a big debate (like we seem to be having) about atrocities committed by Allied and Axis soldiers during WW1 or WW2; or French soldiers in Algeria or Indochina; or Americans in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan or Arabs, Israelis, or Soviets in....etc, etc, etc. I could cite references to backup my statements as I too read books and watch documentaries. I also have personal experience with a civilian relative (my uncle) 'disappearing' in war.
This is a picture thread and I for one would like to keep it that way. Perhaps we need a political discussion forum like Gunboards and War Relics have.
But I, for one (and I suspect others), am getting tired of the lack of respect, childlessness and lack of civility that rears up here on CGN. I've noticed the absence of a number of participants over the years and have corresponded with one extremely knowledgeable and previously frequent CGN poster about his absence and he told me he got fed up and left.
If this keeps up we all lose as there are plenty of other forums to participate in where such behaviour is not tolerated and is dealt with by the moderators.
This is a picture thread and I for one would like to keep it that way. Perhaps we need a political discussion forum like Gunboards and War Relics have.
But I, for one (and I suspect others), am getting tired of the lack of respect, childlessness and lack of civility that rears up here on CGN. I've noticed the absence of a number of participants over the years and have corresponded with one extremely knowledgeable and previously frequent CGN poster about his absence and he told me he got fed up and left.
If this keeps up we all lose as there are plenty of other forums to participate in where such behaviour is not tolerated and is dealt with by the moderators.
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Dark Alley Dan
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
- Location
- Darkest Edmonton
Yanks, I think. In France, perhaps?
Fugawi, I agree with you.
I would LOVE this to be a good Pictures thread (as it has been for a long time now).
My problem is people who read too many books written by revisionists who didn't need to revise in the first place.
Reality is bad enough; we don't need to trash it up with poorly-written denunciations backed by far too little research. Anyone who claims to know something about atrocities in the Great War SHOULD have known about the Ponsonby Commission; it has been public knowledge since 1922. I mean, really I CAN'T be the first person in 50 years to have researched this..... and then nobody after me for the next 40????????
A quote from that great American philosopher/historian/visionary Fox Mulder: "The truth is out there...."
Sorry for being suckered in, guys.
Have to come up with some REAL good pics for this......
I would LOVE this to be a good Pictures thread (as it has been for a long time now).
My problem is people who read too many books written by revisionists who didn't need to revise in the first place.
Reality is bad enough; we don't need to trash it up with poorly-written denunciations backed by far too little research. Anyone who claims to know something about atrocities in the Great War SHOULD have known about the Ponsonby Commission; it has been public knowledge since 1922. I mean, really I CAN'T be the first person in 50 years to have researched this..... and then nobody after me for the next 40????????
A quote from that great American philosopher/historian/visionary Fox Mulder: "The truth is out there...."
Sorry for being suckered in, guys.
Have to come up with some REAL good pics for this......
Na we will make sure this is always a good thread
Cheers
Joe
As always Joe...very classy if you don't mind a "trolls" opinion.
Cool pic. Exercise or action? I can't figure out how someone could fight with a full pack on, and would assume that those rucks would have been dropped if things were actually..."ON"?
As always Joe...very classy if you don't mind a "trolls" opinion.
Cool pic. Exercise or action? I can't figure out how someone could fight with a full pack on, and would assume that those rucks would have been dropped if things were actually..."ON"?
If they were attacking to take and hold ground they would have packs on. Part of the problem of thge Somme was that the British were so weighed down by their packs that they had to walk across the kill zones of the 'Huns'. Add the that some good sticky mud, and nobody will be charging an MG nest too quickly.
Love the KV2! It looks like every 5 year old's drawing of a tank. I read once that if the the hull sat on an angle of much more than 5 degrees, the turret wouldn't turn. Partly due to poor quality bearings, partly due to massive weight. One of these tanks held up an entire German division for two days!
