In my grandfathers last days, he began telling us around him some of his memories from his time in the European Theater, he was a frontline NCO in the Army--he had never spoken about it before according to my Grandmother and aunt. We believe he was asking the lord to forgive him for the sins in his life. We also believe he wanted his family to know how he became the man he was. My Grams said he was a very different man when he came back at the end of WW2.
He had some pretty horrifying stories, but the one which had us all in complete shock was when he described some of the things they did to get information for captured enemy. He said they would take them in groups of four or five, and line them up according to rank. Then starting at the lowest rank, ask them questions, if that first soldier, who likely didn't know squat, hesitated or didn't/couldn't answer, they would execute him right there and move to the next in line. He said that usually, the ranking soldier would start blurting out answers, right then, but sometimes would hold out till the 2nd was killed. He said that was the worst thing he ever had to do in his life, and that he's seen those faces in his dreams ever since.
He also said participated in hunting down Nazi officers and party officials for a few months after, and said they ended up executing some of them as well.
Heh, I had to look back, didn’t realize this was an older thread...
This, to me, is one of the most odious aspects of human warfare, and one of the saddest.
I have heard it said that in war, the people who are most affected by it mentally are people who have a degree of sensitivity. I forget where I read it (Possibly “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa”) but he said that less sensitive people weathered the terrible things they had to do with less mental trauma and seemed to skate through it, and people who had a degree of sensitivity were more vulnerable to emotional trauma, which makes a lot of sense to me.
My heart goes out to good men who have had to do things in war to survive (such as shooting prisoners, because there was no way to process them in the middle of a battle and they couldn’t let them go) and they live with that the rest of their lives. Or men who became so unsensitized in the middle of it all that they stopped feeling anything about human life or individuals they fought against, then when they are released from it and the war ends, they come back to reality and they suffer with it.
Good men who suffer because of it. It breaks my heart.
It is one of the reasons I try so hard to reserve judgement on soldiers in warfare unless it is clearly a heinous or sadistic act.
Many men came back from WWII as changed men. My dad was on a destroyer out in the Pacific near the end of the war, and for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t go into water deeper than his knees. We used to joke about it, but after he passed, I wondered if he had seen something that gave him that aversion to swimming. I know that he knew how to swim, but he never even went into the swimming pool he had built, beyond getting his legs wet.
Thank you for your post. It made me contemplate this kind of thing.