I also bought, but haven't yet read "Terrible Victory: First Canadian Army and the Scheldt Estuary (Holland) Campaign: September 13 - November 6, 1944" by Mark Zuehlke. The Scheldt area was near where my father was born in 1904. Although my father had already come to the U.S. in 1912 with his brothers and their parents, I visited the area in 2006, and wanted to get a better understanding of the Canadians' struggles to liberate that area from the Nazis. My father's village of Schoondijke, was destroyed by allied bombing during the war. About the only thing that was still standing once the war ended, was the windmill, which I got to see on my visit. The family that owned it during the war, hid downed allied pilots, and helped them get back to allied lines.
R W Thompson’s ‘The 85 Days’ published in 1957 presents a clear combat narrative of the fighting to open the poer of Antwerp. Thompson was an outstanding and honest correspondent who was a participant in the Schelde fighting and he writes without a lot of hammy good war posturing.
It’s worse than that. Among the first things they did, was start dosing everybody at the CIA with L.S.D., also lots of aerial tests of other chemical and bioweapons. Prisoners, and university students, the military, patrons of prostitutes, vagrants, etc. They burned all the records, conveniently, for much of their activities by the 1970s.
Another curious “development”, a coincidence no doubt, was the rise of “trauma based” conditioning brainwashing techniques. The lunatics “over there” discovered that one way to really mess with people, to reshape someone completely, is to rape and torture children and younger people.
Get people to completely divorce themselves from everything they had been taught about morals, right and wrong, everything.
This is a big contributor to the rise of Cult based behavior - a notable example being the Manson gang. Chuck was actually a pretty smart guy in some ways, for someone with no formal education after grade school to speak of. But he had help, he didn’t figure out all those techniques by himself, never in a million years. And he used trauma based conditioning in every facet possible. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” meets “Church of Satan”.