Posted on 05/09/2005 8:24:48 AM PDT by metesky
NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade. Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: The Good War.
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called beautiful national legends. By we I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
The rapes of the Red Army are a fact, a stone cold fact. Sure its embarrassing years later, but it happened.
Who was the one leader pre-war to have stood up to Hitler, and actually forced him to stand down?
The Pacific War was a take-no-prisoners affair from the get go. Both sides understood that.
The bombing of downtown Rotterdam was a mistake from confused orders, as was the initial bombing of civilian portions of London. Churchill, OTOH, ordered a deliberate attack on the citizenry of Berlin and then many other cities, with eager help from Bomber Harris. And the Allied attacks were not simply dropping bombs here and there, but the purposeful use of incindiary devices to create fire storms to destroy the city being attacked.
Its difficult to see the moral or historical difference between such bombing campaigns against civilians and the gas chambers, except that one side won and the other lost.
What a pile of stinking crap. He uses some truths to couch his lies about the war.
The Japanese Bushido did not allow for surrender. The Bushido code also dictated that an enemy who surrendered was dishonorable and not worthy of consideration. The Japanese were wholly unlike the Germans. The Japanese would shoot medics, they killed the injured, they were not at all humane. They even cannibalized captured Americans. They killed millions of Chinese in a horrid holocaust of death and rape and slavery that makes the works of the Nazis pale in comparison.
And we nuked them twice. Too freaking bad.
During the war the Germans quite often demonstrated mercy and civilized behaviors that were wholly absent the Japanese. They did not shoot medics and there were many incidents in which US & German medical units worked together to save people.
And while the Germans were great soldiers, they were defeated in many operations by Allied units that were less than the equal of the Germans in supplies and numbers. The Japanese-American 442nd regiment routinely took on German positions of greater strength.
And it is not a "fairy tale" that the Russians went on an orgy of rape and pillage in Germany. They raped and pillaged their way though the Baltic states, Poland, Prussia, and then Germany and Austria. And let us not forget that the damnable stinking French declared a three day 'plundering right' in the French sector of Germany where they raped, murdered, and pillaged with the same ferocity as the Russians. The French in Mannheim ranged afield and tried to enter Heidelberg to continue their atrocities and Patton put an end to that.
But the Japanese? They got no mercy during the war because they GAVE no mercy. Japan deserved far more retaliation than they received and post-war Japanese knew this. It is the latter-day generations who were taught that the USA started the war and bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki without provokation who are confused about the facts of the war.
And the moron who wrote this article.
'You think Ill weep for scores of thousands of women and children?"
Agreed, but boy, did I get flamed on an earlier thread/post about the Russian gang rapes for making the same point. I hope you fare better than I.
I've started noticing an undercurrent of Nazi sympathy...or at least more of a tone of "It wasn't really the citizens' fault" or "they had no choice but to follow orders" crap on the History Channel lately. I find it unsettling.
"I wonder for how long I will have to hear this dirty fairytale."
Just don't make the mistake I made, which was to say "Oh well - war is hell" in relation to this dirty fairytale. I got roasted in an earlier thread about Russian Gang Rapes for not feeling awful about the poor Nazi citizens. Apparently, the time frame for "NEVER FORGET" is only 60 years or so for a few posters here...
"With these truths in mind, this most holy synod makes its own the condemnations of total war already pronounced by recent popes,[2] and issues the following declaration.
"Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation. "
This quote is from a document called "The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World." It comes from the last (Catholic) Ecumenical Council and has the form of a teaching which is solemn and universal.
I quote it here, not because I think you have any particular ties to the Catholic Church (I don't even know you) but because anyone with any ties to "God" or "man himself" ought to seriously consider the moral evaluation of an act which indiscriminately kills noncombatants.
There are very few acts that can't ever be justified by context, pretext or precedent. The deliberate taking of an innocent life is one.
It doesn't matter whether something similar or 1000 times worse was done to you beforehand. It doesn't matter whether it's done by abortion, a bomb, or a baseball bat. It doesn't matter whether you think it'll have good consequences. It doesn't matter whether it's soon covered over with rubble or flowers or a brand-spanking-new city, democracy, free enterprise, and peace.
It's still putting your crosshairs on the innocent and pulling the trigger. It's still murder.
" Stalin was an active partner with Hitler."
He was also a paranoid, delusional lunatic who went out of his away to ignore the intelligence advice of his officers, most often with disastrous results for his troops.
1) The Nazis were right to start the war in Europe. They were the Good Guys. It's a shame they lost.
2) The Japanese were right to start the war in the Pacific. They were the Good Guys. It's a shame they lost.
3) The Allies responded when attacked. They were the Good Guys. I'm glad we won.
4) Despite all my reading on WWII, I have not yet figured out who the Good Guys were. Could have been the Nazis. Could have been us. Who's to say?
I choose Option #3.
I take it you choose option #4?
Hard to argue with an objective fact, but I'm sure some will try.
They are higher. Soviet troops who retreated were machine-gunned by Commissars who stayed behind them. It was go forward or die.
On the Soviet side, there were probably more machine guns pointed at Russians than Germans.
That's moronic. The Germans had war industry in those cities. The Jews weren't exactly making B-24's in the ghettos.
The American Army Air Corp conducted daylight raids against factories and other military targets to try to spare as much non combatant damage as possible. Bomber Harris thought that the US was insane for not killing as many "Huns" as possible, and the RAF mainly operated at night against whole cities. That is why Harris was not very welled liked among his peers of the time.
In the eastern theater, the US firebombed Japanese cities. The death toll was higher in those attacks than in the two atomic bombings. In a culture of wood and paper houses, a few napalm bombs caused a firestorm.
Targeting of civilians is a dirty way to fight, no matter who did it. I can't really blame either of the Allied commanders for doing it though. They were under enormous pressure and probably felt it was them or us.
Intentionally targeting civilian non combatants is wrong. War is never "good" but can be just. WWII in the end was a just war because if Germany hadn't been stopped, there is no telling just what would have happened.
The better question is would WWII happened if we (the US) stayed out of WWI?
"The deliberate taking of an innocent life is one. "
Even so-called "collateral damage"?
The RAF operated an night because it saved bombers from being shot down.
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