Posted on 05/24/2014 6:01:46 AM PDT by Kaslin
Strange, the once obscure villages that war makes unforgettable, forever resonant with the echoes of battle. Gettysburg. Hastings. Lexington and Concord. The fate of nations, and of freedom, was determined by what happened at such places. And their names became indelible. So it is with the names of massacres, too, names soaked in blood and shame. Names like Fort Pillow. That was the Union post in Tennessee just north of Memphis where black troops wearing the uniform of the United States Army were slaughtered. It wouldn't be the first time.
It happened in 1944, too. In the middle of the Battle of the Bulge, the last great German offensive of the war that took the Allies completely by surprise. Having finally broken out of the hedgerows in France, encountered bridges too far and advances suddenly turned into retreats, now the Allied armies were poised on the edge of victory by Christmas. It lay just across the Rhine.
And then ... the panzers were everywhere. The bulge in the Allied lines had erupted, whole divisions were broken and scattered, the outcome of the war itself was in doubt. The front was collapsing.
Then came Malmedy. A lightly armed American convoy trying to escape the rout was captured by the SS near that village, the GIs collected in an open field, and then ... mowed down by machine-gun fire.
When American forces regained the initiative and returned a month later, they would find 84 frozen bodies under the snow. But word of the atrocity had spread within hours of the massacre. And so did the rage. All along Allied lines. And back home, too. The mask of the enemy had been torn away, the evil underneath it revealed. It wasn't necessary to put the order in writing: Take no prisoners. A fever for vengeance took hold, and would have to run its course before it abated.
Who could forget Malmedy?
But who now remembers Wereth? That's the little hamlet where a small detachment of the redoubtable 333rd Field Artillery Battalion had taken refuge. The 333rd, an all-black outfit in those Jim Crow days, had fought its way across northern Europe since D-Day, only to be caught in the Bulge along with the rest of VIII Corps. The detachment had been part of the two batteries left behind to cover the American retreat when the front collapsed.
Mathias and Maria Langer hid the fleeing Americans in their farmhouse, but an informant told the SS about them. The 11 Americans were taken prisoner and marched off. To a small, muddy field where they were shot, but not before being tortured and maimed. Legs were broken, skulls crushed, fingers cut off. Their ordeal must have lasted for the better part of a day; the Americans had become playthings to be torn apart for the amusement of sadists. The 99th Infantry Division would find only their broken remains when it entered the village a month later. Then the Wereth Eleven were pretty much forgotten.
Till half a century later. That's when Hermann Langer, the son of Mathias and Maria, would put up a cross at the site of the Forgotten Massacre. His sister Tina said he was haunted by the memory of the GIs being taken from the farmhouse, and was determined to commemorate the massacre. A decade later, the Belgians would erect a stone monument on the site. They remembered.
Let the country whose uniform these American soldiers remember them, too, on this Memorial Day.
They came from Mississippi and Texas and South Carolina and West Virginia and Texas and Alabama ... and one of them was from Arkansas: PFC Due W. Turner, 38383369, lies buried at Henri-Chapelle, Plot F Row 5 Grave 9. He's officially listed as a native of Columbia County, Arkansas, but last time I looked at the Columbia County Courthouse website, with its picture of the county's monument to its war veterans, there's still an empty space under the list of World War II veterans inscribed there. Let it be filled with the name
Due W. Turner
“I, for one, will never forgive the Germans or trust them. As far as I know, the Germans have never asked the world’s forgiveness or apologized. They still owe the civilized world, basically the Allies, bigtime.”
You cannot forgive them if you weren’t the injured party anyway. Anyone who wants to hold that part of history against the perpetrators is fine by me; holding their grandchildren responsible for it is absurd & immoral. Any conversation about “owing” should take into account the debt the Germans incurred from WWI; it played no small role in bringing about WWII. The Allies felt they were “owed” something by Germany after WWI - how did that work out? A continent divided between fascism and communism...
I've lived in Germany as an adult for 3 years. Their self-abasement has gone so far its unhealthy. Saying that Germany and Germans have contributed to civilization is verboten. Germany is the root of all evil and any sign of patriotism is denounced. This is sick. And it was sick when I first experienced it in 1975.
But in doing so you accept the possibility that you will be killed, which is what happened.
And the repeated offer of surrender is not just nothing. It changes the moral logic. Did the Germans who machine gunned the lifeboats offer the possibility of surrender first? I'll bet not. Therefore Forrest is not like the Germans.
And unlike Malmedy it wasn't a case of slaughtering prisoners.
So I guess I'm not sure you have a point.
A lot of mythology has been printed about Sand Creek.
Many years ago TIME-LIFE published a series of books on the Westward expansion and republished these myths as facts, completely ignoring that those “facts” had been disproven over a hundred years before by government investigation.
The US Army was thrilled with what happened at Sand Creek, but Chivington became a disliked figure by the Army, not because of the massacre but because he did not kill as many Indians there as he reported he did.
The Indian Wars of 1864 by Lt Ware.
You accept the possibility that you will be killed in action, but not that you will be simply murdered.
And unlike Malmedy it wasn't a case of slaughtering prisoners
It actually depends on the motivation. If Forrest shot those men only because they were trying to escape, then Fort Pillow wasn't like Malmedy.
But if Forrest shot them because they had earlier refused to surrender, or because they were Negro troops, then yep, it was a Malmedy.
I suppose it boils down to this: did Forrest order the shooting of the men who had surrendered and weren't trying to escape? To this day, that question is being debated.
Trying to escape to fight another day is an action.
If they weren’t prisoners, then nope, it wasn’t a Malmedy.
If Forrest ordered the shooting the men who had surrendered then of course that changes everything.
the men = of men
They also became fast allies. Learned our form of government. learned our industrial methods. And beat us fair and square in the electronics industry!
Gee. That sound like the US under obama and the MSM...
Not true.
The military was fully segregated from the Civil War through WWII, with black outfits (almost) entirely led by white officers.
Black Jack Pershing of WWI fame received his name because of his service with 10th Cavalry, one of the Buffalo Soldier black regiments.
Oddly, we had many mixed regiments during our Revolution.
Sand Creek was done by Colorado Militia volunteers, not regular US Army troops.
Of late, I’ve read several books about Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. “Son Of The Morning Star” and several others. In those books, the authors do not omit or attempt to rationalize the savage practices of the Plains Indians towards their enemies. I wish those books could be standard reading in college history courses...even though a few of them are obviously biased towards the Indians.
My dad said that his Light Cruiser spent about 90 minutes trying to talk some Japanese survivors to surrender and come on board, but with no success, so they machine gunned them and got back under way.
I get annoyed when people make fun of the 7th Cavalry, because they were American GIs fighting for us, and I usually ask how the American POWs were treated by the victors in that battle, as people so enthusiastically praise the Indians as the good guys and almost heroes.
Same reason Kit Carson wasn’t?
...and they smelled of elderberry...
--Hobbs
War is Hell!
That is correct.
I’m unclear on how this makes a difference relative to the vast majority of Union forces at the time, which were also volunteers, not regulars.
Yep, there you go. War is hell. You do your due diligence and let the chips fall.
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