Posted on 05/16/2004 3:26:48 PM PDT by plato99
And your pint is? WWII was a bloody mess, had lots of botched stuff happening, why bother with this bit of still unacknowledged history? Other than making the US look bad because there was live ammo rather than dummy , what is the purpose? This is meaningless to the living as well as the dead. These soldiers died in a valiant effort to defeat the Axus powers why diminsh that with this?
I forgot about that. With no gas pressure built up in the rifle barrel from firing a live bullet, the blank wouldn't give enough pressure to automatically reload the next round.
read both of PFs books dealing with wwII, and sledge's "with the old breed."
But I've also been in the army, and fired blanks. And I call bullshit.
If it was on "TV" then it must be true.
You are right. It was also gas-operated as was that other great WWII infantry weapon the BAR.
My analysis: British civilians created this rumor and repeated it to themselves to explain all the deaths from the hushed-up E-Boat attack.
If dozens were "guilty" of killing scores of our own some vets would have talked by now.
More and more I feel a relic of a dead age, and I'm only 45!
War is HELL! Shite happens! The frustration of the Men involved must have been unspeakable but that's the way anything involving imperfect humans can go. The need to get this out is, I suspect, a modern thing. Hell, didn't Churchill let some 5,000 Brit troops go to their deaths rather than save them and thus let the Germans know that their code was cracked? War is Hell--there is nothing else to say.
LOL. In this case I think there was a massive mistake. I remember little about it but they interviewed some old locals and many supposedly wouldn't talk about it. If this article is right it does freak me out that someone could be moronic enough not to be able to tell live ammo from blanks, especially since you need to mount something on the end of the bore so the semi and auto actions will work. In the special I thought it was artillery fire that killed them.
Don't sell yourself short. :-)
I don't think this will hold water. Sure maybe someone fired back at the surprising Germans and in the confusion there was some friendly fire hits(provided someone had live rounds), it's possible but I don't believe it is to the degree this story states. That many people couldn't have had live ammo and not known it quicker.
Nightly newspeople would be in sackcloth throwing ashes over themselves...
yeah, and the committee should have had a Republican majority as the Pres. was a Democrat(Roosevelt)---people today are so full of bullshit, it makes me laugh my ass off---ww2 vet
Actually, I would say this is the legacy of Hitler and Stalin. WWII was so horrible (what? 60 million dead?) the civilized (note I say civilized) world said never again. Unfortunately it seems it was a unilateral statement. Korea was nasty, so was Viet Nam but I would be safe in saying that we have never prosecuted a war in the last 60 years like WWII. And look at the outcomes:
1 stalemate
1 lost due to fighting with one arm tied behind our back and a mispeception laid upon the American public by the Alphabets,
1 won , well kinda because we had to go back 10 years later to finish the job, and the jury is still out on this one
If you want to call Grenada and Panama wins, well they were more police actions. If we really wanted to clean up the sewer in Latin America, well why have we let the flea infested Castro survive for 40 freaking years. Now we have another cancer in our hemisphere and , guess what, we will let it grow.
Now, I am sure someone will bring up we won the Cold War, but honestly, it sounds romantic to say we won it, but did not Russia really lose it more than us winning it.
This may sound like a negative screed, but I am just pointing out that because of Hitler's and Stalin's horrors in WWII, (even though the leftists throw out Hiroshima more than Hitler in their anti-war diatribes),I do not know if a war to save civilization can ever again be allowed by the politician, media, leftists et al, to be prosecuted the way it needs to be.
Also having experience with BFAs and having fired lots of blank and live ammunition, I agree. You'd have to be a complete imbecile not to know the difference.
The Browning .30 cals are recoil operated. They need one of these:
screwed onto the muzzle, as well as a cartridge stop installed in the feed mechanism.
It is highly improbable that a soldier trained enough to get and keep the weapon firing would not know he is firing live ammo.
I expect to read this headline any day now: Democrats Outraged that GWB and Rumsfeld Did Nothing to Stop Friendly-Fire Disaster!
Should say they need that adapter to fire balnks.
You don't need a Bachelor of Science degree to call this bravo sierra. Isn't the Guardian a hardcore leftwing rag?
The movie was "The Best Years of Our Lives" I think.
That movie was called "The Best Years of Our Lives", directed by William Wyler, and starred Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, and Hoagy Carmichael. Harold Russell was the double amputee vet and received 2 Oscars, one for best supporting actor and a special Oscar for giving hope to disabled vets. Looked it up on Yahoo when you mentioned it. Saw it (on TV!) as a kid and remembered being impressed .
Blu, ya beat me to it!
By the numbers and the black granite panels I believe you're referring to the Vietnam War. The lower number that you refer to as "friendly fire" is in the ball park of what I remember being described as "non-combat fatalities" which included un-intentional friendly fire, intentional friendly fire including the "fragging" of officers(aka murder), deaths with medical causes, e.g. appendicitis, motor vehicle accidents, accidental drownings, aircraft accidents, etc. I remember an accident in 1972 with a CH-47 losing one of its rotors, coming off by mechanical failure. About 40 soldiers died.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.