quote:

Originally posted by TigerDore:

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Originally posted by sigfreund:
...violation of the law of warfare as agreed to by the belligerents because the shot was lead without any sort of jacket. They threatened to treat anyone found using such loads as a war criminal...

Jacket required. That's a fancy war right there.



.

No tie required it's still casual.

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Originally posted by mojojojo:

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Originally posted by 46and2:
And I advocate no murder of anyone. I advocated killing enemy soldiers on the battlefield

Here’s the problem with that argument. What happens when the enemy soldier quits fighting and simply gives up? You kill him anyway? After all he’s “on the battlefield” right? That’s when it becomes simply murder. Or maybe you’re ok with the way the Germans machine gunned America soldiers who surrendered during the Battle of the Bulge (as one example)? I mean, after all they were just “enemy soldiers on the battlefield” so hose ‘em down, right?

I think if you’d ever faced going in harms way you might think differently. But maybe not. There have been those throughout history who were ok with murder to achieve their goals.

What happened to the executioners at Malmedy after the war?

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Originally posted by 46and2:
why in the world would we bother spending the resources to transport, house, feed, secure and otherwise be responsible for Nazi soldiers captured in Africa or anywhere else here to the CONUS? How is that not an extraordinarily pointless waste of resources, and a security threat?

Made a world of practical sense.

Humanitarian considerations aside, POWs were going to be housed, clothed and fed courtesy of the Geneva Convention. The question was by whom, and where.

We had scads of empty ships coming back from the ETO after taking over troops and equipment - why not put POWs in? And someone had to guard them - why transport guards and construction folks to Europe to build POW camps? We needed to reserve US->European shipping for war-essential stuff.

Plus, we needed labor as we'd sent a bunch of our men off to fight.

Net net: The POWs were sent on spare shipping space, did work we needed to have done, and were guarded by people we didn't need to ship to Europe.

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Originally posted by joel9507:

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
why in the world would we bother spending the resources to transport, house, feed, secure and otherwise be responsible for Nazi soldiers captured in Africa or anywhere else here to the CONUS? How is that not an extraordinarily pointless waste of resources, and a security threat?

Made a world of practical sense.

Humanitarian considerations aside, POWs were going to be housed, clothed and fed courtesy of the Geneva Convention. The question was by whom, and where.

We had scads of empty ships coming back from the ETO after taking over troops and equipment - why not put POWs in? And someone had to guard them - why transport guards and construction folks to Europe to build POW camps? We needed to reserve US->European shipping for war-essential stuff.

Plus, we needed labor as we'd sent a bunch of our men off to fight.

Net net: The POWs were sent on spare shipping space, did work we needed to have done, and were guarded by people we didn't need to ship to Europe.

That brings up another one of the main arguments for bringing them here. In WWII German U-boat attacks were a serious problem and we lost a lot of ships to the Germans. Filling empty ships with German POWs was thought to be a way to dissuade those attacks on our ships.

^^^^^^

Really? I hadn’t heard that. Interesting.

By May 1943 the U boat threat was GREATLY diminished. Not saying it didn’t give pause to German uboat commanders as maybe it did, but the possibility of transport of allied POWs aboard Japanese merchant ships didn’t dissuade US submarine efforts. Curious why allied commanders thought it might prevent German Uboats.

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Originally posted by mojojojo:
^^^^^^

Really? I hadn’t heard that. Interesting.

By May 1943 the U boat threat was GREATLY diminished. Not saying it didn’t give pause to German uboat commanders as maybe it did, but the possibility of transport of allied POWs aboard Japanese merchant ships didn’t dissuade US submarine efforts. Curious why allied commanders thought it might prevent German Uboats.

I’ll see if I can find the paper I read on it. It was about POWs from multiple wars through WWII. There were several arguments for relocating German POWs to the US including using them as labor resources, hopeful equal good treatment of American POWs and keeping the Germans from sinking returning ships. There were other arguments for but I can’t recall them all. And I don’t know if U-boat captains cared so it might have had no effect at all.

There seems to be an American tendency, demonstrated by some within this thread, to believe that every single member of the Wehrmacht was a Nazi. Indeed, some seem to believe that every last German was a Nazi. That is a profoundly ignorant belief demonstrating a vacuous understanding of German history throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

Need a good reason to not murder 400,000 people? Here’s one based in self interest. It was far cheaper to house them throughout the war, and then enlist many of them after the war, to provide a buffering deterrent to the threat from the USSR. How easily would it have been to ally with Germany after 1948 to combat the eastern threat had we spent the war murdering their surrendered soldiers in cold blood? Not likely.

How much did it cost to house these POWs anyway, as a percentage of the cost of the war? It couldn’t have been much. Certainly less than maintaining a huge army in Germany post-war because we killed the Wehrmacht instead of accepting their surrender.

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Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
How much did it cost to house these POWs anyway, as a percentage of the cost of the war?

I’m always a little amused when I read an outraged post about dropping something like a Hellfire missile on a few “insurgents,” or perhaps only one: “How much did that cost‽” Yeah, it cost a lot to buy that missile in the first place, but the cost of everything else that was required to do the dropping was far, far more than that specific piece of ordnance itself.

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Originally posted by Pale Horse:

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Originally posted by mojojojo:
^^^^^^

Really? I hadn’t heard that. Interesting.

By May 1943 the U boat threat was GREATLY diminished. Not saying it didn’t give pause to German uboat commanders as maybe it did, but the possibility of transport of allied POWs aboard Japanese merchant ships didn’t dissuade US submarine efforts. Curious why allied commanders thought it might prevent German Uboats.

I’ll see if I can find the paper I read on it. It was about POWs from multiple wars through WWII. There were several arguments for relocating German POWs to the US including using them as labor resources, hopeful equal good treatment of American POWs and keeping the Germans from sinking returning ships. There were other arguments for but I can’t recall them all. And I don’t know if U-boat captains cared so it might have had no effect at all.

My mistake, it seems that the idea of transporting German POWs to the U.S. as a deterrent against submarine attacks was made during WWI not WWII. I did not re-read this entire paper tonight so maybe they mention it during WWII but a search for both "submarine" and "u-boat" only yielded results from WWI.

In any case the paper is a fascinating read on the subject.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a438000.pdf

This is the United States of America. We are not barbarians. America did not willingly enter WWII. We had no choice. Fight or be be defeated. That is no choice. The idea of slaughtering prisoners wholesale is out of the question. It is preposterous. We went to war because we had no choice. Some individual soldiers became heartless killers on the battlefield and perhaps rightly so, in view of the atrocities and the ferocity of our foe, but we as a nation do not wantonly slaughter defeated men. The very idea is repulsive.

In the American Civil War, should each side have killed all of their prisoners? Come on.

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Originally posted by sigfreund:

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Originally posted by sigcrazy7:
How much did it cost to house these POWs anyway, as a percentage of the cost of the war?

I’m always a little amused when I read an outraged post about dropping something like a Hellfire missile on a few “insurgents,” or perhaps only one: “How much did that cost‽” Yeah, it cost a lot to buy that missile in the first place, but the cost of everything else that was required to do the dropping was far, far more than that specific piece of ordnance itself.

Yeah, I love the armchair warriors trying to justify wholesale murder of POWs on economic grounds. Pleaszzze.

I put good money that anyone advocating such action has never had their own ass remotely 'in the fight', whether actual conflict or even a hot zone on the edge of one. Seen it before with members here advocating burning theoretical ISIS prisoners to death.

And they have no grasp how wasteful conflict and the military in general is, when it comes to financial costs. It's not a business, its dirty, wasteful, conflict and war.

As a decorated combat veteran who has taken my share of lives, I agree with your statement. As usual Para, very well said Sir.

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Originally posted by bushpilot:
As a decorated combat veteran who has taken my share of lives, I agree with your statement. As usual Para, very well said Sir.

As a human being, so do I.

Sun Tzu wrote that an enemy should never be allowed to see that it cause is hopeless. Otherwise they will fight to the death.

As example: During the Civil War a Union Officer argued for repeating rifle’s for his Black troops. His point was “They will not surrender as they know they will not be taken a prisoner.”

During training on the Geneva Conventions we were told that America are the ones in white hats. That, by following the rules, we put pressure on the enemy to treat our soldiers and civilians humanly. I would suspect that the German POWs returned to Germany with a positive view of America.

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Originally posted by RHINOWSO:
And they have no grasp how wasteful conflict and the military in general is, when it comes to financial costs. It's not a business, its dirty, wasteful, conflict and war.

^^^^^This right here. There is no human endeavor more wasteful than war. If you don’t have the coin, you shouldn’t be in the conflict. Justifying murder simply to cheapen the cost is immoral, and would be irreparably harmful to us as a people.

I’m all for kicking our enemy’s ass in combat, but killing when it’s unnecessary is where I draw the line. In fact, I feel the destruction of Dresden was a travesty against humanity, but that is probably a subject for another discussion.

Many soldiers were sons of newly emmigrated europeans. Consider the name Eisenhower or Eisenhauer. Killing prisoners would have been something like killing your cousins, second cousins, or uncles. There were war crimes trials although we did not get them all.

Regarding the POWs in the US, here is a story. Around 1980 my father, USAF retired, was stationed near K-town. The family was shopping at Herties. The floor salesman helping us had been a POW in Kentucky. He showed us a photo in his wallet. He said that being a POW was great. He had food, tobacco, sunshine, entertainment, and much less risk of death. He was grateful. After the war, that was to our benefit.

For those who lost family because of the criminal nazi regime, you have my sympathy and prayers for justice.

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Originally posted by divil:
What happened to the executioners at Malmedy after the war?

About 70+ were tired, 43 were sentenced to death (none of those death sentences were carried out), 22 received life sentences, and 8 shorter terms.

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Originally posted by mojojojo:

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Originally posted by divil:
What happened to the executioners at Malmedy after the war?

About 70+ were tired, 43 were sentenced to death (none of those death sentences were carried out), 22 received life sentences, and 8 shorter terms.

Joachim Peiper was sentenced to death but paroled. He worked in the german automotive industry after the war, then moved to France. On July 14, 1976 he died in his burning house. Circumstances indicate that multiple arsonists set the house on fire.

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Originally posted by 46and2:
That we even take POWs is a dumb idea in general. The very idea of a polite war with rules is in direct opposition to the idea of war itself. There are no ROEs in a real fight.

Don't wanna get shot? Don't go to war. Go to war and get caught? Expect to be shot. Simple as pie. Perhaps if we all treated war like this there would be fewer, shorter, wars...

Politicians have watered down the idea of war so much that far too many take it too casually, and treat it and the lives of those who serve as disposable, renewable, pawns.

War should be the last resort, and when it comes it should be swift and relentless.

Are you a combat vet? Have even been in a fight since grade school ? This is an incredibly ignorant statement.

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Originally posted by HCM:

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
That we even take POWs is a dumb idea in general. The very idea of a polite war with rules is in direct opposition to the idea of war itself. There are no ROEs in a real fight.

Don't wanna get shot? Don't go to war. Go to war and get caught? Expect to be shot. Simple as pie. Perhaps if we all treated war like this there would be fewer, shorter, wars...

Politicians have watered down the idea of war so much that far too many take it too casually, and treat it and the lives of those who serve as disposable, renewable, pawns.

War should be the last resort, and when it comes it should be swift and relentless.

Are you a combat vet? Have even been in a fight since grade school ? This is an incredibly ignorant statement.

Agreed!!!