Quote:
Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
that's funny! did you watch The War?
It was funny too! We killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Italy alone. We shot prisioners dead. I had heard of the Germans doing it, but we did too. I don't know if the Captains that ordered realized they were ruining the long standing US rules, but they did it. Oh, and if we did happen to have a Japanese soldier surrender on Okinawa we torutured the shit out of him to hopefully learn where others were hiding.
You guys are historically goofy.
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Hank, we have had this discussion before. There is a fundamental difference between recognizing that bad things happen in a war, and in enshrining those bad things as policy approved at the highest level.
I can virtually flat out guarrantee you that we didn't torture German prisoners in WWII away from the battlefield in order to learn how far along the Luftwaffe was with the heavy water project, or with where V-1s and V-2s were being aimed. And I strongly suspect (but am slightly less confident, if only because of the attitudes of the era) that the same is true about Japanese prisoners away from the battlefield.
This is not about Sergeant Rock in the hedgerows with Fritz trying to find out where the sniper that killed Gus is hiding. This is about what happens outside of the blood rage of immediate action, and is instead about policy decisions made in the light of cool reason. The fact that you continue to ignore this distinction puzzles me.
