War crime? Or very hard decision?

"When we were fighting the japanese, we did not feel like we were fighting a war, but more that we were exterminating rodents."- WWII vet that I talked to in the NMUSAF. I think if you compare the war crimes committed by the U.S. in WWII and the ones done by the Japanese, we will come out looking like boyscouts.

There is a 35mm newsreel sequence taken by WW2 Australian photographer Damien Parer that shows Beaufighters strafing Japanese survivors in the water from a convoy attack - Battle of the Bismarck Sea 1943 - Parer shot the newsreel over the shoulder of the pilot as he was making his attacks. Depending when its shown (usually on the ABC on ANZAC Day each year), the sequence is usually edited to not show it.

[chico]

War Sucks.

Ditto.

Paraphrasing from "Apocalypse now"; accusing people of committing war crimes is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500.

[O.P.]

OP, if I understand your writing, you are saying the murder of civilians (it wasn't "VC boys") at My Lai was ok in response to combat losses there previously. A couple of problems; first "VC boy" did not come over here a la (9-11), nor attack us as Japanese did at Pearl Harbor. We invaded his country and they fought back. Also it was mostly women holding infants and a few old men that our soldiers shot at My Lai. There were no combat VC killed there. If this is ok, then maybe you agree with Muslin terrorists who believe it is justified to plant bombs on school buses since they have had losses from our soldiers or our Israeli allies. Are there no limits on what a "civilized nation" ? does in a war? And from a practical or tactical sense, can you think of any better recruitment for our enemies than atrocites by our troops?

What I am saying is, handle it the way it was handled towards to end of WW2. If you take fire from a village, put fire on the village. One veteran I talked to who walked to Germany, said "every time we came up to a village, and we took fire, we put fire on the village. After a few times of that, We pretty much didn't take that much fire from the villages anymore, because they knew the consequences."

You can watch tons of Vietnam footage of villages getting bombed, napalmed, ect, you think they had anymore VC in there that Mai Li did? Probably the same amount, a couple of county communist supervisor boneheads screwing it up for everyone. Calley's mistake was not to call in an airstrike after the first shooting happened days beforehand.

Recriutment? That shows another flaw in modern thinking. There should be no one left to recruit. There should be nothing left to recruit.

Hmmmmm, lets see, How many German Nazi's have been recruited in the last 60 plus years? How many Imperial Japanese have been recruited?
Zero? Zero has got to be close to the correct number. I wonder why that is? Could it be that those people and those ideaologies are pretty much extinct and are universialy reviled?

The same thing should happen to their modern equivalents. Extinction and universal revulsion.

[n5151ts]

In war there are ENEMY COMBATANTS and ENEMY NON-COMBATANTS. An enemy non-combatant is like an Iraqui...they know their neighbor is ALKAYDUH and builds IED's to kill americans, but they don't report them...so are they a combatant by default?
who knows certainly not me!

[k5083]

America may have to fight another war on its own territory before attitudes like Jack's change.

Jack's reasoning is exactly the same as Sherman's rationale for burning Atlanta in 1864. By Jack's logic, though, Sherman should not have allowed the city to be evacuated first. Make those Confederates extinct, make their ideology reviled. Kill them all, leave none to recruit. I'm sure there were those who would have done so.

And what about all those other southern towns that harbored rebels, yet were allowed to survive. Turns out the Civil War was fought much too gently. Almost in line with wussy modern thinking.

Oh, but wait -- despite not wiping out all those southern towns, the Confederacy was defeated and there are not many new recruits. So maybe exterminating civilians who harbor the enemy (i.e. their sons) isn't so important for winning a war or defeating an ideology, after all.

Hard to be sure though. Heck, let's kill them all anyway. 'Specially if they're foreigners.

August

[mustangdriver]

Have you all been down south? The civil war aint over down there. That might not be what you want to compare that to.

[Randy Haskin]

War is thugs killing each other.

Thugs?

[muddyboots]

okay, some of us are well trained thugs.

[Randy Haskin]

It's interesting to see what ideas people who have never had to pull the trigger and kill another human being in combat have on this subject.

War is SUPPOSED to be evil, brutal, cruel, deadly. It is the last resort of humanity. If it were a nice, clinical, easy way then it would not work.

As they say, there are only two ways for people to interact with each other -- by reason and by force.

If reason does not work, then the only other way is by force. Force is never a "happy" way to have to get your point across to another person. Interestingly enough, force usually works in the end -- for better or worse.

It's very interesting how the attitude of people with respect to "non combatants" has changed. Today we live in a world where a "civilian" woman or child who is shooting at a soldier with an AK-47 isn't an "acceptable" person to be engaged and killed in combat.

I hate war. I hate combat. I hate the idea of having to kill another human being. It is vile.

But, I do it in the name of a higher calling and I have never lost sleep at night as a result of doing it.

[tom d. friedman]

a soldier, airman, or sailor joins their branch of choice to serve & defend their country, regardless of national origin, philosophy or doctrine.

[O.P.]

America may have to fight another war on its own territory before attitudes like Jack's change.

Jack's reasoning is exactly the same as Sherman's rationale for burning Atlanta in 1864. By Jack's logic, though, Sherman should not have allowed the city to be evacuated first. Make those Confederates extinct, make their ideology reviled. Kill them all, leave none to recruit. I'm sure there were those who would have done so.

And what about all those other southern towns that harbored rebels, yet were allowed to survive. Turns out the Civil War was fought much too gently. Almost in line with wussy modern thinking.

Oh, but wait -- despite not wiping out all those southern towns, the Confederacy was defeated and there are not many new recruits. So maybe exterminating civilians who harbor the enemy (i.e. their sons) isn't so important for winning a war or defeating an ideology, after all.

Hard to be sure though. Heck, let's kill them all anyway. 'Specially if they're foreigners.

August

Hi August!

Hmmmm, harboring anyone, is one thing, shooting a weapon at oncoming troops is another. I wonder, how many southern towns were not destroyed, or damaged, because they did not fire. The South, did the same thing that the Axis did in WW2, they stopped fighting, it was not worth it anymore.

Everyone says, Enough, we're finished. That doesn't happen when you send an armed force to "Liberate" people. Liberating Iraq from Saddam is like saying "We're gonna liberate Japan from the emperor". heheeee, It sounds retarded no matter how you say it.

War is horrific. Most wars take a lot of folks to make it happen. If it didn't work that way, there would not be enough violence to be considered a war. It'll just be murder. I don't have a problem passing around the sh1t sammich so everyone can take a bite. Maybe they won't do it again. Maybe the next time, everyone will argue for a zillion years, and not kill.

If you're gonna do war, Do it. Otherwise stay home and let those boneheads waste each other.

[JDK]

This thread's not going to go well I feel, however, while I don't care about his politics or similar (not being a US citizen, it's not my interest or business) I think the following quote is worth bearing in mind. My emphasis.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: I've been asked before, where did the brave men I was privileged to serve with in Vietnam draw the strength to resist to the best of their ability the cruelties inflicted on them by our enemies.

Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment -- a few of them even unto death. But every one of us, every single one of us knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them.

That faith was indispensable not only to our survival but to our attempts to return home with honor. Many of the men I served with would have preferred death to such dishonor.

Soldiering is of course an abrogation of normal, civilised standards. Soldiers are licensed to step outside some conventions. Pragmatic realism shows that 'our' people do 'the wrong' thing sometimes. It remains inexcusable, because when it's licenced it undermines what they are supposedly defending.

Any number of excuses can be offered for the things that happen in war; they don't matter. It's the ideas that the society aspires to that counts, and the continuation of that aspiration, despite the efforts of your enemies.

It is always the people and their ideals that make a country 'great'. If they fail, whatever noise is made, that greatness is gone.

Finally, it's not what you can excuse of your military that matters, it is the good opinion of your friends and allies, where they too are free, and your society can accept and act on the criticism of your allies, and know you live to your standards, not the depths of your enemies'.

[Bill Greenwood]

Randy you seem to object to the term "thug" that someone used. It certainly fits many Japanese soldiers, many Nazis ones, and unfortunately sometimes our own guys. I am not sure which incident you are focusing on with talk about a woman or a child shooting our soldiers with "AK-47"; but that has no relation to what happened at My Lai. It was part of the lie propagted by our military and the Nixon govt to excuse that atrocity. The truth, when the facts came out, that not one of our soldiers there that day suffered any wound by hostile fire. Both witness accounts and photographs showed the causualties were old men and worse, women holding infants in their arms. As good a fighters as the VC were, I don't think those infants were marksmen. As for Kent State and Jackson, all the shooting was by the army/cops; there were no students with guns.

[O.P.]

Heheeeee,
ahhhhhh

I'm with JDK, I think this thread has gone about as far south as I'm willing to go.

I'd try to get it back to the point, but I got sucked in and probably stirred this mother a little to much. It's toast, and borderline......

Back to some good ole timey wholesome warbirdery for me.

Toodles

a soldier, airman, or sailor joins their branch of choice to serve & defend their country, regardless of national origin, philosophy or doctrine.

Very well stated Sir