77 years ago last month, World War II went into a brief run of extra innings, as German troops launched a surprise attack, trying to drive a wedge between the US and British armies and take the port of Antwerp, robbing the Allies of their main logistics hub on the continent. We know it as the “Battle of the Bulge”.
In a strategic sense, the attack was doomed before it started. It may have cost the Germans more than it ganed them, burning through their last supplies of fuel, ammunition and fresh vehicles, to no gain that they were able to hold for more than a month.
But that was little comfort to the GIs on the ground – many new to the front in brand-new divisions, many more exhausted after six months of constant battle and resting in the “quiet sector” of the Ardennes, and the corner of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.
The GIs fought on – some of them famously surrounded, others who just happened to be at the wrong place at the right time, still more who rushed to the scene to hold lines in the snow that could not be passed.
They fought an enemy that was exhausted and morally shaped by five years of total war, including troops – the Waffen SS, who had made war crimes part of their “mystique” since the fall of 1939. One SS battlegroup had left a trail of war crimes, including the massacre of a group of combat engineers at Malmédy, Belgiuim, and a smaller and more obscure but perhaps even more gruesome slaughter of African-American troops at Wereth – two of a number of real shootings of American POWs, and dozens more rumored mass killings.
It’s no secret to those who read military history; at times, after hearing news about the GIs gunned down at Malmédy in particular, that GIs – cold, often cut off from higher authority, thousands of miles from home, fighting for people they largely didn’t understand, in a war none of them asked for – took rough revenge. The history of “The Good War” is not void of stories of American troops gunning down Germans, and especially Japanese, without worrying too hard about the rules of war. Americans and Brits were less likely to throw the rules of war under the treads of the passing tank than the Russians or French – all of whom took “take no prisoners” pretty literally – but war, being famously “hell”, brings the worst out of everyone at times.
Suffice to say – while the typical 18 year old American draftee was on balance, as Stephen Ambrose called him, “the. best thing that could have happened to a conquered Germany or liberated France, Luixembourg and Belgium”, some of them, sometimes, had their breaking points. It wasn’t taught in high school history class – which, when I was in school, was still being taught by some of the men who’d been there – but you don’t have to dig too far into history to find honest portrayals by GIs who, as the years rolled on, talked it out (including at least one infamous episode from Band of Brothers itself).
It’s not news, suffice to say.
If you read your history.
But this is 2022. And most Americans, including most of today’s generation of “news” reporters, never read history, or at least nothing before 1960.
“The Reveal” is an NPR ‘Investigative journalism’ program, hosted by Al Letson. This past Sunday’s episode focused on the groundbreaking investigation of a massacre of 80 German POWs in Belgium by members of the 11th Armored Division.
I listened so you don’t have to – but here it is, anyway:
So what’s. the purpose of this “investigation?”
To prove that World War II a reductionist battle between good-hearted, white-hatted GIs and cartoony black-hearted Nazis, and that some Americans did some horrible things?
Again – it’s not news.
To bring out a story that has been hidden by history?
As the story itself points out, the episode was common knowledge among people who follow the war.
That George Patton and other Army brass, at the time and during the telling of the story of the war, found it expedient to either “not publicize” or “cover up” the details of the massacre, to a people who were becoming weary of war and who were shocked by the late-campaign bloodshed? Leaving aside the whole “what the hell do they expect?” angle – who do they expect to hold accountable? 95% of the GIs are gone; all the senior officers who set the policy had passed on forty years ago.
To undercut and sandbag a key part of the American self-image? To throw crap on the notion that America has had, and acted upon, and sacrificed mightilly, for noble ideals that didn’t strictly benefit us? To liberate people we had no moral obligation to sacrifice for?
I think I’m getting warm.
A former teacher, who has drifted far to the left since I was a student, once said “the Walt Disney version of history doesn’t tell the whole story” – to which I replied “either does the Ingmar Bergman version (I suppose I could have said NIkole Hannah-Jones, as well).
Either way – when it comes to piddling on any shred of American exceptionaism, to say nothing of nobility, there is no statute of limitations.
the rules of war
Who dreams up this shit?
Well, there was a set of Geneva Convention rules, and both the US and Germany (and the UK and France) had signed them. Signatories troops are accountable for following them – as we found at Nuremberg,My Lai and Abu Ghraib.
All of which happened since that night in Belgium.
So my quesiton is, why cover this, other than out of historical interest – which is not “Reveal’s” turf…?
General Omar Bradley once commented that German snipers essentially shouldn’t be allowed to surrender. The notion that someone, as Mitch illustrates, is cold, hungry, scared and has watched countless buddies get wounded or die, wouldn’t be tempted to exact revenge on an enemy, is looney tunes.
So my quesiton is, why cover this…
I have no problem with this post. You are absolutely correct to bring it up and in the way you did.
My problem is with the notion that there exists “rules of war” and that they will, much less should, be followed by all.
The Geneva Conventions arose from the same mindset as the Treaty Westphalia: governments are restrained and virtuous and therefore are permitted to have armies and to make rules about waging war, whereas tribes, families and corporations are governed by passions and are not.
Which is elitist rot, of course. That’s one reason the Second Amendment was such a novel and game-changing concept at the time it was adopted. The notion that ordinary citizens should have not only the right but also the means of waging war but also the right to wage war – ON THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT – was unthinkable to the crowned heads of the time.
Rules are for diplomacy. Wars are for winning.
Just think of how brave it was to reveal this tidbit of history to the rabid left.
Rules of war? Oxymoron. During the US Civil War, captured soldiers were sometimes “paroled”, meaning they were released with the promise they wouldn’t fight again until officially exchanged. Eventually the practice ended: too complex and it re-supplied the losing side (the Confederacy) with troops. Captured soldiers are often dealt with harshly. War is harsh. Hypothetical question: if a guy on the other side of the line has his rifle jam, do you spare his life? The answer for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong was: No. If a guy drops his pants to relieve himself, does an opposing rifleman hold his fire until the afflicted soul has re-armed himself? Is it OK to shoot an opponent in the back when he’s begun running away? It’s a fricking miracle any captured combatant ever returns alive. I wouldn’t make a documentary being critical of the times that practice wasn’t honored.
Has any nation, in a battle for its existence, ever decided that following the rules of war was more important than winning?
The unwillingness of the nazis to use the sarin gas that they developed and stockpiled was not a decision made on ethical grounds.
“Has any nation, in a battle for its existence…”
Wait’ll NPR discovers that the US and UK deliberately firebombed German and Japanese cities to make civilian participation in the war effort – and in hundreds of thousands of cases, life – impossible.
S**t’s gonna hit the fan then.
Wait’ll NPR discovers that the US and UK deliberately firebombed…
Which was pretty much my point about there being no rules of war. Well, unless/except when it’s convenient. Here’s another example that NPR will never, ever touch: the Soviet Army in WWII. Shit, just the way the Soviets treated their *own* soldiers.
Or maybe they’ll discover that Churchill threatened to gas bomb the civilian populations of German cities if the Hitler used gas against the Russians. Modern people have no idea of the violent destructive impulses unleashed during WW2. Why, I’ve heard it said that nuclear bombs were considered being dropped on non-military targets like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that air command even considered fire bombing Tokyo and killing tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians. Can these rumors be true?
Yes, this wasn’t right. It’s war and sometimes bad things happen. A friend of mine let me read her father-in-law’s story, let’s call him Jon. Jon got into an armored scout battalion. Their job was to enter German-occupied and German towns, find out if the enemy was there and hopefully report back to HQ if they lived or before they were destroyed. Jon was in the lead jeep and held a BAR. He was on a hair trigger as they moved into one town. Suddenly there was movement on his right where he thought there shouldn’t be anything. Jon opened up with his BAR on the movement, taking no time to identify the target, there should be no friendlies there. When he stopped firing an elderly German couple who had gone out into the field to try and find a leftover potato were blown apart. Jon’s crew did not stop to pay reparations, they needed to move into the town and they were now totally announced.
Was this a war crime? Bad stuff happened. Not a pattern like the Japs did to their prisoners. But bad stuff happened. It was war.
One of the tactics the US used to shatter the luftwaffe after D-Day was to award kill scores to fighter pilots for shooting down German trainer planes. You had these mustangs hanging out just below the horizon from luftwaffe training fields so that they could pop up and shoot down unarmed, novice pilots. I’ve heard a lot of aces were made this way.
The Germans and the Brits didn’t do this.
Kudos to US brass – very effective. Alas, no mas.