collateral damage and historical memory
A useful reminder from the BBC of the sorts of collateral damage that were considered "acceptable" in WWII, as well as the impact they had on local public opinion:
Revisionists challenge D-Day story
BBC news, 15:23 GMT, Friday, 5 June 2009
Quote:
Some 20,000 French civilians were killed in the two-and-a-half months from D-Day, 3,000 of them during the actual landings.
...
"It was rather a shock to find we were not welcomed ecstatically as liberators by the local people, as we were told we should be... They saw us as bringers of destruction and pain," Mr Roker wrote in his diary.
Another soldier, Ivor Astley of the 43rd Wessex Infantry, described the locals as "sullen and silent... If we expected a welcome, we certainly failed to find it."
...
It is not as if the devastation wrought by the Allies is not known - it is just that it tends not to get talked about.
And yet for many families who lived through the war, it was the arrival and passage of British and American forces that was by far the most harrowing experience.
...
In his book, Mr Hitchcock raises another issue that rarely features in euphoric folk-memories of liberation: Allied looting, and worse.
"The theft and looting of Normandy households and farmsteads by liberating soldiers began on June 6 and never stopped during the entire summer," he writes.
One woman - from the town of Colombieres - is quoted as saying that "the enthusiasm for the liberators is diminishing. They are looting... everything, and going into houses everywhere on the pretext of looking for Germans."
...
Even more feared, of course, was the crime of rape - and here too the true picture has arguably been expunged from popular memory.
According to American historian J Robert Lilly, there were around 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war.
"But it is still worth remembering that it all came at a cost."
That's the last sentence in the article. It's totally true -- as it always is in any war.
I'm unsure what your or the BBCs point happens to be?
Most of the Anti-War crowd...
never bother to explore military history or the causation of war. It's so much easier and politically expedient to blame the soldier for inveterate warmongering.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Ken White
The anti war crowd never seems to realize that everyone is not genetically attuned with their view and their excessive prating about the evils of war is largely ignored by those not susceptible to Omygodthisisterriblebleedingheartitis. In fact, such prating with some folks can be downright counterproductive.
"The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." - Douglas MacArthur
How you justify collateral damage in war
I have re-opened this thread as this article reviewing a new film fits here. The film is about Operation Anthropoid, the assassination in Prague, in May 1942, of SS officer Richard Heydrich and asks:
Quote:
Can a Czech soldier justify assassinating a Nazi leader when he knows that it could lead to thousands of innocent citizens being murdered in revenge? If so, how?
Link:https://theconversation.com/anthropoid-new-blockbuster-interrogates-how-you-justify-collateral-damage-in-war-64926?