Quote Originally Posted by JMA View Post
I was never challenged in terms of moral courage as the two mentioned above were. My anger may well be the result of subliminal fear that I too may collapse under those circumstances.
That was eloquent.

General comments on this thread.

I don't know how much interest this thread is getting but I am hugely impressed by the erudition and insight shown in the discussion.

In the movie Go Tell The Spartans the last scene or two depicts guys doing the right thing regardless. The only people I ever heard of doing something almost exactly similar were some Frenchman in Indochina. They ran an irregular force of mountain tribesman and gave them their personal word that they would stick by. When the French pulled out those guys didn't. They stayed and they died. The American cultural bias about French courage is a bit curious in the light of that kind of behavior.

My ill informed opinion about surrendering is in two parts. The first is the observation that when wars start, it takes a long time for people to really accept that it is real and people will kill you or others without a thought, that they really don't give a damn if you approve or not. That perhaps is a component in the surrenders of big forces by Hull, Percival and the Dutch commander. To my knowledge, the Dutchman had never seen real combat, nor had Wainwright and it had been a long time since Percival and Hull had seen any. All those surrenders were in the beginning of the war. Maybe part of it was they just hadn't had time to accept what surrender in a war really means.

On the other hand, you have a guy like Puller. He knew. He had fought and fought at intervals frequent enough that he would have had no doubt what surrender in wartime could mean, especially to Japanese. Besides, it was the Marines.

On an individual level, maybe it is just the triumph of hope over imagination, or lack of imagination. When soldiers were taken by American Indians say for example, in the War of 1812, they knew what was probably going to happen to them, or should have. But many surrendered anyway.

JMA makes a hugely important point about the British and Basra. What happened? It wasn't that long ago that the Glowworm fought the Hipper. And contemporary with Basra were the prolonged platoon fights in Afghanistan. What happened?