Allied units Implicated in War Crimes

[john h]

a lengthy but quick find massacres and attrocities of ww11 by all sides can be found on http/members iinet net au/~gduncan/massacres.html

[Andreas]

Alleged warcrime by 97th US ID discussed here:

viewtopic.php?t=81974

[David Thompson]

A post from Marcfj, which did not add any research information to the topic of allied units implicated in war crimes, was deleted by the moderator - DT. This thread is for research. Comments which do not document the participation of specific allied units in identified war crimes should be placed to threads in the main area of the H&WC section. See the explanatory post at the beginning of this research sticky: viewtopic.php?p=226977#226977

[Beek]

Interesting topic. My Uncle Dallas Jamieson was a member of the 508th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. He jumped on D-Day and was later killed in Holland. Anyway I have been a member of the regimental association and the vets have told me that they were instructed on D-Day not to take prisoners. It was a simple fact: Your behind enemy lines, no time or place.
Another interesting point is that this topic came up at both Nuremburg and other war crimes trials. German defense lawyers,with some success argued that the allies had themselves particpated or ordered criminal activity according to the rule of war (which itself is an oxymoron)

[Andy H]

Interesting topic. My Uncle Dallas Jamieson was a member of the 508th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. He jumped on D-Day and was later killed in Holland. Anyway I have been a member of the regimental association and the vets have told me that they were instructed on D-Day not to take prisoners. It was a simple fact: Your behind enemy lines, no time or place.

Hi Beek

I had a similar conversation with British DDay Para. The instruction was more to do with the practicalities of guarding and providing for POW when engaged in combat behind established lines, than outright elimination of any POW's. This gent said that on the occasions when they took POW's they stripped them of there weapons, ammunition, boots and trousers and turned them loose. In wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility that others took a different tilt to the 'not to take prisoners' instruction.

Regards

Andy H

[Penn44]

Interesting topic. My Uncle Dallas Jamieson was a member of the 508th PIR, 82nd Airborne Division. He jumped on D-Day and was later killed in Holland. Anyway I have been a member of the regimental association and the vets have told me that they were instructed on D-Day not to take prisoners. It was a simple fact: Your behind enemy lines, no time or place.

The rationale or argument often given to kill prisoners under such circumstances was "military necessity." Current international law rejects that argument.

Penn44

.

[B5N2KATE]

Great thread.....Balanced view is the way to go. Full marks

[David Thompson]

A number of discussion posts were removed by the moderator -- DT.

Please note that this research thread is for posting sourced facts identifying Allied units implicated in war crimes, not for discussions.

[Oasis]

A number of discussion posts were removed by the moderator -- DT.

Please note that this research thread is for posting sourced facts identifying Allied units implicated in war crimes, not for discussions.

Message received... I followed the stream not "stopped" before.
Regards

Toni

[Alaric]

Got sources?

Perhaps the same question should be asked of the poster who claims, with no "sources" at all, that James Bacque's seminal work Other Losses has been "debunked" by historians and the like. Bacque's book is thoroughly documented and is true, but a post claiming it isn't with no proof at all is allowed to stand?

[Alaric]

Here are some interesting links (and some have links within them) for Allied war crimes.

In 1945, as at the end of all wars, the victor powers spun the conflict's history to serve the interests of their elites. Wartime propaganda thus achieved an extraordinary afterlife. As Vladimir Putin showed yesterday, the Great Patriotic War remains a key political resource in Russia. In Britain and the US, too, a certain idea of the second world war is enthusiastically kept alive and less flattering memories suppressed.

Five years ago, Robert Lilly, a distinguished American sociologist, prepared a book based on military archives. Taken by Force is a study of the rapes committed by American soldiers in Europe between 1942 and 1945. He submitted his manuscript in 2001. But after September 11, its US publisher suppressed it, and it first appeared in 2003 in a French translation.

We know from Anthony Beevor about the sexual violence unleashed by the Red Army, but we prefer not to know about mass rape committed by American and British troops. Lilly suggests a minimum of 10,000 American rapes. Contemporaries described a much wider scale of unpunished sex crime. Time Magazine reported in September 1945: "Our own army and the British army along with ours have done their share of looting and raping ... we too are considered an army of rapists."

The British and American publics share a sunny view of the second world war. The evil of Auschwitz and Dachau, turned inside out, clothes the conflict in a shiny virtue. Movies, popular histories and political speeches frame the war as a symbol of Anglo-American courage, with the Red Army's central role forgotten. This was, we believe, "a war for democracy". Americans believe that they fought the war to rescue the world. For apologists of the British Empire, such as Niall Ferguson, the war was an ethical bath where the sins of centuries of conquest, slavery and exploitation were expiated. We are marked forever as "the good guys"and can all happily chant "Two world wars and one world cup."

All this seems innocent fun, but patriotic myths have sharp edges. The "good war" against Hitler has underwritten 60 years of warmaking. It has become an ethical blank cheque for British and US power. We claim the right to bomb, to maim, to imprison without trial on the basis of direct and implicit appeals to the war against fascism.

When we fall out with such tyrant friends as Noriega, Milosevic or Saddam we rebrand them as "Hitler". In the "good war" against them, all bad things become forgettable "collateral damage". The devastation of civilian targets in Serbia or Iraq, torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, the war crime of collective punishment in Falluja, fade to oblivion as the "price of democracy".

Our democratic imperialism prefers to forget that fascism had important Anglo-American roots. Hitler's dream was inspired, in part, by the British Empire. In eastern Europe, the Nazis hoped to make their America and Australia, where ethnic cleansing and slave labour created a frontier for settlement. In western Europe, they sought their India from which revenues, labour and soldiers might be extracted.

American imperialism in Latin America gave explicit precedents for Germany's and Japan's claims of supremacy in their neighbouring regions. The British and Americans were key theorists of eugenics and had made racial segregation respectable. The concentration camp was a British invention, and in Iraq and Afghanistan the British were the first to use air power to repress partisan resistance. The Luftwaffe - in its assault on Guernica, and later London and Coventry - paid homage to Bomber Harris's terror bombing of the Kurds in the 1920s.

We forget, too, that British and US elites gave aid to the fascists. President Bush's grandfather, prosecuted for "trading with the enemy" in 1942, was one of many powerful Anglo-Americans who liked Mussolini and Hitler and did what they could to help. Appeasement as a state policy was only the tip of an iceberg of practical aid to these dictatorships. Capital and technology flowed freely, and fascist despots received dignified treatment in Washington and London. Henry Ford made Hitler birthday gifts of 50,000 marks.

We least like to remember that our side also committed war crimes in the 1940s.The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by our bombers against civilian populations. We know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but do not remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese. Edgar Jones, an "embedded" Pacific war correspondent, wrote in 1946: "'We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/may/10/foreignpolicy.usa

http://www.rense.com/general39/allied.htm

http://www.gnosticliberationfront.com/allied_war%20crimes%20II.htm

http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/us_war_crimes/allied_war_crimes_1941-1950.htm

http://www.reference.com/browse/Allied+war+crimes+during+World+War+II?jss=1

[LWD]

Perhaps the same question should be asked of the poster who claims, with no "sources" at all, that James Bacque's seminal work Other Losses has been "debunked" by historians and the like. Bacque's book is thoroughly documented and is true, but a post claiming it isn't with no proof at all is allowed to stand?

A quick search of this forum will display a number of threds where Bacque and his book(s) are discussed. The general consensus is that you are wrong.

[Marcus Wendel]

Please continue the discussion on the claims made by Bacque and the Allied bombing in the numerous threads on those topics, thanks. This thread is not for discussions, only for posting sources facts about specific Allied units being involved in war crimes.

See an index of threads on these topics at viewtopic.php?p=478575#p478575

/Marcus

[Marcus Wendel]

A discussion was split off into a thread of its own: 1st Polish Armoured Division killing POWs?

/Marcus

[RFPB]

"In Normandy, on D-Day plus two, Pvt. Ken Webster of the 101st saw a German jeep pop out of some smoke and drive boldly through the village of Vierville. It was flying a large Red Cross flag and carried two wounded Germans on stretchers in back, with a big husky German paratrooper at the wheel. It was so surprising a sight, no one made a move to stop it, until finally when it was almost out of the village an American officer stopped it. Webster described the result: 'The jeep was commandeered. The driver, a medic, was shot for carrying a pistol, and the two wounded men were left by the side of the road to die' "
----
"Americans sometimes shot medics. Maj. John Cochran of the 90th Division recalled a forward observer who would call for a barrage when he knew the Germans were eating...He explained to Cochran that in five or twn minutes 'their medics will come out to treat the casualties and we'll get them too' "
----
"Sgt. Robert Bowen of the 101st recalled...'I thought of the wounded Germans who had lain in the road that day before and our guys had tried to kill whomever went out to help them' "

101st Airborne Division - glory of the US military...
Source: "Citizen Soldiers" by Stephen E. Ambrose