What do you think is the baddest ass piece of military hardware? II

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Serb
Enjoy your victory then. After 50 years or so, Iraqis, whose contry you just "liberated", would start to tell stories about American atrocities, muss murders, genocid, raped Iraqis wemen, children and elders.

[Serb]

Originally posted by Zylka


Shut the **** up, you useless hack

FY too, pani Zylka.

[Serb]

Originally posted by skywalker

"Liberated" Afghanis already do this:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jun2002/afgh-j17.shtml

[Saras]

Originally posted by Serb

Enjoy your victory then. After 50 years or so, Iraqis, whose contry you just "liberated", would start to tell stories about American atrocities, muss murders, genocid, raped Iraqis wemen, children and elders.

serb, why say things like that that you don't believe yourself?

[Serb]

I believe.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Cruddy


Hawwwkkkkkkk-PTTTUI!


The most unreliable, twisted, arse licking, back stabbing "creative" journalist from this country in recent years.

Did you know he was nearly knifed by his fellow journalists at the end of the Falklands War for deliberately sending only his story off telling the country about the ceasefire?

There was only one seat on the chopper to the ship with the radio gear - and he handed out all the other copy to the off duty officers in the wardroom.

After that sort of behaviour, I wouldn't beleive a road safety guide written by Max "Hitler" Hastings. Yes, that is his nickname.

I've only read his short book on Normandy which is very good for someone who is just starting to read the history of the WW2, so much so in fact that I have lent it out to several friends who showed an interest. He apparantly has some grounding for this viewpoint regarding formerly Soviet troops fighting with the Wehrmacht or SS. Here's an excerpt from an oral history of a US Navy officer which shows that his ship did evacuate some Russian prisoners from Normandy (mostly for Serb):


Following our initial trip to Normandy, we made numerous round trips from England to the beaches. We would go in at high tide, open the bow doors, drop the ramp so that trucks, vehicles, and tanks could drive off onto the sandy beach. We made several return trips to Omaha Beach, one trip to Utah Beach near the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, and one trip to the British Beach east of Omaha. On one trip we carried wounded American soldiers. On another trip we carried 245 wounded German soldiers. They were accompanied by several German doctors to care for them. There were about 12 or 15 wounded who had us puzzled. They obviously were not German, but orientals. We could not explain their presence in German uniforms, but we learned that they had been Russian soldiers from the Asiatic parts of the Soviet Union. I am sure there were many White Russian soldiers among these wounded, but we could not tell them from among real Germans. Many of these soldiers had developed a hatred for Stalin and wanted to overthrow him. Many others turned to the Germans to escape the horrible conditions the Germans had in their prison camps. The Germans tried to treat American and British prisoners fairly well, much better than the Japanese did, but they regarded the Russians and other Slavs as subhuman and made little effort to care for them. The result was barbaric conditions and an enormous death rate.

http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq109-2a.htm

There is also a much longer and comrehensive article on former Soviets joining with the Germans in WW2 here:

http://www.feldgrau.com/rvol.html

I have no idea what the agenda of the group who run this site is, other than what they state:

Feldgrau.com is a non political German military history research site. Our focus is on the German armed forces during the most tumultuous period of the 20th century, the time between 1918 and 1945.

We've been online since February of 1996 and have had over one million visitors! Our main focus is on the operational histories of the units and organizations that made up the German army, navy, airforce and all associated auxiliary formations, both during the Weimar period and the NSDAP era.

Whatever their agenda, the article seems real enough. I didn't find anything glaringly amiss in the information it presented, and for those who can read German there is a lengthy list of footnotes to accompany the article.

Here's another snippet which seems to have been gleaned from Stephen Ambrose:

Foreign Soldiers in the Wehrmacht

Ost Battalions - Often men from the East like Poland, Russia or even Korea were conscripted into the Wehrmacht because the German army was constantly lacking sufficient men. By June 1944, one in six German riflemen in France was from an Ost battalion. Yet these battalions became increasingly unreliable. Their skill was not like that of elite SS troops, and the will to die for Germany was certainly not comparable to the nature of a native-German soldier's Blut und Boden. "In general, Ost soldiers in Wehrmacht uniforms tended to surrender as soon as GIs got near them. They were mainly in the trenches. Ethnic Germans inside concrete fortifications tended to fight on" (Ambrose 424-5).

And the link: http://cghs.dade.k12.fl.us/normandy/...omposition.htm

Gack, I hate internet research!

That said, I've read numerous books on WW2, including probably a dozen that dealt with the war in the East on a large scale. The existence of a fairly large number of people who were willing to join with the Germans early in the war, including prisoners of war (who may in some cases been worried about their own fates more than any political considerations I'll grant). That said, it is hard to deny that there were numerous persons within the borders of the Soviet Union who hated it or Stalin enough or loved their own nation enough to join up or assist the Germans. It is also well-known that these feelings were often nullified by German or Nazi attrocities, especially in the Western Provinces of the Soviet Union.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Tingkai

You may call it "grandoise language", but perhaps this is the only language that can describe the extent of the atrocities committed by the Germans in Russia.

The attempt to eliminate the Jews stands alone in WW2 I'll grant. Not so much from its brutality (though it was extremely brutal, so were a lot of attrocities throughout the war) or even its scale (though it was the largest mass murder during WW2) but for the fact that it represented the one overarching goal of the Nazi regime before which the good of the nation, the existence of the regime, the state and the very lives of its leaders were sacrificed.

What's more it was a more or less secret goal insofar as knowledge about it was on a need to know basis and the only political discussions about it were made at the highest levels and the final decisions were only made at the highest level. There was a partially successful effort to keep the German public in the dark about what was really going on in Poland and Russia. While Nazi propoganda certainly allowed one to connect the dots if one were so inclined (and perhaps blessed with hindsight having grown up with our modern lowered expectations for human behavior in police states), I can't help noting that even when Himmler is speaking to the cadets who will become the leaders of the Einsatzgrouppen he speaks very carefully and continues to use euphemisms for the mass murder which these men are expected to carry out.

Originally posted by Tingkai

Do you think the Germans during WWII were just like everybody else? Did everyone else try to kill all the jews gypsys, etc? You do know that three millions Russians POWs out of 5.7 million captured died in German captivity. Did the Western allies kill half of the Germans they captured?

The Soviets certainly did, and the Americans would have had the Japanese shown more of an inclination to surrender. As it was most were never given a chance, and many who tried to surrender were shot down.

Originally posted by Tingkai

Your comparison of the Germans in WWII and My Lai is one of apples to oranges.

As it was meant to be. I was simply showing that another group of soldiers raised in a completely different environment could nonetheless commit grave attrocities without first being propogandized into believing that their enemies were subhumans who had to be eliminated, as the post I responded to seemed to imply. My point is that you can't point to this war and claim that every attrocity occurred because of X or Y. A lot of German attrocities in fact were carried out in response to partisan activity. Some were completely extra-legal even by Nazi standards.

Originally posted by Tingkai

My Lai was an isolated event. The US government put Calley on trial (after the incident was exposed) and he was convicted IIRC.

Um, ok I agree that the events in My Lai only occurred there. But this sort of attrocity occurred numerous times during the Vietnam war (read up on the Tiger force of the 101st Airborne which has been in the papers recently), though mostly on a smaller scale.

Originally posted by Tingkai

The German atrocities in Russia were wide spread, widely known among the troops and endorsed and encouraged by the government.

Do you see the difference?

The differences to the U.S. in Vietnam are perhaps less than you imagine. Certainly the scale of attrocities was much smaller, though very high by 20th century American standards. The U.S. didn't have the death camps or the SS or a lot of secret orders from the very top to commit genocide upon the Vietnamese people. But there was certainly a common knowledge aspect to atrocities in Vietnam that was every bit as common as the knowledge of what was happening to people who fell into the hands of the SS was on the Russian front. In both cases there was little to no public acknowledgement of what was happening by the administrations in Washington or the Regime in Berlin. Of course it wasn't actual policy for the Americans to wipe out the Vietnamese in their entirety, which is the salient difference.

Originally posted by Tingkai

The question is then: Why did the Germans do what they did? Why did "civilized" people become barbarians. One of the main reasons is the Nazi philosophy that East Europeans were "sub-human", a belief that was drilled into the German people through propaganda. To the vast majority of German soldiers, killing Russian civilians and POWs was perfectly acceptable.

The following are quotes from Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad describing conditions during the first summer of the German invasion of Russia.

"Nazi propaganda simultaneously provoking atavistic fears and hate, incited soldiers to kill as much out of former as the latter."

"The wounded [Russian POWs] generally received no medical assistance and those who could not march or who collapsed from exhaustion were shot... The German Army itself, not the SS nor any other Nazi organization was responsible for prisoners of war."

"German soldiers were "taking pot-shots at the columns of Soviet prisoners trudging to the rear."

An order from the German Sixth Army HQ on 10 Aug 41 noted: "There have been cases of off-duty soldiers volunteering to help the SD with their executions, or acting as spectators and taking photos."

"Although there were cases of soldiers reluctant to carry out executions when ordered, most natural pity for civilians transmuted into an incoherent anger."

Your attempt to paint the German army and SS units in Russia as just another fighting force simply goes against the facts.

Yes, some German Army officiers tried to distance themselves from the atrocities. Some even refused to issue orders for killing POWS. But these officers were in the minority and virtually all of the Germans who fought during WWII helped to keep the Nazi-organized killing machine alive by fighting to defend it.

And I can tell you many stories of people who weren't raised on Nazi propoganda who have committed similar acts in many cases. Americans regularly shot the lifeboats of ships that were sunk by submarines for instance (which is similar in my mind to shooting at passing columns of prisoners), Canadians rarely took prisoners who wore SS uniforms, instead shooting them. Most troops killed snipers rather than take them prisoner. Americans used to watch Japanese prisoners commit suicide for entertainment, providing the Japanese with a means (often explosives) and they took pictures as souvenirs. Americans and British leveled numerous cities in Europe and Japan with full knowledge that the vast majority of people who were going to be killed were civilians who didn't even work in defense industries.

Do I agree that race hatred and dehumanizing propoganda have an effect on the number of attrocities? Of course, as do the level of discipline of the troops, the type of warfare being conducted and the general level of racism and education in the society before the wartime propoganda took root.

The difference between the Germans and everyone else is one of degree with the exception of the point I made up top. In no other state was the leadership willing to commit everything to the cause of destroying an entire race. This is what set the Nazis so far apart from the Japanese, the Soviets and the Western Allies. Absent Hitler at the top, I don't think that the German soldiery would have been any more brutal than a lot of other armies put into the position of occupying a huge territory with millions of restive civilians as a long war draws on.

Originally posted by Tingkai

The whole point of the death camps was to kill Jews and others efficiently and quickly. It was not about sparing the sensibilities of the German soldier.

Nope, you are wrong about this one point blank. The original idea was to kill the Jews and Communists as they went along, but there were far too many to kill with individual murders. The "men" who were assigned to this duty were specially selected, but many broke down after a day or two of forcing people to dig their own graves and then machingunning them. Himmler himself visited one of these units to see what the problem was, and he puked himself green. After this the Nazis tried the carbon monoxide vans which didn't work very well and cost a lot of fuel to operate. The next step was the Zyklon B and the death camps which were mostly in Poland because it was the source or closer to the source for the population being murdered and because they wouldn't arouse suspicions of Germans nearly as much as if they were located in Germany. Note that the death camps didn't get started until 1942, a year after the German attack on Russia and 3 years after taking Poland. Nazi policy evolved, including the exploitation of the slave labor, which complicated the extermination policy immensely.

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by Serb
I believe.

AAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!

[Kramerman]

Originally posted by Saras


Kaboom! Iowa broadside.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Lonestar
The Real Stryker warrior.



It, like the other "Striker warriors" is a hyped up POS

Ugly bastards allright. Especially when they are dressed up to avoid being RPG fodder..

[Kramerman]

i heard those things really suck, is that true? I know they were designed to meet certain weight requirements so they could quickly be airlifted in masse, but they are realy vulnerable because of that, and to make up for it they have to add armor to it when it arrives, pretty much nullifing the point of making it light in the first place, and it is still weakly armored. At least i think that is what i read...