Whether or not the “good old days” ever existed is a matter for debate. An Associated Press article summarizing declassified US Army documents describes the summary execution of thousands of Korean communists during the Korean War.
Extensive archival research by The Associated Press has found no indication Far East commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur took action to stem the summary mass killing, knowledge of which reached top levels of the Pentagon and State Department in Washington, where it was classified “secret” and filed away. Now, a half-century later, the South Korean government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is investigating what happened in that summer of terror, a political bloodbath largely hidden from history, unlike the communist invaders’ executions of southern rightists, which were widely publicized and denounced at the time. …
“The most important thing is that they did not stop the executions,” historian Jung Byung-joon, a member of the 2-year-old commission, said of the Americans. “They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports.”
They took pictures in July 1950 at the slaughter of dozens of men at one huge killing field outside the central city of Daejeon. Between 3,000 and 7,000 South Koreans are believed to have been shot there by their own military and police, and dumped into mass graves, said Kim Dong-choon, the commission member overseeing the investigation of these government killings.
In July, 1950, the bulk of US forces had not yet arrived in the Korean peninsula. Task Force Smith, which had been constituted from troops taken from occupation duty in Japan had just been annihilated by the North Koreans. The military context of the South Korean mass killings was this:
The first significant foreign military intervention was the American Task Force Smith, part of the U.S. Army’s 24th Infantry Division based in Japan. On July 5, it fought for the first time at Osan and was defeated with heavy losses. The victorious North Korean forces advanced southwards, and the half-strength 24th Division was forced to retreat to Taejeon, which also fell to the Northern forces. Major General William F. Dean, commander of the division, was taken prisoner.
By August, the South Korean forces and the U.S. Eighth Army under General Walton Walker had been driven back into a small area in the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula around the city of Pusan. As the North Koreans advanced, they rounded up and killed civil servants. On August 20, MacArthur sent a message warning Kim Il Sung that he would be held responsible for further atrocities committed against UN troops.
By September, only the area around Pusan — about 10 percent of the Korean peninsula — was still in coalition hands. With the aid of massive American supplies, air support, and additional reinforcements, the UN forces managed to stabilize a line along the Nakdong River. This desperate holding action became known in the United States as the Pusan Perimeter.
As these battlefield events were taking place, the South Koreans were rounding up and killing every Communist sympathizer they could find. The AP article continues:
On June 29, 1950, as the southern army and its U.S. advisers retreated southward, reports from Seoul said the conquering northerners had emptied the southern capital’s prisons, and ex-inmates were reinforcing the new occupation regime. In a confidential narrative he later wrote for Army historians, Lt. Col. Rollins S. Emmerich, a senior U.S. adviser, described what then happened in the southern port city of Busan, formerly known as Pusan. Emmerich was told by a subordinate that a South Korean regimental commander, determined to keep Busan’s political prisoners from joining the enemy, planned “to execute some 3500 suspected peace time Communists, locked up in the local prison,” according to the declassified 78-page narrative, first uncovered by the newspaper Busan Ilbo at the U.S. National Archives.
While the AP article doesn’t provide the military context and darkly describes the pre-war Korean ‘right wing campaign of oppression’ against the Korean Labor Party, the events described were certainly crimes and for that reason their existence was suppressed. The closest the AP article comes to describing the desperate situation is to say that “as that summer wore on, and the invaders pressed their attack on the southern zone, Busan-area prisoners were shot by the hundreds, Korean and foreign witnesses later said.” No such excuse of course can be put forward to explain the 11,000 summary executions that is the “partial accounting” of the purges conducted by the French resistance in the immediate aftermath of the Liberation.
Wars provide a unique opportunity for evening scores. Even in civilized Europe; or perhaps especially so. Before Germany had surrendered the French had tried an executed Robert Brasillach, a homosexual French author who had collaborated with the Nazis. His execution divided the French intellectual establishment of the time. Here was a well-known French author going to his death, not for acts he had committed but for words he had written. Kim Koster wrote of the controversy:
To many Frenchmen at the time, however, Brasillach was a hated symbol of collaboration and oppression. After his conviction, a group of French writers circulated a petition calling upon French president Charles de Gaulle to show mercy and prevent the execution. Despite the free-speech issues involved, many writers refused to sign. Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, “didn’t sign and never explicitly explained why,” Kaplan writes, “but he referred in much of his writing of the period to the responsibility of the writer and to the idea that a writer must be prepared to die for what he puts on paper.” Simone de Beauvoir also refused to sign, and her reflections eighteen years later came to the point: “There are words as murderous as gas chambers.É In the case of Brasillach, there was no question of a mere ‘offense of opinion’; his denunciations, his advocacy of murder and genocide constituted a direct collaboration with the Gestapo.”
Albert Camus did sign the clemency petition, but as Kaplan shows in a letter he wrote to a friend, it was solely because he abhorred the death penalty. “It is not for the writer, whom I consider of no significance,” Camus wrote. “Nor for the individual, whom I disdain with all my might. If I had even been tempted to be interested in him, the memory of two or three of my friends who were mutilated or gunned down by Brasillach’s friends while his newspaper encouraged them to do it would have prevented me.”
Even the immortals of the French pantheon were not beyond revenge. War is a hard thing for those who have grown up in peace to understand. The saying “what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas” goes double for wartime. I’ve written elsewhere that what really distinguishes veteran’s reunions isn’t the stories they tell but the secrets they keep. That goes for both the good and the bad. Were the Korean killings a crime? They very probably were. And why are they being declassified now? Because everyone involved is either dead or too old to be held to account. That leads us back to the first sentence: did the good old days ever exist? How does one weigh the act of cold blooded murder against the backdrop of the of the armies of Kim Il Sung bearing down on your position? Pray that you never find out. There are situations in which there are no good solutions.
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66 Comments
1. Panday:Wretchard,
An Associated Press article summarizing declassified US Army documents describes the summary execution of thousands of Korean communists during the Korean War.
Sorry, but I get about as upset over this as I would being given a dinner fork to eat my salad.
Jul 6, 2008 - 7:31 pm 2. mts:Between the devil and the deep blue sea. In Spanish, entre la puñal y la pared (between the dagger and the wall). You’re bottled up in your personal Dunkirk, about to be overrun by an enemy you know will be ruthless with you, and you have some enemy sympathizers who will go fight against you if released, and their release seems imminent. The enemy within, ready to help the enemy without to win.
If you want to survive, I don’t know how you can even wonder what to do. That’s 3-7,000 fewer people who want you dead that you have to worry about. Che and the Viet Cong wouldn’t have sweat it, nor would the Chicoms or the jihadists today. I’m tired of our guilting ourselves to death.
Jul 6, 2008 - 7:47 pm 3. Anthony (Los Angeles):I’m tired of our guilting ourselves to death.
On the contrary, while recognizing that desperate circumstances may call for horrifying measures, I think we need that sense of guilt and shame that comes from not living up to our own ideals, even when violating them is necessary to survive. It shows a conscience, a belief that we can be better, which is something that separates us from our barbaric enemies.
Jul 6, 2008 - 8:51 pm 4. Nomenklatura:For every war our country has won we now have a charming class of people eager to explain how it should have been done in a better way.
Presumably this amounts to a claim that these people, these ‘human rights activists’ would have done better. Color me skeptical. Had we been obliged to rely on their delicate sensibilities we wouldn’t even possess a country to argue about now.
Jul 6, 2008 - 9:01 pm 5. wretchard:It shows a conscience, a belief that we can be better, which is something that separates us from our barbaric enemies.
Crimes committed in wartime can never be anything else. But some have the interesting property of condemning you whatever you choose to do. There are situations in which the only way you can escape guilt entirely is through pure dumb luck. For example, during the Liberation of Paris, my aunt’s husband, who was a 4′11″ intelligence officer (who landed on Omaha Beach on June 6 armed with an M1 Garand) had to guard 250 German prisoners in Paris. The Germans were very nervous about the French and he told the German officer (he liked Germans) that if they stayed quiet, he’d deploy the only and only machine gun he had so it would also cover the French. Maybe he just said it to keep the German POWs from being spooked. Fortunately, it all ended happily. But here’s a mental experiment, what if the French had decided to kill the Germans? What if they rushed the POWs? Would you have opened fire? And on whom? Or would you have done nothing? An American unit in the middle of nobody’s business.
People who have been in those situations know there are times when you are forced into doing bad things. There are some who when accused, will take the 3:10 to Yuma willingly, knowing the fact they had to do whatever they did is no excuse; and understand even as they are reading out the specifications, that they are guilty as charged. If that sounds absurd, well it is.
I don’t know whether this makes sense, but it’s the only sense of it I have been able to make.
Jul 6, 2008 - 9:15 pm 6. bobal:Well, this seems like a place to put in proper perspective Luther’s old saying of ’sin bravely’.
Jul 6, 2008 - 9:56 pm 7. Alexis:I’ve written elsewhere that what really distinguishes veteran’s reunions isn’t the stories they tell but the secrets they keep.
Here’s one dirty secret about war weariness. It’s cumulative. The “draft dodgers” during the Vietnam War got the headlines. Yet, in some families, the young men had less to do with their own legalized draft dodging than their mothers, and this was the result of their mothers’ pent-up frustration with WWII. Likewise, the isolationism of WWII was a result of war weariness from WWI and outrage at getting lied to about fake atrocities in Belgium.
It is unwise to forget the sheer resentment among Isolationists that America got dragged into World War II. Many Isolationists were honorable people who thought that America could and should remain as an oasis from the horrors elsewhere. Although the America First Committee had a vicious pro-Nazi demagogue in Charles Lindbergh, it also had statesmen such as Gerald Nye, Burton Wheeler, and Robert LaFollette Jr. “Isolationist” is used as a pejorative by the mainstream media, and yet the very Isolationist prose of the era would have been lauded by the mainstream media as brilliant if it had been written in 1967 in reference to the Vietnam War instead of being written in 1937.
When a war is popular with the powers that be, opposition against it is called “Isolationism”. Yet, when a war is unpopular with the powers that be, anti-war activism isn’t called “Isolationism” even when it patently is. Is Gore Vidal an Isolationist now? Well, he was certainly an Isolationist before World War II! My how times change.
For that matter, I suspect that the “Red Scare” and McCarthyism were payback for how Communists and their allies tried to smear the Isolationists as traitors during WWII. Communists like to portray themselves as the victims, but they weren’t particularly shy about attacking defeatism so long as America was a compliant ally of Uncle Joe. Imagine being an Isolationist who thinks that Communist infiltration of the Roosevelt administration meant that Stalin could maneuver the United States into provoking a Japanese attack. There would be rage against the Japanese, of course, but there would also be rage against the Communists. So, the Cold War would be an excellent opportunity for an Isolationist to seek a kind of revenge that was denied to him during World War II.
When an American prisoner of war injures his cartilage from slipping and falling on the ice during a forced march of American prisoners by the SS, and then when the war is over an Army doctor claims there is no injury, this has an effect on future generations. When the US government tells a soldier that his pain is a lie, this undermines morale. War can be a deeply isolating experience for a farm boy who fought while most of his neighbors throughout his county avoided military service. Who can he talk about his past with, especially when the memories are painful? Even with soldier reunions, when the experiences of a soldier are sufficiently different from those of other veterans, the reunions themselves can create more isolation than camaraderie.
American soldiers who got injured by the fighting in 1942 had a different perception of World War II than American soldiers who fought in 1945. For that matter, America’s soldiers from 1942 had a very different perception of the war than occupation soldiers who went on a looting spree in Germany. Prisoners of war were particularly prone to lack the jingoistic triumphalism of official historiography. I keep on hearing about the “greatest generation”, yet it’s interesting how many children were born during WWII to keep their fathers from getting drafted. Yet, it isn’t fashionable to talk about Americans dodging the draft during WWII, for the official historiography of that war often comes close to being hagiography with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as its patron saint. Compare that to the Vietnam War…
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:17 pm 8. NahnCee:“It shows a conscience, a belief that we can be better, which is something that separates us from our barbaric enemies.”
How is this different from the threat, “If we don’t do thus and so, the terrorists will have won”?
In either case, you’re basing your behavior on what the other guy is doing, and not on what you think needs to be done in that particular situation.
It increasingly seems to me that logically we should be doing some mass annihilation of our enemies abroad, perhaps starting with all the Gitmo detainees rather than releasing them. Just because some South Koreans did the same thing 50 years ago, does that make it the wrong thing to do now?
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:19 pm 9. Tom Holsinger:Next they’ll blame us for Stalin being beastly to various Soviet minorities, such as the ever-lovely Chechens. Because we were Stalin’s ally at the time.
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:29 pm 10. wretchard:Here’s one dirty secret about war weariness. It’s cumulative.
It cuts both ways. People with an actual knowledge of what war entails are likely to be cynical about facile jingoism yet simultaneously possess a real abiding horror of watching things they’ve sacrificed for thrown lightly away. It’s a tug of war in which the outcome is decided by which looks worse the greater evil: the return or renewal of all the bad, horrifying and smelly experiences coming back again or a threat which can imagine to be real unless it’s actually scorched them. To simultaneously know that war is not a picnic yet understand that defeat is not the same as losing a ball game is a painful kind of understanding.
Especially when you get older you just know that you can’t do it again. That knowledge coexists, unhappily, with the realization that you might have to do it again. Another absurdity, but human conflict is interesting in that way: it’s like an event horizon where logic and morality get smeared out and things run to the asymptote. And like the guy who has a choice of committing suicide or a war crime there are situations where you are simply behind the 8-ball with no escape. And I believe that if you ask, a lot of people will attribute their survival, either physically or as morally whole persons, purely to luck.
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:39 pm 11. bobal:Alexis, I think you are thinking too deeply about these things. Sometimes, the truth is the popularly accepted narrative. The Nazis were bastards, and the German farm boys were scared of the threat from the east. Hitler got the country by the throat, and brought out the worst in them. The Jap was militant at that time. The whole thing went to hell. We fought, the good guys won, the world is a better place for it. That’s the narrative that will always make the most sense to me.
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:40 pm 12. Bob Murphy:Sometimes you just have to have the will to win, no matter what.
Jul 6, 2008 - 10:45 pm 13. Alexis:I think what the Koreans did was understandable in the circumstances and why should the US have to bear any guilt because they did not interfere?
Look at what happened in Indonesia when a bunch of alleged communists were killed. Solved a big problem. Not nice but it worked, more or less. Now all we have to worry about there is radical Islam.:) 40 years later.
bobal:
I think it is possible to sympathize with what the Isolationists thought they were trying to accomplish while also seeing that they were wrong. It was necessary to defeat Hitler. I am pointing out how winning the war against him had a price, a price with deferred costs.
We are the good guys, but that is because our political system gives hope to those who want something other than tyranny in their lives. We have a political system where we can be proud of who we are instead of living under a tyranny where we are told how we can become a great nation. America’s greatness doesn’t come from Americans being supermen, but from our liberty to refuse to conform to the ideals of the superman.
One of the sad side effects of Phillippine independence is how the depredations of Japanese tyranny there didn’t soak into American consciousness. It was what happened elsewhere, to someone else; it wasn’t perceived as happening to some of us on American soil. It feels strange to read maps from the 1940’s portraying the Phillippines as American territory. I’m accustomed to thinking of that place as someplace else.
Jul 6, 2008 - 11:51 pm 14. Alexis:In 2003, French Minister of Defence Michèle Alliot-Marie said, “La guerre est toujours la plus mauvaise solution”. (“War is always the worst solution.”) Why couldn’t French leaders tell Americans those words in 1917, in 1940, or in 1944? Her words effectively tell Americans that France’s alliance with the United States during the Revolutionary War was a mistake, for French participation in that war was definitely not a war of choice. These words also tell Americans that Vichy France’s decision to surrender in 1940 was the right one to make.
I am not one to make jokes about French soldiers, for the bravery of French soldiers shown in this past century has been second to none. If there is any fault, it is the cumulative effects of the horrific slaughter of World War I, where French generals from the “School of Attack” thought that the bayonet charge was the way to win wars. French generals treated French, Serb, Russian, British, Senegalese, Algerian, Greek, Italian, and Romanian soldiers as cannon fodder for their war, so it is hardly surprising that French generals would regard American soldiers as cannon fodder too.
When a French senator roars how the French are “allies, pas vassaux” (allies, not vassals), this leads me to consider that much French anti-Americanism, as self-defeating as it is, comes as a result of an apparently common French political assumption that America is a vassal state of France. I get the feeling that the French government and intelligentsia only like Americans when we are cannon fodder for their wars just like a proper vassal state; Americans who don’t rise to the level of cannon fodder for the glory of France are reviled as barbarians. Given such a circumstance, French praise for the sacrifice of American lives for French liberty can actually feel grating, for this praise of dead Americans serves as a poignant reminder of French contempt for living Americans.
French anti-Americanism is not a minor problem. The Islamist critique of America owes much of its venom to the writings of Charles Maurras, whose anti-Americanism started a trend in French thought. As harsh as this may sound, I feel a bit disappointed that Charles Maurras was spared the guillotine, although the Fourth Republic at least had the decency of imprisoning him for the rest of his life. And yet, while Charles Maurras is physically dead, his ideas live on in the stale prose of Sayyid Qutb and his acolytes.
As far as I am aware, no philosopher has attempted to drive a stake through the heart of the “intellectual” arguments of Charles Maurras. Perhaps the time for doing so is coming soon. Intellectuals who promote hatred against America have much to answer for.
Jul 7, 2008 - 12:22 am 15. bobal:Yes,sure, I can agree with most all of that. I think our foreign policy has worked pretty well, taken all in all. After all, all of Europe is free now, and the first thing they did, when out from under the Soviet gun, was rush to the west, as everyone knew they would. Now, they elect their leaders, want to join, or have joined, the EU and NATO, and a guy can fly to Poland and stay in a hotel. I call this a big success. There is not going to be another big war in Europe. Germany is not going to invade Belgium or France. They have their own governments and own lives. When our Founding Fathers talked about no alliances, etc. it was a good idea for those days. But they had not the automobile, or the airplane, much less all the other developments. It always kind of irritates me when people talk about the Fathers, when they would not even recognize the world we live in now. I wonder sometimes, what would they say now? In these circumstances?
Jul 7, 2008 - 12:33 am 16. Fortinbras :: Belmont Club » The Good Wars :: July :: 2008:[...] Belmont Club » The Good Wars The saying “what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas” goes double for wartime. [...]
Jul 7, 2008 - 4:08 am 17. RWE:In WWII, during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Allied aircraft wreaked havoc among the Japanese ships carrying reinforcements. Many of the aircraft engaged in the attack were modified B-25’s, equipped with incredibly heavy forward firing armament. You can imagine what the effect they had on troopships and destroyers with their decks packed with infantry.
And once the slaughter should have been over, it continued. The waters were quite warm, many of the Japanese survivors were afloat in lifeboats, rafts, and debris, and the remaining distance to the islands they planned to reinforce was not great. The appropriate orders went out to Allied pilots. The Bismarck Sea turned red.
In the Atlantic, things were more gentlemanly. Or were they? The British developed a rocket that could reach out ahead of an attacking aircraft and sink U-boats. This came as a surprise to the Germans, who often would try to fight it out on the surface with attacking aircraft. And the element of surprise had to be maintained. When the first U-boat was sunk using the new rockets, a fighter plane began to strafe the German crew as they floated in the water. “Wait!” came the call over the radio. “We need some to interrogate.” The response from the fighter pilot was “Okay. How many do you want me to leave for you?”
Finally, relative to what Alexis and bobal said about the American isolationists, I was quite amused in the late 60’s to see that when the Vietnam War protests started, there were old-time WWII Isolationists who said “See! I told you so!”
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:05 am 18. Vinny Vidivici:It is a measure of the safety and luxury in which most of us in the West live — and a measure of our conceit, as well — that we can demand war be choreographed and scheduled, that its timeless brutality be sanitized according to increasingly fussy standards, that ‘understanding’ an enemy’s language and culture (beyond what it takes to defeat him) so as not to cause offense carries any sort of moral authority.
The over-the-top hysterics and hyperbole about ‘losing our souls’ over Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo (where, apparently, halal meals and holy books handled with white gloves were a diversionary ruse) and fictional atrocities like Haditha, illustrate my point.
My uncles didn’t bone up on bushido or learn Japanese cultural ettiquette before wading into unspeakable violence on islands across the Pacific in order to put an end — by whatever means necessary — to a vicious and evil regime. That they came home to raise families and build the world around us, and that their countrymen helped bring a defeated enemy back into the human fold tells me all I need to know about ‘becoming just like our enemies’ when we fight fire with fire.
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:14 am 19. Doug:“The British developed a rocket that could reach out ahead of an attacking aircraft and sink U-boats. This came as a surprise to the Germans, who often would try to fight it out on the surface with attacking aircraft. And the element of surprise had to be maintained.
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:29 am 20. Doug:When the first U-boat was sunk using the new rockets, a fighter plane began to strafe the German crew as they floated in the water. “Wait!” came the call over the radio. “We need some to interrogate.” The response from the fighter pilot was “Okay.
How many do you want me to leave for you?” ”
—
Where could we read about that, rwe?
Reminiscent of the need to keep news of the (proximity) fuse secret.
(Live pilots would fly target aircraft in tests of jamming technology!)
…don’t think any were shot down.
“That they came home to raise families and build the world around us, and that their countrymen helped bring a defeated enemy back into the human fold tells me all I need to know about
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:33 am 21. Mark:‘becoming just like our enemies’
when we fight fire with fire.”
—
EXACTLY, Vinny!
My experience also.
It is interesting that we are spending billions upon billions so that we can avoid the kinds of moral questions that emerge in close-up combat situations. Assassinations via car bombs are cheap, and as long as there is deniability, the national or worldwide audience tends to shrug. When there is a name and face, the media takes note, and the media loves to hold a mirror up to our collective face. Bill Clinton therefore always chose the missile or joint action. If a nation wants to wage a big war, though, the opportunities for close-up quick-decision death multiply beyond any way of limiting them.
US Iraq warfare moves in a see-saw between stories about operational initiative success and possible atrocity somewhere or other. The media loves the atrocity. Abu Ghraib provides the sexual depravity and atrocity jackpot. The media interrogates the nation: “Isn’t your hypocrisy sufficient reason for you to quit and head home, shamed and defeated?” A moral elephant gun shot is the greatest weapon against the West. Hiroshima looms in the background. It would be interesting to know what the version of the CIA in Riyadh or Teheran is thinking up along these lines. ‘Islamophobia’ is wearing thin.
One thing the volunteer army does is remove moral culpability largely from citizens to our soldiers (and president). When things go well (and was that re-up ceremony in Saddam’s palace not right out of ‘Star Wars’?), the soldiers are our heroes. When things go bad, we tend to blame them. They chose to join, as opposed to soldiers being drafted in prior wars.
All the more reason to honor our soldiers. And to think ahead to the next good-war/bad-war memes. The brain is the battlefield as surely as any terrain.
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:37 am 22. Doug:The Mantra of
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:42 am 23. Doug:“The terrorists will have won.”
(wrt any reaction, or change in lifestyle/perspective/behavior in on the homefront in response to the attacks)
following 9-11, was so constant, incessant, and nauseatingly absurd, that I can’t presently remember in detail, a single specific example.
Mark,
you reminded me of this:
Larry Elder Takes On the Media For Ignoring Iraq War
Now that we are winning the War in Iraq, the media has devoted up to 92% less time on the story.
Conservative Larry Elder discussed this on his show on FOX News this past weekend…
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:49 am 24. Lifeofthemind:Excellent thread.
Jul 7, 2008 - 6:54 am 25. RWE:So much of what the left does today is simply political payback for past grievances. Like the classic feuds of history it reaches back to personality struggles hundreds of years old. There is no real policy dispute that justifies the continuing grudge match that sucks in new acolytes. Like the Islamists they ally with they use anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism as organizing structures in this permanent war. Since all but a small fringe of those that oppose them are focused more on having a life in this world than on a soul destroying cultivation of grievance and conflict the disciples of struggle have an advantage. They will not, can not, quit or go away. Revenge is all they have.
Doug:
I have read so many books on U-boat warfare that I will have to check about use of the rockets, but I think it was in a remarkable book entitled Druid’s Circle. The name comes from the fact that British test pilots would use nearby Stonehenge as an aiming point when checking out new armament installations. Of course, they never actually bombed the place, which was probably a miracle.
Interesting thing was that they developed an anti-ship rocket and it did not work too well. And they developed an anti-tank rocket and it did not work, either. But then they tried the anti-ship rocket against tanks and it worked great. So they said “Whathell… let’s see if…” and tried the antitank rocket against ships and it worked great, too.
Jul 7, 2008 - 7:15 am 26. Doug:
Jul 7, 2008 - 7:26 am 27. John Samford:War is a crime. To pick out a single little part of war and declare it more of a crime is silly.
Unfortunately, war is sometimes necessary. That doesn’t mean it’s not a crime, it just means the lesser crimes that are part of war are necessary also.
My other point is that winners write the history books and hold the show trials. If Hitler had won (unlikely, but NOT impossible), Churchill and FDR would have stood in the dock answering charges. They would have been found guilty and hung. Victors justice. Just ask Saddam.
AFAIK, the Allies violated the GCIII as many times in as many ways as the Axis did.
“War is cruelty. There’s no use trying to reform it, the crueler it is the
Jul 7, 2008 - 7:42 am 28. Big D:sooner it will be over.”
-William Tecumseh Sherman
From someone who would know.
There are still those today who think killing a few hundred thousand Japs with atomic bombs was worse then starving to death 10 or 12 million of them.
OT: Technically, it was the same rocket, just with different warheads.
A solid warhead was intended to penetrate tanks, while a HE warhead was developed for use against subs. However, hitting a tank dead on with a rocket is hard, while hitting a sub with one is much easier. In addition, the 3″ chunk of fast-moving steel *did* penetrate right through u-boat hulls, even if it had to go through several feet of water first. And frankly, a few 3″ holes in a u-boat would sink it; the kill rate with RP against diving subs was much higher than with depth charges.
Meanwhile, while the HE warhead wouldn’t necessarily kill a tank outside of the same lucky shot, but it would devastate lighter targets.
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:07 am 29. El Jefe Maximo:It should be remembered that there was a considerable underground communist movement in the ROK prewar, which at times tied down good parts of the ROK army hunting real or suspected guerillas.
Also, during the first part of the war — from the invasion, through the fall of Seoul to the solidifying of the front around the Pusan perimeter, the NKs mixed recon units and inflitration troops in among refugee columns. Even if the military peril from known and unknown communist sympathizers had not been real (which it was), extreme concern about “Fifth Columns”; saboteurs; alleged traitors; phantom parachutists, etc., is a common feature of chaotic retreats, military disasters and surprise offensives, usually out of all proportion to the actual threat. Anybody remember Operation Grief?
I don’t doubt that paranoia, settling of scores,and plain panic caused a lot of unjustified killing. But it’s easy to say that 50 plus years on, from the air-conditioned comfort of libraries and the well-appointed offices of Truth Commissions. July 1950 was a little different.
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:08 am 30. El Jefe Maximo:Looking over the comments, I thought Wretchard’s mental experiment re the Americans protecting German prisoners from an angry French mob was worth some thought:
“But here’s a mental experiment, what if the French had decided to kill the Germans? What if they rushed the POWs? Would you have opened fire? And on whom? Or would you have done nothing? An American unit in the middle of nobody’s business.”
Were I in the situation of Wretchard’s lieutenant, I hope I would have fired on the mob (allied mob or no) if I had to to protect the prisoners. The prisoners were unarmed and surrendered, and in the custody of the US Army, and thus entitled to protection. If some were war criminals, that is not a mob’s business.
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:16 am 31. Lifeofthemind:El Jefe Maximo
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:30 am 32. Dr. Scott:The Sheriff facing down the lynch mob is an enduring theme in American fiction. Such narratives help train us in what we can expect of ourselves when the hard choices face us. They can be used as tools in good civics or officer training programs.
“The most important thing is that [the Americans] did not stop the executions. They were at the crime scene, and took pictures and wrote reports.”
What’s most important? Some way to blame the Americans, that’s what! I suppose it’s all Bush’s fault…
Jul 7, 2008 - 9:59 am 33. RWE:Big D: Yep, they thought they would use blast effect against ships but that did not work out. But based on fighting in North Africa they found that non-armor piercing artillery could stop Tiger tanks by blowing the treads off. So they tried the blast warheads and they worked on tanks, not penetrating but disabling them.
For the antitank rockets they tried to make them armor piercing but they could not penetrate the thicker armors. But they found that the shape of the head made the rockets pitch up when they hit the water. So you could aim in front of the ship and have the rocket penetrate the hull below the water level. And if you missed the water and hit the ship there was nothing wrong with that, either.
Was it Gen Sherman who said “It is well that war is so terrible lest we love it too much?’ Well, he lived up to that when he burned down my home town. Of course, they burned down the wrong church. Were aiming for First Baptist where the Succession Convention originally had been convened but were redirected to the Methodist Church around the corner by the black janitor.
Jul 7, 2008 - 10:02 am 34. Eggplant:Lifeofthemind said:
“So much of what the left does today is simply political payback for past grievances. Like the classic feuds of history it reaches back to personality struggles hundreds of years old. There is no real policy dispute that justifies the continuing grudge match that sucks in new acolytes.”
Normally, I would be inclined to say: “Let the penduleum swing back to The Left and allow The Left to again wear out their welcome as they always have in the past.”
The only problem with this sort of outlook is I don’t think we really have the option of allowing The Left to foul up things good and proper. So many things are marginal, e.g. Peak Oil, Islamic Fascism, credit bubbles, the near bankrupt financial state of the government, etc. We don’t really have the opiton of allowing The Left to hammer everything into the ground and then doing a clean-up afterwards.
Jul 7, 2008 - 10:31 am 35. George Bruce:In a desperate civil war, when one side is trying to impose a communist dictatorship by force, killing those who seek to enslave you is not only justified, but laudable.
Pinochet should have been given the Nobel Peace Prize for saving his country from a Stalinist horror.
Jul 7, 2008 - 10:35 am 36. socialism_is_error:RWE: Was it Gen Sherman who said “It is well that war is so terrible lest we love it too much?’
Actually, that observation is attributed to General Robert E. Lee.
Sherman applied the lesson.
Jul 7, 2008 - 11:20 am 37. Michael Hoskins:Lefty,
Jul 7, 2008 - 11:36 am 38. Mark:I remember an officer leadership training program based on a scene by scene analysis of Gregory Peck in “12 O’clock High”. If memory serves, the points made still apply.
John S. wrote:
“War is a crime. To pick out a single little part of war and declare it more of a crime is silly.”
This opinion seems to be a slippery slope, with a result that no war could be a good war. Is not a just war argument the appropriate beginning, at least, of a good war?
Breaking of the peace is a crime, as when any person commits a criminal act. Civil authorities are responsible for apprehending and punishing the criminal. The police are not criminals for using force to apprehend and punish the criminal and restore the peace.
In just war theory, and I hope all of our wars start that way, or in just self-defence, the aim is to restore the peace. Thus T. Aquinas places his discussion of just war within his discussion of charity. Within that just war, some actions are going to be criminal. That’s one of the reasons we have a military judicial system and international rules.
Al Qaeda learned early on to game the system re. blurring the distinctions between, say, combatants and non-combatants, making atrocities almost inevitable, even to the best-intentioned combatants. Abu Ghraib involved crimes. Haditha apparently did not. But the overall war is not a crime, since it aimed to restore the peace, enforcing international resolutions (which, it is true, the UN did not want to enforce).
Jul 7, 2008 - 11:56 am 39. Presbypoet:Dean Koontz latest book “Odd Hours” relates very well to this topic. Koontz, ( pg243 to 244) has his hero, (a common man, with uncommon powers), say: “To do something, to do what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that, when recalled on lonely nights, make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.
Such doubts are high cards in the devil’s hand, and he knows how to pay them well, in hope of bringing you to despair and ennui, if not to self-destruction.”
It seems to me Koontz has expressed it exactly right. Life doesn’t come in neat good and evil packages, easy to discern. Often the worst and easiest sin is to do nothing.
Will you stand with those good men who stand up in the face of evil? Will you?
I served in the Army from 1966 to 1969. I did nothing of “importance”, yet my tiny actions helped defeat the evil of communism. I stood at the gap in time of trouble, ready to be obedient. My father was an x-ray tech in WWII. All he did was take thousands of x-rays of future pilots. Yet we collaborated with those at the sharp end of the stick, those blessed with the chance to directly do great good and great evil.
Jul 7, 2008 - 12:00 pm 40. Lifeofthemind:Michael Hoskins
Jul 7, 2008 - 12:45 pm 41. El Jefe Maximo:Yes, I remember that also.
George,
You said:
“In a desperate civil war, when one side is trying to impose a communist dictatorship by force, killing those who seek to enslave you is not only justified, but laudable.”
That’s a mighty slippery slope, and a very broad statement, which can cover a multitude of sins. Does “killing those who seek to enslave you” include unarmed enemies who are prisoners, and no longer resisting ? Do these enemies get any kind of due process, or are they shot out of hand ?
I recognize that in a “desperate civil war” that there are times when people may wind up shot out of hand (I’m thinking of both sides in Spain in 1936). Such practices make civil wars a good deal more desperate.
As for Pinochet, a lot of people (including me) would agree with you that the Allende government was bad news. A lot of people would probably agree with you that an end to the Allende regime was a good thing (even if it took a coup to do it) and that, in general, Pinochet’s later economic policies were the correct medicine for that country’s problems; and that he restored democracy on a better basis than previously existing. (I’d be less than candid if I didn’t count myself in this camp).
But too, too many people died after Pinochet’s coup — most of them after there was no question of any challenge to his regime. The memory of all that death will probably last longer than the memory of any good that he did, and will probably political hobble the political right in Chile for years. Pinochet did some good things, it’s true. But he did plenty of bad ones too.
Personally, I think as long as enemies are in arms, one should fight them with any and all available means, but once they’ve ceased resistance and surrendered, they should be, as Lincoln said in another context, let up easy.
Jul 7, 2008 - 1:59 pm 42. Derek:Fascinating thread. There are those who feel the evils of war are never justified. And there are many in today’s context who think that we can duck it all.
The true test of ones opposition to war is the willingness to die for it. There were a number who were executed during WWII for refusal to take the uniform.
But the anti-war crowd today tries to convince us that there is no enemy, there is no one out to kill, and for that reason war isn’t justified.
What if there is? That is what I fear the most. The anti-war crowd, including politicians, driven to the stark realization that there are two choices. Kill them all or die.
Any doubt as to the outcome?
Derek
Jul 7, 2008 - 2:07 pm 43. Doug:The Execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik
During World War II, 21,049 American military personel were convicted of desertion, 49 were sentenced to death, but only Pvt. Slovik paid the ultimate price.
In fact, he was the only American soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War.
Jul 7, 2008 - 2:18 pm 44. Grimmy:—
Spread the Word
The Obama campaign promises the American people a new level of transparency.
So why won’t he show the public his birth certificate?
Barack Obama birth certificate Now petition
El Jefe:
The slippery slope argument really has no place in this particular issue, when that issue is taken in context.
1. There was no reason to assume the Pusan Pocket would be able to hold against the Norks. The American and South Korean military had been pushed back from every attempt to establish a line of resistance, and the pocket itself was under immense pressure at that time.
2. Much of the Norks success came from their taking advantage of the refugee flows to saturate forward American or South Korean positions with agents. It was not at all uncommon during the retreat of the allied forces for the opening salvo of Nork arty to obliterate allied artillery emplacements and ammo dumps. This was due to the ability of Nork agents and/or symps to fully map out allied positions and communicate that info back to Nork units.
3. The atrocities were, by no means, a one way street. The Norks slaughtered anyone in every village, town or city that they occupied that may have had any connection with the former gov, or had ever spoken out against the commies, or was a teacher, or overly educated, or simply appeared not fully cowed.
4. A prison full of those already proven to be committed to the enemy’s cause is not something that can be taken lightly, when in context of the absolute brutality and murderous intent of that cause.
5. When the issue in question is survival of a people, there is no degree of remorselessness that is not morally acceptable. Compassion and mercy may be saintly at the individual level, but for a government tasked with doing what is necessary to ensure its peoples’ survival, it is just incompetence.
Life does not bend itself to the will of those who wish to see the world in rose colored glasses filtering situations that are non-operational outside of the intellectualists ivory tower protections. Reality is brutal and merciless at such times as under discussion here. Those who do not rise up to meet it at the levels of intensity required simply cease to exist.
Jul 7, 2008 - 2:25 pm 45. El Jefe Maximo:Grimmy,
I would emphatically agree with your propositions 1-3. You’re quite correct in your specific comments about the 1950 campaign (I sort of said 1-2 in an earlier post on this thread), and I am in general agreement with propositions 4 and 5, certainly in the context of June-July 1950 on the roads of the ROK and in the Pusan perimeter. Context is absolutely, positively everything. I suppose who and what worries me are the sorts who maybe enjoy the implications of your propositions 4 and 5 a bit too much.
Jul 7, 2008 - 3:05 pm 46. hdgreene:How does the AP know the North was executing “Southern Rightists?” As they seize power the Communist often execute teachers, cops, mayors, village elders, scout masters, people who wear glasses — anyone they think might lead a resistance to “change.” Hell, they’ve been known to shoot a reporter now and then. And the communist would put a bullet through the back of the head of a Social Democrat as fast (or faster) than any of the above. As for the real “Southern rightist,” I doubt they were waiting around to take their chances. It seems to me the AP should treat these victims like they were terrorist — innocents swept up by an invading horde.
And is the AP sure the fellow snapping pictures and taking notes wasn’t William Duranty of the New York Times? Oh. Right. This is one massacre he would have reported. (Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1930’s for covering up Stalin’s genocidal “terror famine” in the Ukraine).
I stopped watching the network news long ago so this is an old example. The Palestinians lynched a dozen or so “suspects” and Peter Jennings reported that they were, beyond doubt, “Israeli Collaborators.” So I emailed ABC news: “How do you know the crowd did not just owe them money? Hang the guys who hold the mortgage and it’s a clear profit to you.”
Often in these situations democracy committed nationalist get it from both sides because they are a threat to both sides. And neither side will identify them as what they really are. When you align yourself with communists you have the problem that if the other side don’t kill you, the communist will (but only after you’ve served your purpose).
Jul 7, 2008 - 3:07 pm 47. Grimmy:El Jefe:
It’s all good. Brutality for brutality’s sake never serves anyone but those who revel in being brutal.
That said, there are times when the gentler side must be shut off in order to allow for survival.
One thing our current enemy, both foreign and domestic, tend to forget is that the US armed forces are going about things in a “kinder gentler” method these days because they can.
The same ferocity and remorseless intensity that met the Japanese in the Central Pacific Campaign is still available in our hearts and minds for access. The enemy that pushes things far enough that such gets pulled out and put into effect again will not survive long enough to regret it.
Jul 7, 2008 - 3:17 pm 48. Brian H:Vinny;
Jul 7, 2008 - 7:06 pm 49. Eggplant:You remind me of a fascinating meeting between an American writer and a Japanese elder that didn’t go quite the way the “guilt-ready” American expected: Charles McCarry.
It’s probably about time to re-read some of Spengler’s excellent articles concerning war, refer to:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FJ19Aa01.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB10Aa03.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EF12Ak01.html
Key Spengler quote:
“When brave men are convinced that conquering others is the best way to make their fortune, it may be necessary to keep on killing until not enough are left to fight.”
This quote is as applicable to Islamic fascists as it was to Confederate slave holders and German Nazis.
Jul 7, 2008 - 7:52 pm 50. heather:the really interesting thing is that people like war enough to go at it over and over again. We have theories about this: fights over land, over gold, over women, over slaves, over all sorts of whatevers, including “justice”.
Funny, eh?
The good thing is, we stop long enough to build very nice cities, like Sarajevo, for example, before the last war…
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:22 pm 51. vnjagvet:Brian:
That is quite a story.
Thanks for linking.
Jul 7, 2008 - 8:33 pm 52. John Samford:Mark
“This opinion seems to be a slippery slope, with a result that no war could be a good war. Is not a just war argument the appropriate beginning, at least, of a good war?”
No war is a good war. As far as a just war, that is a different issue;
“War is just when it is necessary; arms are permissible when there is no
hope except in arms.”
- Niccolo Machiavelli
“Breaking of the peace is a crime, as when any person commits a criminal act. Civil authorities are responsible for apprehending and punishing the criminal. The police are not criminals for using force to apprehend and punish the criminal and restore the peace.”
That depends. Did not the Officers that apprehended Rodney King do a little jail time?
Like most Americans I’m a firm believer in the law. So long as it doesn’t cause me any inconvenience.
You are approaching the issue from a theoretical POV. In the real world, the law does not go where enforcement cannot reach and cops on the beat enforce the laws they think important at that moment.
There is a local ordinance against beeping the horn on a car. It dates back to the days when autos and horses shared the roads. It is ignored by both the local drivers AND police.
Prisoners (POW’s) get shot all the time. By both sides. That started with the invention of gunpowder. Before that, prisoners were put to the sword. One assumes that started with the invention of the sword.
“A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.”
- Sir Winston S. Churchill, 1952. (The Observer)
It is not going to stop because some fancy boy with nice hair signs a sheet of paper.
Jul 7, 2008 - 10:34 pm 53. Greg:Pulling out of the GCIV would be a smart thing to do. It would prevent the Jihadists ( who have no record of ever honoring a treaty) from using it against us. It would also provide the diploms one last chance to avoid war.
It would make a difference if the negotiators with Iran said one day; “Enough about the sanctions. Today we will discuss how to treat POW’s. We expect to have a LOT of yours in a few days. You might have one or two of ours.”
I still think the best way to deal with Kim II is to send in a diplo with a picture of Saddam swinging by a noose and a sales brochure for the South of France and say “Make your choice a$$hole”.
Articles like this one are the reason I read The Belmont Club.
Jul 8, 2008 - 7:00 am 54. David M:The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the – Web Reconnaissance for 07/08/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
Jul 8, 2008 - 8:26 am 55. someone:” It always kind of irritates me when people talk about the Fathers, when they would not even recognize the world we live in now. I wonder sometimes, what would they say now? In these circumstances?”
Given that they solved a very abstract problem, I think that they would do their best to see how that abstraction applies to modern living.
Jul 8, 2008 - 7:49 pm 56. bobal:Yes, they did a good– an excellent–job for their day. I wonder what their ideas would be about our relations with China, for instance, or our relations with the EU, or the United Nations. Just asking.
Jul 9, 2008 - 1:15 am 57. George Bruce:El Jefe Maximo:
You make some interesting comments for someone with your pen name.
As far a Pinochet is concerned, I am not aware that he did anything wrong, other than the accusations made by communists and communist sympathizers. And since I don’t believe anything such people say, I have no reason to agree that Pinochet did anything wrong. Even if some of the people on his side acted excessively, (and I don’t concede that they did), on balance, Pinochet was a great liberator and hero.
It is precisely because Pinochet thwarted the goals of Stalinists, and for no other reason, that he is hated so much by the left. The people who wanted to hang Pinochet don’t give a damn about a few dead civilians here or there. The Pinochet haters are the type of people who would regard any number of deaths in Chili as necessary expenditures if the result was a Marxist dictatorship. The left will use concepts of human rights only so long as it serves their purposes…..just as they use human rights advocates when, and for so long, as it suits them.
If you ever feel compelled to give mercy to those who moments before were very willing to steal your property, enslave you or kill you, after they “cease resistance”, you would be wise to remember that “surrender” is a western, bourgeois concept.
Jul 9, 2008 - 11:47 am 58. Hendryk:RWE:
In WWII, during the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, Allied aircraft wreaked havoc among the Japanese ships carrying reinforcements. Many of the aircraft engaged in the attack were modified B-25’s, equipped with incredibly heavy forward firing armament. You can imagine what the effect they had on troopships and destroyers with their decks packed with infantry.
And once the slaughter should have been over, it continued. The waters were quite warm, many of the Japanese survivors were afloat in lifeboats, rafts, and debris, and the remaining distance to the islands they planned to reinforce was not great. The appropriate orders went out to Allied pilots. The Bismarck Sea turned red.
Jul 9, 2008 - 4:24 pm 59. NahnCee:———————————–
The one telling effect of the above mission was of the pilot who upon returning from this slaughter got out of his aircraft, put his .45 pistol in his mouth and terminated his own life.
Hendryk – do you have a citation for that story? Especially the part about the suiciding pilot?
Jul 9, 2008 - 6:10 pm 60. Grimmy:There wasn’t much sniveling over the bleeding out of Japanese soldiers by US and allied warfighters by the time of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Guadalcanal had been in progress for some time as had the New Guinea fight, including the epic ANZAC defensive action along the Kokoda Track.
The absolute barbaric brutality of the Japanese was well known by this time and there was very nearly zero hesitation to do unto them what they’d been doing for so long to so many for so long.
The Japanese killed in the Battle of the Bismark Sea were being sent to reinforce their offensive to take New Guinea. The allied forces were barely able to hold on as it was. If the Japanese had succeeded, there’s every likelihood that the ANZAC nations would have been cut off, isolated and eventually invested by Japanese forces.
I seriously doubt there was any pilot that shed even a single tear of remorse for those Japanese that got fed to the sharks.
Jul 9, 2008 - 11:39 pm 61. Hendryk:NahnCee:
Hendryk – do you have a citation for that story? Especially the part about the suiciding pilot?
——————————————
The incident is mentioned in the book Angels Twenty: A Young American Flier a Long Way from Home by Edwards Park who flew in New Guinea and concerns the newsreels of time describing the battle and its casualty free outcome on the american side which he wryly remarks upon and includes as far as I can recall the pilot (a friend of his) finding – in the authors words “a use for that big ol´rusty Iron they carried around”.
Grimmy:
Jul 10, 2008 - 7:05 am 62. El Jefe Maximo:There wasn’t much sniveling over the bleeding out of Japanese soldiers by US and allied warfighters by the time of the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Guadalcanal had been in progress for some time as had the New Guinea fight, including the epic ANZAC defensive action along the Kokoda Track.
——————————————
Yes its true there wasnt much compassion especially with the japanese canibalising the corpses of their australian opponents during the Kokoda Campaign but when you consider having to fight a grimm war in a forgotten part of the world with little resources/support compared to the european theater its small wonder that some of the most remote and primitive airstrips also had high suicide rates.
Grimmy and Hendryk are both correct on the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. Seems like I recall much of the strafing of Japanese troops in the water and of rescue vessels was retaliation for the Japanese machine-gunning shot down bomber crews as they parachuted. As for the argument that the Japanese had to be strafed because they could be got back in the fight after rescue, that’s probably got merit, but I’m not sure how much use the surviving waterlogged troops with no equipment or supplies were going to be to the Japanese Army in New Guinea.
Seems like I saw a general discussion of Bismarck Sea in Richard Frank’s book on the Guadalcanal campaign, and in a volume of Morison’s US Naval Ops of WWII series.
George,
Surrender may indeed be, as you put “a western, bourgeois concept.” Inasmuch as I’m a western bourgeois, and somewhat Norte-Amero-Euro centric, perhaps that explains my positions. BTW, I don’t like Stalinists or commies any more than you do.
Jul 10, 2008 - 8:41 am 63. Grimmy:Hendryk:
The war against the Japanese could only be considered a “forgotten front” by Europers and scumbags in the Uncle Joe Fan Club. For many, if not most, Americans, it was the primary front of the war. It was the Japanese who attacked us at Pearl. It was the Japanese who were slaughtering our POWs. The Germans were a European problem. Japan was the primary in the hearts and minds of most Americans.
Jul 10, 2008 - 10:12 am 64. Frozen Al:The AP article ignores 2 important pieces of info:
The NKs killed American prisoners as well as S Koreans, frequently torturing them first. These bodies were found when the UN troops broke out of the Pusan pocket.
Second, there was an ongoing guerilla war going on in the South throughout the Korean War. (There was a home-grown Communist movement in the South that predated the Soviet occupation of the North.) These executions should be seen in the context of ongoing attacks accompanied by atrocities by the guerillas.
Neither side was interested in taking prisoners.
Al
Jul 10, 2008 - 1:55 pm 65. NahnCee:the pilot (a friend of his)…
If you added another clause to make it “a friend of a friend” it’d be the very definition of an urban legend. Which I think I’ll consider it to be any way, since from your description it’s from the narrative of a movie / newsreel.
Jul 10, 2008 - 2:20 pm 66. WebElf Report News Blogroll « The WebElf Report:[...] WHETHER OR NOT the “good old days” ever existed is a matter for debate. An Associated Press article [...]
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