10-29-2024, 05:59 AM
I suppose by that stage in the war, most soldiers had begun to learn that the Geneva Convention was only really being upheld by the allies. Seeing direct physical confirmation in thousands of examples of depraved indifference, abject base cruelty clustered into a single place must have been emotionally traumatic.
How many of these soldiers knew someone who was lost and perhaps captured, how many suddenly realized that what happened here is just a glimpse into what might be happening to their friends? "Who the hell were these people who would do this?"
Simply human empathy... it was not 'ideologically scrubbed' in American soldiers as it was in German soldiers, who were often taught "they are animals" "they are not human beings". In Americans at least, empathy was oppositely nurtured as a 'reason for fighting.'
The result is outrage, a sense of the rape and murder of compassion and human dignity. The fury which followed was more punishment than war... Officers tried to control it... but they were just as affected as their units.
It was a shameful lapse of command, a tragic loss of control... there can never be excuse to justify plain mass execution... Americans want to stand by the value of 'due process'... but there was none there.
Just my 'projection'... others would know better... I welcome correction.
How many of these soldiers knew someone who was lost and perhaps captured, how many suddenly realized that what happened here is just a glimpse into what might be happening to their friends? "Who the hell were these people who would do this?"
Simply human empathy... it was not 'ideologically scrubbed' in American soldiers as it was in German soldiers, who were often taught "they are animals" "they are not human beings". In Americans at least, empathy was oppositely nurtured as a 'reason for fighting.'
The result is outrage, a sense of the rape and murder of compassion and human dignity. The fury which followed was more punishment than war... Officers tried to control it... but they were just as affected as their units.
It was a shameful lapse of command, a tragic loss of control... there can never be excuse to justify plain mass execution... Americans want to stand by the value of 'due process'... but there was none there.
Just my 'projection'... others would know better... I welcome correction.
