A Survival Question

Amsel said:

Were there many fanatics in the Luftwaffe?

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Oh, they were there, that's for sure, but of course not all of them. What I meant was that the will of fighting with the Germans was very much gone by that time. Only fanatics couldn't see that the war was lost at that time.

A few days ago I was watching a program about Japanese Kamikaze pilots which survived the war and one particular pilot expressed that when learned about the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki he of course was in shock because of the horrible fate of the civilians in those cities, but at the same time he felt relieved that he no longer would be called to sacrifice himself for the emperor in a suicide attack; so in my opinion it is reasonable to think that some German and Japanese pilots during the last months of the war had enough seeing+their+friends+getting+killed+for+a+lost+cause+and+their+priority+was+to+survive+the+war.

Njaco said:

Grau, you just put it in perspective for me. Thanks. I have a feeling I was being a little thick.

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It was a great question, I wouldn't say you were being thick at all.

We can only speculate what goes through a person's head based on our experiences and/or observations.

People sometimes do things under great stress that would be considered irrational under normal conditions.

I've read similar stories about various crew members of bombers bailing out for no reason other then they'd had enough it was thought