wuzak
Captain
Perhaps why these schemes were rejected.
'Hajo' Herrmann's Craziest Idea
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Perhaps why these schemes were rejected.
Shortround6
Major General
Strange, I did not notice any such "confirmation" unless by not actively denying it you take that as confirmation.
I am willing to be educated, what was the name or names of the camps and where were they located?
Tankworks
Airman
Yes Mr. Shortround6, thousands of German POWs (refered to something like 'disarmed enemy combatants' or some such) died in the camps in the spring and summer of 1945. It is not a secret and a simple google search will give you all the info you could want.
As for the shooting of pilots in their parachutes, it is completely justified if they are over their own territory, they will be back in the air again and you will have to fight them all over again. The job is to kill the other pilot, planes are more easily replaced than a pilot. I have always wondered about the sqeamishness at shooting a pilot who has bailed out of his aircraft but machine-gunning tank crewmen that are abandoning their tank seems quite alright!
As for the shooting of pilots in their parachutes, it is completely justified if they are over their own territory, they will be back in the air again and you will have to fight them all over again. The job is to kill the other pilot, planes are more easily replaced than a pilot. I have always wondered about the sqeamishness at shooting a pilot who has bailed out of his aircraft but machine-gunning tank crewmen that are abandoning their tank seems quite alright!
My posts re PoWs confirm no such thing.
There were claims made that hundreds of thousands of German PoWs had starved to death or died of neglect at the end of the war and specifically that tens of thousands had perished in the infamous "Rheinwiesenlager" (RWL)
In fact there were a total of 5,311 registered deaths in the RWLs. This out of a total of 557,000 prisoners held in those facilities.
No one is trying to say that no prisoners died in those camps,they were not holiday resorts,but the idea that there was some kind of systematic effort to neglect and allow the deaths of PoWs in US hands is nonsense.
As far as shooting at men in parachutes I have looked at this in some detail. Both in later accounts and contemporary encounter/combat reports pilots of the RAF,USAAF and Luftwaffe mention witnessing or even themselves shooting at parachutes. There are also reports of pilots strafing men escaping from crash landed aircraft. One pilot always tried to position his aircraft to give himself a shot at an enemy pilot as he attempted to bail out and was happy to put this in several of his encounter reports.
The fact that they are prepared to put these sorts of things in a report indicates that they were not expecting to be censured for it. They could easily have left them out. At the very least a blind eye was turned towards the practices at higher levels.
I do not believe that the evidence supports these practices being common,but they were certainly perpetrated by all the Air Forces I mention above. I don't know about the others. I would be surprised if they were any different.
Human beings are human beings and there was a war to fight. It is dangerous to judge their actions through the lens of a later morality and with the benefit of hindsight.
Cheers
Steve
There were claims made that hundreds of thousands of German PoWs had starved to death or died of neglect at the end of the war and specifically that tens of thousands had perished in the infamous "Rheinwiesenlager" (RWL)
In fact there were a total of 5,311 registered deaths in the RWLs. This out of a total of 557,000 prisoners held in those facilities.
No one is trying to say that no prisoners died in those camps,they were not holiday resorts,but the idea that there was some kind of systematic effort to neglect and allow the deaths of PoWs in US hands is nonsense.
As far as shooting at men in parachutes I have looked at this in some detail. Both in later accounts and contemporary encounter/combat reports pilots of the RAF,USAAF and Luftwaffe mention witnessing or even themselves shooting at parachutes. There are also reports of pilots strafing men escaping from crash landed aircraft. One pilot always tried to position his aircraft to give himself a shot at an enemy pilot as he attempted to bail out and was happy to put this in several of his encounter reports.
The fact that they are prepared to put these sorts of things in a report indicates that they were not expecting to be censured for it. They could easily have left them out. At the very least a blind eye was turned towards the practices at higher levels.
I do not believe that the evidence supports these practices being common,but they were certainly perpetrated by all the Air Forces I mention above. I don't know about the others. I would be surprised if they were any different.
Human beings are human beings and there was a war to fight. It is dangerous to judge their actions through the lens of a later morality and with the benefit of hindsight.
Cheers
Steve
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Edgar Brooks
Senior Airman
Position locations were found by radio listening posts using direction-finding equipment; it had nothing to do with Bletchley Park.
German ships, crossing the Mediterranean, were NOT always intercepted; some got through by using differing routes.
Name them.
Who attacked who, in Hungary, in 1945? Remember that the Germans kept total radio silence for the Ardennes attack, and it still failed, so they could hardly have been suspicious of Enigma being broken.
Thousands of workers spent days and nights, working on breaking the codes, leading to actions like the sinking of the Bismarck, terminal damge to the Tirpitz, and defeat at Kursk; your post infers that they wasted their time inventing machines to do the work, even producing the world's first computer, since the Germans knew of their work. Now, suddenly, you've changed tack.
I "confirmed" no such thing; read my post again.
And how do you know that all of the pilots were American?
6-8 out of an air force how big? And only 2-3 Germans? Now, you really are showing your anti-Allies bias; I suggest you read up on the Malta operations, but from the Allied side, so you get an even balance of the events. Incidentally, Dowding, during 1940, shook Churchill rigid, when he said that he felt that the Germans were perfectly justified in shooting at British parachutes; he didn't have this 20:20 hindsight thing, of today, where everybody was supposed to fight a "gentlemanly" war. Put simply, it was "Kill, or be killed."
If you have no evidence (and you don't) the reaction would be predictably fierce.
Opinions are fine, but you'll find that they're more readily accepted if they're based on evidence, rather than guesswork.
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I've never seen any evidence that German airmen were told to open their parachutes as low as possible. I'm not a parachutist but with out any accurate means of judging altitude this seems a risky procedure. I'd love to see your evidence if you have some.
I recall a USAAF bomber veteran saying that they were supposed to open their parachutes when "you could tell a horse from a cow on the ground". Most of the footage I have seen of parachutes from American bombers would indicate that they did no such thing.
Going by first hand accounts,British bomber crews seem to have deployed their parachutes as soon as they felt they were clear of the aircraft,but then at night they would have had little idea of their altitude.
The problem with shooting men in parachutes is that it becomes reciprocal. You might easily find yourself as the target the day after you were the shooter. I believe that this is why the practice did not become commonplace. It is a sort of self regulation,not followed by all men on all sides,but,nonetheless,followed by the majority in the three Air Forces I cited above.
Cheers
Steve
I recall a USAAF bomber veteran saying that they were supposed to open their parachutes when "you could tell a horse from a cow on the ground". Most of the footage I have seen of parachutes from American bombers would indicate that they did no such thing.
Going by first hand accounts,British bomber crews seem to have deployed their parachutes as soon as they felt they were clear of the aircraft,but then at night they would have had little idea of their altitude.
The problem with shooting men in parachutes is that it becomes reciprocal. You might easily find yourself as the target the day after you were the shooter. I believe that this is why the practice did not become commonplace. It is a sort of self regulation,not followed by all men on all sides,but,nonetheless,followed by the majority in the three Air Forces I cited above.
Cheers
Steve
oldcrowcv63
Tech Sergeant
Wuz,
My understanding of that proposal after reading Top Secret documents was that it was actually a mission contracted by the Mafia with M&M Enterpises (using axis aerial and naval assets) to replenish the stocks of Italian olive oil used in the restaurants of Little Italy in NYC. These stocks had been depleted by war time use as a lubricant. Olive oil full canisters were to be parachuted into lower Manhattan and collected for use there. Evidently M&M couldn't respond due to its staff's prior commitment to bomb USAAF airfields in Italy with USAAF aircraft. Later it made a proposal to perform the same mission but replacing the olive oil with chocolate covered cotton it had produced from cotton procured from the Egyptian market.
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vikingBerserker
Lieutenant General
Wow, that's really a Catch-22 
- Thread starter
- #49
Njaco
The Pop-Tart Whisperer
Let's get back on topic or the thread will be closed and infractions handed out.
