quote:
Originally posted by Stone Mill:
3. Airborne really never took prisoners as an unwritten (and unspoken?) rule. Lots of breaches of Geneva shown; but this is the way it was.
My first reaction to this scene was "No way! This has got to be an exaggeration. This
can't have really happened."
But the more I think about it, the more believable it is that this really happened, at least some times. If you think about what happens to prisoners normally in the middle of a battle. They are sent to the rear and watched by non-combat personnel until they can be removed from the battle. But in the middle of an airborne assault, there is no "rear", and no “non-combat” personnel to watch prisoners. You are totally surrounded, and need every available pair of eyes watching out for the enemy.
The soldiers of the Airborne divisions in Normandy on June 6th couldn't know how soon they would be relieved by troops coming up from the beach. And you can't simply take the enemy soldiers guns and ask them to go home and not shoot anybody.
Most likely though this didn't happen very often. I think it more likely that the vast majority of this kind of thing would have been similar to the night scene where a couple of German soldiers were shot after clearly signaling their intention to surrender. There in the heat of the moment it would be much easier for a "civilized" person to pull the trigger when you know in the back of your mind there is no capability to keep prisoners. And you could at least tell yourself they may be faking a surrender to get you to let your guard down.
But I can't imagine the kind of person that could walk up to a group of unarmed people, hand them a pack of cigarettes, and then mow them down in cold blood. There was probably a few sociopaths in every unit that got off on killing. These would be the kind of people that would be given those “dirty” jobs. But no doubt the rest of the men in his own unit probably hoped deep down that guy would buy it before the war was over and he got sent home.
I can only guess, never having been in a war, but the worst nightmares a veteran must go through are probably not the memories of atrocities committed by the enemy, but about those committed by their friends, and themselves. These are probably the things they don’t even talk about to others that were there.
Geoschmo
OT- Band Of Brothers
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