You see people spelling HIStory and implying that the truth is something other than the official version in the school books. I have found this to be true in some cases. For instance the first black slave owner in the United States was black. You never hear about that during black history month. Sure you'll get the off the cuff mention about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, as if liking a bit of brown sugar now and then was some sort of stain on America's founding.
History is filled with little stories that don't fit the narrative. Some historians go after these stories. I always find these little side trips interesting:
The newly unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.
The death of General Patton in December 1945, is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash in Manheim, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.
But after a decade-long investigation, military historian Robert Wilcox claims that OSS head General "Wild Bill" Donovan ordered a highly decorated marksman called Douglas Bazata to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname "Old Blood and Guts".
His book, "Target Patton", contains interviews with Mr Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton's Cadillac and then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile, which broke his neck while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.Can I see this being true, yes. It will be interesting to see how this work holds up. There is much from the WWII days that is now coming into the public domain and the story I was told in school about "America's greatest generation" is something less than the whole truth. Finding out the whole truth is going to be a long uphill battle. I've been wanting to get my hands on this book, for some time. Talk about a difficult task. Then again, getting the truth is seldom easy.
I've been reading a lot of that stuff too.
ReplyDeleteWatching WWII documentaries about our guys not taking any prisoners. We treated the Japanese like subhumans. The Japs acted like subhumans.
The thing that sticks most in my mind about those stories is that our boys went off to war thinking that there were rules of conduct and honor. They believed that because of the stories they read as kids or becuase of what they were told about WWI or the civil war, etc. Then they went up against the Japs. The japs had a different idea of what honor in war ment.
ReplyDeleteOur men started fighting and behaving JUST LIKE the Japs they were fighting. Which ment they killed everyone fighting against them. Now we want to judge them by a standard of behavior that simply didn't apply in that time and place.
I don't judge them at all. As you said, the japs had different ideas. Our guys surrendered thinking they'd be treated well. They weren't. They wouldn't surrender because of their honor and the belief they wouldn't be treated well.
ReplyDeleteAnd we didn't fall as low as the Japs. They literally killed and ate our pilots.
Was watching the Civil War documentary and they showed pictures from Andersonville.
"I don't judge them at all."
ReplyDeleteI wasn't trying to say you were. One of the problems I have with the made for TV history shows is when they do this with out even thinking about why whatever happened, happened.
I guess my philosophy is that war is bad. We have put rules in place to make war more civilized, but the enemy doesn't care sometimes. It is difficult to put men in that kind of environment and then ask them to show restraint in certain situations. I think we do well at this most of the time, but when people fail it is understandable. It takes a huge toll on a person. You have to expect people to lose their way morally once in awhile or flip out and machine gun the wrong people.
ReplyDeleteIt happens at the higher levels too. We couldn't hit what we were aiming at with the bombers and our losses were heavy so we firebombed civilians instead. Both in Europe and Japan. Tens of thousands of civilians died at a time. Can you blame them when we were losing 600 men every time the bombers went out? Probably can blame them, but we won so nobody will.
I agree.
ReplyDeleteDid you know that the policy of the English governement in WWI was total war on the German civilian population? That's why the germans started sinking every boat on the ocean.
Did you know that the policy of the English governement in WWI was total war on the German civilian population?
ReplyDeleteI've been watching Ken Burns "The War" on Netflix. That was their attitude during WWII also. The Americans were trying to hit industrial targets during the day and failing. The average airman lasted 15 missions and a tour of duty was 25. The British were simply night bombing cities.