Hi Alstair McIntosh; It's not an "interesting perspective", it's a desperate cry for help by an administration that got itself stuck in a vicious quagmire. I wonder what the objective is, to keep the American public convinced that Iraq is doing great until after the 2004 elections?
The lies in that article are too extreme to be described as "slant". All he's doing is trying to match the situation in Iraq with the predictions of the Administration that it would be as easy as the German occupation. Germany was an easy occupation, the Americans would have reduced troop levels there even faster than they did, if only they'd had the available ships to get them home. By contrast, Iraq has seen no reduction in US forces in 4 months.
When people stretch the truuuuuth this far you have to take their whole point of view and wonder about what other lies they've been spreading. I'm tempting to look up on the web what this joker was saying about WMDs before the war, LOL.
Re: "Worse, the attacks on soldiers, General Dwight D. Eisenhower warned, revealed a deeper resentment of the occupation: "The sentiments below them may provide popular rallying points for activities which might grow into organized resistance directed against the occupation forces.""
The author conveniently fails to give a date for the above quote, LOL. I'm sure that it predates the end of the war, if Eisenhower ever even said it at all. I couldn't locate a copy of it on the net, so I'm guessing that it's a recent fiction.
Here's the US military's definitive document on the German occupation, 1944-1949:
army.mil
A quote from the above:
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Except for black marketeering, some thefts of food and firewood, and petty violations of military government ordinances, the German civilian crime rate was low, sometimes almost disconcertingly low for the Army agencies charged with ferreting out and suppressing resistance. In October, after five months of occupation, Seventh Army G-2 believed Germany to be a "simmering cauldron of unrest and discontent" and claimed to have detected a "mounting audaciousness in the German population"; but as concrete evidence G-2 could only cite some illicit traffic in interzonal mail (then still prohibited), a "strongly worded" Werwolf threat to one military government officer in the Western Military District, and a protest against denazification from the Evangelical Church of Wuerttemberg.[38] Patrols occasionally found decapitation wires stretched across roads, ineptly it would seem, since no deaths or injuries resulted from them. Military government public safety officers from scattered locations reported various anti-occupation leaflets and posters, some threats against German girls who associated with US soldiers, and isolated attacks on soldiers. Although not a single case was confirmed, possibly the most talked about crimes against the occupation were the alleged castrations of US soldiers by German civilians. When the commanding officer of Detachment E3B2, in Erbach, Hesse, was asked to investigate one such rumor, he reported that not only had there been no castration but that there had not been a single attack on US military personnel in over four months of occupation.[39] The most pressing concern of public safety officers was often with getting the German police out of their traditional nineteenth century Prussian drill sergeant uniforms and into American styles, usually modeled on the uniforms of the New York City police. Wherever troops were stationed, especially in towns and smaller cities, prostitutes and camp followers were a moral problem, placed added strain on food supplies, housing, and medical facilities (frequently also on jails), and raised mixed feelings of disgust and jealousy among the other civilians. In quarrels with other civilians and with the police, the prostitutes did not hesitate to call on their soldier friends.[40]
...
army.mil
Now, is the crime rate in Iraq "disconcertingly low"? Not from what I hear. And is the US army already organizing tourist tours of Iraq for bored soldiers? Hell no!
-- Carl
P.S. More quotes:
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The army-type occupation was comprehensive and showed the Germans that they were defeated and their country occupied. This type of occupation was presumably capable of squelching incipient resistance since none was evident.
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The US zone in Germany, in spite of the war damage, offered a variety of tourist attractions. (A standard military government joke was that the Russians had received the agriculture, the British the industry, and the Americans the scenery.) In the summer of 1945, USFET Special Services opened a rest and recreation center at Berchtesgaden that rivaled the one on the Riviera. Civilian guides conducted tours for three hundred men a day at Heidelberg. The most popular tours in Germany were the Rhine tours. From three riverside hotels at Assmanshausen, parties of soldiers were taken on motor rides to points of interest in the Rhine valley. The climax of the three-day tour was a seven-hour boat ride from Mainz to Koblenz.
...
By mid-summer 1945, the search for morale-sustaining devices was being stretched to, and perhaps somewhat beyond, the limits of feasibility. In July, General Marshall visited Paris and the Berchtesgaden center and pronounced the efforts being made there for morale "splendid," but he came away worried that the enlisted men were still not getting the "feeling of independence which all Americans crave." He proposed that each regiment, for a week at a time, give trucks, rations, and gasoline allowances to small groups of about ten men and let them go anywhere they pleased except into the Soviet zone. Eisenhower thought the idea was good and, rather gingerly, passed it along to the Army commanders with the comment that he would "like to see such excursions permitted insofar as local conditions will permit." The result was the establishment of a category known 'its Military Vacation Tours, of which few were taken. Confronted with a steeply rising traffic accident rate and a growing black market, commanders, much as they might have agreed with the spirit of General Marshall's proposal, could not bring themselves to turn loose on the roads of western Europe small groups of men in trucks with no supervision.
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In spite of the offerings in education, entertainment, and recreation, surveys conducted in July indicated that the high-score men wanted above all to go home. An Army-wide survey revealed that in the Pacific particularly, delays in getting the eligible men home were generating dissatisfaction with the whole point system. In Europe, where the war was over at least, outright disgruntlement was less evident; but almost half the men complained that their officers had given them no explanation for the delay in their departures. Most correctly assumed that the cause was a shortage of shipping space but said that they had not been so informed.
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The shipping schedule set in August would bring USFET's strength down to this number by the end of January 1946. The low point would be reached in the middle of the first postwar winter, when civil unrest, if it occurred at all, was to be expected in Germany and when the Army would probably still have to care for about it half million DPs and guard many thousands of war prisoners and internees.
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The nine-division permanent occupation force planned for Germany soon began to look like an outright extravagance after Japan surrendered.
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Calculating on the basis of one constable (plus signals, supply, and air reconnaissance) for 450 Germans, Eisenhower informed the War Department that a constabulary of 38,000 men would be enough to establish police-type control by 1 July 1946, assuming that by then the surplus property, DP, and prisoner of war burdens would have been substantially eliminated.
...
army.mil
Another interesting article, on the occupation of Aachen in late 1944:
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American plans for the occupation of Germany were based on two premises: first on the expectation that the Germans were on the whole Nazi-infected and hostile towards the American conquerors, secondly on the assumption that a more or less functioning German administration could be taken over by and serve under the direction of the military government. Both premises, as the Americans at once discovered in Aachen, were quite off the mark. Actually, the civilian population in Aachen proved to be docile and cooperative, and every German claimed to have had nothing to do with the Nazi regime.
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histinst.rwth-aachen.de |
