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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: skinowski who wrote (90665)	4/6/2003 6:52:35 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

<each time when those young men, our fathers, raised their weapons in anger, who was responsible for the consequences? They personally, or the bizarre Nazi regime which forced itself upon the world and upon them?> I've got my father's war diary Skinowski and there was no anger in it [though I haven't read it all; there was contempt for some of the allied muckity mucks who made unctuous speeches and mismanaged the allied soldiers]. It was a job to be done, defeating Hitler's forces. There was sympathy for the poor "Jerry gunners" who my father knew he targeted and succeeded in killing. He was out in front of the lines, using sound-ranging to locate German guns, radioing the co-ordinates back to the allied artillery. Over 4 years of it! That's a long time for a young husband and father. He expressed admiration for the Germans and their beautifully built ammunition boxes and so on, with thought about what they could achieve if they turned their talents to the arts of peace. Which the post WWII economic and technological achievements of Germany proved to be prescient comments. He very decidedly took responsibility for each one of his actions. He also stopped some Indian soldiers from robbing an Italian woman of some chickens - they didn't want to pay her. War doesn't remove morals and ethics though plenty of soldiers think they can get away with a lot and blame it on the enemy making them do it. I don't know what he thought about Dresden and Hiroshima, but I suppose [conjecture] that he'd have thought that when it's total war, psychological collapse of the supporting population is vital. It's areas like that where I struggle to figure out what's ethical and what's barbaric. Would I have dropped the nuke? I think so. I'd prefer to have done a demonstration first to see if that would get them to surrender. But when people are going for your throat, you can't be messing around too much with demonstrations. I wouldn't have been surprised if the USA had simply nuked Tora Bora and Mecca and anywhere else where there were strong concentrations of supporters of the attacks of 11 September. I was surprised at the moderation of the response and the continuing moderation of it. Mqurice