bewbies posted:side note: we were also robbed of a close range slugfest between the bizarre A-H dreadnaughts and crappy italian ships and probably also old royal navy battlewagons Well there was at least one of those fights wasn't there?
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Dec 13, 2017 14:52
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Milo and POTUS posted:Is that how that one woman did the Appalachian trail in like less than 3 months Not sure which you mean, but possibly. Times will often be referred to as "supported" or "self-supported" to clarify. Incredibly, the current fastest known time for the AT was self-supported, coming in at 45d12h15m. Dude averaged 48 miles per day. 
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Dec 13, 2017 14:57
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I'm still trying to catch up to the present after abandoning the thread to follow the ongoing US electoral trainwreck last year. However, I had some questions that I might as well ask now. A long time back, somebody posted some video of allied strafing runs on various things and one looked like a power switching station. I particularly noticed they were shooting through the scaffolding so a lot of bullets ended up just zipping through everything into the farmland behind it, but it wasn't something that was commented on. It made me think of a story basically used as a "both sides were bad"  argument for WW2. My father-in-law was born right after the war and emigrated to the US as a young man. He had a whole bookshelf of ~1970s Clean Wehrmacht bullshit and generally was pretty lovely. One thing that he perpetuated was a story from his village that a US fighter had strafed one of the farmers while he was out plowing his field. My first thought was, "Was he on a giant-rear end tractor?" I don't think they knew. Let's assume it was a work animal. What was the likelihood of that? I am starting to think they were zapping something else nearby and the poor guy was just at the end of the line of fire. Would there be some means of finding action reports in that area to see what were targets towards the end of the war?The second question has to do with American chocolate. I had gotten into a little debate on this, but my expertise is weak compared to this thread. There was a notion that Hershey's chocolate changed in flavor after the war due to changes to help the chocolate stay fresh and not melt in Pacific Theater rations. I had thought that the stuff Hershey's produced in rations were completely different animals than their chocolate and was deliberately designed to taste like poo poo. Hershey's particular flavor just came from using old milk--namely butyric acid from rancid fat--and their whole business edge was being able to make milk chocolate from such crappy milk in the first place. This predated the war. I think the notion in particular was that Hershey's added wax or something else to the chocolate.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:15
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Regarding strafing runs, I could understand if a farmer got strafed because his car on the road was targeted but attacking cows in the field or an obvious civilian farm seems unlikely. Couldve been a unique instance? 
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Dec 13, 2017 15:28
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Clarence posted:The front line is roughly in the same place as the last turn in the front, I won't repeat the same map. So, the battalion is holding the line... by thinly spreading out about a company's worth of platoons?
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Dec 13, 2017 15:32
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It's pretty believable that stuff like that happened. There's gun camera footage from the Pacific showing similar stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUpCsO3pI08&t=86s Though as the video suggests it's not all that likely that the pilot was targetting a man on the ground specifically. It does not also make all that much sense that commanders wanted pilots to waste ammunition and fuel like that while still over enemy territory. So I can totally believe some incidents like this occured but if you wanna go 'but both sides' based on this then lol.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:36
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Polyakov posted:lovely as it was the Luftwaffe was far from alone in just strafing roads, a not insignificant amount of bailed out allied pilots were lynched by enraged german civillians, typically condoned or actively instigated by the local nazi officials, this was in a large part because of the fighter pilots who would fly low and strafe the roads of Germany (also because of the massive bombing of the cities). Air forces were generally equally dirty as far as i know in terms of actually fighting (ignoring the luftwaffe ground forces), the only difference was in capability allowing many to kill far more, if an allied airman was found by the Luftwaffe or the Wehrmacht he was usually ok, if he was found by the Volksturm or committed members of the Nazi party he was very often in trouble, theres a quote from an American bomber crew who were shot down: I transcribed this quote from one of my books on the bomber campaign a while back, I would say that the story of an allied fighter strafing a farmer in his field is entirely plausible, probably even inevitable when you let hundreds of pilots loose in civillian areas to interdict transport in the sort of environment of WW2.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:37
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Jobbo_Fett posted:Regarding strafing runs, I could understand if a farmer got strafed because his car on the road was targeted but attacking cows in the field or an obvious civilian farm seems unlikely. I'd say it was unique, and it's still a false equivalency to be like "Some very bad Nazis who were not us normal Germans must have killed some Jews, but an American shot a farmer in a field from his airplane once." I shouldn't even be bothering with it. However, it's the turd that won't flush. My mother-in-law trots it out every once in awhile when an argument about WW2 atrocities is getting a little too Midwest-unpleasant for her. Still, I'm heavily suspecting that if you looked closely enough, there was probably something nearby the plane was actually targeting. I mean let's say I'm in an allied fighter-bomber walking the beat. Or I'm a fighter that flew over the channel to chew bubblegum and shoot Nazis and ran out of both. I am pretty sure I could look out either side of the plane and see a cornucopia of industrial and semi-industrial targets that could become industrial and semi-industrial targets with lots of holes in them. But instead, I focus harder, see some guy grunting in a field and decide that's just unacceptable. Part of the problem is I don't know literally where this happened. It is apparently baked into the town's lore enough that I should be able to figure it out. If it was literally next to the road then, well, there you go. They make it sound like it was smack in the middle of a flat, open, unobstructed field.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:41
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It'd be almost impossible to deliberately target an individual guy out in a field but I'm sure random field Germans regularly caught collateral fire. I'd also imagine that experience to be uniquely terrifying. WWII-era planes at low altitude and multiple heavy machine guns going off and lots of bullets hitting the ground anywhere near you is a whole lot of sensory input all at once. Rocko Bonaparte posted:I'd say it was unique, and it's still a false equivalency to be like "Some very bad Nazis who were not us normal Germans must have killed some Jews, but an American shot a farmer in a field from his airplane once." I shouldn't even be bothering with it. However, it's the turd that won't flush. My mother-in-law trots it out every once in awhile when an argument about WW2 atrocities is getting a little too Midwest-unpleasant for her. Still, I'm heavily suspecting that if you looked closely enough, there was probably something nearby the plane was actually targeting. Strafing in WWII (and even now) is a very dangerous and difficult thing to do. We're all familiar with stuff like from that one Indiana Jones movie but in real life it was extremely difficult to detect and then actually figure out a firing solution for something as small as a single guy (who is likely wearing earth tones) sitting out in a field. The plane is going too fast, the target is too small, the guns not precise enough, etc etc. Hitting something as big as a truck or tank was hard enough. I'd imagine what happened is the village or something in it got strafed. This was a pretty traumatic experience for the reasons I listed above...one of the things about being shot at, be it by artillery or planes or otherwise, is it feels like THE WHOLE WORLD IS SHOOTING SPECIFICALLY AT YOU. There isn't much reason to think that some allied airmen were deliberately targeting some guy in a field, but it is pretty understandable that the guy in a field and the people who knew the guy in the field really, really thought they were. bewbies fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 15:46
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I don't think that any argument that boils down to the existence or otherwise of a particular bored or sociopathic fighter pilot is that worthwhile. There is a point to be made that allies didn't go after such pilots (and even today, I think serious punishment is unlikely) but ...
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Dec 13, 2017 15:47
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bewbies posted:side note: we were also robbed of a close range slugfest between the bizarre A-H dreadnaughts and crappy italian ships and probably also old royal navy battlewagons
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Dec 13, 2017 15:47
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I doubt there is any real record. If there is anything his post flight report probably has “strafed targets of opportunity over the area of Nearest Big City while returning to base” WW2 generates tons of amazing paperwork but there is even more that went unrecorded and unremarked upon. Bad poo poo happened to German civilians, ranging from bombing to rape to executing camp guards, but none of it absolves the loving Holocaust. This isn’t something like the Contras and Sandistas where both sides did lovely stuff in rough parity, it’s lovely a ging’s being done to civilians against the backdrop of their regime engaging in systematic genocide.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:50
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I'm pretty sure I've seen Americans strafing civilians in some war movie or documentaries, if I weren't phone-posting from a train station with a freezing wind howling around me, I'd look it up right now.
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Dec 13, 2017 15:50
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Libluini posted:I'm pretty sure I've seen Americans strafing civilians in some war movie or documentaries, if I weren't phone-posting from a train station with a freezing wind howling around me, I'd look it up right now. *cough*Collateral murder*cough*
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Dec 13, 2017 15:59
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Cyrano4747 posted:Bad poo poo happened to German civilians, ranging from bombing to rape to executing camp guards, but none of it absolves the loving Holocaust. This isn’t something like the Contras and Sandistas where both sides did lovely stuff in rough parity, it’s lovely a ging’s being done to civilians against the backdrop of their regime engaging in systematic genocide.
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Dec 13, 2017 16:14
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I'm not making any statement on the factual basis since I have nothing to go on there but people puttering along the rural road on bicycles or horse carts getting strafed is a bit of a staple of the memoir literature. You could see how even beyond its potential value in tarring the allies it would also be an attractive story for someone to want to tell as a way of illustrating in a nutshell the ubiquity and power and impunity of the allied air effort maybe.
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Dec 13, 2017 16:34
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It's pretty much impossible to tell from the air whether a guy on a bike or a wagon is a civilian or not. For all the fighter pilot knows it could be a dispatch rider from Armeegruppe Schwanzkopf HQ who's trying to avoid depleting their gasoline stockpile. And that horse-drawn wagon might be carrying a load of ammunition in disguise. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 16:42 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 16:39
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Fangz posted:*cough*Collateral murder*cough* What?
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Dec 13, 2017 16:50
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Fangz posted:*cough*Collateral murder*cough* You mean shooting armed men who are within RPG range of a patrol that had already come under fire that morning? Wikileaks and Julian Assange were extremely disingenuous with that case. Look at the framing, calling it "collateral murder" is an overt attempt to paint the Americans as wanton killers, enacting another My Lai massacre. Assange and Wikileaks have already been exposed as agents of Russia, trying to make the US look as bad as possible. The way the story is always presented is a very slick piece of propaganda. Insurgents don't wear uniforms. This makes it extremely difficult to determine who is a combatant on the battlefield. This is the reason that modern armed forces are required to wear them, to identify who is and is not an enemy. When insurgents wear the same clothes as the civilian population, it endangers the civilians as it makes it more likely that they will be killed in a case of mistaken identity. The insurgents then use this as an argument that the civilians should not support the occupying power. In the case at hand, there were several things going on. The ground forces had already been in contact that morning. The journalists did not identify themselves as such and did not notify the US forces that they would be in the area. They had a security detail with them that consisted of a group of men in civilian clothes carrying rifles. While they were walking down the street in Baghdad, they stopped and spoke with a man guarding a Mosque. The man was armed with an RPG, which was in violation of the rules and laws put in place by the Iraqis and Americans. The group then traveled on foot to within RPG range of the US forces on the ground, and one of the journalists set up in a kneeling position, peering around a corner, and deployed a camera with a large telephoto lens. The sum of all this is the journalists and their escorts looked very much like a group of insurgents attempting to attack the US ground forces in the area. Their actions met all the requirements needed by the ROE for the Apaches pilots to engage them. An investigation after the attack found an RPG among the bodies. This was verified by the testimony of a US medic who was on the scene after the attack, as well as photographs, though those have been marked as classified and the non-redacted versions have not been released to the public. After the attack, a passing civilian stopped his van by the bodies and attempted to render aid. Again, insurgents don't use marked military vehicles. People rendering aid on the battlefield are still valid targets if they have not identified themselves as a medical asset. This is not against the laws of war. There are many examples of US troops committing crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that you can point to without bringing up something that, while unfortunate, is still an example of a legal engagement.
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Dec 13, 2017 16:56
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My point in bringing in "collateral murder" is that even to this day, with much improved RoE, monitoring and so on, attacks on civilians are perpetrated by US air forces. The other point of similarity to this alleged incident is that it's unlikely for people to be punished very severely for it. I didn't really intend to go into the controversy about this particular incident, the point is that it's not really necessary to dig particularly hard for examples of civilians getting shot up - it's the interpretation of these incidents that is important. The original poster is focusing too much on the question of 'did this thing really happen' when that's not the issue. Fangz fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 17:02
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The farmer just might have been a poor bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time. Spent rounds got to go somewhere at the end of their velocity.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:06
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Would civilians at the time necessarily know or care about the difference between fighter pilots and bomber crews? Because I cannot imagine that anybody would have any patience for bomber crews of any nation, given their function. Or frankly most of the air force by association.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:25
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Yeah, considering the level of German mechanization, horse drawn carts and bicycles tend to become actual targets. Heroes and Generals having bicycles as a mode of transport in game is hilarious.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:26
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It was a fair assumption in WW2 that any vehicle behind German lines had been requisitioned for military usage. See: the random strafing that caught Rommel in Normandy. Fighter pilots were probably even more hated than bomber pilots - opportunistic strafing requires a level of directed intent that bombers didn't (but then, bomber crew were really hated).
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Dec 13, 2017 17:37
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SeanBeansShako posted:The farmer just might have been a poor bastard in the wrong place at the wrong time. Spent rounds got to go somewhere at the end of their velocity. Sometimes to make a cool laser, you have to break a few schools. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_of_the_Little_Egg_Harbor_Intermediate_School
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Dec 13, 2017 17:40
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Ultimately it just doesn't matter. The fighter pilot could have been a total psychopath with eagle eyes purposefully searching out civilians so he could shoot them up and stencil baby carriages and farmer hats on the side of his plane and it wouldn't matter. He could have landed in the field, had a conversation with the farmer, and then shot him with his sidearm and it wouldn't matter. The ultimate issue is that lovely people among the Allies who did lovely things does not even begin to excuse the actions of the Germans during the war. This comes up a LOT with Wehrmacht apologists, usually in the context of the Dachau guards who got rounded up and shot or the various crimes committed against German civilians by the Red Army as they pushed through Germany. It is totally legitimate to talk about these things and how awful they were and how they shouldn't happen or be tolerated, but it's also not an excuse to absolve the other side of war crimes. American soldiers absolutely did bad things during that war, but they need to be discussed on their own merits not in the context of "and this is why what the Germans did isn't so awful." Plus, as Hey Guns pointed out, "It was a dirty, awful war on both sides" also obscures the fact that only one side promoted genocide as a matter of national policy.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:44
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ultimately it just doesn't matter. Exactly.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:55
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SimonCat posted:After the attack, a passing civilian stopped his van by the bodies and attempted to render aid. Again, insurgents don't use marked military vehicles. People rendering aid on the battlefield are still valid targets if they have not identified themselves as a medical asset. This is not against the laws of war. This was a vaguely justifiable explanation up until the point you tried to argue that an unarmed civilian rendering medical aid was a valid target. Even if the rules of engagement made that technically legal under the laws of war, that's still an absolutely horrific policy.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:57
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Cyrano4747 posted:This isn’t something like the Contras and Sandistas where both sides did lovely stuff in rough parity I doubt Nicaraguans would feel that way. It's kinda like people saying the Spanish Civil War was a fair and square deal: It absolves one side for being a murderous loving fascist coup and blames the other for being the democratically elected government of their country.
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Dec 13, 2017 17:58
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Cyrano4747 posted:Ultimately it just doesn't matter. What it sounds like is if this guy was out there in the field by himself without an animal or anything else is that he probably just got caught in some fire going somewhere else. If he had a vehicle than yeah, he was probably targeted, and it could be reasoned away. Either way, there is very little chance of a report about it." So, what about Hershey's chocolate?
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Dec 13, 2017 18:24
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chitoryu12 posted:This was a vaguely justifiable explanation up until the point you tried to argue that an unarmed civilian rendering medical aid was a valid target. The point is that it is impossible to definitively tell the difference between an "unarmed civilian bystander rendering aid" and an "armed insurgent patching up his lightly injured comrade so that they can resume the attack" from even rifle distance, let alone an airborne attack helicopter. This is why uniforms are mandated by solemn international treaty, and the proper markings for medical personnel are also mandated.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:31
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:So, what about Hershey's chocolate? One of my planned projects for the ration testing is to make an authentic D-ration bar, terrible taste and all. Gnoman posted:The point is that it is impossible to definitively tell the difference between an "unarmed civilian bystander rendering aid" and an "armed insurgent patching up his lightly injured comrade so that they can resume the attack" from even rifle distance, let alone an airborne attack helicopter. This is why uniforms are mandated by solemn international treaty, and the proper markings for medical personnel are also mandated. Yes, but the moment you start saying that shooting unarmed civilians "just in case" is okay is the moment you really need to start reconsidering everything.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:32
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Cyrano4747 posted:Plus, as Hey Guns pointed out, "It was a dirty, awful war on both sides" also obscures the fact that only one side promoted genocide as a matter of national policy.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:36
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chitoryu12 posted:This was a vaguely justifiable explanation up until the point you tried to argue that an unarmed civilian rendering medical aid was a valid target. beaten
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Dec 13, 2017 18:37
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Wait, are you allowed to shoot uniformed medics? By “allowed” I mean under the ROE, not reality
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Dec 13, 2017 18:38
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Gnoman posted:The point is that it is impossible to definitively tell the difference between an "unarmed civilian bystander rendering aid" and an "armed insurgent patching up his lightly injured comrade so that they can resume the attack" from even rifle distance, let alone an airborne attack helicopter. This is why uniforms are mandated by solemn international treaty, and the proper markings for medical personnel are also mandated. It was a mistake in hindsight to bring up that video because it's politically really touchy. My opinion is that it's acceptable to risk letting some wounded insurgent survive if it means you avoid risking blowing away good samaritans. Realistically you have to balance killing the enemy vs risking civilian casualties, but the balance point chosen as exhibited in that video is not just amoral, it's strategically stupid. An insurgent that got bundled into a van and patched up might one day return to the fight, but someone's dad getting blown away trying to help will create many more insurgents and wreck the gently caress out of your nation building effort.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:40
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Ainsley McTree posted:Wait, are you allowed to shoot uniformed medics? No, you're not supposed to. If I remember correctly, medics in the Pacific theater often painted their crosses green because the Japanese would ignore the rule and specifically target medics.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:41
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Ainsley McTree posted:Wait, are you allowed to shoot uniformed medics? Designated medics are not valid military targets but no one really pays any attention to such silly things like the geneva convention anymore.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:44
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Somewhere among my posts in the Aviation thread, I posted a 1944 American propaganda film on the P-47. It was filmed in Sardinia, and showed P-47 pilots machine gunning things in the countryside that looked suspicious.
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Dec 13, 2017 18:46
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Early in the war, the Yugoslav Partizans had an attempt to negotiate with the Germans about issues like being recognized as combatants for the purposes of prisoner exchange and some basic stuff like not shooting medics. The German reply can be summed up as "lol"
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