trexmeyer wrote:
LordofHats wrote: trexmeyer wrote:
Seal Team 6 (may have been a different team...) was recently under fire after reports of them canoeing enemy corpses came out. Defilement isn't completely gone.
It was one of those problems the US military had during WWII and the island campaigns. The military got nervous when reports of Marines taking trophies from bodies. Knuckle bones I think were the popular ones, but the practice existed in the Army and Navy too, and one famous case was published as the picture of the week by Life Magazine in 1944:
Nothing says I love you like the skull of a dead Japanese soldier, I guess? The military tried to crack down hard on the practice for fear it would damage the war effort. Some troops just took the crackdown as a sign to be less open about what they were doing though. We still find trophy skulls and bones from time to time in the US and have agreements with Japan for repatriating remains found on US soil because of it XD
I was familiar with most incidents, but that Life Magazine one. What the hell? I can almost comprehend a Marine (or anyone who has seen sustained combat against a fanatical enemy) taking physical trophies or desecrating corpses. Particularly when said enemy is already doing it to you. How does that photo get taken for a civilian magazine and released? That's psychotic.
Here's the story, offensive language common in ww2.
https://time.com/3880997/young-women-with-jap-skull-portrait-of-a-grisly-wwii-memento/
As for atrocities, yes they happen on both sides. I like to think that in ww2 my grandfather's side wasn't the worst one. He was in the USN on a
DE. While people may be put off by what some americans did in ww2, and yes there were atrocities committed by american forces, the japanese committed far more and far worse. The rape of nanking, the mass kidnapping and rape of thousands of korean women and young girls, the use of biological weapons in china, the list goes on.
American atrocities were never a matter of official policy as the ones committed by japanese, German and russian forces during and after ww2 were. The japanese did throw chinese babies in the air and impale them on bayonets as they fell, they did commit mass murder beheadings as
recreation, etc. German atrocities are well known, and russia made mass rape a police in occupied germany.
If we were to have a list of war crimes and atrocities, i'd like to believe, and can honestly say i
do believe, that america in the 20th century would rank fairly low compared to some other nations, and that in many cases our atrocities were a reaction to acts committed by the enemy whereas many of the atrocities committed by the axis in ww2 were based on racial hate.
In some ways i can, maybe hypocritically, excuse some american actions that were technically warcrimes. There was the incident at the nazi death camps where US soldiers more or less summarily executed a disputed number of nazi prisoners after seeing the full horror of the death camps and asking survivors who was responsible for the piles of mass starved bodies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_liberation_reprisals
Their actions may have been legally wrong, but given the circumstances i can be forgiving.
Our invasion and robbery of iraq was nothing but a colossal warcrime, i admit.
In general war itself is an atrocity. Crack open any history book written for adults and you'll find litanies of real horrors
GW would never let anyone write about in an official
wh40k novel.
Those are my opinions and nothing more.
Eldar- 4436 pts
