Celebrating two Canadian POWs who took down an entire shipyard
quillette.com
quillette.com
Reminds me of a story Dan Carlin related on his latest Supernova In The East. During the early fighting in New Guinea with green Australian troops, the Japanese troops would tie captured Aussies to trees, torture them to death, and leave their bodies for other Australian troops to find with signs reading “he took a long time to die” on them.
A captured Japanese soldier explained why. The Japanese soldiers did this under their unit leaders orders, to convince every Japanese soldier to fight to the death knowing that surrender would only get them the same treatment from the Australians.
Japan had not signed the Geneva convention on prisoner treatment and refused to be bound by any of its principles.
You can imagine how Germany reacted to that.
Western allies also treated German POWs relatively well. The eastern front was a different scenario though, surrender for German and Soviet soldiers and civilians was very unpleasant.
Coming home to Mainz and seeing what the French and British had done to his ancestral home and the civilians who lived there, he had other things to say about them. After escaping from a French POW camp (they were still being held despite the war being over and there were reprisal killings, etc.) he made his way back to Mainz (French occupation) but fled across the river in the dead of night to Wiesbaden, which was under American occupation and thus considered safer. A similar story for my Oma.
He was actually my father's adopted father. My dad's biological father I don't know much about, but he served on the eastern front and came home a broken man with a missing leg.
After being betrayed by pirates, he was cut off by the legions at the southern tip of what's today Calabria. He crucified a soldier before the Roman earthworks, both to demoralize the soldiers and to warn his fellow slaves what fate awaited them on defeat. His men breached the wall and, if I'm remembering my chronology, fought their way to the Alps (before things turned out badly for them.)
I hear this argument a lot for acts of valor in war. The counter to this is imagine what would happen to the hundreds if not thousands of lives if they didn’t act.
It’s a mental game you play.
Not unlike in a startup.