Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

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Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities.

Or, sometimes human beings act like human beings, even in a time of war. In addition to the whole notion of "rules of war," there are thousands of examples, but here is a famous one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

> The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.

People like you and me work at computers all day and start to think like computers and try to use "logic" to explain everything away. Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.

Christmas truces were absolutely a thing, but they came about through the action of troops on the ground -- and the commanding officers absolutely hated them.

I'm not condoning it at all, but I think it's easy to understand why commanding officers didn't like their troops fraternizing with the enemy. If GI John and Soldat Hans share a coffee and a cigarette together, and perhaps even a pleasant chat, they will quickly come to realize that both of them are human beings, with human feelings, a family worrying about them, children possibly, hopes and dreams, and so on. And once you are acutely aware that your enemy is just like you, only perhaps speaks a different language, you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.

I've never been in a war, and hope I never live to see myself in one, but the only way I can see one human viciously trying to kill another is by not thinking of their enemy as a human being, but rather just a thing.

Absolutely. They were described as "disastrous to morale" and units which had engaged in Christmas truces would routinely be moved to other parts of the front in order to avoid the issues you mention.

> you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.

But you also take the other side's soldiers out, in the same way. Why wouldn't commanding officers like that?

I'm not a military thinker, so I might well be off on this, but I'd say because that would usually results in a draw, whereas the commanding officers generally want to win so that they can achieve the overall plan set out by strategic command - and want to achieve a crushing victory from which the opponent cannot recover from.

I guess an army on the retreat who would favor an instant draw would favor the fraternizing, but generally by that point the winning army - including the soldiers - are not amenable to stop their advance and play a friendly game of football.

The morale of your troops is known. The morale of the opposing troops is suspected but not certain.

WW1 ended because the influenza epidemic was devastating the troops on both sides but neither side knew for certain how hard it was hitting the other side.

Ah, yes. Spanish flu: so-named because (neutral) Spain was one of the few countries not lying about whether they had it.

> Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.

You might be right about the general, who knows. But Goring? No, that man was definitely a computer.

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