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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3724 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 14, 2024

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I’m wondering to what extent the German Wehrmacht is, or at least was present in British and American cultural memory as a worthy enemy in battle, unlike the Japanese and the Italians, in a similar way how, I suppose, Confederates were seen as worthy enemies in the Northern US after the Civil War, unlike the various Indian tribes. It’d largely explain why the so-called myths of the clean Wehrmacht and the Lost Cause of the South came to be.

Obviously as a Brit I'm consuming the fictionalised version of the American frontier from a long distance, but in the Cowboys and Indians mythos I grew up with Indians were always Worthy Opponents in the TVTropes sense. I assume this idea dates back to the golden age of the Western as a movie genre because that is where the tropes come from.

if we're dealing with mythos, this scene might be a worthwhile corrective.

Yeah, there was a brief "lone ranger and Tonto" period where the mythology was sanitized, which was used to launder support for AIM and other Indian terrorist groups in the 60s-80s.

Didn't the warriors of various Indian tribes routinely take hostages/captives and kill/torture them?

On the east coast colonial period, yes. Horrible drawn out tortures. Being seared to death with hot coals. Skinned alive one small strip at time. Fingers broken and twisted the wrong way. Completely senseless. And not even always during warfare. They'd take hostages and get to work on one as an example to the others.

Depends on the period, roughly speaking. During WWII Germany was of course villainized in propaganda and amongst western Allied soldiers; massacres of surrendering German soldiers were not regular but also not uncommon. SS troops were frequently shot out of hand due to several high-profile incidents. In the mass surrenders at the end of the war surrendering Germans were not classified as POWs but rather as "disarmed enemy soldiers" who were not entitled to the levels of treatment outlined by the Geneva Conventions. The claims surrounding the "Rhine death camps" are overblown but there was genuine systemic mistreatment of surrendering Wehrmacht personnel during and immediately after the war.

The dive in relations with the Soviet Union led to the quick realization that Europe and the United States might need to fight the Reds and there were a bunch of people with lots of experience killing Russkies. This is what initiated the rehabilitation of ex-Wehrmacht senior officers and the start of the "clean Wehrmacht" myth in the west. I'm short on time but I might come back to this later because there are some interesting dynamics at play here.

After the end of the Cold War the changing political realities and the opening of Soviet archives doomed the reputation of the Wehrmacht. There was no way to deny their involvement in horrendous war crimes or the depth of their entwinement with Nazi rule.

A simple way to look at the arc of it all is to look at how officers convicted of war crimes to Allied forces were treated. Take Kurt Meyer for example: sentenced to death, reduced to life in prison, transferred to Germany, released permanently all within ten years.

During WWII Germany was of course villainized in propaganda and amongst western Allied soldiers; massacres of surrendering German soldiers were not regular but also not uncommon.

I think it's important to point out here that the massacred soldiers in question were almost(?) all Waffen-SS, not Wehrmacht.

For larger massacres, generally. But lots of ordinary Wehrmacht soldiers had their surrenders not-so-politely declined; this was sort of glossed over in the post-war official histories but appear frequently in AARs. Also as Ioper notes due to the influx of draftees and soldiers from other branches into the Waffen-SS (whose units were almost always subordinated or OKH or OKW) just because someone was in the SS doesn't mean they were SS.

At the point of the Allied invasion of continental Europe that distinction isn't super clear due to the massive expansion and forced conscription of both large numbers of Germans (often Wehrmacht) and foreigners, doubling in size many times over. It wasn't remotely the same org as before or at the start of the war.

Do most Americans not regard the Japanese as a worthy enemy? Maybe I listen to too much Dan Carlin or something, but my memory of Imperial Japan includes extreme bravery and substantial competence.

No, they don't, the dominant view of the WWII Japanese is that they were batshit crazy and directed by Nazi-tier evil leadership.

I think that this has changed over time. I am old enough to have known many WWII vets and they almost universally hated the Japs and did not really admire them even in the most begrudging fashion. the common adjectives describing Japanese soldiers would have been more like fanatical, honor bound, or suicidal. More like a death cult than an army. I think over the period of the Cold War, when Japan became more and more of an economic and strategic ally, and as the WWII generation died out, that shifted. In the popular worldview, movies like TORA TORA TORA and later films like Letters from Iwo Jima contributed as well.

The Japanese didn't adhere to Western codes of chivalry, they routinely tortured and executed their captives and generally fought without either decency or mercy. Such an enemy isn't seen as worthy and earns no respect; I think American attitudes towards them during the war reflect that.

A somewhat less subjective (but by no means esoteric) view might be that many of the Japanese conscripts were themselves basically brainwashed thugs drunk on pie-in-the sky notions of honor and loyalty to the emperor (they weren't all thugs, of course). They had their own codes, albeit not ones really accessible to non-Japanese, and this made them seem (particularly at the time) impenetrably barbaric. Their martial views of any enemy who would so dishonor themselves as to surrender contributed to the objectively horrific treatment they afforded any captives.

In the actual fighting (e.g. the jungles of Burma) they made formidable and resilient, if despised enemies. To say they were without decency or mercy may feel good but is a contextual judgment that overlooks the considerable cultural influences involved.

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