American paratroopers in WWII are war criminals?

Well personally I don't think the guys totally useless. If the aliens ever come here looking for intelligent life and they run across him, they'll decide no intelligent life exists here so no reason to destroy the planet! Look on the bright side.

 

What if the question they ask him is "Justify your existance"?
(An old sci/fi quandry...) If he can justify his existance then he (we) get to live...if he cant then....
Who here can justify there existance? Hes just another example that we all WERENT born equal...

 

Dress him up like a Kardashian? I find the whole Kardashian craze to be an alien concept.

Although I wonder if this guy hasn't already had an alien experience. He seems a bit out there.

 

If they look like Kardashians...i wouldnt mind an alien experience... : )
Sorry Clementine - your just giving me good material today...

 

To be honest though....British paratroopers are akin to aliens...Trust me..

 

No aliens...I saw it on wikipedia

 

Well, that settles it.

 

I agree the youtube poster is definitely off the deep end and suspect. That said there are a number of documented incidents in Mark Bando's book 'Avenging Eagles' on the 101st and in Zig Boroughs '508th Connection' on the 508th PIR and other books by veterans which could easily fall under the common conception of what constitutes a war crime.

All armies had a lackidasical approach to what was proscuted and what was not while the combat raged. One cannot ignore that the airborne troops on D-Day were given oral instructions to not take prisoners until the ground forces caught up to the airheads. Most troopers ignored that order but some did are they were directed. Was that a war crime at the time?

Civil law is generally ignored when in combat because what is appropriate behavior in peace time will get you killed. A War Zone has it's own rules which are loosely governed by the Laws of War and Geneva Conventions as well as the national mores regarding warfare. In the end usually the winner of a war gets to decide what is a war crime. Coming back to the incident and claiming war crime with a peace time view 50 plus years later does not put the incident in appropriate context and should be disgarded as of little value. But we should acknowledge that no army's record is completely free of questionable actions that could be charged.

Just my quick 2 cents.

 

This.

Combat from what I had read is a unrelenting, chaotic, brutal, and raw. It is something that transcends civil laws and traditional mores because of its very unique nature. I have always found laws of war problematic just for that reason. War makes killers of men. It brutalizes men. It takes the man socialized to respect life and property, and transforms him into a gun-wielding destroyer of lives and lands.When Oppenheimer spoke of becoming death and a destroyer of worlds he really could have been speaking for all combatants.

 

Well I posted a response.

 

No surprise that it's from youtube, I'll watch videos from that site, but I steer clear of the comments section when it comes to videos like that since it would be full of Nazis, radical Islamists, and just your generic low-life USA-hating pieces of worthless trash who seem to make an account there just to talk crap about America and her military. Seriously, every video that shows any aspect of the US military gets infested with arrogant, overtly-nationalistic assholes from other countries who will proceed to belittle the American armed forces with illiterate and uneducated comments like "omg, u yencs suc, u lost vayetnam," it's disgusting, can people just leave the US alone?