It's a known FACT that Mush Morton on the Wahoo ordered his crew to shoot up the lifeboats of a transport they had just sunk. Too bad they killed more POWs than they did Japanese. His men even shot one that was trying to surrender since Morton didn't want any "Nips" on his boat.

http://www.warfish.com/patrol3con.html ...A good link that puts it in perspective. Much the same as shooting parachutes, all sides did it...but it was not common practice or policy...not for most anyway.

Both fiercely aggressive and competitive by nature, the intersection of Morton and the boats of BUYO MARU was a collision of personality and power. In the middle of fourteen hours of combat and faced for the first time with personal contact with the enemy, emotions ran exceedingly hot. Morton clearly viewed the men in the water as combatant soldiers only recently on their way to fight Americans in the jungles of New Guinea - a valid assumption based on the information available to him. General hostility became personified in those "troops". And the crack and whiz of rounds fired at WAHOO as they approached reinforced his assumptions. Morton's order to fire the first single round into the boats was both a challenge and a dare. The response of machine gun fire was like the opening kickoff to a football game. One Morton was determined not to lose.

The only perspective that that article provides is that of the contemporary US right, whose desperate need to burnish America's halo is matched only by the nationalistic of all other nations and empires, past and present.

Removing the patriotic, red-blooded man, 9-11 talk, what you have is that it was OK, because he was really, really angry and anyway the Japs attacked us first, didn't they.

This sort of thing could be used to justify almost any atrocity comitted by anybody.

My opinion is that you would not agree that an angry Iraqi, whose family members were bombed by the US in gulf wars 1 and 2, and who has recently blown up a Humvee full of GIs would be justified in his actions. Certainly not if he then shot those GIs while crawling from their burning car.

So I am left wondering if you believe atrocities are only atrocities if performed by non-Americans, and that if Americans "cross the line" somehow, it must be for natural human reasons.

I am not anti-american, quite the opposite. But the US conduct in wars of the past has not been blameless. Americans fought war using similar brutal methods to those that others used, and in the case of air raids, the UK and US worked at a whole level beyond what anyone else did.

Where America proved its moral worth was not in the conduct of the war, but in its conduct after the war, which was, in my opinion, a display of greatness of spirit without historical precedent.

I leave them alone to drift in the sea unless they are survivors from a destroyer which banged up my boat then are surface and mow them all down with my AA guns. :arrgh!:

It's just a shame the Americans didn't start carnage of some form two years earlier. Australia and New Zealand already had no illusions about the Japanese. They were coming :gulp: .

Havn't had an inclination to try and use guns on em, damn tricky to ram the little blighters though, those guys can really pull those oars!!

Anyone else noticed when the rafts are bumped together they make big ship hull sounds? like they are steel hulled 5,000 ton vessels or something :doh:

:down: :down: :down:

Im just really surprised how many of you is gunning down the survivors.

Your "simulation" of behaviour of US sub crews is much worse than behaviour of total majority of German U-boot crews in WWII

shame on you.


Read this article and think about yourself


http://uboat.net/articles/index.html?article=55

Since it's a GAME, I've shot at absolutely everything that I could that floats/dives/flies/walks in the GAME - enemy, allied, neutral. Why? First off, because I could. Second, it's a GAME.

Every japanese not killed at sea heading to the front (or heading home, had we had to invade---a certainty without the bombing campaign) would have been killed anyway, the only difference is that allied troops would have lost their lives doing so. That is 98-99% true since only 1-2% of japanese surrendered. Allied units surrounded could have bled the IJA very badly indeed, but they knew they'd still eventually lose, so they surrendered (Singapore, Hong Kong, Philipines, etc) to spare lives on both sides. For their trouble they were brutalized and murdered.

So churning the water seems pretty reasonable instead of digging them out of caves with TNT and napalm later at great loss of allied life (look at the bloodbaths the Marines faced doing such warm work).

At that point, the PTO became a "no holds barred" conflict for the most part. The Allies treated POWs well, but took very few POWs. It took "bribes" to the troops to even get them to accept japanese surrenders since they would frequently use surrender as a guise to kill our troops. Had large units surrendered more, it might have been different, but the numbers even trying were so low, the % of faked surrenders was high.

It's interesting to note that in the ETO POWs were usually taken in sizable groups, not individuals (at least by the US). This suggests that singleton surrenders might not have been worth the trouble to accept.

I'm an American! I'm not from Mars,...that means I have as much right as anyone else to inflict pain and suffering.

I'm also a realist, there's no such thing as a fair fight and the end justifies the means. We (the Allies) won the war because we inflicted more death and destruction faster than our enemy.

As for killing pixels...I'm a realist, it's a pixel...

Regardless of whether it's a game or not,the lack of morals I find in people these days is a bit frightning. Makes it easier to see how some soldiers in Iraq can commit outright murder and rape. Somewhere along the line,morality got thrown out the window.

From warfish.com:


One of the main issues surrounding the charge of war crimes has been body count. Upon returning to Pearl Harbor on February 14, 1943, Morton claimed killing "most of the troops" from BUYO MARU, estimated at between "1,500 to 6,000." And from the perspective of WAHOO's smoke clouded, emotionally charged bridge, it was a fair claim to make. No attempt was made to count heads in the water and Japanese transport ships were entirely capable of carrying large numbers of men. However, in DeRose's book, Japanese reports and first hand testimony reveals the true number of passengers lost and their nature. For BUYO MARU was not exclusively a troop transport but also a POW ship, loaded with 491 Indian prisoners of war. Along with a company of Japanese ordnance troops and crew, BUYO carried 1,126 men. And though the men of WAHOO assumed those left behind when they set off in pursuit of the rest of the convoy would be lost to the sea, Japanese rescue ships did arrive on the scene and take most of the survivors aboard. Head counts made en route to Palau indicated a total loss of 87 Japanese and 195 Indian prisoners (the disparity in numbers reflects a less-than-concerted Japanese effort to rescue the Indians).

If only 87 japaneese lost their lives, it is fairly obvious that it was not a "mass slaughter." They aimed for the boats and (according to O'Kane) did not single out any individual soldier which appears true in light of the total amount killed.

An example from Wiki on the sinking of the Yamato:

Only 280 of the Yamato 2,778-man crew were rescued from the sinking ship. Japanese survivors reported that U.S. aircraft temporarily halted their attacks on the Japanese destroyers during the time that the destroyers were busy picking up survivors from the water.[

I think that you'll find that the treatment of POWs was in general far better on the allied side of the war than from the axis powers. No where in America did any POW have the equivalent treatment of the Bataan Death March or have heads chopped off with a sword for not being able to stand.

How many allied officers were tried for war crimes? How many axis?

Chuck

True, once taken as a POW by the Aliies, you were in good shape. I know many German POWs elected to stay in the US. The death rate for POWs held by the Japanese was over 40% I believe (compared to ~4% for those held by the Germans). To even get to that point you'd need to survive to even be considered a POW. Many were offed on the spot.

Yep! that's us. Morally bankrupt. Nothing like starting the day with a little rape, pillage, and plunder.

Personally I think we should take the gloves off. Carpet bomb a few cities just to get the point across. We're sick of your ****.

But that's just me...I think it foolish to let PC dictate combat strategy...I think it prolongs the suffering and costs lives.

Be wary when near Jap survivors, some of them, particularly failed Kamikaze pilots, had a nasty trick up their sleeve.

Easy now fellas...if this escalates than this baby is gunna get shut down and I'm enjoying the debate/discussion, so lets play nice please? :ping: