New Medal in the U.S. Army

[Retribution]

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/world/Medal-for-_courageous-restraint_-plan-get-mixed-review-from-troops-93007014.html

 

What do you think?

 

Personally, I think it's one of the stupidest things I've heard of. Why they throw away the lives of our soldiers instead of just bombing astounds me. We used to do it, and it was pretty effective.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

[TheTerminator2004]

I'd have thought the reason they don't drop thousands of tons of high explosive into the middle of densely populated cities would be fairly obvious... But, just in case you really are thick enough to not get it - that particular bombing run you link to resulted in some 40,000 innocent civilians being killed, and many times that number being wounded. A quote from a survivor, also from that same page you linked to:

 

It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother's hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.

 

We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.

 

I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.

 

And of course, you have to remember that this is just one, relatively minor bombing. Many, many, many more such raids were carried out on a regular basis, by both sides, over the course of the war. One alone would not win a war at all - and it could be argued that, in the end, they had less effect in winning WW2 than the armies did anyway.

[Retribution]

No, I do get it. Apparently, you don't know what war is.

[TheTerminator2004]

You mean other than a foolish, pointless, tragic waste of life? If governments feel the need to kill people, at least nowadays most of them have the decency to try and make sure that only the people who signed up for it get killed. They don't do a very good job, but its still a huge improvement over the past wars where slaughtering as many civilians as possible was considered to be a viable tactic.

[Retribution]

It is a viable tactic. See: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[slygothmog]

It is a viable tactic. See: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

 

I think atrocities would better describe those two acts. Japan had all but surrendered, they had lost and where already on the verge of surrender.

They where a way for America to say to the world " look what we can do ", those bombs where designed to explode above ground to inflict maximum damage on both buildings and people. A totally unnecessary act of evil to my mind.

[Aurielius]

Given the current political climate avoiding collateral damage is something that modern military units strive for. As long as that does not imperil the lives of the soldiers themselves, I see nothing wrong with it. Returning vets have enough to deal with without having memories of unnecessary deaths on their conscience. You never forget combat no matter how many years pass, too much adrenaline reinforcing the neural pathways at the time. Just my two cents...

[Dark0ne]

I think atrocities would better describe those two acts. Japan had all but surrendered, they had lost and where already on the verge of surrender.

They where a way for America to say to the world " look what we can do ", those bombs where designed to explode above ground to inflict maximum damage on both buildings and people. A totally unnecessary act of evil to my mind.

 

Playing devils advocate here, that's wrong. The Japanese weren't going to surrender at all; they were going to fight to the very last man. The Japanese were given an ultimatum stating if they did not surrender they would suffer "prompt and utter destruction". The Japanese refused and the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. The Japanese STILL refused to surrender, so another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The Japanese then surrendered.

 

You must remember that these were the Japanese, a proud and noble nation who would rather die before surrendering; hence all the (true) stories about Japanese soldiers waiting for American soldiers to get near them (to capture the Japanese soldier) and then pulling the pin on a hand-grenade, killing himself and all nearby American soldiers. Hence the kamikaze pilots taking down American (wooden decked? LoL?) aircraft carriers.

 

Declassified American war documents suggest that the American's were preparing for Allied casualities to be in the range of one million men for the taking of Japan before the atom bomb was finished. The Japanese would have literally fought for every single house on their island. It was nothing like the war in Europe. With that in mind I can honestly understand where the American generals were going. Save one million of my own men for 200,000 of the enemy's. The ethical dilemma was in dropping the bomb on cities, rather than military locations or simply on unused land as a "demonstration". However Japanese spies would have known what the atom bomb was and what it was capable of, and the Japanese were probably trying to call the American's bluff on dropping the bombs on mainland Japan.

 

The ethics of dropping the atom bomb are obviously highly dubious but I'd rather the facts weren't skewed in to "Japan were surrendering and the American's dropped atom bombs on them!!!".

 

------------------------------------

 

 

All of that has absolutely no relevance to any of the current wars America is in, however. War has changed. Just like it changed from the 19th century to the 20th century, it's changed again from the 20th century to the 21st century. You can't drop tactical nukes on a group of 100 insurgents in a town of 4,000 civilians. Why? Because the next town over will go from having 100 insurgents to 4,100 insurgents very quickly. Then you've got a whole load more people to worry about blowing themselves up in Time Square.

 

I hope we're all just getting trolled on this one. Either that or someone has just watched one of those cliche Van-Damm or Segal films with the cliche American general whose plan is always to bomb anything that moves and he's taken it to heart.

[Vagrant0]

No, I do get it. Apparently, you don't know what war is.

The conflict in Afghanistan/Iraq/ect isn't war. There's no well trained army, there's no leader with whom a discussion about surrender or sanctions can be made. All there are are civilians who spent a few weeks at a camp, got drilled with religious rhetoric, given 30 year old weapons and told to fight for Allah. Standard definitions of an enemy combatant do not apply.

 

That said, this medal just seems to me like too much of a "You didn't shoot any unarmed women and children, here's a medal" kinda thing. In fairness, it probably isn't easy to tell the unarmed women and children from the ones with explosives strapped to their bodies, but it still seems somewhat misguided.

[slygothmog]

No, i am not trolling here ( or i hope not ), this is just the view i have formed after reading many different things over a span of many years.

The Japanese people were indeed noble and proud ( still are i think ), but they were very much brainwashed by their leaders into thinking the allied forces soldiers would do unspeakable things to them if captured and this led to those acts of suicide that you speak of.

At the beggining when Japan entered the war there was a code of obey your superior without question, and the Emperor was regarded as a deity, at the closing stages these attitudes had suffered a major blow and things had turned internally for Japan as well as externally, yes the leaders would would have liked to fight to the last man, but they no longer had the support from the people that they used to, they where risking a revolt by their own citizens and had begun to recognise this. After Hiroshima if my memory serves me correctly, the Japanese tried to open negotiations with the Americans and were ignored.

And i dont watch those silly segal and Van-Damm films :smile: , i am not that gullible.