Quote:
Originally Posted by HGabor
"Momentary loss of humanity and self-control"... To me it is still a war crime. Anybody could use it as a cheap excuse. Do not try to wash it clean or make it look less barbar than any other murder in history. A crime is a crime regardless of the side or who won the war and who lost it. The nazi war propaganda did not allow the general public to know all of the real details of what was going on in the camps. Those rural civilians did not speak English at all. The word 'Jew' sounds completely different in Hungarian. So I am not sure what Lt. Crawford was really hearing from them... Just relax and think again.
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It is a common knowledge that American and Japanese fighter pilots had the disturbing habit to shoot bailed out enemy aircrews, this kind of actions certainly do not fit the common accepted moral code of warriors. But the reason behind of this behavior, well, are a little bit complicated, some did it just in the heat of combat, fighing blood is up, just want to shoot any enemy who are still alive, others do it because that is the tradition of his unit, "Everyone in my group are doing this, so that I will do that too", or as many American and Japanese veterans explain: a bailed out enemy is still a dangerous enemy, if he survies, he would come at you next time in a new plane, and he can kill you.
Intentionally Killing unarmed civilians on the ground is a war crime of course, but the unarmed civilians killed by strafing are small number comparing to unarmed civilians killed by mass bombing, and sadly I have to admit that such mass bombing such as Luftwaffe bombing Warsaw, London and Coventry or RAF bombing Hamburg and Dresden or American nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate war actions.