The Off Topic Topic

[Caliga]

I think I've mentioned here before that Princesca's great uncle Georgie fought in the Pacific and kept a jar of gold teeth/fillings he looted off of dead Japanese.

[Tonitrus]

Ah, the days before we got all the hang ups about racism.

[Valmy]

Yeah they don't show that in the training montage at the beginning of WWII movies.

[Valmy]

Ah, the days before we got all the hang ups about racism.

It is PC gone mad I tells ya.

[derspiess]

Pearl Harbor really, *really* pissed people off

[DGuller]

I googled for the "Hunting Licenses" mentioned in the Cracked article and got more than I bargained for. 















I couldn't find a German/Jerry/Kraut equivalent.

That was really insensitive.

[lustindarkness]

I think I've mentioned here before that Princesca's great uncle Georgie fought in the Pacific and kept a jar of gold teeth/fillings he looted off of dead Japanese.

Are we sure they were all dead?

[Valmy]

Pearl Harbor really, *really* pissed people off

Remember how people felt right after 9/11? This was far more intense and unrestrained and lasted for years.

[Caliga]

I think I've mentioned here before that Princesca's great uncle Georgie fought in the Pacific and kept a jar of gold teeth/fillings he looted off of dead Japanese.

Are we sure they were all dead?

Yeah.  Georgie had some job where he laid telephone and telegraph cable so he wasn't exactly on the front lines.  He came in after the real Marines did all the fighting, dying, and killing.  If he was encountering Japanese dudes they were long since dead.

[derspiess]

Remember how people felt right after 9/11? This was far more intense and unrestrained and lasted for years.

Yep.

[alfred russel]

We would have had to go down the rabbit hole a great deal farther to outdo the Japanese sure.

But keeping bones as trophies is not the extent of it. But it was entirely understandable, we are human beings no demi-Gods. I just hear people get all bent out of shape about fire bombing cities, dropping the atomic bombs, widespread looting and murdering prisoners and civilians and I just wish they would understand that for this period we were completely out of our minds.

What is also forgotten is that the Japanese attempted to militarize the civilian population, and though it never came to that on a really grand scale, there was every appearance the civilian population was to an extent militarized.

At the same time, US service members weren't the professional volunteers they are today. If you were 18 and didn't have some medical defect, you could end up wandering through Tokyo in an invasion whether you wanted to or not, after some rather abridged training program.

On both ends, the line between civilian and military was somewhat more blurry than we are used to.

[Malthus]

I saw some old WW2-era movies - one, for example, made concerning "Operation Strangle" in Italy. They were truly startling to modern eyes in their callousness.

For example, in that movie they showed at one point fighter-bombers(?) roaming over the Italian countryside basically blowing up random houses - and the voice-over was simply gleeful at their target-shooting; no-one expressed the slightest concern about the Italians presumably living in those houses. 

Edit: this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt!

[lustindarkness]

http://news.yahoo.com/eiffel-tower-shut-staff-walk-over-pickpockets-134522704.html

I was going to post this in my vacation thread as we talked about this earlier, but no need to scare The Wife with this. Fun stuff.

[Duque de Bragança]

Sadly not surprised about this stuff. Last Languish trip at the Eiffel Tower was thwarted by the long queueing necessary to visit the Eiffel Tower.

[alfred russel]

I saw some old WW2-era movies - one, for example, made concerning "Operation Strangle" in Italy. They were truly startling to modern eyes in their callousness.

For example, in that movie they showed at one point fighter-bombers(?) roaming over the Italian countryside basically blowing up random houses - and the voice-over was simply gleeful at their target-shooting; no-one expressed the slightest concern about the Italians presumably living in those houses. 

Edit: this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thunderbolt!

I came across this speech from Patton after the war in LA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYjnWXFTQkM

"Coming over here, for the first four hours of my journey, I passed over a land that was totally destroyed. Utterly destroyed. You you have not seen it do not know what hell looks like from above. That is what Germany looks like, that is what Austria looks like. That is what any place that the Eighth Air Force and Third Army worked on looks like."

Applause

"You must remember this. From Brest to various towns in Southern Germany and Austria whose names I can not pronounce but whose places I have removed..." interrupted by laughter, interspersed with some applause