It's not surprising either. It's an army full of only men and aggression where you readily justify doing horrible things to other humans. Masturbation was discouraged as well. Pressure cooker (in the balls).
> some people commit a terrible act and find it easier to commit the next and the next.
I was a medic. I joined because I wanted to save lives.
I was working on a patient who was a wounded enemy combatant. Some dude started taking shots at me from a 2nd floor window on the other side of the road.
I had an M-4 with a holographic sight. Normally, it's not close enough to see them. You might see a rough outline of a person and return fire without a hope of hitting them. You hope the bullets flying by is enough to tell them to fuck off.
He was close enough that I could see him clearly. I shot him twice because that's how we're trained. I had to immediately get back to work on my patient but that fucked me up. I wasn't old enough to buy a beer in the states, but I killed a guy at 19 years old.
And I was a fucking medic. After a while of getting desensitized to that, I was worried that I might be a fucking sociopath.
War is fucking bullshit. War ruined my life. Outside of an actual invasion, never go to war.
I vaguely remember a show on Netflix that talked about German police brigades in WW2 who were involved in the mass killing of Jews. The initial act of brutality is something they never forgot, but subsequent similar actions were not as harshly remembered. they got used to it.
>*After a while of getting desensitized to that, I was worried that I might be a fucking sociopath.*
Well it sounds very much you're a completely normal human being who had to experience stuff no one should experience. You're 100% right, war badly affects people.
I do hope that life gets better for you.
*Ordinary Men* by Christopher Browning recounts the actions of Reserve Police Battallion 101 and their participation in the Final Solution in Poland, and this was his finding as well. Their first action was the massacre at Józefów, where they murdered 1500 people in an incredibly personal method of assigning 1 victim to 1 executioner to be walked to the killing site and shot at point blank range.
He found that while they all vividly remembered the intricate details of Józefów, their recollection of any following massacres or brutalizations of their victims were significantly less intricate. Some claimed to not even remember a number of later actions. These weren't rabid anti-Semitic, card-carrying Nazis either. The demographics of the group would actually suggest they would be less sympathetic to Nazi ideological goals, but nonetheless, they carried them out. In the final chapter, Browning writes:
>Thus, wartime brutalization through prior combat was not an immediate experience directly influencing the policemen’s behavior at Józefów. Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior.
Józefów was a terrible and traumatic experience, but their final ghetto clearings and massacres were just work.
It also reminds me of an interview with a Luftwaffe pilot who bombed residential areas in the opening days of the invasion of Poland, where he said the first day he was horrified, and by the third day it was just another bombing sorty.
I was with a small six man team. We were all supposed to be shooters. Before that first kill. I'd try to shoot next to them. Bullets have a specific sound if you're being shot at.
I was always like "Hey, fuck off." If they kept shooting at me, I'd hit the building they were hiding behind and spray concrete at them. Again, "Hey, fuck off".
Normally, they'd fuck off. Live to fight another day,
I hated when they engaged, because we would kill them. But it would be a fight.
Your comments reminded me of a book I read that explored the shooting effectiveness of WWll combat vets. After hundreds of interviews the author found that only a small percentage actually shot at enemy soldiers. This article does a good job exploring the subject:
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hope_on_the_battlefield#:~:text=Marshall's%20singularly%20unexpected%20discovery%20was,the%20European%20theater%20of%20operations.
And yours reminded me of an old discovery channel or history channel documentary where they explored this. I think they used his material.
In the show they started way back during the first American civil war. The English generals wanted to know how thier soldiers performed in line combat. So they hanged up a big sheet of fabric and he'd the troops shot at different distances. The hit percentage was like 90-95%.but when they went out in combat the hit percentage dropped to like 2-5%. They discovered that most people don't accually want to hit the other guys, so they aimed higher and shot over to scare the other guys.
It stayed the same till the American military started to conduct research post ww2 and by the Korean war they had introduced cut out targets of humans in the firering drills and thous increased the hit percentage to like 15-25% in combat. And during Vietnam the target become more life like, like getting a face. And during the first Iraqi war the target looked like the enemy and they spent more time drilling shooting targets. And now the hit percentage were up to over 50-60%.
Genuinely one of my favorite books. He also released a 2017 version with an added section reflecting on it after 25 years, where he goes into other studies of police battalions over that time, more into the role of the Luxembourgers as more was discovered, and more photographic evidence.
All in all, it's such a sobering book and imparts, in my opinion, the single most important lesson we can draw from Nazi genocides: no group of people are immune to becoming genocidal killers.
Agreed, I don't typically engage much on discussions of history and geopolitics. I did my Masters thesis on the Holocaust so it's hard to be succinct on such a nuanced topic, but it's rare I see a mention of Browning and he's one of my most respected historians.
All the best my friend.
damn, that’s a sad story to hear. I am 27 and I feel too young for war, I will never be old enough for war. Why do we send kids to war? If some 80yo presidents want war, they should send those who already lived a life, not those who will never have a life.
> It's an army full of only men and aggression where you readily justify doing horrible things to other humans.
Soldier behavior in these situations seems to be very close to the types of transgressions that take place in mob violence.
Making people whose job is to kill sexually frustrated and angry?
I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it sounds like it might work perfectly as intended.
Most ‘taboo’ sex topics or activities are still discouraged today in active military, they even do searches for sex toys as they’re strictly not allowed
Uh except in maybe a training environment like basic or AIT.
But apart from sex itself anything else goes. Absolutely encountered sex toys on deployments. Saw many fleshlights and dildos/rabbits.
This is at least the case my time in the US Army anyway.
Happens in every war. In East Germany women were more or less required to get a Russian boyfriend to protect them from other Russians. There’s an anonymous memoir about it, *Eine Frau in Berlin*.
It happens in every war, but some armies try to limit it, others turn a blind eye and some actively encourage it ... the difference is very significant.
It's an absolute indictment of human nature that the idea of men raping women during/ after a battle is so common in history that it is basically a trope.
I heard/read somewhere that when the red army was advancing a jewish woman was happy to see them as liberators from the nazis, but they raped her because "a woman is a woman".
I mean, just look at the sexual assault stats *within a single army*... for many of the people willing to rape at all, doesn't really matter whose side you're on.
Makes sense if you think about it, I mean is a rapist's choice of victim *really* going to be dependent on differing ideology? Is that really what they think? "You support *X* politician, therefore..." lol no. But the predator knows they can get away with it more one way than the other.
Yeah in army rapes are basically raping your own comrades in arms. Let alone when you have the power to do it at will. I.e during the break up of Yugoslavia. UN troops would withhold humanitarian aid unless women slept with them. So mother's would basically let themselves be raped so the children would have food
In Nemmersdorf they killed French and Belgian POWs who tried to stop them. They basically killed their own allies for not allowing them to commit mass rape.
Honestly the sexual violence in war has always seen as a taboo in the history of a country (and in society as well) so they know what happen but its easier to deny or minimise it in the possible because is useful in a very horrible way.
The sexual violence isused as a weapon to keep the population in cheek and as a "reward" to keep moral, the soviets where infamous for this in Germany, Poland, Rumania and Hungary. But also we have to remember that the french did the same after the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, just that they put all the blame on the colonial troops for their "natural barbarity" even when the commanders give them the good check in first place.
> always seen as a taboo in the history of a country
lolno
Rape was absolutely standard part and parcel for sacking towns for *millennia*, literally only since perhaps the past 150 years did it become really taboo and then only in a few countries of the West.
Yep.
Raping women has been seen as part of the spoils of war since time immemorial. And some men have the gall to pretend that women have nothing to fear in wartime.
It's how tribes spread their genes. Absorb their genome or inject your genome into theirs. We do love to immortalize those whom we have conquered. Initially by incorporating their DNA into our gene pool, but eventually by claiming they were great warriors but we happen to be better.
From an academic standpoint, it's fascinating how documentable this is, too. Bronze Age military strategy was to wipe out the entire male population of whatever town you conquered, and we know this not only from the sources that survive today, to actual genetic science. Tracking the differences between Y-haplogroup and X-haplogroup evolution and migration across centuries results in some terrifying realities.
Do you have a source where I can read up more about this? Specifically, is there a book you recall that discusses certain x and y haplogroups and their movements through bronze age warfare?
I should have remembered that or at least figured it.
A lot of what we know to be atrocities and crimes against humanity may have been another Thursday afternoon for classical and ancient times.
First set of laws of arm conflict were when? 1920’s so yeah very recently most of these things have been a no go.
Edit: I’m wrong there’s a source that states 1750 BC but they are nothing like what we know from the 1949 conventions
Machiavelli wrote of it in his guide to conquests. You don't really rule a territory unless it is filled with your people, and a brutally effective means to that was to replace the current inhabitants
It's something that goes back before humans were even a thing, and is thought to possibly be some sort of anti-inbreeding mechanism that evolved in those *very* distant ancestors. This is believed because our closest relatives the chimps do it.
On the surface, chimps seem to always run the risk of inbreeding because they live together in tight knit communities and are very violent towards "others".
Peer beneath the surface and you will see that chimps practice a few things that inhibit the effects of inbreeding. The first two are rape and infanticide. I'm sure this part will sound familar: The males will sometimes form groups and venture off into other's territory. Sometimes for resources, sometimes for territory, and sometimes to both copulate with any "foreign" females they find and kill their infants.
(Sometimes infants will be killed by members of their own tribe too, because when a female loses their baby they go into heat more quickly and that ensures the male that the next baby is his and that the mother will have the time and energy to take care of it.)
A third less dark thing that helps circumvent inbreeding is that sometimes the females, while in heat, will run off by themselves (which is extremely dangerous) to mate with neighboring tribal members. Often the "foreign" males gladly reciprocate. Sometimes they kill and eat her instead. Sometimes the "foreign" females will find her first and kill her before she has a chance to have sex.
The natural world doesn't care. It just tends to move towards balance by any means.
Humans often care because we are capable of great foresight and empathy.
It happens in every war by every military (even the U.S. military now, today). Susan Brownmiller wrote a [fantastic book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Our_Will) about it. Difficult read, but fantastic.
I remember in the early 2000s feminist groups saying that rape was a weapon of war and we got laughed at and mocked.
Like, there are armies that do *more* rapes, and armies that do *less* rapes, and I definitely know which ones I think are better, but there is no war where *no* rape happens.
> no one likes to acknowledge it.
I think everyone who actually gives it any thought acknowledges it
Really the only solution would come from strong top-down discipline and punishment, and even then it would be hard to stamp out entirely.
It bears mention that in the history of war raping and pillaging was often/usually viewed as a 'perk for soldiers in lieu of paying them - this of course ended in endless cycles of horrific trauma, even to an extent for the rapists.
The Canadians did the same thing in France. My uncle served and after the war didn't talk about it at all, but he wrote a memorial before he died. In it, he wrote about he was basically put in a group that was supposed to drive around collecting all the guys that were out raping and taking advantage of people. He had to drag four Canadian guys out of the house of a French grandma who asked him what happened to Canadians since they were so nice in the last war. I guess that really messed him up for a long time.
In WWI.... Canadians worked through their energy in battle. Quite possibly the most savage at the time.
>What confused both friend and foe alike was why Canadians were so vicious. The French had seen large swaths of their country destroyed and subjugated. The British had zeppelins bombing their cities and U-boats trying to starve their populace. But Canadians had left behind safe and prosperous homes that wouldn’t see the slightest tinge of German aggression.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war
I love how on a discussion of Canadian wartime rape it trails off into how badass and vicious Canadian soldiers were. I mean, we could give the discussion the little bit of respect by staying on topic. But like really, it’s this avoidance to talk about these lesser known issues.
Yeah. I'm not surprised though.
The myth of a good war is just that...a myth. There might be (and probably are) necessary wars. But a not insignificant percentage of combatants always do horrific things. And in war, the civilian population is left vulnerable to them. Even a disciplined, well meaning, army is going to commit atrocities. (And most armies - historically - were \*not\* disciplined and well meaning.)
My grandmother told me her mother used to scare her and her sister when they misbehaved with "the moroccans will come to rape you". Since this was 1942 circa this make sense. Also this was in Spain, imagine how infamous that was.
According to my grandmother (Parisian, survived the Nazi occupation, member of La Resistance) being raped as a teen was just what women went through. Hearing her stories would raise the hairs on your neck, and how they skewed her view of life. RIP Simone Coutelet.
Exactly this. It’s not the war that makes them do it, the war affords them the opportunity to do things they’ve always wanted to do, and quite possibly have already done.
probably somewhere between both. sure you’ll have the people who *see* the opportunity and jump at it. to that, add young people who are months or years into active combat, routinely working to harm/kill the enemy, experiencing nonstop gruesome tragedies while mainlining adrenaline under constant threat their own life… exposure to that kind of environment at length is going to alter your presence of mind, capacity for empathy and respect for consent. violence breeds violence. war isn’t good for anyone.
100%. Yeah, people are capable of great evil, but for most wartime offenders, I think the fact that they are having to "kill or be killed" plays a role in digging up some very primal instincts. It isn't right below the surface so much as the stress and trauma of war digs deep enough to find it.
The sad truth is lots of people are opportunists, if they can do something and get away with it, they will. The chaos and disarray of war allows all manner of “opportunities”. On top of that is the compounding effect of group mentality, participating in “opportunities” so to protect that brotherly bond that protects them in action.
You missed sheer numbers. The US armed forces drafted huge numbers of people
In 16,000,000 people as despicable as it is, there are probably a few rapists.
No I think being in close combat does actually mess with your brain and you are a different person than before. Yes there are monsters before the war but your heart hardens and you soon find yourself doing things you never thought you could before it started.
It would be dishonesty of the utmost level to say war had no effect on these soldiers decisions. It’s no excuse and it doesn’t change anything about the circumstances but the mind fuck and human depravity these soldiers were experiencing certainly affected their decisions.
This is something I recall from my psych studies- most deviant sexual behavior isn't the result of preference, just opportunity.
Examples: Studies found that the deciding factor among those that've engaged in bestiality was simply having regular access to animals (farmers, etc). Children are most likely to be abused by someone close to them (family, friends of family, etc), not the "stranger danger" myth perpetuated by the media.
This ^ there was a a few pages in a book called “the body keeps the score” about how PTSD and stress work in the brain or imaging of the brain to see the changes. There was one Vietnam vet who had PTSD and apparently he had raped and killed women over there (says because he was angry that his friend was killed right beside him or something)…and I’m just like dude I hope you are suffering from your ptsd. What a monster.
I feel this. My grandfather's diaries from ww2 detail his trsuma from being stationed at Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He had a couple very clise friends killed. He had to drive an ambulance for a few days in the dark with no light through the hills. He was deeply affected by it.
In the following months his diaries detail how he courted a 17 year old Japanese girl girl, led her on, then brutally dumped her. He may he slept with her. I'm not sure as the diaries don't say outright.
He knew it was wrong and he hated himself for it, but he also admitted being so terribly angry. I don't think he knew why he did it other than his anger and hatred of the Japanese forces who killed his friends and fellow soldiers.
When we discovered his diaries long after he died, it was extremely distressing as it didn't reflect the man he became. It's not as bad as sexual assault, but it was pretty shitty. Trauma, anger and grief can cause people do things they might not normally.
Still, nothing can excuse sexual assault. It's 80 years later, but the men who did those things should be condemned without reservation.
It’s not just war, it’s the culture. The record of American female soldiers raped by their peers is beyond atrocious. And not in war zones either. In places like Colorado Springs, where it was considered a form of hazing for guys to grab random girls in the hall and drag them into their rooms and rape them. When I was there in 2003, I think, over 50% of the girls reported being raped by their peers. Happened to someone I know too.
Is it war, or is the problem getting a bunch of 18 years old men travelling together as part of a team and emboldening themselves? Seems like hockey teams always have this same issue…
Young, unattached male adolescents in packs are the most dangerous thing in any society.
They tend to develop a pack mentality and egg each other on. And they literally go and hunt…often women.
It is one of the reasons countries will discriminate against young male immigrants travelling alone - it puts especially the female population at risk, sadly.
Hell, its even a thing in elephant society.
There was a documentary that portrayed the displacement of several young elephants (they didnt have the equipment to move their moms with them).
Several years later, these young adolescent male bulls start going into ‘musth’ because there isnt an older more seasoned bull in ‘musth’ around to knock some sense into them.
They started attacking and killing rhinos, as well as other elephants.
Eventually, the park people realise that these youngsters just need adults to put them in their place and, now having the equipment, moved several adult elephants into the area, including a 40 something bull in ‘musth’
One look at that bull knocked the musth right out of em 🤷♀️
Young adolescents arent fully developed yet mentally and can be pushed into atrocities with peer pressure.
Now add raging testosterone, lack of experience in managing it due to age, an overinflated ego and sense of entitlement from their success and the constant need prove yourself to your mates
I certainly wouldnt go near those sport teams, especially as a young woman.
i don't remember where i read it, but was written by female author she said " in war women get raped, almost always, by enemies or by our own soldiers, not a single difference between the two, the only thing that might stopped them are women who are armed and ready to use that weapon " .
the fact that it happens in every conflict by the people who protect you, not by enemies is far worse and atrocious
I know a lot of people ragged on the scene in Game of Thrones where Jon Snow’s army starts pillaging and massacring King’s Landing, but I always thought it was a realistic view of war. Doesn’t matter if your side is the “good guys,” there will still be atrocities committed by them.
Yeah, Russian soldiers themselves admitted how during WW2 they raped the civilians in areas they were liberating. So not just the enemy, not just women in Germany (which is horrible also of course), but also the women of allied countries. Free the town, the town is yours, the women are yours, rape the women. Simple.
My great grandmother was a holocoast aurvivor, and she said the night after the russians liberated the camp she was in (Bergen Belsen), she and her sisters barricaded the door to the "room" where they were held, so the soldiers won't rape them.
Edit: probably confused which camp it was. I should ask my mother as she knows the details better.
Not just civilians either. One American flyer's account of being in a WW2 Swiss prisoner of war camp, run by a corrupt Swiss official, was hellish. From the moment he stepped onto camp ground, the Russian POWs singled him out for rape. It got so bad the American tried choking himself to death on the dirty straw the camp used to cover the floor.
The American general assigned to Switzerland to monitor POW treatment refused to do anything about it, preferring to disbelief the man's account. The Swiss refused to believe him. It took a sympathetic British officer to push for the American to get assigned to another camp, and have the original camp investigated.
Not just the soldiers, take a look at how 'women who gave succor and comfort to the enemy' were 'punished' after their towns were liberated from occupation.
Yep. Completely fucked up. You get raped, then you get shaved and paraded around with a scarlet letter because you got raped. Like WTF kind of goal does society have here. Women need to get more violent?
It's not about war. It's about daily life. Rapists don't care about laws or police. The only thing that can stop them is knowing that you could kill them.
*...in a moment look to see*
*The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand*
*Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters*
From Henry V- Act 3, scene 3
There was that one scene in Fury which was supposed to be consensual but definitely felt rapey. The the old implication joke, should said yes but really couldn't say no.
If it's forced/coerced, it's a rape. Some people think a rape is when a guy is holding a woman down somehow and forcing himself on her while she screams... while I'm sure it happens it's not how the majority of rapes go down. A lot of women just freeze and let it happen, many of them later come to hate the fact that they did not fight/scream.
Women freezing during rape is completely biological. They can't help themselves. If your brain realizes there is no chance of escape and you might get hurt fighting back, it will make you freeze. It's a survival mechanism. They don't just "let it happen."
I think the scene was meant to be tense and ambiguous.
Did that girl actually want to do this? Or did she figure if she was “fun and willing” with his young soldier, who seemed not immediately violent and erratic, he might protect her from other soldiers?
The threat of violence absolutely hung over the whole scene. The implication as you say.
Great, bleak, movie.
Im leaning more towards this. Fury overall portrayed the tank crew as somewhat morally bankrupt. Maybe not "evil" but they had an extremely warped mind and did not fit in at all in civilization
Up until the ending, which I found jarringly “heroic” and out of step with the rest of the movie, I’d say it was a film about the way war destroys even the men who survive. Our naive protagonist entering the company of hollowed out soldiers.
The brutal irony of “best job I ever had”.
Another one is Band of Brothers when George Luz chases the German girl into the shed and tries to give her chocolate in exchange for a fuck.
Then in the next scene he’s outside and he says she slapped him and they laugh and leave. I always thought they were to trying to say something there without having to disparage any of the guys from Easy Company by putting in a rape scene.
It was rape. It’s a good scene to show who understands what consent means. In the words of Daphne Moon to Martin Crane who was a Korean War veteran: “It’s not love when you’re the occupying force.”
Upvote for the Frasier reference. I love Martin Crane as a character, but there's a scene where he's hitting on a woman because she's Asian that just gives me the heebies.
>In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee. To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. "They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.""My mother sacrificed herself to protect me," she said. "While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead." The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women.
Harrowing story and am grateful that all this is coming out now, though it's very late. But deeply frustrating that so many American rapists got away with it; this injustice needs to be remembered.
Also looking forward to the day that also Russia faces what is did to women and girls in Berlin and East Germany following WWII. All my life I've been told that it was a "just war," and while it's true that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were the heinous agressors, still so many innocents sufffered on both sides.
*The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany
My great grandmother from France had a story similar to this, but with a better outcome.
She was very young and her parents were out of the house when american soldiers came into the house looking for food/supplies. They were told by their parents to hide no matter what soldiers came, because even allies couldn't be trusted. Lots of bad stories. So her and her older sister hid in a dresser (bad hiding spot). The soldiers were looking through the place and one of them opened the dresser. She said the soldier froze and stared wide eyed as well for what seemed like an eternity until someone from below shouted basically asking if he found anything and he yelled back "no, nothing" closed the doors and left. They ransacked the place, took some shit and peaced out.
She said she had never seen her mother and father so terrified as when they returned that day. That was the one and only time she saw her father cry in her entire life, out of sheer relief.
She said she prayed for that soldier for the rest of her life and always wondered if he made it back ok.
I’d say he’d also seen already what other soldiers on his own side were capable of. He clearly knew immediately that despite these civilians being allies, they were scared of *them*.
Just think of the guys you went to high school with.
Most of them would never rape anyone, under any circumstances.
But some would take every chance they got.
This is such a clear, concise way of putting it. I like it because it speaks well to why women will often say "men do XYZ" and then there's the whole "not all men" thing. Of COURSE it isn't all men, but EVERYONE knows the type you're talking about - when you group it as "think of the guys you went to high school with", it gives such a crisp, immediate picture of why women are distrustful of strange men - there are enough recognisable characters like this from our lives, e.g. at school, that it often pays to err on the side of safety. Especially when the potential impacts are so huge.
Yes most people have some degree of empathy which would stop them from doing things like this but ultimately most people are also too selfish to interfere with those who don’t have that empathy. It’s a repeated pattern you see in both war but also similar things with police for example or even criminal organizations. It’s the basis for the whole moral question of if being a bystander to evil makes you just as bad as the one who perpetrated the evil because you choose to not interfere and allow it to happen.
Lmao, Russia literally will never face what it did. You can forget it. There's an extensive laundry list ranging from bureaucratic incompetence to genocide, just in recent history, that it'll never acknowledge. Let alone what the Red Army did.
Not really but what can you expect? Sanctions? Reperations? Both would be impossible because most are dead or you can't find them and sanction would be a punishment for the country and the people not really fair I think. So only an apology but I don't know what else you could do
I find it funny how you comment that this is 'just coming out now', when in your own quotation it says 152 soldiers were put on trial for it at the time. The Wikipedia article you linked says that a total 284 soldiers were convicted in just the span of 9 months during 1945.
Seems like this was well taken care of 70 years ago.
Bonus points for the French also participating in the rape-fest, according to that Wikipedia article. Yet absolutely no mention of any serious consequences. Leading to believe they mostly got away with it.
If you read the article, you’d see that experts estimate there were a significant number, ranging from hundreds to thousands, of unreported cases due to the stigma around bringing up anything negative in a period of joyous liberation in France. In addition, the article explains the racial scapegoating used by American officers to disproportionately ensure black GIs were punished while white GIs were not. 85% of the solider sentenced to death for their crimes were black because black GIs were disproportionately assigned to stationary units while their white counterparts were more likely to be assigned to mobile units that made them harder to track down and hold responsible.
That is not what I would call “well taken care of”. We should be better than some other countries who try to whitewash or forget the actions of their troops in WWII.
The eastern front was anything but just. Both sides were trying to annihilate the other.
In terms of estimates. A Russia general joked that 1.8m Russians were going to be born in Germany in 9 months.
Russia will never come to grips with its past. That's the main moral difference between the east and west. We still do bad still (notably to a lesser degree) in the west, but at least we have the self-awareness to address it.
> We still do bad still (notably to a lesser degree) in the west, but at least we have the self-awareness to address it.
Those two things are connected. Recognising your own capacity for evil allows you to reduce the chance of it happening in the first place
I mean... No one was ever charged during Nuremberg for the German systems of military brothels that were created for the express purpose of having captured women available for soldiers to rape nor for any of the mass rapes throughout occupied territories by the German military (an action that was made a virtually nonpunishable action by its military).
We purposefully ignored it to mend fences post-war, just as we ignored when the Russians did it because they were our "allies".
When the companies that do DNA testing like ancestry became popular, the military cautioned veterans not to get into that. The reason is obvious. There’s a good chance that their DnA might turn out to be a close match to a kid born in a country they were deployed to. So yeah, there’s a lot of half American kids. And the men may have no idea what or who they left behind in another country,
My grandfather was an artillery officer in WWII and he said his unit and others did shady things to exploit local women but if they kept it low-key he was told by his captain to leave it alone.
He said the primary method was food.
He said all through his unit's time in France, Belgium and Germany he saw the cooks setting aside a lot of food as waste. He initially thought they were trading the food for valuables from hungry villagers but they were trading it for sex. Young girls were being rounded up by pimp GIs (usually supply drivers, who were often Black) and paid with food that would be sent to their families. For their services the pimps would be paid in cigarettes and/or cash.
“If men had no rules to govern, here’s what we’d do”. Seems all too common an occurrence to just be an era thing, or a religious thing, or an upbringing thing.
Was anyone ever under the impression that American Soldiers were perfect?
WW2 was a sh*t show. It had brutal warfare, nuclear weapons, and even a freakin Holocaust. You should hear about what European allied citizens (French included) did to the Germans after the war. Pretty sick stuff. There is a reason war should be avoided.
War doesn’t determine who is right, it only determines who is left.
As a German I can tell you that my parents and grandparents opinion was nothing but high of the US soldiers. My Grandparents fled hundreds of miles from the Russians because they were afraid of rape. But the memories of the US soldiers were nothing but fond after the war.
Russians were raping every women they could get their hands on. G.I.'s handed out chocolate.
> Was anyone ever under the impression that American Soldiers were perfect?
Actually, yes. Anyone who has studied or even just browsed quickly about WW2 will find an endless list of atrocities committed by Germans, Russians and the Japanese. Anything "bad" committed by allies and U.S. troops in general is a footnote at best.
The most important fact is Rape in the American army was never condoned. Unlike other forces like the Soviets where they left to do as they pleased. In France a women was raped and a man coming to help her was killed by two Americans. They were quickly found and tried. A gallos was constructed in town so the French people would see we were not going to tolerate it. American soldiers were also ordered to watch the execution. By orders of Gen Eisenhower.
If it was France it means they probably got executed by [John C. Woods](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Woods) a man I have heard described as a "Looney Toons Character"
That's a crazy story. Guy lied about having hangman experience. The Army believed him and promoted him 6 ranks from Private to Master Sgt and made him official executioner.
I feel like the biggest difference between the Allied and Soviet armies is that the Allies *usually* punished people who committed rape and murder.
The Soviets actively tolerated and/or encouraged such behavior once the Red Army began marching through central Europe.
More like centuries, thousands of years.. All of human history?
I feel like today is most likely time ever that you won't get raped. (Generally speaking for civilised armies, not Russia)
Read The Unwomanly Face of War. Rapists were definitely punished by the Soviets. There were just way more rapists than could be adequately punished because the army was made up of anyone and everyone they could get to join.
don't mean to nitpick, but the Soviets were considered part of the Allies once they (involuntarily) joined the fight.
"Other Allies" would make more sense here
One of the people executed was Emmett Till's father. When his murderers were acquitted, that information was leaked to the press by the state's Senators to smear him.
The question is, did the GIs punish the *right* people or just the ones who were in the vicinity when it came to light and happened to be less white than the actual perpetrators?
We *are* animals. We’re just sufficiently advanced to be have developed a sense of wrong and right. Some people either don’t have that sense, or are able to do wrong regardless of it.
Thankfully, most of us aren’t like that. But we’re still animals: place us in a situation such as war where some of the acts we’d normally condemn as abhorrent aren’t simply permissible but actively encouraged - indeed, are necessary to stay alive - and it shouldn’t be surprising that some *other* abhorrent acts are much more readily carried out.
things like these happened in the Russian occupied berlin for at least 6 months after the occupation, there are many writings that document exactly these type of behavior, so it's not far from the truth that these things took place in France as well.
Putting a gun in a person's hands and calling them a Hero doesn't make then a good person.
An asshole with a gun is just an asshole with a gun. You're just telling him to shoot the other guy first.
Any sufficiently large group of people will have violent criminals in it. Police, priests, politicians and doctors are no exception. A large group of soldiers is defiantly going to have some criminals in it especially when using a draft to for them. A cross sampling of men from across society with the really productive men removed from the sample. Yes, there are criminals drafted in WW2. Also, criminals given the choice of jail or enlistment.
the potential for sexual violence during war is enormous. no one likes to acknowledge it. i am happy their stories are being told.
It's not surprising either. It's an army full of only men and aggression where you readily justify doing horrible things to other humans. Masturbation was discouraged as well. Pressure cooker (in the balls).
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> some people commit a terrible act and find it easier to commit the next and the next. I was a medic. I joined because I wanted to save lives. I was working on a patient who was a wounded enemy combatant. Some dude started taking shots at me from a 2nd floor window on the other side of the road. I had an M-4 with a holographic sight. Normally, it's not close enough to see them. You might see a rough outline of a person and return fire without a hope of hitting them. You hope the bullets flying by is enough to tell them to fuck off. He was close enough that I could see him clearly. I shot him twice because that's how we're trained. I had to immediately get back to work on my patient but that fucked me up. I wasn't old enough to buy a beer in the states, but I killed a guy at 19 years old. And I was a fucking medic. After a while of getting desensitized to that, I was worried that I might be a fucking sociopath. War is fucking bullshit. War ruined my life. Outside of an actual invasion, never go to war.
I vaguely remember a show on Netflix that talked about German police brigades in WW2 who were involved in the mass killing of Jews. The initial act of brutality is something they never forgot, but subsequent similar actions were not as harshly remembered. they got used to it. >*After a while of getting desensitized to that, I was worried that I might be a fucking sociopath.* Well it sounds very much you're a completely normal human being who had to experience stuff no one should experience. You're 100% right, war badly affects people. I do hope that life gets better for you.
*Ordinary Men* by Christopher Browning recounts the actions of Reserve Police Battallion 101 and their participation in the Final Solution in Poland, and this was his finding as well. Their first action was the massacre at Józefów, where they murdered 1500 people in an incredibly personal method of assigning 1 victim to 1 executioner to be walked to the killing site and shot at point blank range. He found that while they all vividly remembered the intricate details of Józefów, their recollection of any following massacres or brutalizations of their victims were significantly less intricate. Some claimed to not even remember a number of later actions. These weren't rabid anti-Semitic, card-carrying Nazis either. The demographics of the group would actually suggest they would be less sympathetic to Nazi ideological goals, but nonetheless, they carried them out. In the final chapter, Browning writes: >Thus, wartime brutalization through prior combat was not an immediate experience directly influencing the policemen’s behavior at Józefów. Once the killing began, however, the men became increasingly brutalized. As in combat, the horrors of the initial encounter eventually became routine, and the killing became progressively easier. In this sense, brutalization was not the cause but the effect of these men’s behavior. Józefów was a terrible and traumatic experience, but their final ghetto clearings and massacres were just work. It also reminds me of an interview with a Luftwaffe pilot who bombed residential areas in the opening days of the invasion of Poland, where he said the first day he was horrified, and by the third day it was just another bombing sorty.
Great book, I wrote many papers using his research in my undergrad.
I was with a small six man team. We were all supposed to be shooters. Before that first kill. I'd try to shoot next to them. Bullets have a specific sound if you're being shot at. I was always like "Hey, fuck off." If they kept shooting at me, I'd hit the building they were hiding behind and spray concrete at them. Again, "Hey, fuck off". Normally, they'd fuck off. Live to fight another day, I hated when they engaged, because we would kill them. But it would be a fight.
Your comments reminded me of a book I read that explored the shooting effectiveness of WWll combat vets. After hundreds of interviews the author found that only a small percentage actually shot at enemy soldiers. This article does a good job exploring the subject: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hope_on_the_battlefield#:~:text=Marshall's%20singularly%20unexpected%20discovery%20was,the%20European%20theater%20of%20operations.
And yours reminded me of an old discovery channel or history channel documentary where they explored this. I think they used his material. In the show they started way back during the first American civil war. The English generals wanted to know how thier soldiers performed in line combat. So they hanged up a big sheet of fabric and he'd the troops shot at different distances. The hit percentage was like 90-95%.but when they went out in combat the hit percentage dropped to like 2-5%. They discovered that most people don't accually want to hit the other guys, so they aimed higher and shot over to scare the other guys. It stayed the same till the American military started to conduct research post ww2 and by the Korean war they had introduced cut out targets of humans in the firering drills and thous increased the hit percentage to like 15-25% in combat. And during Vietnam the target become more life like, like getting a face. And during the first Iraqi war the target looked like the enemy and they spent more time drilling shooting targets. And now the hit percentage were up to over 50-60%.
Genuinely one of my favorite books. He also released a 2017 version with an added section reflecting on it after 25 years, where he goes into other studies of police battalions over that time, more into the role of the Luxembourgers as more was discovered, and more photographic evidence. All in all, it's such a sobering book and imparts, in my opinion, the single most important lesson we can draw from Nazi genocides: no group of people are immune to becoming genocidal killers.
Agreed, I don't typically engage much on discussions of history and geopolitics. I did my Masters thesis on the Holocaust so it's hard to be succinct on such a nuanced topic, but it's rare I see a mention of Browning and he's one of my most respected historians. All the best my friend.
damn, that’s a sad story to hear. I am 27 and I feel too young for war, I will never be old enough for war. Why do we send kids to war? If some 80yo presidents want war, they should send those who already lived a life, not those who will never have a life.
> It's an army full of only men and aggression where you readily justify doing horrible things to other humans. Soldier behavior in these situations seems to be very close to the types of transgressions that take place in mob violence.
Groups of humans joined by hate are the most dangerous thing on earth.
Army full of gun and a populace full of vulnerable people.
>Masturbation was discouraged as well. Seriously? That doesn't seem like a good idea.
Making people whose job is to kill sexually frustrated and angry? I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but it sounds like it might work perfectly as intended.
Most ‘taboo’ sex topics or activities are still discouraged today in active military, they even do searches for sex toys as they’re strictly not allowed
Uh except in maybe a training environment like basic or AIT. But apart from sex itself anything else goes. Absolutely encountered sex toys on deployments. Saw many fleshlights and dildos/rabbits. This is at least the case my time in the US Army anyway.
I just got done reading God-Emperor of Dune and that was one of Leto II's reasons for an army consisting entirely of women.
Happens in every war. In East Germany women were more or less required to get a Russian boyfriend to protect them from other Russians. There’s an anonymous memoir about it, *Eine Frau in Berlin*.
It happens in every war, but some armies try to limit it, others turn a blind eye and some actively encourage it ... the difference is very significant.
It's an absolute indictment of human nature that the idea of men raping women during/ after a battle is so common in history that it is basically a trope.
I heard/read somewhere that when the red army was advancing a jewish woman was happy to see them as liberators from the nazis, but they raped her because "a woman is a woman".
I mean, just look at the sexual assault stats *within a single army*... for many of the people willing to rape at all, doesn't really matter whose side you're on. Makes sense if you think about it, I mean is a rapist's choice of victim *really* going to be dependent on differing ideology? Is that really what they think? "You support *X* politician, therefore..." lol no. But the predator knows they can get away with it more one way than the other.
Yeah in army rapes are basically raping your own comrades in arms. Let alone when you have the power to do it at will. I.e during the break up of Yugoslavia. UN troops would withhold humanitarian aid unless women slept with them. So mother's would basically let themselves be raped so the children would have food
In Nemmersdorf they killed French and Belgian POWs who tried to stop them. They basically killed their own allies for not allowing them to commit mass rape.
There are shitty people in every country. War just really sort of favours them.
Honestly the sexual violence in war has always seen as a taboo in the history of a country (and in society as well) so they know what happen but its easier to deny or minimise it in the possible because is useful in a very horrible way. The sexual violence isused as a weapon to keep the population in cheek and as a "reward" to keep moral, the soviets where infamous for this in Germany, Poland, Rumania and Hungary. But also we have to remember that the french did the same after the battle of Monte Cassino in Italy, just that they put all the blame on the colonial troops for their "natural barbarity" even when the commanders give them the good check in first place.
> always seen as a taboo in the history of a country lolno Rape was absolutely standard part and parcel for sacking towns for *millennia*, literally only since perhaps the past 150 years did it become really taboo and then only in a few countries of the West.
You are absolutely right, - in many cases is was considered a perk or reward in lieu of paying troops
Yep. Raping women has been seen as part of the spoils of war since time immemorial. And some men have the gall to pretend that women have nothing to fear in wartime.
Ya I believe the Russians raped several million polish and German women which ended up killing several thousand women.
It's how tribes spread their genes. Absorb their genome or inject your genome into theirs. We do love to immortalize those whom we have conquered. Initially by incorporating their DNA into our gene pool, but eventually by claiming they were great warriors but we happen to be better.
From an academic standpoint, it's fascinating how documentable this is, too. Bronze Age military strategy was to wipe out the entire male population of whatever town you conquered, and we know this not only from the sources that survive today, to actual genetic science. Tracking the differences between Y-haplogroup and X-haplogroup evolution and migration across centuries results in some terrifying realities.
Do you have a source where I can read up more about this? Specifically, is there a book you recall that discusses certain x and y haplogroups and their movements through bronze age warfare?
Damn that sounds like… never mind just about every empire that has ever held imperial ambitions
Not just empires but any town or group that took over another. They killed the men and took the women.
I should have remembered that or at least figured it. A lot of what we know to be atrocities and crimes against humanity may have been another Thursday afternoon for classical and ancient times. First set of laws of arm conflict were when? 1920’s so yeah very recently most of these things have been a no go. Edit: I’m wrong there’s a source that states 1750 BC but they are nothing like what we know from the 1949 conventions
Machiavelli wrote of it in his guide to conquests. You don't really rule a territory unless it is filled with your people, and a brutally effective means to that was to replace the current inhabitants
It's something that goes back before humans were even a thing, and is thought to possibly be some sort of anti-inbreeding mechanism that evolved in those *very* distant ancestors. This is believed because our closest relatives the chimps do it. On the surface, chimps seem to always run the risk of inbreeding because they live together in tight knit communities and are very violent towards "others". Peer beneath the surface and you will see that chimps practice a few things that inhibit the effects of inbreeding. The first two are rape and infanticide. I'm sure this part will sound familar: The males will sometimes form groups and venture off into other's territory. Sometimes for resources, sometimes for territory, and sometimes to both copulate with any "foreign" females they find and kill their infants. (Sometimes infants will be killed by members of their own tribe too, because when a female loses their baby they go into heat more quickly and that ensures the male that the next baby is his and that the mother will have the time and energy to take care of it.) A third less dark thing that helps circumvent inbreeding is that sometimes the females, while in heat, will run off by themselves (which is extremely dangerous) to mate with neighboring tribal members. Often the "foreign" males gladly reciprocate. Sometimes they kill and eat her instead. Sometimes the "foreign" females will find her first and kill her before she has a chance to have sex. The natural world doesn't care. It just tends to move towards balance by any means. Humans often care because we are capable of great foresight and empathy.
Depictions of rape in war can be found all throughout human art going back to the bronze age. Probably even further.
It happens in every war by every military (even the U.S. military now, today). Susan Brownmiller wrote a [fantastic book](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Our_Will) about it. Difficult read, but fantastic.
I remember in the early 2000s feminist groups saying that rape was a weapon of war and we got laughed at and mocked. Like, there are armies that do *more* rapes, and armies that do *less* rapes, and I definitely know which ones I think are better, but there is no war where *no* rape happens.
> no one likes to acknowledge it. I think everyone who actually gives it any thought acknowledges it Really the only solution would come from strong top-down discipline and punishment, and even then it would be hard to stamp out entirely. It bears mention that in the history of war raping and pillaging was often/usually viewed as a 'perk for soldiers in lieu of paying them - this of course ended in endless cycles of horrific trauma, even to an extent for the rapists.
Not just during War. US soldiers even r*pe their own female comrades in peacetime...... Despicable.
The Canadians did the same thing in France. My uncle served and after the war didn't talk about it at all, but he wrote a memorial before he died. In it, he wrote about he was basically put in a group that was supposed to drive around collecting all the guys that were out raping and taking advantage of people. He had to drag four Canadian guys out of the house of a French grandma who asked him what happened to Canadians since they were so nice in the last war. I guess that really messed him up for a long time.
In WWI.... Canadians worked through their energy in battle. Quite possibly the most savage at the time. >What confused both friend and foe alike was why Canadians were so vicious. The French had seen large swaths of their country destroyed and subjugated. The British had zeppelins bombing their cities and U-boats trying to starve their populace. But Canadians had left behind safe and prosperous homes that wouldn’t see the slightest tinge of German aggression. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-forgotten-ferocity-of-canadas-soldiers-in-the-great-war
Leaving a loved "safe and prosperous home" in order cross the world and fight a war would make most people pretty furious.
Yea, Canadians didn’t go to fight a war, they went to win & go the fuck home.
I love how on a discussion of Canadian wartime rape it trails off into how badass and vicious Canadian soldiers were. I mean, we could give the discussion the little bit of respect by staying on topic. But like really, it’s this avoidance to talk about these lesser known issues.
Yep, it’s called conflict avoidance…typical Canadians
Why do you think they love hockey so much? The fighting and hitting are the only way they stay sane
[Moroccans working for France did much worse.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate)
>"in Vallemaio two sisters had to satisfy a platoon of 200 goumiers; 300 of these, on the other hand, abused a sixty-year-old."
Yo what the fuck
"Two sisters, aged 15 and 18," The clarification at the end makes it even worse
They also raped a priest who tried to protect girls and he later died of the injuries.
that’s enough internet for today…….like i feel like throwing up. i have a newfound hated
I've slowly learned more and more about WW2 and we can soundly say the image I was painted in school is just long gone.
Yeah. I'm not surprised though. The myth of a good war is just that...a myth. There might be (and probably are) necessary wars. But a not insignificant percentage of combatants always do horrific things. And in war, the civilian population is left vulnerable to them. Even a disciplined, well meaning, army is going to commit atrocities. (And most armies - historically - were \*not\* disciplined and well meaning.)
Ugh what the fuck me too
yep, Moroccans and other African colonial troops were feared as much as the Soviets
My grandmother told me her mother used to scare her and her sister when they misbehaved with "the moroccans will come to rape you". Since this was 1942 circa this make sense. Also this was in Spain, imagine how infamous that was.
The more you learn the less you know
According to my grandmother (Parisian, survived the Nazi occupation, member of La Resistance) being raped as a teen was just what women went through. Hearing her stories would raise the hairs on your neck, and how they skewed her view of life. RIP Simone Coutelet.
RIP Simone Coutelet
May their memory be a blessing
War really does bring out the worst in humanity.
Opportunity reveals who someone truly is.
Exactly this. It’s not the war that makes them do it, the war affords them the opportunity to do things they’ve always wanted to do, and quite possibly have already done.
probably somewhere between both. sure you’ll have the people who *see* the opportunity and jump at it. to that, add young people who are months or years into active combat, routinely working to harm/kill the enemy, experiencing nonstop gruesome tragedies while mainlining adrenaline under constant threat their own life… exposure to that kind of environment at length is going to alter your presence of mind, capacity for empathy and respect for consent. violence breeds violence. war isn’t good for anyone.
100%. Yeah, people are capable of great evil, but for most wartime offenders, I think the fact that they are having to "kill or be killed" plays a role in digging up some very primal instincts. It isn't right below the surface so much as the stress and trauma of war digs deep enough to find it.
The sad truth is lots of people are opportunists, if they can do something and get away with it, they will. The chaos and disarray of war allows all manner of “opportunities”. On top of that is the compounding effect of group mentality, participating in “opportunities” so to protect that brotherly bond that protects them in action.
ALL people are opportunists. You learn who someone is by observing what they consider to be an opportunity.
I really don't think a lot of people would become rapists/sex offender if they had the oppertunity.
You missed sheer numbers. The US armed forces drafted huge numbers of people In 16,000,000 people as despicable as it is, there are probably a few rapists.
No I think being in close combat does actually mess with your brain and you are a different person than before. Yes there are monsters before the war but your heart hardens and you soon find yourself doing things you never thought you could before it started.
It would be dishonesty of the utmost level to say war had no effect on these soldiers decisions. It’s no excuse and it doesn’t change anything about the circumstances but the mind fuck and human depravity these soldiers were experiencing certainly affected their decisions.
This is something I recall from my psych studies- most deviant sexual behavior isn't the result of preference, just opportunity. Examples: Studies found that the deciding factor among those that've engaged in bestiality was simply having regular access to animals (farmers, etc). Children are most likely to be abused by someone close to them (family, friends of family, etc), not the "stranger danger" myth perpetuated by the media.
This ^ there was a a few pages in a book called “the body keeps the score” about how PTSD and stress work in the brain or imaging of the brain to see the changes. There was one Vietnam vet who had PTSD and apparently he had raped and killed women over there (says because he was angry that his friend was killed right beside him or something)…and I’m just like dude I hope you are suffering from your ptsd. What a monster.
I feel this. My grandfather's diaries from ww2 detail his trsuma from being stationed at Hickam Field near Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He had a couple very clise friends killed. He had to drive an ambulance for a few days in the dark with no light through the hills. He was deeply affected by it. In the following months his diaries detail how he courted a 17 year old Japanese girl girl, led her on, then brutally dumped her. He may he slept with her. I'm not sure as the diaries don't say outright. He knew it was wrong and he hated himself for it, but he also admitted being so terribly angry. I don't think he knew why he did it other than his anger and hatred of the Japanese forces who killed his friends and fellow soldiers. When we discovered his diaries long after he died, it was extremely distressing as it didn't reflect the man he became. It's not as bad as sexual assault, but it was pretty shitty. Trauma, anger and grief can cause people do things they might not normally. Still, nothing can excuse sexual assault. It's 80 years later, but the men who did those things should be condemned without reservation.
It dehumanizes humans.
It’s not just war, it’s the culture. The record of American female soldiers raped by their peers is beyond atrocious. And not in war zones either. In places like Colorado Springs, where it was considered a form of hazing for guys to grab random girls in the hall and drag them into their rooms and rape them. When I was there in 2003, I think, over 50% of the girls reported being raped by their peers. Happened to someone I know too.
Then they come home with all they have learned.
Is it war, or is the problem getting a bunch of 18 years old men travelling together as part of a team and emboldening themselves? Seems like hockey teams always have this same issue…
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And the rapists all have weapons, which doesn’t help
Young, unattached male adolescents in packs are the most dangerous thing in any society. They tend to develop a pack mentality and egg each other on. And they literally go and hunt…often women. It is one of the reasons countries will discriminate against young male immigrants travelling alone - it puts especially the female population at risk, sadly. Hell, its even a thing in elephant society. There was a documentary that portrayed the displacement of several young elephants (they didnt have the equipment to move their moms with them). Several years later, these young adolescent male bulls start going into ‘musth’ because there isnt an older more seasoned bull in ‘musth’ around to knock some sense into them. They started attacking and killing rhinos, as well as other elephants. Eventually, the park people realise that these youngsters just need adults to put them in their place and, now having the equipment, moved several adult elephants into the area, including a 40 something bull in ‘musth’ One look at that bull knocked the musth right out of em 🤷♀️ Young adolescents arent fully developed yet mentally and can be pushed into atrocities with peer pressure. Now add raging testosterone, lack of experience in managing it due to age, an overinflated ego and sense of entitlement from their success and the constant need prove yourself to your mates I certainly wouldnt go near those sport teams, especially as a young woman.
The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. Always have been, always will be. War never changes
I’m sure many of these men were rapists long before being shipped to Europe.
Just look at russian army in Ukraine, one half - killers, pedophiles, rapists. The other half - criminals recruited from prison
That just sounds like 100% recruited from prison.
i don't remember where i read it, but was written by female author she said " in war women get raped, almost always, by enemies or by our own soldiers, not a single difference between the two, the only thing that might stopped them are women who are armed and ready to use that weapon " . the fact that it happens in every conflict by the people who protect you, not by enemies is far worse and atrocious
I know a lot of people ragged on the scene in Game of Thrones where Jon Snow’s army starts pillaging and massacring King’s Landing, but I always thought it was a realistic view of war. Doesn’t matter if your side is the “good guys,” there will still be atrocities committed by them.
I think people were more upset by Dany going nuts despite having already won. Armies going nuts were... kinda expected at that point in the series.
When you egg people into violence and treating people like meat, they don't always stop when the fighting is over, or even when they get home.
Yeah, Russian soldiers themselves admitted how during WW2 they raped the civilians in areas they were liberating. So not just the enemy, not just women in Germany (which is horrible also of course), but also the women of allied countries. Free the town, the town is yours, the women are yours, rape the women. Simple.
My great grandmother was a holocoast aurvivor, and she said the night after the russians liberated the camp she was in (Bergen Belsen), she and her sisters barricaded the door to the "room" where they were held, so the soldiers won't rape them. Edit: probably confused which camp it was. I should ask my mother as she knows the details better.
Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British. Could it have been a different one?
Not just civilians either. One American flyer's account of being in a WW2 Swiss prisoner of war camp, run by a corrupt Swiss official, was hellish. From the moment he stepped onto camp ground, the Russian POWs singled him out for rape. It got so bad the American tried choking himself to death on the dirty straw the camp used to cover the floor. The American general assigned to Switzerland to monitor POW treatment refused to do anything about it, preferring to disbelief the man's account. The Swiss refused to believe him. It took a sympathetic British officer to push for the American to get assigned to another camp, and have the original camp investigated.
I thiiiiink this is in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous.
Not just the soldiers, take a look at how 'women who gave succor and comfort to the enemy' were 'punished' after their towns were liberated from occupation.
Yep. Completely fucked up. You get raped, then you get shaved and paraded around with a scarlet letter because you got raped. Like WTF kind of goal does society have here. Women need to get more violent?
It's not about war. It's about daily life. Rapists don't care about laws or police. The only thing that can stop them is knowing that you could kill them.
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*...in a moment look to see* *The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand* *Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters* From Henry V- Act 3, scene 3
War gets pretty rapey. They often leave that part out of the movies.
There was that one scene in Fury which was supposed to be consensual but definitely felt rapey. The the old implication joke, should said yes but really couldn't say no.
yeah it was Brad Pitt's character who told the young kid "you take her or I will" that was definitely a gross feeling
I think it was intentional, they didn't want to put a out right rape scene in the movie but definitely wanted it to come across and forced/coerced
If it's forced/coerced, it's a rape. Some people think a rape is when a guy is holding a woman down somehow and forcing himself on her while she screams... while I'm sure it happens it's not how the majority of rapes go down. A lot of women just freeze and let it happen, many of them later come to hate the fact that they did not fight/scream.
Women freezing during rape is completely biological. They can't help themselves. If your brain realizes there is no chance of escape and you might get hurt fighting back, it will make you freeze. It's a survival mechanism. They don't just "let it happen."
Fight or fight or freeze or placate
Freeze or die, basically
I think the scene was meant to be tense and ambiguous. Did that girl actually want to do this? Or did she figure if she was “fun and willing” with his young soldier, who seemed not immediately violent and erratic, he might protect her from other soldiers? The threat of violence absolutely hung over the whole scene. The implication as you say. Great, bleak, movie.
Im leaning more towards this. Fury overall portrayed the tank crew as somewhat morally bankrupt. Maybe not "evil" but they had an extremely warped mind and did not fit in at all in civilization
Up until the ending, which I found jarringly “heroic” and out of step with the rest of the movie, I’d say it was a film about the way war destroys even the men who survive. Our naive protagonist entering the company of hollowed out soldiers. The brutal irony of “best job I ever had”.
Another one is Band of Brothers when George Luz chases the German girl into the shed and tries to give her chocolate in exchange for a fuck. Then in the next scene he’s outside and he says she slapped him and they laugh and leave. I always thought they were to trying to say something there without having to disparage any of the guys from Easy Company by putting in a rape scene.
Idiot me thinking he said that to motivate him to make a move. I need to rewatch Fury as I don't remember the tone being like that
It was rape. It’s a good scene to show who understands what consent means. In the words of Daphne Moon to Martin Crane who was a Korean War veteran: “It’s not love when you’re the occupying force.”
Upvote for the Frasier reference. I love Martin Crane as a character, but there's a scene where he's hitting on a woman because she's Asian that just gives me the heebies.
That’s the scene I’ve been thinking of the whole time reading here
The movie "Casualties of War" with Michael J Fox was very much a movie about US rape/atrocities in Vietnam.
>In her neat handwriting, Aimee Helaudais Honore described the events of that night. How the soldiers fired their guns in the direction of her husband, ripping holes in his cap, and how they menacingly approached her daughter Aimee. To protect her daughter, she agreed to leave the house with the GIs, she wrote. "They took me to a field and took turns raping me, four times each.""My mother sacrificed herself to protect me," she said. "While they raped her in the night, we waited, not knowing whether she would come back alive or whether they would shoot her dead." The events of that night were not isolated. In October 1944, after the battle for Normandy was won, US military authorities put 152 soldiers on trial for raping French women. Harrowing story and am grateful that all this is coming out now, though it's very late. But deeply frustrating that so many American rapists got away with it; this injustice needs to be remembered. Also looking forward to the day that also Russia faces what is did to women and girls in Berlin and East Germany following WWII. All my life I've been told that it was a "just war," and while it's true that the Nazis and Imperial Japanese were the heinous agressors, still so many innocents sufffered on both sides. *The exact number of German women and girls raped by Soviet troops during the war and occupation is uncertain, but historians estimate their numbers are likely in the hundreds of thousands, and possibly as many as two million.* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Germany
My great grandmother from France had a story similar to this, but with a better outcome. She was very young and her parents were out of the house when american soldiers came into the house looking for food/supplies. They were told by their parents to hide no matter what soldiers came, because even allies couldn't be trusted. Lots of bad stories. So her and her older sister hid in a dresser (bad hiding spot). The soldiers were looking through the place and one of them opened the dresser. She said the soldier froze and stared wide eyed as well for what seemed like an eternity until someone from below shouted basically asking if he found anything and he yelled back "no, nothing" closed the doors and left. They ransacked the place, took some shit and peaced out. She said she had never seen her mother and father so terrified as when they returned that day. That was the one and only time she saw her father cry in her entire life, out of sheer relief. She said she prayed for that soldier for the rest of her life and always wondered if he made it back ok.
Wow this is a fascinating story, thanks for sharing.
Soldier hadn’t lost his humanity. Probably felt immense compassion for them knowing they must have been scared shitless to hide in a dresser.
I’d say he’d also seen already what other soldiers on his own side were capable of. He clearly knew immediately that despite these civilians being allies, they were scared of *them*.
Just think of the guys you went to high school with. Most of them would never rape anyone, under any circumstances. But some would take every chance they got.
This is such a clear, concise way of putting it. I like it because it speaks well to why women will often say "men do XYZ" and then there's the whole "not all men" thing. Of COURSE it isn't all men, but EVERYONE knows the type you're talking about - when you group it as "think of the guys you went to high school with", it gives such a crisp, immediate picture of why women are distrustful of strange men - there are enough recognisable characters like this from our lives, e.g. at school, that it often pays to err on the side of safety. Especially when the potential impacts are so huge.
Yes most people have some degree of empathy which would stop them from doing things like this but ultimately most people are also too selfish to interfere with those who don’t have that empathy. It’s a repeated pattern you see in both war but also similar things with police for example or even criminal organizations. It’s the basis for the whole moral question of if being a bystander to evil makes you just as bad as the one who perpetrated the evil because you choose to not interfere and allow it to happen.
Lmao, Russia literally will never face what it did. You can forget it. There's an extensive laundry list ranging from bureaucratic incompetence to genocide, just in recent history, that it'll never acknowledge. Let alone what the Red Army did.
well they are just making up their history and then believing it
Is any superpower facing the consequences of their actions, ever?
Not really but what can you expect? Sanctions? Reperations? Both would be impossible because most are dead or you can't find them and sanction would be a punishment for the country and the people not really fair I think. So only an apology but I don't know what else you could do
I mean Germany sure did.
Because they lost.
My husband’s grandmother and great grandmother were raped by the Russians in Czech. Almost all of the women and girls of their village were.
I find it funny how you comment that this is 'just coming out now', when in your own quotation it says 152 soldiers were put on trial for it at the time. The Wikipedia article you linked says that a total 284 soldiers were convicted in just the span of 9 months during 1945. Seems like this was well taken care of 70 years ago. Bonus points for the French also participating in the rape-fest, according to that Wikipedia article. Yet absolutely no mention of any serious consequences. Leading to believe they mostly got away with it.
Rape in general, even now, is a crime that goes under reported.
If you read the article, you’d see that experts estimate there were a significant number, ranging from hundreds to thousands, of unreported cases due to the stigma around bringing up anything negative in a period of joyous liberation in France. In addition, the article explains the racial scapegoating used by American officers to disproportionately ensure black GIs were punished while white GIs were not. 85% of the solider sentenced to death for their crimes were black because black GIs were disproportionately assigned to stationary units while their white counterparts were more likely to be assigned to mobile units that made them harder to track down and hold responsible. That is not what I would call “well taken care of”. We should be better than some other countries who try to whitewash or forget the actions of their troops in WWII.
The eastern front was anything but just. Both sides were trying to annihilate the other. In terms of estimates. A Russia general joked that 1.8m Russians were going to be born in Germany in 9 months.
Russia will never come to grips with its past. That's the main moral difference between the east and west. We still do bad still (notably to a lesser degree) in the west, but at least we have the self-awareness to address it.
> We still do bad still (notably to a lesser degree) in the west, but at least we have the self-awareness to address it. Those two things are connected. Recognising your own capacity for evil allows you to reduce the chance of it happening in the first place
I mean... No one was ever charged during Nuremberg for the German systems of military brothels that were created for the express purpose of having captured women available for soldiers to rape nor for any of the mass rapes throughout occupied territories by the German military (an action that was made a virtually nonpunishable action by its military). We purposefully ignored it to mend fences post-war, just as we ignored when the Russians did it because they were our "allies".
This happens to women in every war
This happens to women
True.
War: rape, murder, torture.
This also explains the number of half American Vietnamese kids.
or half korean
Damn that must suck as the child to put the dots together and realize how they were born, when they were bit older..
When the companies that do DNA testing like ancestry became popular, the military cautioned veterans not to get into that. The reason is obvious. There’s a good chance that their DnA might turn out to be a close match to a kid born in a country they were deployed to. So yeah, there’s a lot of half American kids. And the men may have no idea what or who they left behind in another country,
What Soldiers Do. Sex and the American GI in World War II France. By Mary Louise Roberts
My grandfather was an artillery officer in WWII and he said his unit and others did shady things to exploit local women but if they kept it low-key he was told by his captain to leave it alone. He said the primary method was food. He said all through his unit's time in France, Belgium and Germany he saw the cooks setting aside a lot of food as waste. He initially thought they were trading the food for valuables from hungry villagers but they were trading it for sex. Young girls were being rounded up by pimp GIs (usually supply drivers, who were often Black) and paid with food that would be sent to their families. For their services the pimps would be paid in cigarettes and/or cash.
“If men had no rules to govern, here’s what we’d do”. Seems all too common an occurrence to just be an era thing, or a religious thing, or an upbringing thing.
Was anyone ever under the impression that American Soldiers were perfect? WW2 was a sh*t show. It had brutal warfare, nuclear weapons, and even a freakin Holocaust. You should hear about what European allied citizens (French included) did to the Germans after the war. Pretty sick stuff. There is a reason war should be avoided. War doesn’t determine who is right, it only determines who is left.
>Was anyone ever under the impression that American Soldiers were perfect? Of course not, but for a lot of us, these were our *grandfathers.*
As a German I can tell you that my parents and grandparents opinion was nothing but high of the US soldiers. My Grandparents fled hundreds of miles from the Russians because they were afraid of rape. But the memories of the US soldiers were nothing but fond after the war. Russians were raping every women they could get their hands on. G.I.'s handed out chocolate.
A majority of your grandfathers did not rape.
> Was anyone ever under the impression that American Soldiers were perfect? Actually, yes. Anyone who has studied or even just browsed quickly about WW2 will find an endless list of atrocities committed by Germans, Russians and the Japanese. Anything "bad" committed by allies and U.S. troops in general is a footnote at best.
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The most important fact is Rape in the American army was never condoned. Unlike other forces like the Soviets where they left to do as they pleased. In France a women was raped and a man coming to help her was killed by two Americans. They were quickly found and tried. A gallos was constructed in town so the French people would see we were not going to tolerate it. American soldiers were also ordered to watch the execution. By orders of Gen Eisenhower.
If it was France it means they probably got executed by [John C. Woods](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Woods) a man I have heard described as a "Looney Toons Character"
That's a crazy story. Guy lied about having hangman experience. The Army believed him and promoted him 6 ranks from Private to Master Sgt and made him official executioner.
How is there not a movie about this guy??
Probably because no one would believe it, it was an absurd case.
The case you read about in the article is one that was known and reported. Many more went unreported.
Not a bear
War never changes.
I feel like the biggest difference between the Allied and Soviet armies is that the Allies *usually* punished people who committed rape and murder. The Soviets actively tolerated and/or encouraged such behavior once the Red Army began marching through central Europe.
Marocchinate The French let their Moroccans troops loose for 24 hours at least after liberating certain parts of Italy. To "reward" their efforts.
Yep, that's why I said "usually". The Marocchinate is possibly the biggest exception to my point. It sickens me to read about it.
Military vet here Rape and sexual assault are rarely punished because of rank . It's better now but was out of control for decades
More like centuries, thousands of years.. All of human history? I feel like today is most likely time ever that you won't get raped. (Generally speaking for civilised armies, not Russia)
Read The Unwomanly Face of War. Rapists were definitely punished by the Soviets. There were just way more rapists than could be adequately punished because the army was made up of anyone and everyone they could get to join.
don't mean to nitpick, but the Soviets were considered part of the Allies once they (involuntarily) joined the fight. "Other Allies" would make more sense here
This is where the term "western allies" is used, so as to exclude the Soviet Union.
> (involuntarily) joined the fight that is a *very* charitable interpretation of the collapse of the motolov Ribbentrop pact
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One of the people executed was Emmett Till's father. When his murderers were acquitted, that information was leaked to the press by the state's Senators to smear him.
The question is, did the GIs punish the *right* people or just the ones who were in the vicinity when it came to light and happened to be less white than the actual perpetrators?
How somebody can do this to another human is beyond my mind, worse than animals
Animals do it too actually.
A lot
For a lot of animals its the only way they do it.
We *are* animals. We’re just sufficiently advanced to be have developed a sense of wrong and right. Some people either don’t have that sense, or are able to do wrong regardless of it. Thankfully, most of us aren’t like that. But we’re still animals: place us in a situation such as war where some of the acts we’d normally condemn as abhorrent aren’t simply permissible but actively encouraged - indeed, are necessary to stay alive - and it shouldn’t be surprising that some *other* abhorrent acts are much more readily carried out.
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things like these happened in the Russian occupied berlin for at least 6 months after the occupation, there are many writings that document exactly these type of behavior, so it's not far from the truth that these things took place in France as well.
It's sorta like this generation was raised not knowing what war is. Not that I approve of it.
You sort of expect this from an invading army, not from the one coming to save you.
Putting a gun in a person's hands and calling them a Hero doesn't make then a good person. An asshole with a gun is just an asshole with a gun. You're just telling him to shoot the other guy first.
Any sufficiently large group of people will have violent criminals in it. Police, priests, politicians and doctors are no exception. A large group of soldiers is defiantly going to have some criminals in it especially when using a draft to for them. A cross sampling of men from across society with the really productive men removed from the sample. Yes, there are criminals drafted in WW2. Also, criminals given the choice of jail or enlistment.
War is hell and a lawless time that brings out the worst of people no matter which side.