My Hat Has Got Three Corners
Tragic news that 30 hostages were killed in by Algerian forces trying to free them from their Islamist captors underscore how hard it is to carry off rescue operation without causing heavy casualties. Reuters reports:
Thirty hostages and at least 11 Islamist militants were killed on Thursday when Algerian forces stormed a desert gas plant in a bid to free many dozens of Western and local captives, an Algerian security source said …
Two Japanese, two Britons and a French national were among at least seven foreigners killed, the source told Reuters. Eight of the dead hostages were Algerian. The nationalities of the rest, as well as of perhaps dozens more who escaped, were unclear.
The reality of average combat probably comes as a shock to a world accustomed to the cinematic portrayals of the nearly superhuman exploits of the SEALS and SAS. But these units are the Mozarts of mayhem, and their members are drawn from the right hand tail of the distribution. Just as Mozart is unlikely to perform in person for you, as the Islamist conflict spreads, people caught in the middle will find their lives depend on soldiers from the middle or left hand tail.
The Algerians probably did their best. But in reality their task was hard. If the world is in shock it is because the hegemon made it look so easy. For seventy years the seas have remained open to navigation. Airplanes crisscross the skies with impunity. No one could seriously disrupt the peace. Why when Saddam, who had one of the largest armies in the world took on the hegemon, the US forces went through them as if they weren’t even there.
The ease was only apparent, a product of the overmatch between the hegemon and the challenger. But as the hegemon retreats and it becomes every country for itself, no longer will the world have the luxury of reviling the 101st Airborne, or the 2nd Armored division. As these units leave the field, they peanut gallery have to do it themselves. There will be less of an overmatch. And countries will discover that it wasn’t as easy as it seemed.
If the conflict broadens across the Sahara or crosses over into Europe, the character of violence will become at once more amateur yet more total. For surely the militaries of Mauretania, Niger, Chad and the Sudan are unlikely to be much better than the Algerians.
People who have no experience at storming a building by going through the walls are apt to just burn the whole thing down. They don’t know how to do anything else. Armies accustomed to garrison duty or suppressing internal populations will use the same brutal methods they learned from routine when faced with a new enemy. They are not — in the short term at least — about to become SEALS.
The experience of Europe during the 30 years War is reminder of how “uncivilized” warfare was. War is always uncivilized, there are degrees of barbarity even in inhumanity.
A major consequence of the Thirty Years’ War was the devastation of entire regions, denuded by the foraging armies (bellum se ipsum alet). Famine and disease significantly decreased the population of the German states, Bohemia, the Low Countries, and Italy; most of the combatant powers were bankrupted. While the regiments within each army were not strictly mercenary, in that they were not units for hire that changed sides from battle to battle, some individual soldiers that made up the regiments were mercenaries. The problem of discipline was made more difficult by the ad hoc nature of 17th-century military financing; armies were expected to be largely self-funding, by means of loot taken or tribute extorted from the settlements where they operated. This encouraged a form of lawlessness that imposed severe hardship on inhabitants of the occupied territory.
We remember the wars of the 17th century now in a children’s song, as we do many other terrible things.
My hat it has three corners,
three corners has my hat;
and had it not three corners,
it would not be my hat.
The new normal without the hegemon could resemble the bad old days of mass armies before mass armies had discipline; and the swath of destruction they left in their wake could become common. Every three generations humanity has to relearn the old lesson. It is less expensive to guard the peace than to redeem it at great price after it has been lost.
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“Tragic news that 30 hostages were killed in by Algerian forces trying to free them from their Islamist captors ”
Tragic yes but until the west goes Keyser Söze on them the savages will grow in strength. There will be a point that if you want to go to Algeria you will have to sign a release form that says you agree that the allies can bomb any position that you are held hostage in, ostensibly to kill jihadis’. I would pray to have a bomb dropped on my head.
Yes, and the notions of the Geneva convention will become more than some forgotten nonsense when all we needed to do was scream ‘WAR CRIMES’ when the US did something.
It is a recurring theme that the Left is profoundly reactionary. All the evidence is that their dream is not of perfect egalitarianism with rule by the proletarian masses but rather Enlightened Despotism with the Great and the Good whispering in the ear of a Prince. A very small number of disciplined professionals will serve while most beg for protection from chaos and marauders. Good luck getting Marisa Berenson as compensation.
Obama started out his reign, there is no other word for it except maybe usurpation, by tossing various members of the Special Forces, especially Navy SEALs, in jail until he felt safe. It isn’t that he doesn’t want trained professionals as long as he is satisfied of their loyalty. It is that he wants to drain any source of power independent of himself from society. That is why he crushes Due Process and the 2nd Amendment and the bulk of the Armed Forces.
The small tiny note of good news here is that the Ummah has essentially dropped a bomb on itself. This is the equivalent of Iran calling its own bluff and closing the Straits of Hormuz. Outside talent can no longer do their work for them. The insurance costs of dealing with them have just become prohibitive. The arguments for fracking and nukes have just been made. The wealth that flowed to OAPEC and Iran will now be cut off. They will now face well deserved obscurity, while causing much destruction on their way out. We may have been spared The Three Conjectures.
Once Zero Dark Thirty goes into more general circulation, the “Three Valkyries” of the State Department, Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice and Samantha Power will be blown away by the Valkyrie of the CIA, Maya the Redhead.
“The Warwolf: A Peasant Chronicle of the Thirty Years War” is a great novel about that conflict. The author is German journalist Hermann Lons, who published his work in 1910. It tells the story of the war from the point of view of the inhabitants of a rural village in Germany repeatedly and continually beset by freebooting Protestant and Catholic war bands. The villagers do not take sides in the religious strife: their only concern is to defend themselves against their attackers. They learn to do so quite capably and with increasing ruthlessness: simple, docile peasants become by necessity merciless warriors, experts at the art of partisan warfare and ambuscade, and more than a match for the ill-disciplined soldiery who mistakenly take them for easy pickings. In a darkly humorous twist, the villagers eventually become wealthy as result of all the money and other loot they plunder from the bodies of their would-be killers. It’s available from Amazon; get the version translated by Robert Kvinnesland.
In August 1914, at the start of the Great War, the author, age 48, volunteered for service in the German army. He was killed in action a few weeks later, on September 26. The Nazis later claimed him as their own and made him a hero of the Nazi movement. For reasons too lengthy to recount here, I consider that a travesty: I very much doubt that Lons would have approved of the Nazis. For starters, he was too ironic, too humorous in a dark sort of way–as his novel demonstrates. The Nazis thought his novel took a “blood-and-soil” approach, extolling the resiliency of the German Volk; I would contend that Lons was doing nothing of the sort, and that the Nazis entirely misunderstood him because his ironic humor left them clueless.
If the world is in shock it is because the hegemon made it look so easy.
They (we) make it look so easy, that attempted and achieved mercy looks easy, too. In general, hostages should be killed by their captors if a rescue is attempted, that’s sort of the point. Which is why in general, the punishment for such should be to the perp’s entire family, village, tribe, and if necessary, geographic region with as many unrelated, collateral casualties as it happens to cause.
Them’s the rules, violate them at your peril.
I’ll remind everyone here once more that a lawsuit was filed in Federal court in the summer of 2001, suing the US on behalf of those sent to Auschwitz on the basis that we did not bomb the rail lines leading to the camp.
And some “analysts” have charged that the US did not launch special missions to destroy the ovens at Auschwitz because of antisemitism among our leadership.
That’s the standard to which we are held – an absurd one. Those were not our camps, nor were they began in response, say, to the Normandy invasion or our strategic bombing efforts. But we are supposed to be responsible for them nonetheless. Because we could have done something more, theoretically, or so they think.
And the rail interdiction lawsuit, at least, was not supported by real capabilities. We could not have bombed the rail lines, at least not without wiping out some Polish cities in the process. To hit the ovens they theorized a special P-38 mission using fighters with one bomb and one drop tank, refueled on a tiny island off Yugoslavia.
And if we had diverted our war effort to hit the railroads and ovens at Auschwitz, would not, say, the citizens of Paris or Brussels or Amsterdam have had a basis for a lawsuit, saying such sideshows delayed the libertation of their city by some months?
The impossible standards will have to be forgotten, even if it is, horrors, to the detriment of certain law firms’ income. And our little war in Iraq, where we dropped concrete bombs to prevent damage to enemy infrastructure, will be regarded as quaint nonsense.
I still have trouble believing how the Israelis managed to pull off Operation Entebbe.
Armed hostage situations are the most difficult tactical situations to solve. 100% success is virtually an impossible standard. Entebbe, Cabanatuan, Munich, Iranian Embassy ’80: they all had good-guy fatalities.
And with contemporary Islamist tactics, you can expect considerable heartbreak. In the Nord-Ost siege in 2002, over 100 hostages died… but hundreds more were rescued, and more importantly, the perpetrators were confronted with deadly force. When they start strapping hostages with explosives, you have to greenlight and go- and hope for the best. There is no tool or tactic to guarantee success. It would’ve been nice if Army Delta or SEAL Team 6 were mobilized to Algeria, but it would still end ugly.
This may be the beginning of a new trend: targeting these innumerable soft targets all over the globe in an attempt to disrupt the energy supply. While our president wages war on the Constitution, the enemies of the civilized world are focused on what really matters.
BFTP wrote:
“It is a recurring theme that the Left is profoundly reactionary. All the evidence is that their dream is not of perfect egalitarianism with rule by the proletarian masses but rather Enlightened Despotism with the Great and the Good whispering in the ear of a Prince. A very small number of disciplined professionals will serve while most beg for protection from chaos and marauders. Good luck getting Marisa Berenson as compensation.”
Hadn’t thought of that movie in a long while, sir. It is truly a great one, panned in its release era, a sad time of extolling the current and the hip and the modern/postmodern. Kubrick was aiming not only for the beauty etc. but the pace of life of that time and a lot of viewers and almost none of the critics understood. The setting wasn’t exactly Thirty Years War but later during the runup to and during the American Revolution. Still captures the flavor of that age.
The truth is that nearly all women and not an inconsiderable number of men during this time of the faltering American Republic have desired those pre-Revolution times. All of them have been people rife with insecurity who have run up against their max in terms of maney and status and imagine that during a time where meritocracy was not in place they could insinuate themselves into power and treasure above their relative status now. As someone here once said, none of the people who watch those British pre WWI series on PBS imagine themselves to be the servants, only the ruling class. The distilled one, while extreme in some regards, always had the truth of this when commenting here.
Being happy, being successful in a meritocratic republic takes work, sacrifice, discipline, and an understanding and acceptance of what your work is worth to everyone else in terms of money. Too many people nowadays can’t face the truth, or have convinced themselves that they are entitled to more than what their neighbors will pay them. Too many people who have not received a quality history education and don’t understand that big man government – also known as monarchy – always devolves into a system where merit is pushed aside for currying favor and that outside of a few victorious warlords and their immediate toadies everyone is equally miserable. Also, too many people who believe that neomonarchy will result in a better world for them and screw everyone else. They look at those times and figure that if they lived in a world like that, then they would be the ones with the ear of the monarch, that they would be the one for whom the sky was the limit in terms of wealth and trinkets and sex. Who knows, maybe a few of them even believe they could use such power to do good. Refernces to the Ring of Tolkien’s works apply. These types are among the most dangerous and immoral people in existence, whatever they claim for justification or righteousness.
They believe in a monarch issuing executive orders, insuring their money and status and a society tailor made for their personal sensibilities and narrative and disenfranchising and ultimately killing off those with whom they disagree. The reality is the eradication of a quarter of all the German speaking peoples, grinding poverty for 90% of the rest, endless war with the monarch over the next mountain range, and a constant state of fear.
#5 wrote, “The Nazis thought his (Lons) novel took a “blood-and-soil” approach, extolling the resiliency of the German Volk; I would contend that Lons was doing nothing of the sort, and that the Nazis entirely misunderstood him because his ironic humor left them clueless”.
Perhaps the Nazis enjoyed Lons because in “Der Werewolf” he depicted Jews as unscrupulous speculators, usurping the land of honest German Volk – see Paul Johnson’s “History of the Jews (1988)” … “interesting” choice of reading
A very thought provoking post from Wretchard. I’m reminded of Martin Van Creveld’s “The Transformation of War” … that or “Mad Max”.
” We could not have bombed the rail lines,”
because rail lines are easy to rebuild
And so the learning curve begins. We all know that the U.S. military is the best in the world and it woulda, coulda and maybe shoulda done the job in Mali. Yes all that elaborate nonsense that anti U.S. critics flung at the American military was self serving and largely missed the point.(I know because to my everlasting embarrassment, in my distant and uninformed youth I took part in that).
But woulda, coulda, shoulda probably doesn’t serve anybody’s purpose today because the rest of the free world has to learn to cope without the leadership of that amazing U.S. fighting force and in the process to stay free. The outcome in Mali is completely uncertain.
Generally speaking, hostage rescues do not end well. The rescue of hostages being held by the MRTA in the Japanese embassy in Lima was a relative success, with only one hostage having been killed. All of the hostage-takers were killed, several of them reportedly having been executed while trying to surrender. I frankly have little patience for anyone who sheds tears for them.
Ambassador Aoki was a personal friend, an impressive diplomat, and an exemplary ambassador for his country. In keeping with Japanese cultural norms, he accepted personal responsibility and shame for the takeover of his embassy, and was, I think allowed to retire early. 50 years earlier he probably would have committed hara kiri.
But Wretchard is right: American special operators make these kind of operations look a lot easier than they really are. Inexperienced imitators do not generally fare well when they try their hand at similar ops. My condolences to the families of the dead hostages.
RWE 7,
You surprise me. Of course we could have bombed Auschwitz-Birkenau. There are photographs of the camps and the belching smoke crematoria that our heavy bombers flew over in order to bomb factories located directly to the East. Slave labor from the camps worked in those factories. Our bombers followed the rail lines and the smoke to reach their targets. We issued maps during the war, I have seen them, showing the locations of the camps and rail lines. Bombing the crematoria and collocated gas chambers would have disrupted operations and saved some lives. More important it would have been the right thing to do. The allies were begged to do so even at the cost of killing some prisoners. Bombing the rail lines might have saved many of the Hungarian Jews who were exterminated as the Red Army approached. George Marshall refused and FDR declined to overrule him. Military necessity had little to do with the decision. While important and often critical military efficiency is not the only criteria to consider.
In his cynical approach to this decision FDR resembled Obama. Both felt secure in controlling the Jewish vote and took them for granted. Obama pays attention to his base to the Left and indulges the shock troops, like La Raza and the New Black Panthers, to his left. FDR was concerned about Southern Democrats to his right.
At least the West is beginning to fight back, it’s just too bad that the French are showing the way (sorry Marie-Claude)The French lost Dien Bien Phu due to logistics, not tactics, but IIRC the U.S. wouldn’t back the French with weapons, etc.so My Dad and others entered the field in 1959(yes 59).
Let’s hope we don’t repeat that mistake, Africa is hot, or so I hear,
Bob
The coming war for Andalus will be savage and unrelenting. Unopposed, the Muslim grows strong, confident of victory. Many in Europe will welcome the invader from inside, seeing little difference in what will seem to them to be simply a change from one religious superstition for another. But it will be more than that, and there will be those who remember what it meant to be master in their own lands, and they will resist, and it will not be settled by negotiation; it will be settled only by savage force of arms.
My hat it has three corners
A cockade red and blue
Brown Bess to make some mourners
Replacing bows of yew
With kepi regulation
And rifled musket bore
We conquered us a nation
And evened up the score
My hat now had no corners
‘Twas sleek and painted steel
Yet many more were mourners
Who heard the bell’s sad peal
No hats now as our brothers
Take arms to save their lands
To save their wives and mothers
From crescent borne brigands
No quarter will be given
No quarter then received
The landscape red and riven
Survivors not yet grieved
My hat it has three corners
A cockade red and blue
Alone, I have no mourners
And yes, it will be you
Blast #16:
The bombers did not follow the rail lines. They could not have seen them from the altitudes we used and certainly could not have hit them. The only aircraft capable of reaching that area with bombloads were heavy bombers and any attempt to hit the ovens given our typical bombing accuracy would very likely have flattened the camp as well. While people might argue those imprisoned in the camp would rather have died that way, we simply did not do things like that. Nor do we still.
The only way we could have found the rail lines with high altitude heavy bombers would have been to bomb the appropriate area in a city, a Polish city. We probably could have found that target. When in October 1943 the 8th AF hit the marshaling yards in Munster they aimed for the cathedral, since normal bombing inaccuracy would cover the RR yards – and the homes of the people who worked there. Of course, Munster was a lot closer to uor bases than was eastern Poland.
Get out the maps, calculate the distances from our bases, look up the capabilities of our aircraft. The rail lines going to Auschwitz could not have been attacked by light or medium bombers, dive bombers, or fighter bombers. They were much too far from any base we had. It was heavy bombers or nothing, attacking from 25,000 ft, and they need very large targets.
In the book “The bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attemped It?” even the advocates did not suggest attacking rail lines. Some claim we could have hit the ovens and not hit the camps. And they hypothesized a very special long range P-38 mission to do so like the one tried at Polesti – which was considered a nightmare by the fighter pilots
But the simple fact was that we were AT WAR and those concentration camp targets were not ones that would advance the war effort.
The Soviets could have hit those targets – rail lines and ovens – but for some strange reason no lawsuits were filed against them.
The way to deal with hostage situations is to use non-lethal chemical warfare agents.
The new ones combine synthetic opiate agents combined with powerful oxytocin analogues.
No reason not to use them apart from an irrational phobia about non-lethal chemical warfare agents since the Church Commission eviscerated the Army and CIA programs.
The US Army did excellent ethical research on these in the 50s 60s and 70s and research has continued on non humans and informed consent human volunteers since then.
The Russians used cruder versions of these weapons against Chechen terrorist who took over a Moscow theater.
They used opiate analogues and were able to save 85% of the hostages who otherwise would all have been killed.
The Russians were also able to capture or kill all the terrorists in this action.
They did not need perform summary executions of the terrorists as they were all in ” happy sleep ”
The only problem was the specific doses, the specific opiate analogues and the delivery systems-so a few of the hostages were overdosed and died-as did some of the terrorists-not a problem in the case of terrorists death.
For the US the domestic threat of AQ is grossly exaggerated
During the Cold War the Soviets had the Capability to annihilate the US
-but they did not have the Intent to annihilate the US-because they understood Game Theory as well as we did.
AQ has the Intent to annihilate the US-but it does not have the Capability to do so and never will.
We have both the Capability and Intent to annihilate AQ-we just have not made that commitment – yet
A small demonstration by the US of our Capability and Intent – like Hiroshima-and AQ will get the message just like the Kamikaze Japanese regime did in August 1945.
Capability and Intent
1. We might consider that from the Algerian perspective, the operation was a full success – a 100% percent success. This is because it was a “deliver a message” mission, never a “hostage rescue” mission. Two messages were very effectively delivered. First, to anyone considering hostages as a potential source of profit from ransom the message is “we won’t play that game.” Second, to France and the west, “We are playing by our rules, not yours.”
2. FWIW, on January 12 headlines read “Militants Driven From Konna.” On January 17 reports indicate overnight fighting “focused on Konna.”
OT: Just saw the new movie BROKEN CITY (Walberg, R. Crowe).
If your taste doesn’t run to ultra-tired Lefty agitprop, skip it.
Villain: eeeevil wealthy Republican mayor, being cuckolded by his black Police Commissioner;
Hero: Gay preppy dude from Connecticut by way of Harvard who’s an idealistic Lefty and whose lover gets assassinated….
oh, you get the gist. I haven’t seen anything so creaky with Leftist cliches in Quite Some Time.
I can’t shake the feeling that world deserves what’s coming. I suppose that includes America too. All of the traitors in our broken academia, all in the broken media, and all of our political “leadership” have pretended that Islam is not a supremacist totalitarian cancer. Pretending that fire is not hot or that disease is not dangerous will get you seriously burned.
And despite all the evidence from the constant stream of hatred emanating from the ME – despite more than 20,000 terrorist attacks globally since 9/11, the Jihad funding sources in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf remain completely intact and untouched. While they continue to spew their hatred, while they fund Imams and mosques across the land of the hated infidels, these Arab scum also continue to recieve protection and apologies from the West. Once upon a time this cancerous evil bargain yielded somewhat cheap gas – but that ended long, long ago. But what is far, far worse, millions of additional Muslims have been welcomed into the West by our sleazy government bureaucrats. They often even recieve special protected status as “victims”. Talk about perversion.
Half of the electorate voted to re-install the revolting monster in the WH. The Marine who pissed on that Muslim scum in Afghanistan is being court marshalled. Yep – we deserve to have the Muslims kick our ass. Idiots and self-deluded fools get their comeuppance sooner or later. Always.
Yeah gotta love how fanatic Russophobes still bring up Nord Ost, like the SEALs would’ve done much better. The only inexcusable thing about that op was not having enough ambulances ready to take the chemically affected hostages to hospitals.
#9 patriot front
and there was the hijacked plane Alger-Paris in 1994 by the same terrorists that we are dealing with today
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/islamic-terrorists-hijack-a-french-plane
#24 – you are out of your mind. That botched operation was an absolute scandal to the eternal shame of Russian Special Ops. The Russians poisoned the hostages.
1. Hostages alive in Algeria represent a threat to Algerian sovereignty and honor. Better they die than be a temptation for an American, British, or French rescue attempt.
2. B-17s to far eastern Germany would be without fighter support. I don’t think Spaatz wanted to bomb V-1s, V-2s, and Normandy. Anything that was not a part of the main attack on German power should be ignored by the Eight Air Force.
RWE,
As an old Air Intel guy I know that the cameras are so good that the objects may be more distant than they appear. Still Allied heavy bombers did fly over the camps to bomb factories on the other side. Do a BING search, “aerial photos Auschwitz 1944.” They could have dropped ordnance. The gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau were located on a rail spur South of the main camp. My belief is that we could have interdicted the rail lines at the passes going through the Carpathian mountains. The only reasonable defense I have heard for not bombing anything but the factories is that our planes had to land at Soviet airbases to refuel after a mission that far East, and Stalin did not want any targets other than direct support or industrial production. At this day we may acknowledge his role without endorsing his position. If we had dropped a load on Birkenau it would have made work for some bureaucrats soothing Uncle Joe’s feathers. So what?
SBW (5),
Yeah; the Nazi censors allowed Jean Anouilh to stage his Antigone in Paris, so there’s evidence you have a good point.
“ the hegemon made it look so easy”
It took practice. Anyone remember “Operation Eagle Claw?”
22 @ beverly
Too bad about Broken City. I like both Wahlberg and Crowe. Guess the money was good.
“ the hegemon made it look so easy”
or remember Desert One
and No, America and the American military will never get the credit they deserve in the history of warfare for the real extent they’ve gone to reduce collateral civilian deaths since WWII. How many talk about the number of French and Italian civilian casualties caused in that carnage? The anti-American/anti-war critics demand of unhuman perfection will continue to paint the dialogue, because it’s all about power, not principle.
@ 21. ScenarioA >>1. We might consider that from the Algerian perspective, the operation was a full success – a 100% percent success. This is because it was a “deliver a message” mission, never a “hostage rescue” mission.<<
In addition to that, there's also the possibility that the Algerians did not care about the hostages — they wanted their gas plant back. In that respect, the operation is a success.
According to Algerian newssources the operation in “In Amënas” isn’t finished yet. But 2 days after the initial hostage taking by AQIM (local Al Qaeda) some 570 Algerians and 100 of the 132 foreigners seem to have been liberated.
The Algerian government has been fighting the islamists since the 90s and has defeated them. The toll has been heavy there were some 100.000 to 150.000 killed. The speed of the Algerian intervention was remarkable. They seem to have had some troops stationed in this oil rich border region.
Blast from the Past and RWE,
Much ink has been spilled over the issue of whether or not the Allies should have bombed Auschwitz. The best book on this subject is “Auschwitz and the Allies” by Martin Gilbert, refer to:
http://www.amazon.com/Auschwitz-Allies-Dr-Martin-Gilbert/dp/0712668063
The morality concerning this topic is very ambiguous. Directly bombing the gas chambers / crematoria probably would have had minimal impact and caused significant collateral damage through death to the prisoners in the surrounding camps (they were setup as human shields). The gas chambers / crematoria at Auschwitz (actually KZ-Birkenau) were very efficient and economical at secretly killing large numbers of people with minimal panic caused amongst the victims. The biggest technical problem the SS had with the Holocaust was not in mass murder but instead with disposal of the bodies. Near the end of WW-II, one of the crematoriums was knocked out of commission due to sabotage by the Sonderkommandos (prisoners forced to unload gas chambers and stoke the ovens with bodies). The SS was compelled to dispose of corpses using open pit pyres (most of the original secrecy had been lost). Prior to the sabotage, many of the crematoriums had been damaged due to over use, i.e. chimney fires caused by accumulated body fat from burnt corpses. The SS wanted to upgrade their crematoriums in an extension to KZ-Birkenau but WW-II ended before they could build them. Had the railroad lines to Auschwitz been destroyed then the SS would probably have reverted back to murdering Jewish prisoners locally as they did in the early phase of the Holocaust through Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units). The problem with Einsatzgruppen was the process of murdering thousands of innocent women and children tended to cause the SS men responsible to go insane. The industrialized approach to mass murder was adopted as a response to this limitation of the Einstazgruppen. Of course, near the end of WW-II, the SS had serious manpower limitations and would not have diverted personal from the front merely to murder innocent people. This is the bottom line to the whole debate: The Holocaust ended because the Germans lost the war.
fcal @ 34 said:
“The Algerian government has been fighting the islamists since the 90s and has defeated them. The toll has been heavy there were some 100.000 to 150.000 killed. The speed of the Algerian intervention was remarkable.”
Despite the screw up with the recent attempt at liberating hostages, the Algerians are quite skilled at dealing with Islamic fascists. The Algerians have been fighting Islamic fascists for decades and probably know more about the process than anyone on the planet. The Algerians do not “horse around”. When they see Islamic fascists, they try to kill them ASAP.
hostage taking for ransom is part of the islamic culture. Rather than work or build, the culture is parasitic to feed off others. Cervantes was captured for ransom. Rather than continue to play the ransom game (which the french fostered at that time), president jefferson sent the newly commissioned navy and marines to the hostage-taking shores of tripoli.
Not surprisingly, the terrorists are now offering to trade US hostages for the “blind sheik”. Morsi wanted the “blind sheik” released BEFORE the attack on our ambassador in Libya, when obama/clinton refused protection and ordered those capable of defending to “stand down”. It becomes even clearer that obama wanted oour ambassador kidnapped so he could grant morsi’s request to release the “blind sheik” of the first world trade center attack.
If we can get DNA from wooly mammoths, why can’t we clone jefferson, washington, adams, madison et al, to replace the sorry slimy dishonest scum in washington?
Jaybird @ 36 said:
“hostage taking for ransom is part of the islamic culture. … Not surprisingly, the terrorists are now offering to trade US hostages for the “blind sheik”.”
The issue of capital punishment confuses me (I do not like giving the state that much power). However it is unwise to imprison high ranking Islamic fascists at the Supermax Prison or Gitmo because it is an invitation for hostage taking. After extraction of useful intelligence through interrogation, high ranking Islamic fascists should be tried by military tribunal and then either returned to their country of origin (if found innocent of direct murder involvement) or promptly executed. They should not be kept as prisoners.
“For seventy years the seas have remained open to navigation. Airplanes crisscross the skies with impunity. No one could seriously disrupt the peace.”
My prediction is that soon enough some clueless American college students will be sent abroad by their equally clueless professors, and then get stuck there for the rest of their lives because of changing circumstances due to someone’s disrupting the peace. Just a couple years ago, administrators at a nearby college went on a fact-finding trip to Syria because they thought it would be a good place to send students who wanted to learn Arabic.
#37 Eggplant
I don’t think you are confused at all.
The details of the assault from a Algerian (in french)
http://secret-difa3.blogspot.fr/2013/01/les-details-sur-lassaut-sur-le-complexe.html
#35 Eggplant
Actually that is the crux of the discussion. For all the anti-Semitism of the Democrats [and indeed the Allies as a whole, Danes excepted]; it was not unreasonable for the military to assume that if they hit the German warmaking capability hard enough, that would have a better effect on both ending the war and stopping the death camps. The assumption was that resources used in the Holocaust would be diverted to the war. There is no doubt that the existence of the camps was known.
It was reasonable, but it was wrong. After the war we found the orders where maintaining the Final Solution was prioritized over the military situation in case after case. National Socialism, Communism, and the variants trying to become either in the modern world share the fanaticism of the worst of religion. Killing Jews was an article of faith in Germany, and more important than the war, which they believed that they would eventually win anyway.
Hindsight is 20/20. Sometimes, if interpreted correctly and with enough data. But while you are dealing with the problem you don’t have that benefit, and cannot rationally be blamed for it.
I have devoted a bit of effort to the study of the Holocaust. My father’s company liberated the last concentration camp in Nazi hands [Gunzkirchen, a sub-camp of Mathausen] literally as the war ended. He never mentioned it, but I found out after his death when I researched his Army service.
Subotai Bahadur
Re 20 Victor: “The way to deal with hostage situations is to use non-lethal chemical warfare agents.”
Yeah, that worked so well in Moscow 10 years ago. /sarc
http://www.ctvnews.ca/world/russians-mark-deadly-moscow-theatre-hostage-crisis-10-years-later-1.1011644
Subotai Bahadur @ 41 said:
“There is no doubt that the existence of the camps was known. … After the war we found the orders where maintaining the Final Solution was prioritized over the military situation in case after case.”
Actually, one of the main conclusions from “Auschwitz and the Allies” by Martin Gilbert was that the existence of KZ-Birkenau wasn’t widely known until fairly late in the game. The “Vrba–Wetzler report” came from the testimony of two prisoners who escaped from Auschwitz and was the first detailed description of the Holocaust. That report was first published on 25 April 1944 and did not appear in English until 25 November 1944. The Battle of Stalingrad was lost by Germany on 2 February 1943. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April 1945. From the American perspective, the Holocaust became known many months after the German military offensive had failed and Allied victory was assured. Bombing Auschwitz became actionable only about 5 months prior to the war’s conclusion.
German fanaticism concerning the Holocaust was obvious given that a large fraction of the pre-WW-II German intelligentsia was Jewish (a large fraction of Germany’s mathematicians, physicists and engineers were Jews). Killing off Germany’s technical talent prior to a major war was almost as insane as Stalin killing off most of Russia’s military generals just prior to WW-II.
This, excuse me, BS about us not bombing the rail lines or camps was proof of negligence or anti-semitism is just another example of how far the Left has managed to invert reality to further it’s aims. The fact that people who otherwise seem intelligent would buy into it is both infuriating and depressing.
The complete lack of logic applied to:
A) The feasibility of hitting railways and specific locations in a camp when hitting the mark in major cities was always hit and miss, excuse the pun
B) The likelihood that the disruption of rail lines or destruction of ovens would stop the slaughter of a regime which used every method known to kill en masse as needed
…is staggering, and one is left with one of two possibilities.
1) Some people have serious issues with applying logic and thinking past step one
2) Some people’s hatred of the West and/or the United States in particular trumps any supposed reverence or respect for reason.
Let’s remember; the Nazis did not just use camps to kill people en masse, but would do it with old fashioned bullets and mass graves as needed. The camps were just a hellish tribute to the German desire for efficiency.
Diminishing that efficiency would reveal another two German attributes. Ruthlessness and improvisation under adversity.
When trains were disabled, for example German troops would machine guns the cars, then leave the rest to die. Do we really think they would simply let them all go?
In light of this, please explain to me how if you knocked out the ovens, the death of inmates would decrease in any significant way that would outweigh the ones you killed by dropping 500 and 1000 pounders all over the place?
For the love of God, think!
“The only aircraft capable of reaching that area with bombloads were heavy bombers and any attempt to hit the ovens given our typical bombing accuracy would very likely have flattened the camp as well. While people might argue those imprisoned in the camp would rather have died that way, we simply did not do things like that. Nor do we still.”
And had we done it, we would be lambasted as wild-eyed cowboys more intent on killing a few prison guards then caring for the poor inmates, because, you know, it was the Americans and Brits who really hated the Jews.
“This is the bottom line to the whole debate: The Holocaust ended because the Germans lost the war.”
Yes, THAT was the way the slaughter was going to end, and the Allies went about doing that as best as humanly possible.
@ 40. Marie Claude
Thanks for the link. Quite interesting. The Algerian Armed Forces seem to have acted so fast they took everybody by speed especially the foreign political ‘experts’ and of course also the jihadist hostage takers. Liberating 700 hostages isn’t a screw up.
“Bombing the rail lines…”
Please. As if the Nazi’s needed rail lines, or camps to kill Jews, or anyone else. Actually, death camps were a later development. Just walk the Jews outside of town, to a ditch, or woods, a deep stream bed, as was done commonly in the first few years.
And, how many “camps” were there? As if there weren’t tens of thousands of military barracks, industrial buildings, and so forth.
So, what was the Air Force supposed to do, chase Nazi death squads all over Europe?
A Captain, or a Lieutenant, or a Sargent if casualties are high, in charge of a company of infantry, will put out listen posts with a few men. Human trip wires. Even when an attack is known to come, and thus the men are dead men, for the greater good of the company. Battalion Colonels will put out weakened, companies, supposedly with full strength a 120 men, but in combat, maybe down to 20, to guard a half mile of snow covered forest. And they will die that night. So to Generals will sacrifice a battalion, and the General above him maybe a whole division, of thousands. That General will tell his General that he will be needing a new division, soon as his present ones will be in shallow graves, or frozen until spring.
So, in this calculus, these leaders should care about wasting limited resources for as I said, a futile task?
The Jews were dead people walking.
When the Soviets captured 600,000 of German General Paulus’s army at Stalingrad, in the depth of winter, they just marched the German Army prisoners in the snow, 10 degrees below zero, with no food, shelter or water until they were all dead in a week, or less.
In the internal Soviet race to captured Berlin, in the last month of the war, the Soviets killed off more of their own soldiers then the US lost in the entire war.
Hate to say it, but the camps, the killing of the Jews, was small potatoes. As Stalin is supposed to have said about the death/killing of millions, ” A statistic”.
No one, no Jewish volunteer army, no modern day Lincoln Brigade of righteous Jews, or anyone else came to the aid of Cambodians under Pol Pot, nor in Rwanda, nor Yugoslavia.
Anyone wants to form a Twitter, Social Networking, whatever, a armed militia for the next to come mass slaughter, is free to do so.
45. fcal
yes, and I am thanksful to their diligence. It seems that these last events brought the Algerians more proxy to the French than the EU seems to be. As I replied to a contempting German, the Algerians and the French are brothers in tears and arms
#43 Eggplant
I think we are in agreement that it was not practically possible for the US to disrupt the rail lines to Auschwitz. If it were possible, and if we had any idea that the Germans would prioritize the Final Solution over military needs, then it would have been a choke point to affect the German war effort worldwide. But neither condition obtained.
I will disagree with the knowledge of the Final Solution. Yes, there is the “Vrba–Wetzler report” you cite. But that is not the only knowledge of it that came out. And indeed, the knowledge did not have to be “widespread” to be either actionable or to weigh on government wartime deliberations.
The US Holocaust Museum discusses the matter here:
http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005182
under the headings:
“US STATE DEPARTMENT RESPONSE TO NEWS OF THE “FINAL SOLUTION”” and
“US PRESS COVERAGE OF THE “FINAL SOLUTION””
Short form, in August 1942 the State Department intercepted and blocked delivery of a report to the President of the World Jewish Congress, Stephen Wise [an American] from the WJC headquarters in Geneva. ‘The report revealed that the Germans were implementing a policy to physically annihilate the Jews of Europe.’.
Wise got another copy of the report from another source, and went to Sumner Welles at the State Department. In return for him not immediately publicizing it, Welles agreed to confirm the truth of it. Three months later the State Department confirmed the report.
The second heading notes US newspaper mentions.
In addition, the Allies were receiving intel reports from various resistance movements throughout the occupations that confirmed it. All those trainloads of Jews picked up by the Petain Regime being sent East from 1941-44 had to be going somewhere, and no one came back.
There were also cable intercepts/thefts between diplomats in Germany and their home countries that confirmed it; Chile in particular.
They knew, but they could not do anything about it. As the war progressed, there is no doubt that they got other confirmation of mass killings from British prisoner interrogations from 1940 on, not just Jews but all civilians.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1373571/The-perfect-pitiless-Nazi–Soldiers-interviews-reveal-German-troops-driven-bloodlust-killed-fun.html
It does not place blame on the Allies, because they could not do anything about it. It does mean that for at least some, they carried the burden of knowledge.
Subotai Bahadur
“All those trainloads of Jews picked up by the Petain Regime being sent East from 1941-44 had to be going somewhere, and no one came back.”
except that they weren’t as much numerous as you would like to make us believe, otherwise there wouldn’t have been 75% of survivers
BTW Danemark, like Bulgaria had a special treatment from the Nazis, they were allies to the Nazis, and Danemark had another advantage, it was considered as a Arian country. Both countries significantly participated within the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS operations. It’s when the allies were forecasted to win that Danemark reverted and resisted, Germany didn’t apply its permissive policy anymore, then the danish Jews were in danger, but Danish had time to transport them into a swedish island, the danish jewish community wasn’t bigger than 5000 to 8OOO souls, so a relative easy job.
With a hostage situation created by terrorists, IMHO, you have a tactical problem and a big picture strategic issue.
The tactical problem involves containing the terrorists and performing a rescue of hostages with the least loss of life to hostages. The main consideration is to rescue hostages safely but not to let the terrorists get away. These are often conflicting goals.
The strategic considerations involve who or what organization or state is directing/supporting/financing this activity. It seems to me that going after this center of gravity will pay the best return in the long run. We are not talking arclight or big shows, we are talking about working smarter in smaller but deadly operations to cut off the brain to this whole activity, and to send a message that doing these activities will result in organizations and individuals being PERSONALLY hurt, wives, kids, and their little dog, too. Psychopaths do not care about others as they have no capability of empathy. However, they will back off if they are PERSONALLY hurt. That is how you communicate with them.
We have tons of really clever, deadly, and ingenious tools for this activity in our kit. What we lack is the strategic goals and objectives and the WILL to use them. That is the thing we must get squared away in order to survive and win.
47. Marie Claude
“yes, and I am thanksful to their diligence. It seems that these last events brought the Algerians more proxy to the French than the EU seems to be. As I replied to a contempting German, the Algerians and the French are brothers in tears and arms.”
Forget the tears and hearts. If France is able to convince Algeria, or vice versa, that both have the same ennemy: “the islamists”, then a lot is possible. Algeria can eventually attack the “Mali Islamists” from the rear and that will be the end of their adventure. However the Touaregs should obtain a special status there, regarding territory and culture. Be wise at no cost.
51. fcal
It seems that our diplomats are busy to get some “arab supports”, and our politicians are openly laudating Algeria for her contribution at rescuing the hostages.
I just saw a report on Tunisia, where the Salafists have hijacked the tunisian desir for more freedom, transformed by them into a nightmare.
The Europeans, mainly the Germans, who didn’t participated into the Libyan campain are telling us that’s this is the result of our work. But, the illness was already there, it just waited for a opportunity to spread. May-be this salafist disease was necessary to appear, so that the populations understand what they lost, their dignity. It’s like they are under a polpot regime .Now these blurred populations will have to re-make a war on their new masters
The Americans will “help” with transport, and some 600 men (don’t know what is their qualification)
http://www.itele.fr/video/les-usa-vont-apporter-une-aide-militaire-a-la-france
oh and the EU has no idea of what is on:
-http://www.bruxelles2.eu/politique-etrangere/terrorisme/une-menace-terroriste-en-europe-cest-bien-vague-tout-ca.html
read that (a video too), EDIFYING !
Rail lines are rail lines. If they’re broken, nothing runs. So break the main lines, the major bridges, destroy the marshalling yards. That way, you stop the bullets, beans, gas, artillery tubes, and all the rest, along with the Jews. Bomb the spurs to the camps, the transports arrive at the break, and the passengers get out and walk. Meantime, you’ve lost, say, thirty heavies with ten men apiece shot down, half that many written off when returning, with dead and wounded aircrew. Might’s well hurt the war effort and the holocaust effort at the same time.
But, no.
#49 Marie Claude
When France was conquered by Germany, before Germany asked for it, the Petain regime began passing laws against Jews starting with the Statute on Jews; barring them from changing residence, public places, and professional jobs. In 1941, the Vichy government established the Commissariat général aux questions juives to work alongside the Gestapo to round up Jews for deportation. 76,000 were deported to the camps in the East. 2,500 returned at the end of the war. The Holocaust in France, like the entire Vichy period, has been downplayed. But the documents are coming out now that the guilty are dead. See: Petain’s Crime: The Complete Story of French Collaboration in the Holocaust by Paul Webster. ISBN-13: 9780929587554. It shows how the Vichy Service d’ordre légionnaire and its successor Milice acting on orders from the highest levels of the Vichy regime viewed the rounding up of Jews as a matter of working to overfill quotas to please the Germans. The documents and orders are there.
When France fell, there were 350,000 Jews in France. Most were able to hide and pass for Gentiles, frequently assuming a Catholic identity. But the number who returned was 3.5%, not 75%.
The Danes were some of the strongest resisters of German occupation. No, they did not rescue their Jews only after “the allies were forecast to win”. Denmark was conquered on April 9, 1940. On April 23, 1940 the Danish Resistance began sending intelligence to the British. Starting in 1942, the Resistance was in active contact with the British Special Operations Executive and carrying out acts of sabotage with weapons and explosives paradropped in. Despite the fact that the Germans did consider the Danes fellow Aryans, and tried to run it as a model protectorate; the Resistance made life sufficiently unpleasant for the Germans so as to have that status revoked on August 1, 1943, and a “state of emergency” declared. When they revoked that status, the Germans planned to come for Denmark’s Jews, sweeping them up on the night of October 1, 1943. Word got out in Denmark [a leak the Resistance picked up] on September 29.
The Danish response, supported by the King, the Resistance, the Danish Lutheran Church, and the Danish police was to smuggle all 7,000+ of the country’s remaining Jews to the coast, and fishermen took them to Sweden at risk of concentration camps and death. In a few days. Without one collaborator betraying them.
Yes, there were Danish collaborators. And Danes that joined the Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS. 6,000 Danes enlisted in the German forces, mostly in the Waffen SS 24th Panzergrenadier Regiment Danemark as part of the 11th SS Volunteer Panzergrenadier Division.
At the same time the entire Vichy French government was collaborators, and Frenchmen were both enlisting and fighting alongside the Germans in large numbers. There were the “33rd Waffen-Gren.Division der SS Charlemagne“. The Wehrmacht 638th Infanterie-Regiment. Legion des Volontaires Française. The “Französische SS-Freiwilligen-Sturmbrigade” La Brigade d’assaut des Volontaires Française [French SS-Volunteer Assault Brigade]. The “Sturmbrigade” Frankreich which was part of the 18th SS-Frw.Pz.Gren.Divivision “Horst Wessel”. All fought, and were decorated, for fighting on the Russian front, and surviving French SS were part of the last defense of the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin. In addition there were the units of the Vichy Army allied with the Germans, and the Milice which were volunteers assisting the Gestapo.
Every occupied country had collaborators. And every one had those who willingly joined the Nazi’s. If one wants to compare either numbers or percentages, I think that the Danes come off somewhat better than the French.
Subotai Bahadur
Balladur
Would you think that we expected a fair report on the Holocaust from you?
“began passing laws against Jews starting with the Statute on Jews; barring them from changing residence, public places, and professional jobs.” like most of the German occupied countries of the era, even Italy who wasn’t occupied !
“The favorable view of Italy rested, in part, on the tendency to use Nazi Germany as the only gauge against which Italy is measured, a method that has inevitably downplayed the gravity of Fascist Italy’s own anti-Jewish persecution. By confining analysis to the period of the German occupation in 1943–5, which saw the deportation of Italian Jews to death camps, historians largely excluded from scrutiny a distinct phase in the persecution of Italian Jewry – the period of state-sponsored Italian anti-Semitism.
During the years 1938–43, prior to the loss of Italian sovereignty, Fascist Italy waged a debilitating campaign against its Jewish population. The passage of anti-Jewish laws, introduced primarily before the Second World War and without German interference, dealt a sharp blow to the Italian Jewish community. Soon after the Manifesto of Racist Scientists appeared, which attempted to prepare the public and provide a theoretical justification for the coming anti-Jewish campaign, a law of September 5, 1938, declared that Jews could no longer send their children to public or private Italian schools or be employed in any capacity in any Italian school from kindergarten to university;7 a law of November 15, 1938, further decreed the immediate and permanent removal of all textbooks by Jewish authors from the Italian classroom.”
http://assets.cambridge.org/052184/1011/excerpt/0521841011_excerpt.htm
“76,000 were deported to the camps in the East. 2,500 returned at the end of the war. The Holocaust in France, like the entire Vichy period, has been downplayed.”
none is denying these facts, tough it’s your interpretation the problem, you have a “Javert” mentality !
Paris and northern France police depended directly from the Nazis, Vichy hadn’t the decisive power, just that it was warned.
From a Franco-Israelian historian -http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Michel_(historien) translated in english:
-http://galliawatch.blogspot.co.il/2012/07/ambiguous-history-forced-repentance.html#links
Balladur
from a trustful source:
http://www.gutenberg-e.org/esk01/frames/fesk06.html
“From this data, Christiansen concluded that Danish military collaborators came from groups that enjoyed better economic standing than other collaborators, and that economic motives played the least substantial role in their collaboration compared to other groups of collaborators. He also noted that soldiers recruited in the early part of the war were significantly older than those recruited in the last year. His inference that the latter were therefore the least mature of the group might gain support from the last column in the “Criminality” table, showing that half the non-Nazi Danes volunteering in the last year of the war had some criminal record
Krabbe saw the youth of Denmark as confused and agitated. They were nationalistic in spirit, but saw no employment or economic security afforded by their homeland. They also saw no leadership among the higher officials, as the latter knuckled under to German rule. Denmark represented no future; in fact, in their view Europe lay under the threat of internal collapse and civil war. Therefore, it was virtually instinctive for some of the young and the active elements in the population to react to the “dynamism” of National Socialism. The Germans were masters of their own destiny, and a young man could find direction in his life by embracing their cause. This condition existed partly because German foreign policy was not in itself disagreeable to most Danes in the early expansionist period of the war. No intelligent Dane expected neutrality to survive the outbreak of war, and therefore it fell to him to choose sides with some foresight.
Only the West Europeans—numerically the smallest group [of non-Germans]—fought consistently well. The best of them—and this included most of the early volunteers from Norway, Denmark and Holland—were practically indistinguishable from the native Germans in the crack SS divisions. [They] … remained a formidable and reliable fighting force until the end. ”
“The Danes were some of the strongest resisters of German occupation.”
from Wikipedia
“after two hours the Danish government surrendered, believing that resistance was useless and hoping to work out an advantageous agreement with Germany.”
“Nazi Germany’s occupation of Denmark began with Operation Weserübung on 9 April 1940, and lasted until German forces withdrew at the end of World War II following their surrender to the Allies on 5 May 1945. Contrary to the situation in other countries under German occupation, most Danish institutions continued to function relatively normally until 1943. Both the Danish government and king remained in the country in an uneasy relationship between a democratic and a totalitarian system until German authorities dissolved the government following a wave of strikes and sabotage.
Just over 3,000 Danes died as a direct result of the occupation.[1] (A further 4,000 Danish volunteers died fighting in the German army on the Eastern front). Overall this represents a very low mortality rate (ca. 0.08% of population) when compared to other occupied countries and most belligerent countries. (See: World War II casualties).
An effective resistance movement developed by the end of the war, and most Danish Jews were rescued in 1943 when German authorities ordered their internment as part of the Holocaust.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Denmark
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration_with_the_Axis_Powers_during_World_War_II#Denmark
“Starting in 1942, the Resistance was in active contact with the British Special Operations Executive and carrying out acts of sabotage with weapons and explosives paradropped in.”
you are mixing Danemark with Norway
“At the same time the entire Vichy French government was collaborators, and Frenchmen were both enlisting and fighting alongside the Germans in large numbers. There were the “33rd Waffen-Gren.Division der SS Charlemagne“.
“If one wants to compare either numbers or percentages, I think that the Danes come off somewhat better than the French.”
Really?
comparatively to our both populations (Danemark, 1939: 4,100,000, France, 1939: 40,800,000), the percentage of the French collaborators was tiny (10000 volontaries vs 6000), they hadn’t the best appreciation, for less motivated, lots of them were scums that wanted to escape from the police and or from the resistance retaliation.
return to school Mr Javert
“from the right hand tail of the distribution”
I don’t understand the reference. Can someone explain?
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