Quote:
Originally Posted by MikeWaters
I watched the James Cameron documentary about this today, didn't catch the beginning.
A couple of the German survivors were along for the expedition.
It was a miracle they survived. They were picked up from the water by British ships, and they say, were treated with "respect", not as enemies.
That struck me. Yet again. How much we have changed.
(don't bother with they were "uniformed" or blah, blah, blah).
Point is we've forgotten what it is to be the good guys. and that's the trap that was laid for us.
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That's one of the interesting things about WWII. We treated some enemies well and some quite poorly. German POW's captured by the US were taken to camps in the US, one of the bigger ones being in Alabama, IIRC. They worked on farms during the day and were well fed. Many of them even got weekend passes and could go into town to have a few beers and catch a movie. Towards the end of the war, German soldiers were typically happy to be captured because they knew they would finally get some decent meals. Only one German soldier in the US attempted to escape. US soldiers were treated well overall in Germany, and if they were poorly fed, it was typically because the Germans themselves were short on food.
On the other hand, things were not so civilized on the Eastern front. The Germans were absolutely brutal with the Russians and Poles. And vice versa. After D-Day there was a group of Polish soldiers fighting on the Western Front with the Allies and they were supposed to transport a group of German POWs to a new location. When they got to the destination, there were only a few POWs left. They told the US commanders that the other POW's "died along the way". When asked how the remaining POW's survived, they replied "We ran out of bullets".
In the Pacific theater, Japanese POW's did not fare well in US camps. This is not a well-known part of our history, but those camps were brutal. And that is not to mention the detention camps for US citizens of Japanese ancestry. There was most definitely racism in the US towards the Japanese relative to the Germans and Italians.