How Torture Helped Win WWII

Doghouse Reilly said:
Going to have to ask for a cite on that one too. I'm having a hard time accepting that "some general" would have the power based on his notion that they were "coddling" these men to re-formulate the fundamental and well established strategy of retaining and training soldiers in the engineering and professional jobs during wartime.
So basically, I'd like to see evidence for the claim that "the military used the smartest soldiers as cannon fodder..."
Thanks.
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Well, if you check the VMI roster, [p. 4], participation in ASTP dropped drammatically from 1943 to 1944, even as the total number of people in uniform (and of new recruits requiring training) shot up dramatically.

Where did they go if not to ASTP?

ETA: Even better citation. From the official ASTP web site: "But due to the impending invasion of Normandy and the need for additional manpower in its ground forces in Europe, the Army disbanded the program in early 1944. Most of the ASTP soldiers were then assigned to the infantry."
 
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drkitten said:
Well, if you check the VMI roster, [p. 4], participation in ASTP dropped drammatically from 1943 to 1944, even as the total number of people in uniform (and of new recruits requiring training) shot up dramatically.

Where did they go if not to ASTP?

ETA: Even better citation. From the official ASTP web site: "But due to the impending invasion of Normandy and the need for additional manpower in its ground forces in Europe, the Army disbanded the program in early 1944. Most of the ASTP soldiers were then assigned to the infantry."
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Thanks for that. Any evidence though that the soldiers who would have been participating in ASTP were MORE likely to end up on the front lines?

The original claim was that "the military used the smartest soldiers as cannon fodder..."
 
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Doghouse Reilly said:
Thanks for that. Any evidence though that the soldiers who would have been participating in ASTP were MORE likely to end up on the front lines?

The original claim was that "the military used the smartest soldiers as cannon fodder..."
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"Cannon fodder" is a somewhat inflammatory word; it was used by a former participant in the program who wrote that these men were used as "poorly trained cannon fodder".

However, there is no question that many of them were used as replacement troops, which is a more accurate description and comes about as close to "cannon fodder" as you can get.

Consider how the Germans introduced "green" troops into fighting: As a unit became depleted by injuries and deaths, they simply continued to operate until there were not enough of them to keep fighting. At that point, the whole unit was pulled out of action, supplemented by fresh troops, and given time to allow the experienced soldiers train the newbies.

The Americans, on the other hand, treated soldiers like interchangeable parts. When a unit lost a man, that person was immediately replaced by a raw recruit. The old hands were supposed to train him, but in reality they shunned him, treating him like a bad luck charm and essentially leaving him to his fate. Naturally, replacement troops didn't last long.

My father wasn't used in the manner, but his extremely green platoon was placed in a highly vulnerable position along the border between France and Germany. He was wounded almost immediately, and was in the hospital when almost all of his compatriots were captured by the Germans when the Battle of the Bulge commenced. (The Germans attacked the weakest point, where the least experienced soldiers were stationed.)
 
They recruited double agents by torturing them? That doesn't make much sense.

Here's a more credible source concerning British use of torture during WWII. I'd like to see some evidence of how it "helped win" the war, though.
 
Don't mean to make this political but...

Again, more obfuscation and outright lies from the "defender's of the faith" in order to justify immoral behavior. Good stuff from the "law-and-order, moral high ground, holier-than-thou" folks. Why can't they just admit they're scared as hell instead of fronting and chest-thumping and beating on other people to make themselves feel strong and right? Oh, that's right, because it would be in direct contradiction to their, "rugged indivudualist," take-no-prisoner, nationalistic (America is the greastest nation ever and above all reproach; RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!), jingoistic hubris.

Torture does not work and is immoral, end of story. Darth Cheney, STFU or, better yet, let's string you up by your testicles, put leaches on you, give you dysentery, waterboard you and beat you until you admit to rigging the 1918 World Series and planning an attack on the local Chuck E Cheese.
 
From the link in the OP:
Fretting over waterboarding, writes British historian Andrew Roberts, obscures the fact that "enhanced interrogation techniques" have saved thousands of lives in every war.
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Yeah... riiiiiiiiiight... obscures the facts, huh?

www.salon.com/.../torture/ Soufan: CIA torture actually hindered our intelligence gathering
An FBI agent testifies that an al-Qaida prisoner provided useful intelligence until the CIA got rough -- and casts doubt on Bush's statements about the effectiveness of harsh interrogations.

May 14, 2009 | WASHINGTON -- The testimony of a key witness at a Senate hearing Wednesday raised serious questions about the truthfulness of former President George W. Bush's own personal defense of the CIA's brutal interrogation program. Former FBI agent Ali Soufan also indicated that the harsh interrogation techniques may actually have hindered the collection of intelligence, causing a high-value prisoner to stop cooperating.

In the first congressional hearing on torture since the release of Bush administration memos that provided the legal justification for torture, Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the CIA's abusive techniques were "ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida." According to Soufan, his own nonviolent interrogation of an al-Qaida suspect was quickly yielding valuable, actionable intelligence -- until the CIA intervened.

Soufan was with the FBI on March 28, 2002, when the United States captured its first suspected al-Qaida operative after 9/11, a man named Abu Zubaydah, held at a secret location overseas. Soufan had investigated terrorism cases dating back to the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, and he was one of the first experts called after Zubaydah's captur <snip/>

ETA

Zubaydah had been injured during his capture, and Soufan's team arranged for medical care and continued talking to the prisoner. Within the next few days, Soufan made one of the most significant intelligence breakthroughs of the so-called war on terror. He learned from Zubaydah that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind behind the attacks on 9/11.

Then, however, a CIA interrogation team from Washington led by a contractor arrived at the secret location. Zubaydah was stripped naked and the contractor began a series of coercive, abusive interrogations, based on Cold War-era communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. During the Korean War, for example, Chinese interrogators employed the measures to get captured American pilots to make false confessions. "The new techniques did not produce results, as Abu Zubaydah shut down and stopped talking," Soufan explained. "After a few days of getting no information, and after repeated inquiries from D.C. asking why all of a sudden no information was being transmitted ... we again were given control of the interrogation."<snip/>
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themusicteacher said:
Torture does not work and is immoral, end of story. Darth Cheney, STFU or, better yet, let's string you up by your testicles, put leaches on you, give you dysentery, waterboard you and beat you until you admit to rigging the 1918 World Series and planning an attack on the local Chuck E Cheese.
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Or offer a choice of Cake or Death <<=== NSFW
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ImaginalDisc said:
False premise, false conclusion.

Yes, let's just say WWII was the most ethical in history, despite deliberate massacre of civilians by both sides, IQ testing soldiers to send the dumbest onto the beaches of Normandy and the ever controvertial topic of nuclear weapons.
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Panhead56 said:
most ethical???
As an military history nerd with an european (Norwegian) perspective, I must say that I cannot remember ever having stumbled over a claim that WWII was fought in a special ethical way, and far from "the most ethical". So how this can be "generally regarded" I don't understand. But it may be different in the US??
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I agree that WWII probably isn't "the most ethical" war in all senses. I think it probably is the most popular war in the English-speaking world, because there is a consensus that the people we were fighting against were bad guys. Also, they started it. So, "popular" and "good casus belli"
 
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Puppycow said:
I agree that WWII probably isn't "the most ethical" war in all senses. I think it probably is the most popular war in the English-speaking world, because there is a consensus that the people we were fighting against were bad guys. Also, they started it. So, "popular" and "good casus belli"
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And... they lost...

History is written by the victors survivors
 
themusicteacher said:
Torture does not work and is immoral, end of story. Darth Cheney, STFU or, better yet, let's string you up by your testicles, put leaches on you, give you dysentery, waterboard you and beat you until you admit to rigging the 1918 World Series and planning an attack on the local Chuck E Cheese.
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So, torturing KSM is immoral, but torturing Cheney would be OK. Got it.
 
Puppycow said:
So, torturing KSM is immoral, but torturing Cheney would be OK. Got it.
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Sorry, I forgot to push the "make Puppycow understand I was being sarcastic" button but thanks for trying to put it in context of the entire statement in light of what Dead-eye Dick has been saying for the past several years about torture. Allow me to translate:

If Dick thinks those things aren't torture, he shouldn't be afraid of it but would likely find that, once started, those things hurt...a lot and would likely cause him to say anything the torturer wants him to say (lies, all) to get it to stop.

I was being ironical.:boggled:

Then again, perhaps you were, too.
 
Doghouse Reilly said:
Thanks for that. Any evidence though that the soldiers who would have been participating in ASTP were MORE likely to end up on the front lines?
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Where do you think the "infantry" was, especially in light of the specific manpower needs of the Normandy invasion?

Infantry, almost by definition, is on the front line. You don't need infantry in the rear echelon.
 
oldhat said:
Re: Torture Helped Us Win WW2

No, it didn't...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100502492.html

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners' cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Blunt criticism of modern enemy interrogations was a common refrain at the ceremonies held beside the Potomac River near Alexandria. Across the river, President Bush defended his administration's methods of detaining and questioning terrorism suspects during an Oval Office appearance.

Several of the veterans, all men in their 80s and 90s, denounced the controversial techniques. And when the time came for them to accept honors from the Army's Freedom Team Salute, one veteran refused, citing his opposition to the war in Iraq and procedures that have been used at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

"I feel like the military is using us to say, 'We did spooky stuff then, so it's okay to do it now,' " said Arno Mayer, 81, a professor of European history at Princeton University

More...
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I'm not sure what the 2006 Fort Hunt article represents as far as WWII interrogations, never mind what their significance is to the CIA interrogations at GITMO. Henry Kolm, the now 93 year-old former interrogator at Fort Hunt, was questioning Rudolph Hess when his country had already unconditionally surrendered.


"The information we were able to get from prisoners was certainly not – as far as I know – because any of them were tortured or even mistreated. Unless the little practical joke that Captain Iwanowski liked to play on them could be called mistreatment,” Kohn writes.

“Iwanowski had been born and raised in Ohio and knew only the few words of Russian he had learned from his parents, but he sure looked Russian. (Especially when he wore the uniform of a Russian officer.) His ‘office,’ when the occasion called for it, was deep underground in what had been the ammunition bunkers. ‘Uncooperative’ German prisoners were told that the Americans were giving up on them and were turning them over to the Russians: one glance at Ivanowski’s ugly Mongolian face, lit-up with a theatrical colored spot light, waiting at the bottom of the steep, wet, moss-covered, concrete stairs, slapping his riding crop against his boots, with the recorded sound effects of groans and screams of agony, was usually all it took for a prisoner to want to talk to the ‘nice Americans.’ ”

Ret. Maj. Arnold Kohn's remembrances of his time at Fort Hunt ( the recollections not deemed important for The Washington Post to include in their article) are not so benign as Mr. Kolm's.

This article was not about the goings-on at Fort Hunt during WWII as much as it was about providing these three or four guys a political platform to rail against the three detainees waterboarded by the CIA.
 
Lonewulf said:
Don't forget the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese citizens.
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Actually Japanese-Americans and Nisei. It would be prudent to not have Japanese citizens running around on U.S. soil when we were fighting them in the South Pacific, China/Burma/India, The Philippines etc. They were also internment camps, not concentration camps. They didn't do slave labor or have to surrender their gold teeth.
 
gumboot said:
The entire article is a fiction. Most of the double-agents used by the Allies turned themselves in the moment they arrived in the UK. In fact, none of the key German spies used for the Fortitude misinformation campaigns were German - most of them came from German-occupied territories, hated the Germans, and had volunteered to act as German spies specifically so they could be double agents.

One agent, a Spaniard called Juan Pujol, actually offered to act as a spy for the British in 1940 but his offer was refused so he volunteered to be a spy for the Germans, got sent to the UK, and immediately offered himself to the British again.

Part of the reason for this is that the German intelligence service - the Abwehr - were lead by one Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, an ardent anti-Nazi, who actively aided the allies. He hand-picked non-Nazis as his key staff, except for one whom he selected as a Nazi to keep the illusion of loyalty. The Abwehr were in fact involved in numerous attempts to assassinate Hitler. Canaris sent many of his agents to England with the express mission of becoming double agents for the British (effectively making them triple agents).

It's ironic, actually. The claim is made that even in this "most ethical of wars" we had to resort to the immoral for victory. The reality is that the very moral nature of our cause ensured that many of the "enemy" including the head of their intelligence agency, were on our side.

Wilhelm Canaris did everything he could to defeat the Nazi regime and their plans, even "recruiting" Jews and sending them on "missions" so they could escape persecution. He risked himself countless times to save allied agents. Eventually his actions drew suspicion and he was removed from his position. After the July 20 plot failed (Canaris couldn't take part as he was under house arrest) evidence was uncovered of at least 15 other plots against Hitler that Canaris had orchestrated, and on April 9, 1945 he was executed at Flossenbürg concentration camp.

After the war his subordinates testified to his courage, and his name appears on a memorial to members of the German resistance.

So, was it immoral torture that enabled us to use German intelligence agents against the Nazi regime? No. It was the righteousness of our cause.

The success of the WW2 allies in turning German agents is a perfect example of why we must, at all times, adhere to the principles of righteousness, justice, and morality. Even in war. Especially in war.
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May I recommend the Book "Codename Tricycle - The True Story of the Second World War's Most Extraordinary Double Agent (Dusko Popov)"

It mentions Pujol, in discussing other people who were determined to work against the Nazis.
 
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