Ben Mackintyre's book about Colditz reveals that Douglas Bader was actually a pretty unpleasant character, often tolerated by his peers at best, and often loathed by his subordinates whom he would bully. He was an outstanding pilot though and was given the benefit of the doubt as a result.
To his credit, after the war he used his fame to become a vocal advocate for the disabled. I remember him as such when I was young.
In WW2, Admiral Ernest King is reputed to have said "When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches."
There were a lot of utter assholes and bullies around at that time. There were huge inter department feuds that resulted in many thousands of deaths. Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!
As General Jacob L. Devers wrote to French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in 1945, "For many months we have fought together, often on the same side."
Bader was also a chief proponent of the Big Wing, essentially flying a shitload of planes together in formation. The Big Wing which is usually considered [1] to have been a worse strategy than the more dynamic, targeted and integrated Dowding System [2] with which it competed.
He might have been a good pilot and a determined escapee, but I don't think history has much else to say in his favour.
Ben is unlikely to ever be surpassed as in author in my eyes. I have read most of his books, well listened on Audible during my commutes, and they are all amazing. He quite literally brings history to life for me. His descriptions make you feel like you're there. Prisoners of the Castle is the one I haven't really had interest in but I'll probably get it at some point just to hear them all.
Thoroughly enjoyable book. I read it recently and, having gone to a UK boarding school, the stories about life in Colditz being treated like a high stakes public (posh) boarding school by the British Officers rang very true to me.
Mackintyre is a professional historian whose work is based on first hand accounts so I think it can be taken as fact that many found him unpleasant.
I found it interesting & surprising to read of his character, having (possibly like you) only known of him as a war hero, and thought it worth mentioning, that's all.
So no need for vicarious outrage. As you say, he's long gone.
We had one member of the troup that did the real life Great Escape visit our school.
He handed out schematics of how they tunneled, their day-to-day logistics, communication with the outside, etc.
It was a really fun talk, but it ended on a somber note where those who did not escape were later punished/executed in revenge for the escape taking place.
In this context, someone asked him, "was it worth it?" and all I remember about his answer was him gripping his handout and giving a monosyllable reply.
I suspect that’s intentional. Not all writing aims to be pleasurable, and I suspect the parent comment illustrates the gut-wrenching pain of war really well.
What do I as a reader want the answer to be? That it was worth the death of his friends? That he’d rather they never tried? No answer is happy, and I think that’s somewhat the point. Even more touching if it’s a true story, life is sometimes so poetic it hurts.
Some writing conveys beliefs, and other writing makes readers think about their own beliefs. Both are valid, and the resulting effect may not even follow the writer’s intention. I feel this writing mostly makes me interrogate my own beliefs.
Making these types of choices are done in the interest of the writer and not the reader. Plain and simple. It draws intrigue, sometimes undue. This is one of them. That doesn't make it bad or wrong to do. As a side note, generally, its not a good idea to take make stances defending someone acting in self-interest with the guise of "art".
> Making these types of choices are done in the interest of the writer and not the reader.
I strongly disagree with this. There is a long tradition of leaving obvious questions unanswered, to force a reader to really think. A short list of some that have affected my life:
- “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost (it’s unclear whether “good fences make good neighbors” is supposed to be the true belief of the author, or the inaccurate belief of a character)
- the book of Job in the Old Testament (it’s ambiguous whether Job ever sins and turns his back on God, despite that very question initiating the conflict)
- “Jesus Christ Superstar” (doesn’t actually take a stance on whether the character of Jesus in the musical was good or not, leaving the viewer to think about it for themselves)
I know there are many others, because we explicitly studied this technique in class. It’s like the Socratic method for writing.
> “art”
My understanding of art as a field is that it largely attempts to remove any restrictions over what can or can’t be art. I think the scare quotes is contrary to that. Idk, I tend to believe most experts in their fields, including artists.
I see "gripping his handout" as significantly more vivid than the uttered response -- which OP confirms to have eluded their memory. That's the story: the teller's reaction to the question was more visceral than verbal.
Sometimes the truth is inherently dramatic. I know that when I've responded in that way -- clenching and mumbling a monosyllable -- the clench is honest, the syllable may be effectively meaningless.
And leaves no meaningful result. Without knowing why he gripped the paper it is purely left for interpretation and does not guide to a singular understanding.
The emotional response is meaningful. A desire for simple truths is helpful in some areas of life. Handling ambiguity and complexity is helpful in others. Applying an engineering mindset to emotion is a sure route to madness. Perhaps you could look at the story as a koan, and it might aggravate you less.
If it's the famous Great Escape about which the movie was made, only three men who escaped made it to freedom, and just eleven more were recaptured and survived to the end of the war— the rest of the 77 were shot. Of those 14 survivors, most passed away in the 1990s, so if you actually did get to meet one, that's pretty neat!
Certainly the depiction in the movie is that it was absolutely worth it to the men; maybe in practical terms it resulted in greater loss of life than just cooperating with the confinement, but there is value to the spirit in resisting evil that goes beyond the simple imperative to stay alive.
I bet you're right about there being value to the spirit. But if I understand correctly escape was also regarded as a matter of duty. By escaping you would not only stand a chance of making it back to Allied lines, but you would also tie up German forces searching for you.
Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev (1916 – 2001) was a Soviet and Russian military pilot who became a Soviet fighter ace during World War II despite becoming a double amputee.
I have not read the book (Reach for the Sky - 1954) nor watched the movie (Reach for the Sky - 1956) in a very very long time however I recall them fondly from my youth.
A film was made about his life a few years after the war, which is now something of a classic, if only due to how often it is shown on British Television. It was a flop in the US though.
Pilots (that are not bombers) were treated pretty well by the Luftwaffe. Aviators share a comraderie that's hard to describe (very similar to software engineers in a sense).
In a remarkable piece of wartime diplomacy, German General Adolf Galland notified the RAF of Bader's missing right prosthetic leg and, with Hermann Goring's permission, the RAF was given safe passage to parachute in a replacement prosthetic in a mission called 'Operation Leg'.
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities. It's the same logic which says that seriously injuring enemy infantry is more effective than killing them, since one dead soldier is one soldier who can't fight but one injured soldier is one soldier who can't fight plus one or two who won't fight because they're evacuating him.
(Of course, Russian doctrine now seems to counter this by leaving seriously injured soldiers on the battlefield to bleed out...)
I don't think that was the rationale. For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
For example Senior officers at Colditz often received parcels from home with stuff like cigars, chocolates, and spirits, sometimes through diplomatic agreements with the Red Cross. This was at a time when Germany in general was starving. They also organised theatre productions, orchestras, and even sports events.
I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war - similar to how long before this Naval captains from opposing sides often shared meals after a ship's surrender. It is hard to imagine now.
> I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war
It's worth noting that this kind of civility only happened on the Western front. The eastern front was a no-mercy teeth out display of barbarism. I think the conclusion is that it's to the era, but the specific conditions that resulted in acts like this.
For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
It wasn't just senior and important figures; POW camps generally were nothing like the Nazi concentration camps since their purpose was internment rather than extermination. People tend to conflate the two, partly because Eisenhower worked so hard to document the Holocaust.
Western POWs were also treated better than Eastern POWs out of fear of retaliation; the USSR wasn't a signatory to the Geneva conventions and already treated their prisoners poorly so there was no similar incentive to treat Eastern POWs well. (And also layered on top of this was Nazi ideology about Slavic races being inferior etc.)
Germans and British were on friendly terms even right before war. When the Germans completed a test flight of a new aircraft (forget which), British engineers sent a "congrats!" message to them to which the Germans were appreciative.
if somehow two Western European countries ended up at war with each other in this era, POWs would be almost certainly be afforded better respect than ever.
I feel like it's more about the relationship between the two countries than it is the era. the royal family of Britain is and was quite German, and the Nazis believed that the English were part of the Aryan race.
The older cadre of Luftwaffe officers considered themselves better than other forces, with a generational code of honor/conduct. Their highest award was the Knight's Cross, so the concept of chivalry among peers was at least a thing. Aircrew POW camps were run by grounded/older Luftwaffe officers.
Goring was a WWI ace, Galland was younger so maybe eager to please.
Göring also directly gave the order to Reinhard Heydrich to organize the "Final Solution of the Jew Question" aka Holocaust. So code of honor with strict restriction to "Aryan" pilots of the western Allies, if at all, IMO.
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities.
Or, sometimes human beings act like human beings, even in a time of war. In addition to the whole notion of "rules of war," there are thousands of examples, but here is a famous one:
> The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.
People like you and me work at computers all day and start to think like computers and try to use "logic" to explain everything away. Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.
Christmas truces were absolutely a thing, but they came about through the action of troops on the ground -- and the commanding officers absolutely hated them.
I'm not condoning it at all, but I think it's easy to understand why commanding officers didn't like their troops fraternizing with the enemy. If GI John and Soldat Hans share a coffee and a cigarette together, and perhaps even a pleasant chat, they will quickly come to realize that both of them are human beings, with human feelings, a family worrying about them, children possibly, hopes and dreams, and so on. And once you are acutely aware that your enemy is just like you, only perhaps speaks a different language, you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.
I've never been in a war, and hope I never live to see myself in one, but the only way I can see one human viciously trying to kill another is by not thinking of their enemy as a human being, but rather just a thing.
Absolutely. They were described as "disastrous to morale" and units which had engaged in Christmas truces would routinely be moved to other parts of the front in order to avoid the issues you mention.
I'm not a military thinker, so I might well be off on this, but I'd say because that would usually results in a draw, whereas the commanding officers generally want to win so that they can achieve the overall plan set out by strategic command - and want to achieve a crushing victory from which the opponent cannot recover from.
I guess an army on the retreat who would favor an instant draw would favor the fraternizing, but generally by that point the winning army - including the soldiers - are not amenable to stop their advance and play a friendly game of football.
The morale of your troops is known. The morale of the opposing troops is suspected but not certain.
WW1 ended because the influenza epidemic was devastating the troops on both sides but neither side knew for certain how hard it was hitting the other side.
I don't know, I cannot accept in my head that in one part of Europe Nazis were shaving men, women and children to use their hair as industrial filling before throwing them in gas chambers by the thousands, but somewhere else Nazi general was gracious enough to allow British troops to airdrop a prosthetic leg for their pilot - they even remained friends after the war! I'm sorry but it just sounds like.....some kind of joke? Like it happened in a different reality than the one that happened in Europe at the time? Why was that general even allowed to visit the UK and not in prison? Oh that's right - because Churchil has personally advocated against prosecuting nazi generals because it would be "unsporstmanlike".
I'm sorry, I cannot enjoy this article in the spirit it was written in. I grew up next to Auschwitz and the idea of borderline friendly(sorry, "diplomatic") relationship with nazi forces makes me sick.
They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.
Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.
It makes the horrible things the Nazis did even more horrifying. It's easy to think of the Nazi regime as a pure, isolated evil, but when articles like this show that there was room for even a little humanity, it makes it clear how many individual choices for evil were made elsewhere every step of the way.
It makes more sense, if you consider that the Nazis did not really wanted to fight the british in the first place, but would have rather fought with them against the communist hordes in the east and the jews in general. Racism in the british empire was pretty established at that time, so it was not an outlandish goal.
Hitler was fine with the british empire oversea (white rule) while he ruled the continent..
But luckily the Nazis were really bad at diplomacy.
The reason the two co exist in the same regime is (awfully) that they didn’t consider Jews to be people while they considered the British worthy opponents. It’s horrible and disgusting but if one can wrap their head around the idea that a population can be indoctrinated into believing there are two levels of people (effectively people and not people) then Nazi Germany becomes more … comprehensible. The shockingness of it doesn’t go away though.
I thought Churchill was against the trials because he thought the Nazi leadership should just simply be executed or imprisoned for life without the bother of a trial? Churchill was very much a fan of unsportsmanlike behaviour, the more devious the trick the better in his view.
Humans are complex. If we want to be serious about preventing a re-occurrence of the Holocaust, we should remember that it was carried out by ordinary people like you or me. Even today, many - perhaps most - people will make excuses for any amount of evil as long as it's being done by their side.
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
----
To be clear, I'm personally of the "nazis need to be punched in the face" mindset, but I still love this quote. Life is nuanced and people are complex. Even Solzhenitsyn knew.
As a side-note, you can have a sense of honor, or even consider yourself a good person, and nevertheless murder pregnant women and children as part or your day job. They key is to not consider them as human beings or, alternatively, to consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good, e.g. by saving their soul.
Nazis (and Imperial Japan, and Crusaders, and plenty of others throughout history) made this possible at large scale by spending years of propaganda dehumanizing the "other".
Sadly, we're seeing a trend of doing the same alongside political lines these days. It's not yet as bad as Mein Kampf, but it's very, very worrying.
> consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good
I was surprised to read about Fritz Haber, the man who catalyzed nitrogen fertilizers and other "nice" things like mustard gas, that he was convinced that mustard gas is the humane solution for ending the war. Since WW1 would end faster from his perspective he was saving lives.
Almost perfectly mirrors the view that people dropping atomic bombs on Japan had.
Both horrible weapons, one used mainly on the battle field, the other on cities packed with civilians. Both deployed with the same "we're actually saving lives" attitude. Today only one is considered an atrocity almost everywhere in the world. The other still gets the same explanation as it did 8 decades ago.
I agree. But even as recently as last year almost half of Americans still believed dropping the nuclear bombs was justified, with half of these people being convinced that using them on cities was the best thing to do [0].
There’s probably some truth that many normal soldiers fighting for nazi germany were not aware of the full extent of the horrors at the time. I suspect many just ignored the evidence and believed they were in a traditional war like 1914, or colonial wars of the late 19th century.
Certainly when Germans were shown the concentration camps after the war they wouldn’t believe the evidence in front of them. They didn’t want to think about it during the war either.
Theres no excuse now of course.
It’s sickening that with the increased support of the far right across the west being so apparent today, that it’s the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz today.
The "soldier's honour" normally came from the Wehrmacht, professional army officers & soldiers who were very different (and considered themselves very different) to the SS divisions whose leadership were little more than Nazi sadists.
“Germany“ in the larger sense were the bad guys. And in the top ranks of the party there plenty of individuals who were definitely evil. But the regular military - from the foot soldier up to the generals - were just regular people fighting a war. They were no more or less cruel or honorable than their British counterparts.
Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war (after this operation) and its extend was not widely known on either side of the war; and any country takes great care that any war they are engaged in is framed as a just cause
> Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war
Kristallnacht was a year before the start of the war. The mass murders of Polish intelligentsia started immediately upon the invasion of Poland in 1939. Auschwitz received its first prisoners in the spring of 1940. While the formalizing of the "Final Solution" was a bit more than three years into the war (January of 1942), that is very disingenuous place to claim the holocaust "began".
Depending on how exactly you categorise Nazi atrocities, Aktion T4 (September 1939) could be considered the start of the Holocaust – putting the start point at 0 days into the war.
Maybe I shouldn't have written holocaust but "systematic mass-murder of all Jews". I assumed the intended meaning would be clear, but in retrospect I can see how it might offend. And I am open to arguments that this predates the "Final Solution" by up to six months, putting us closer to two years into the war.
But before that while there were events where thousands or tens of thousands were killed, the general policy was to intern people in camps. And while that is horrible enough to our modern morals (precisely because of the Nazi precedent) it was less abhorrent to people of that time. Otherwise the US would have hardly put Japanese-Americans in camps
No the policy was extermination of the Jews. Babi Yar, the destruction of Vilna, the murder of nameless villages now lost to us all took place from the very begining.
Both the straight and twisted path interpretations acknowledge that Hitlers intention was the destruction of European Jews, and that the Nazi state carried it out with little resistance with the fact widely, unmissibly known.
Please just delete both this whole comment and your "3 years into the war" paragraph as long as there is still time.
As an austrian it's clear you don't fully know what you are talking about.
It's ok to get something wrong sometimes, it's never ok to double down and start arguing because of it. Especially if the topic is the Holocaust!
> the general policy was to intern people in camps
This is so wrong it hurts.
All the people in the camps were still meant to soon die there, we are not talking refugee camps here. Comparing these to US Japanese Internment camps is quite troubeling too.
Ben Mackintyre's book about Colditz reveals that Douglas Bader was actually a pretty unpleasant character, often tolerated by his peers at best, and often loathed by his subordinates whom he would bully. He was an outstanding pilot though and was given the benefit of the doubt as a result.
To his credit, after the war he used his fame to become a vocal advocate for the disabled. I remember him as such when I was young.
In WW2, Admiral Ernest King is reputed to have said "When they get in trouble, they send for the sons of bitches."
There were a lot of utter assholes and bullies around at that time. There were huge inter department feuds that resulted in many thousands of deaths. Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!
>Part of why Eisenhower was a good supreme commander was that he could wrangle the assholes into at least not fighting each other!
That's a spicy take on the British.
(I kid, but the joke is in fact based in historical fact, managing relations with the British was a key reason he was given the job)
And the French.
As General Jacob L. Devers wrote to French General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny in 1945, "For many months we have fought together, often on the same side."
Bader was also a chief proponent of the Big Wing, essentially flying a shitload of planes together in formation. The Big Wing which is usually considered [1] to have been a worse strategy than the more dynamic, targeted and integrated Dowding System [2] with which it competed.
He might have been a good pilot and a determined escapee, but I don't think history has much else to say in his favour.
[1] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/battle-of-britain-big-wing-wa...
[2] https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-was-the-dowding-system
An extremely capable and heroic man. But also an out-and-out racist who was an unabashed supporter of apartheid Rhodesia. People are complicated.
Ben is unlikely to ever be surpassed as in author in my eyes. I have read most of his books, well listened on Audible during my commutes, and they are all amazing. He quite literally brings history to life for me. His descriptions make you feel like you're there. Prisoners of the Castle is the one I haven't really had interest in but I'll probably get it at some point just to hear them all.
Thoroughly enjoyable book. I read it recently and, having gone to a UK boarding school, the stories about life in Colditz being treated like a high stakes public (posh) boarding school by the British Officers rang very true to me.
Britain setup a holiday/prison camp for high-ranking german officers and bugged everything. It's a fascinating story..
https://www.amazon.com.au/Walls-Have-Ears-Intelligence-Opera...
Whereas bagging on a dead war hero due to something you read in a book is highly creditable behaviour
Mackintyre is a professional historian whose work is based on first hand accounts so I think it can be taken as fact that many found him unpleasant.
I found it interesting & surprising to read of his character, having (possibly like you) only known of him as a war hero, and thought it worth mentioning, that's all.
So no need for vicarious outrage. As you say, he's long gone.
We had one member of the troup that did the real life Great Escape visit our school.
He handed out schematics of how they tunneled, their day-to-day logistics, communication with the outside, etc.
It was a really fun talk, but it ended on a somber note where those who did not escape were later punished/executed in revenge for the escape taking place.
In this context, someone asked him, "was it worth it?" and all I remember about his answer was him gripping his handout and giving a monosyllable reply.
Both yes and no are one syllable. Your drawn out drama-incucing style of writing left a huge hanger that makes it unpleasurable.
I suspect that’s intentional. Not all writing aims to be pleasurable, and I suspect the parent comment illustrates the gut-wrenching pain of war really well.
What do I as a reader want the answer to be? That it was worth the death of his friends? That he’d rather they never tried? No answer is happy, and I think that’s somewhat the point. Even more touching if it’s a true story, life is sometimes so poetic it hurts.
> What do I as a reader want the answer to be?
Whatever he feels. Would he do it again?
Some writing conveys beliefs, and other writing makes readers think about their own beliefs. Both are valid, and the resulting effect may not even follow the writer’s intention. I feel this writing mostly makes me interrogate my own beliefs.
Making these types of choices are done in the interest of the writer and not the reader. Plain and simple. It draws intrigue, sometimes undue. This is one of them. That doesn't make it bad or wrong to do. As a side note, generally, its not a good idea to take make stances defending someone acting in self-interest with the guise of "art".
> Making these types of choices are done in the interest of the writer and not the reader.
I strongly disagree with this. There is a long tradition of leaving obvious questions unanswered, to force a reader to really think. A short list of some that have affected my life:
- “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost (it’s unclear whether “good fences make good neighbors” is supposed to be the true belief of the author, or the inaccurate belief of a character)
- the book of Job in the Old Testament (it’s ambiguous whether Job ever sins and turns his back on God, despite that very question initiating the conflict)
- “Jesus Christ Superstar” (doesn’t actually take a stance on whether the character of Jesus in the musical was good or not, leaving the viewer to think about it for themselves)
I know there are many others, because we explicitly studied this technique in class. It’s like the Socratic method for writing.
> “art”
My understanding of art as a field is that it largely attempts to remove any restrictions over what can or can’t be art. I think the scare quotes is contrary to that. Idk, I tend to believe most experts in their fields, including artists.
this is not one of those scenarios. The answer is clearly not obvious.
I see "gripping his handout" as significantly more vivid than the uttered response -- which OP confirms to have eluded their memory. That's the story: the teller's reaction to the question was more visceral than verbal.
Sometimes the truth is inherently dramatic. I know that when I've responded in that way -- clenching and mumbling a monosyllable -- the clench is honest, the syllable may be effectively meaningless.
And leaves no meaningful result. Without knowing why he gripped the paper it is purely left for interpretation and does not guide to a singular understanding.
The emotional response is meaningful. A desire for simple truths is helpful in some areas of life. Handling ambiguity and complexity is helpful in others. Applying an engineering mindset to emotion is a sure route to madness. Perhaps you could look at the story as a koan, and it might aggravate you less.
If it's the famous Great Escape about which the movie was made, only three men who escaped made it to freedom, and just eleven more were recaptured and survived to the end of the war— the rest of the 77 were shot. Of those 14 survivors, most passed away in the 1990s, so if you actually did get to meet one, that's pretty neat!
Certainly the depiction in the movie is that it was absolutely worth it to the men; maybe in practical terms it resulted in greater loss of life than just cooperating with the confinement, but there is value to the spirit in resisting evil that goes beyond the simple imperative to stay alive.
I bet you're right about there being value to the spirit. But if I understand correctly escape was also regarded as a matter of duty. By escaping you would not only stand a chance of making it back to Allied lines, but you would also tie up German forces searching for you.
What syllable?
I genuinely can't remember, but it left me feeling washed out.
I want to think it was "nuts"
Aleksey Petrovich Maresyev (1916 – 2001) was a Soviet and Russian military pilot who became a Soviet fighter ace during World War II despite becoming a double amputee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksey_Maresyev
Small note, the airdrop was to Saint-Omer, a Luftwaffe airbase in France not a castle. Bader was later imprisoned in Colditz Castle.
> Bader then used this leg to mount multiple escape attempts from various prisons
Oh, that reminds me of the prosthetic leg joke from 'Guardians of the Galaxy'. So it was a reference?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJfMSE_3iSc
I have not read the book (Reach for the Sky - 1954) nor watched the movie (Reach for the Sky - 1956) in a very very long time however I recall them fondly from my youth.
"Bader then used this leg to mount multiple escape attempts from various prisons"
Coming soon to Netflix...
A film was made about his life a few years after the war, which is now something of a classic, if only due to how often it is shown on British Television. It was a flop in the US though.
Probably because it didn’t have an American saving the day
The screenwriters could simply insert American characters into the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Escape_(film)
Pilots (that are not bombers) were treated pretty well by the Luftwaffe. Aviators share a comraderie that's hard to describe (very similar to software engineers in a sense).
This is an awesome story
In a remarkable piece of wartime diplomacy, German General Adolf Galland notified the RAF of Bader's missing right prosthetic leg and, with Hermann Goring's permission, the RAF was given safe passage to parachute in a replacement prosthetic in a mission called 'Operation Leg'.
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities. It's the same logic which says that seriously injuring enemy infantry is more effective than killing them, since one dead soldier is one soldier who can't fight but one injured soldier is one soldier who can't fight plus one or two who won't fight because they're evacuating him.
(Of course, Russian doctrine now seems to counter this by leaving seriously injured soldiers on the battlefield to bleed out...)
I don't think that was the rationale. For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
For example Senior officers at Colditz often received parcels from home with stuff like cigars, chocolates, and spirits, sometimes through diplomatic agreements with the Red Cross. This was at a time when Germany in general was starving. They also organised theatre productions, orchestras, and even sports events.
I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war - similar to how long before this Naval captains from opposing sides often shared meals after a ship's surrender. It is hard to imagine now.
> I think this is just a relic of a different era and a different code of war
It's worth noting that this kind of civility only happened on the Western front. The eastern front was a no-mercy teeth out display of barbarism. I think the conclusion is that it's to the era, but the specific conditions that resulted in acts like this.
For captured senior/important figures were given all kinds of affordances and gestures made which contrast shockingly with the conditions we know people endured in concentration camps.
It wasn't just senior and important figures; POW camps generally were nothing like the Nazi concentration camps since their purpose was internment rather than extermination. People tend to conflate the two, partly because Eisenhower worked so hard to document the Holocaust.
Western POWs were also treated better than Eastern POWs out of fear of retaliation; the USSR wasn't a signatory to the Geneva conventions and already treated their prisoners poorly so there was no similar incentive to treat Eastern POWs well. (And also layered on top of this was Nazi ideology about Slavic races being inferior etc.)
Germans and British were on friendly terms even right before war. When the Germans completed a test flight of a new aircraft (forget which), British engineers sent a "congrats!" message to them to which the Germans were appreciative.
if somehow two Western European countries ended up at war with each other in this era, POWs would be almost certainly be afforded better respect than ever.
I feel like it's more about the relationship between the two countries than it is the era. the royal family of Britain is and was quite German, and the Nazis believed that the English were part of the Aryan race.
The older cadre of Luftwaffe officers considered themselves better than other forces, with a generational code of honor/conduct. Their highest award was the Knight's Cross, so the concept of chivalry among peers was at least a thing. Aircrew POW camps were run by grounded/older Luftwaffe officers.
Goring was a WWI ace, Galland was younger so maybe eager to please.
At least towards the end of the war, Galland was not a fan of Göring (he was a ringleader of the Fighter Pilots' Revolt)
Göring also directly gave the order to Reinhard Heydrich to organize the "Final Solution of the Jew Question" aka Holocaust. So code of honor with strict restriction to "Aryan" pilots of the western Allies, if at all, IMO.
Not so remarkable when you consider that tying up RAF planes and burning their fuel on missions like this reduces their combat capabilities.
Or, sometimes human beings act like human beings, even in a time of war. In addition to the whole notion of "rules of war," there are thousands of examples, but here is a famous one:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
> The truces were not unique to the Christmas period and reflected a mood of "live and let live", where infantry close together would stop fighting and fraternise, engaging in conversation. In some sectors, there were occasional ceasefires to allow soldiers to go between the lines and recover wounded or dead comrades; in others, there was a tacit agreement not to shoot while men rested, exercised or worked in view of the enemy.
People like you and me work at computers all day and start to think like computers and try to use "logic" to explain everything away. Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.
Christmas truces were absolutely a thing, but they came about through the action of troops on the ground -- and the commanding officers absolutely hated them.
I'm not condoning it at all, but I think it's easy to understand why commanding officers didn't like their troops fraternizing with the enemy. If GI John and Soldat Hans share a coffee and a cigarette together, and perhaps even a pleasant chat, they will quickly come to realize that both of them are human beings, with human feelings, a family worrying about them, children possibly, hopes and dreams, and so on. And once you are acutely aware that your enemy is just like you, only perhaps speaks a different language, you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.
I've never been in a war, and hope I never live to see myself in one, but the only way I can see one human viciously trying to kill another is by not thinking of their enemy as a human being, but rather just a thing.
Absolutely. They were described as "disastrous to morale" and units which had engaged in Christmas truces would routinely be moved to other parts of the front in order to avoid the issues you mention.
> you are much-much less inclined to shoot them and stop being an efficient soldier.
But you also take the other side's soldiers out, in the same way. Why wouldn't commanding officers like that?
I'm not a military thinker, so I might well be off on this, but I'd say because that would usually results in a draw, whereas the commanding officers generally want to win so that they can achieve the overall plan set out by strategic command - and want to achieve a crushing victory from which the opponent cannot recover from.
I guess an army on the retreat who would favor an instant draw would favor the fraternizing, but generally by that point the winning army - including the soldiers - are not amenable to stop their advance and play a friendly game of football.
The morale of your troops is known. The morale of the opposing troops is suspected but not certain.
WW1 ended because the influenza epidemic was devastating the troops on both sides but neither side knew for certain how hard it was hitting the other side.
Ah, yes. Spanish flu: so-named because (neutral) Spain was one of the few countries not lying about whether they had it.
> Fortunately, there are real people in the real world who are free of our burdens.
You might be right about the general, who knows. But Goring? No, that man was definitely a computer.
[dead]
I don't know, I cannot accept in my head that in one part of Europe Nazis were shaving men, women and children to use their hair as industrial filling before throwing them in gas chambers by the thousands, but somewhere else Nazi general was gracious enough to allow British troops to airdrop a prosthetic leg for their pilot - they even remained friends after the war! I'm sorry but it just sounds like.....some kind of joke? Like it happened in a different reality than the one that happened in Europe at the time? Why was that general even allowed to visit the UK and not in prison? Oh that's right - because Churchil has personally advocated against prosecuting nazi generals because it would be "unsporstmanlike".
I'm sorry, I cannot enjoy this article in the spirit it was written in. I grew up next to Auschwitz and the idea of borderline friendly(sorry, "diplomatic") relationship with nazi forces makes me sick.
They maybe just forgot the extend of it. Don't forget that many don't even know the difference between the "normal" (already incredibly horrible and vile) concentration camps like Dachau and the pure extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka or Sobibor. The Brits and Americans only liberated the first kind, and it (mostly) wasn't their citizens who were gassed or shot by Einsatzgruppen.
Also doesn't help that some think it was only done and caused by the SS or Hitler / Himmler / Göring, as if there was no connection with the remaining government, the police or the Reichsbahn, and as if the Wannseekonferenz[1] and Reichskristallnacht[2] had never happened.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference, also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSNN5mnI2g
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht
It makes the horrible things the Nazis did even more horrifying. It's easy to think of the Nazi regime as a pure, isolated evil, but when articles like this show that there was room for even a little humanity, it makes it clear how many individual choices for evil were made elsewhere every step of the way.
It makes more sense, if you consider that the Nazis did not really wanted to fight the british in the first place, but would have rather fought with them against the communist hordes in the east and the jews in general. Racism in the british empire was pretty established at that time, so it was not an outlandish goal. Hitler was fine with the british empire oversea (white rule) while he ruled the continent..
But luckily the Nazis were really bad at diplomacy.
The reason the two co exist in the same regime is (awfully) that they didn’t consider Jews to be people while they considered the British worthy opponents. It’s horrible and disgusting but if one can wrap their head around the idea that a population can be indoctrinated into believing there are two levels of people (effectively people and not people) then Nazi Germany becomes more … comprehensible. The shockingness of it doesn’t go away though.
I thought Churchill was against the trials because he thought the Nazi leadership should just simply be executed or imprisoned for life without the bother of a trial? Churchill was very much a fan of unsportsmanlike behaviour, the more devious the trick the better in his view.
Humans are complex. If we want to be serious about preventing a re-occurrence of the Holocaust, we should remember that it was carried out by ordinary people like you or me. Even today, many - perhaps most - people will make excuses for any amount of evil as long as it's being done by their side.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
----
To be clear, I'm personally of the "nazis need to be punched in the face" mindset, but I still love this quote. Life is nuanced and people are complex. Even Solzhenitsyn knew.
As a side-note, you can have a sense of honor, or even consider yourself a good person, and nevertheless murder pregnant women and children as part or your day job. They key is to not consider them as human beings or, alternatively, to consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good, e.g. by saving their soul.
Nazis (and Imperial Japan, and Crusaders, and plenty of others throughout history) made this possible at large scale by spending years of propaganda dehumanizing the "other".
Sadly, we're seeing a trend of doing the same alongside political lines these days. It's not yet as bad as Mein Kampf, but it's very, very worrying.
> consider that you're somehow doing it for their own good
I was surprised to read about Fritz Haber, the man who catalyzed nitrogen fertilizers and other "nice" things like mustard gas, that he was convinced that mustard gas is the humane solution for ending the war. Since WW1 would end faster from his perspective he was saving lives.
Almost perfectly mirrors the view that people dropping atomic bombs on Japan had.
Both horrible weapons, one used mainly on the battle field, the other on cities packed with civilians. Both deployed with the same "we're actually saving lives" attitude. Today only one is considered an atrocity almost everywhere in the world. The other still gets the same explanation as it did 8 decades ago.
Which one is considered an attrocity? I'd argue both.
I agree. But even as recently as last year almost half of Americans still believed dropping the nuclear bombs was justified, with half of these people being convinced that using them on cities was the best thing to do [0].
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2024/08/what-do-americans-really-thi...
[dead]
There’s probably some truth that many normal soldiers fighting for nazi germany were not aware of the full extent of the horrors at the time. I suspect many just ignored the evidence and believed they were in a traditional war like 1914, or colonial wars of the late 19th century.
Certainly when Germans were shown the concentration camps after the war they wouldn’t believe the evidence in front of them. They didn’t want to think about it during the war either.
Theres no excuse now of course.
It’s sickening that with the increased support of the far right across the west being so apparent today, that it’s the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz today.
[flagged]
If you get bitten by flying bug, that's it. No escape.
I would love to live a carbon-neutral live, but giving up on flying - no way. An easy choice compared to those at war.
Bader willingly reentered the airforce, putting his life at risk, just to be able to fly.
On the German side, to get to fly at least prentend to be a Nazi. Without that, no flying.
Sacrifices have to be made to get airborn.
People are different from person to person and are complex and make different / sometimes even conflicting choices.
We see this when it comes to "meeting your heroes" too.
The "soldier's honour" normally came from the Wehrmacht, professional army officers & soldiers who were very different (and considered themselves very different) to the SS divisions whose leadership were little more than Nazi sadists.
The wehrmacht happily collaborated with SS units or engaged in actions such as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zambr%C3%B3w_massacre or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ciepiel%C3%B3w_massacre
“Germany“ in the larger sense were the bad guys. And in the top ranks of the party there plenty of individuals who were definitely evil. But the regular military - from the foot soldier up to the generals - were just regular people fighting a war. They were no more or less cruel or honorable than their British counterparts.
Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war (after this operation) and its extend was not widely known on either side of the war; and any country takes great care that any war they are engaged in is framed as a just cause
> Remember that the holocaust only started 3 years into the war
Kristallnacht was a year before the start of the war. The mass murders of Polish intelligentsia started immediately upon the invasion of Poland in 1939. Auschwitz received its first prisoners in the spring of 1940. While the formalizing of the "Final Solution" was a bit more than three years into the war (January of 1942), that is very disingenuous place to claim the holocaust "began".
Depending on how exactly you categorise Nazi atrocities, Aktion T4 (September 1939) could be considered the start of the Holocaust – putting the start point at 0 days into the war.
Maybe I shouldn't have written holocaust but "systematic mass-murder of all Jews". I assumed the intended meaning would be clear, but in retrospect I can see how it might offend. And I am open to arguments that this predates the "Final Solution" by up to six months, putting us closer to two years into the war.
But before that while there were events where thousands or tens of thousands were killed, the general policy was to intern people in camps. And while that is horrible enough to our modern morals (precisely because of the Nazi precedent) it was less abhorrent to people of that time. Otherwise the US would have hardly put Japanese-Americans in camps
No the policy was extermination of the Jews. Babi Yar, the destruction of Vilna, the murder of nameless villages now lost to us all took place from the very begining.
Both the straight and twisted path interpretations acknowledge that Hitlers intention was the destruction of European Jews, and that the Nazi state carried it out with little resistance with the fact widely, unmissibly known.
Please just delete both this whole comment and your "3 years into the war" paragraph as long as there is still time.
As an austrian it's clear you don't fully know what you are talking about.
It's ok to get something wrong sometimes, it's never ok to double down and start arguing because of it. Especially if the topic is the Holocaust!
> the general policy was to intern people in camps
This is so wrong it hurts.
All the people in the camps were still meant to soon die there, we are not talking refugee camps here. Comparing these to US Japanese Internment camps is quite troubeling too.
[flagged]