Rosenthal Iwo flag pic

[imarangemaster]

Back on the topic of the German POWs here, they were frequently loaned out to older people in the community to work farms, and often stayed on and married American girls. The hard corps Nazis (SS, etc.) were segregated and kept in high security, but the rank and file had it pretty well. Not surprising as at that time, Americans of German extraction was the single largest Anglo Saxon group in American. Irish was second, by the way.

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[DaveHH]

One guy I worked with flew the spotter plane directing guns onto Tarawa. He said that after about 10 minutes you couldn't even see the island. The Iwo Jima guys all said one thing: there were so many people crammed on that island that every time the Japanese fired a weapon, it hit somebody. What a lot of people fail to realize was that the attacking force going into Iwo Jima had trained for months, many months, to take that one island. When the took off, they had everything they needed in the way of weapons, supplies, medical care and food in one powerful task force. Once they left Australia, they didn't stop for anything, even when a Marine fell off the ship.

[imarangemaster]

We have had our own issues, but it still pales to the atrocities of Stalin (80 million of his own dead), Hitler, and Tojo. Their crimes were on a biblical scale. We only seem to have occasional lapses on individual scale. Mai Lai can not be compared to Bataan death march. We too, are only human. We do as a country, though, tend to take the moral high road.

My favorite quote:

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell ...