#3 delft
It is remarkable how different the conduct of military with a similar background can be. During the liberation of the Netherlands in 1944-45 the Poles and Canadians had the reputation of waging their lives to reconnoiter places that might still be occupied by the German army and try to spare the lives and property of the people living there, while the US army had the reputation of pouting artillery fire into anything suspicious without such concerns.
In the next war the Netherlands was concerned with, the war against newly independent Indonesia, war crimes were committed that could not be acknowledged until a short while ago. There were complaints at the time, in the mid-fifties a cousin of my mother's said this unit had taken part in terrible things he didn't want to talk about, in 1969 someone wrote a book about those war crimes that led to a temporally loud discussion that died down pretty soon but only this year the Dutch government lost a court case in The Hague that forced them to pay compensation to survivors of a massacre on Java in 1949. In the late '90's a short article in my newspaper by a veteran from that war described how he was send out as an officer with a small detachment to retrieve the administration of a forestry company on Sumatra. He took prisoner a small number of members of the Indonesian army but because he had too few men to guard them he had them shot. Quite clearly he didn't recognize that he was a war criminal and the newspaper didn't notice it either.
So this presentation by Mr. Pressfield compares "the" US military ethics with those of antique Greeks and with the Japanese army of WWI and WWII, and wonders about those strange beings in South Asia with but little comprehension of the differences between Western armies at a given time and as they developed through time. It was altogether a rather shallow presentation, although not as shallow as paintgun's remarks.
在相似的战争背景下,军队行为准则的差异可能是显著的。在1944年到1945年的荷兰解放战争中,波兰人和加拿大人愿意不惜性命去侦察德占区并尽力保全当地民众和财产,而美军则不管这么多,他们会向任何可疑物体投掷炮火。
在涉及荷兰的另一场战争,即反印尼独立战争中,存在战争犯罪,但一直到最近才被承认。当时就存在谴责之声,上世纪50年代,我母亲的一位表亲说军队干的一些龌龊事连他也不愿意提起。1969年有人写了一本关于那些战争犯罪的书并引发了一场大讨论,然而很快便消弭于无声。直到今年荷兰政府在海牙法庭的一场官司中败诉,并被判向1949年爪哇大屠杀的幸存者支付赔偿金。上世纪90年代末,一位老兵的一篇短文刊登在我的报纸上,文章描述他作为一个军官如何带领一支小分队收回苏门答腊岛的一家林业公司的管理权。他俘虏过一些印尼士兵,但是因为没有足够看守兵力,他射杀了那些俘虏。很显然,他并未意识到他是一个战犯,报纸同样也没有意识到这一点。
普莱斯菲尔德先生的演讲比较了美军、古希腊人和一战二战日军的军队行为准则,对奇怪的南亚人感到疑惑,但对同一时期西方军队之间的差异和发展缺乏了解。总体来说,这是一个十分肤浅的演讲,虽然比paintgun(2楼的那位仁兄)的言论稍好一些。