Monday, April 10, 2006

Armchair Generals

Perhaps living in an antipodean environment has caused too much blood to rush to the heads of some wise and over educated folks in New Zealand; or, maybe the rules of war have been rewritten since the last time I checked.

These sages of battle say a soldier awarded the Victorian Cross during WWII should have been considered a war criminal, as he donned a German uniform to infiltrate and kill several German snipers. I seem to recall the main reason not to don an enemy uniform was the penalty of automatically being classified a spy, if captured, and shot.

Now if donning an enemy uniform is a war crime would this also apply to that favorite Navel warfare tactic of flying a false color (flying the enemy flag on your warship so as to close the distance before opening fire)?

It's good to know that in these dangerous times there are still those people who can find the time and effort to make trouble for a brave soldier who has passed away and can not raise his voice in his own defense.

1 Comments:

Blogger Diligent Blogger said...

Political correctness seeks to triumph again!

For the record, Alfred Clive Hulme dressed in a paratroop smock to kill snipers, not unarmed civilians. If caught, he would have been treated as a spy and shot, which is allowable by the Geneva Connection. He engaged in a calculated risk, much the same as Otto Skorzeny's SS commandos in the Battle of the Bulge who infilitrated American lines in GI uniforms and were armed with M-1 rifles, Thompson sub-machine guns, and baseball trivia.

Skorzeny (a noted fencer, by the way) was tried at Nuremburg as a war criminal and acquitted on the grounds he was using tactics similar to those of the allies and had not been involved in shooting prisoners.

12:37 PM  

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