Morality of War and Occupation

The opinions expressed herein are not the opinion of any government or any individuals, other than myself. They are based on my own experiences in life. A note on Liberation: “Occupation is not Liberation”. No matter how much the befuddled minds of some soldiery believe they actually liberate an invaded nation from some dictator. Following the end of a war. And that that nation that is being occupied is ‘grateful’ for those Liberators. That is a myth. In particular if an invasion and occupation follows periods (even years) of relentless fire bombing of the citizens of that occupied territory – the citizens being the last survivors of an unarmed civilian population. In other words, mostly women and children. This is exactly what had happened in Germany after the end of World War 2.

May 1945 was the end of that war. The first occupiers that entered was the US Army arriving in our home towns with their tanks. They took the best houses for their Army brass, throwing the owners into the street. Then creating high razor wire fencing around their camp just across from our house at the edge of the city, where they had their army camp and kitchens. And lots of food. For us children, thin as string beans, food would have been nice, but not so. They chased their big guard dogs at us when we only came close to that fence. Where does morality come into the picture ? Was it the Nuremberg trials when they hung by the neck the big Nazi Bonzen (justifiably so) ? Or was it the way they behaved against the children (including yours truly) ? Or was it the way they dug up all the graves in the German graveyards with their bulldozers and piled up protection walls against the edge of the city, where they had built their US Army camps, to be safe (from some starving children). Or was it the way they tried to teach us play football with the skulls dug out of those German graves ? And where does morality come in when those same Allied armies pretended to have liberated all countries in Europe ?  Our sector had the British occupation. That lasted at least until the end of the century.

Having left Europe in 1974 for North America, I returned in 2005 the first time to my home town. By that time all had been re-built. This is a long time ago. Lucky for me, for all those years I tried to forget the 4 year long horrors of being bombed. Until I ended up in the ‘British Colonies’. Where memories of WW2 are being kept alive by the war veterans. They fondly remember. Who knows, they would like to see themselves again in their air planes, dropping bombs ?  I figure it would be more beneficial to clean up Germany of the hundreds of thousands of unexploded bombs still under the ground, ‘garbage of war’ left behind for others to clean up.

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