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As usual, just a brief note on today’s reading:
First of all, my comments yesterday about the unrealistic survival rate among Hellman’s 2060 young warriors apply perhaps even more to this chapter.
Secondly, Alma 57 reminds me of my father’s accounts of the Second World War, during which he spent the most significant part of his time attached to the Eleventh Armored Division, a part of General George Patton’s Third Army.
He was stationed in High Wycombe, between London and Oxford, and then was sent over to the Continent shortly after D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge. He served in Belgium, Germany, Austria, and France. There were times, he told me, that they were moving forward so rapidly that handling German prisoners became an enormous problem. Sadly, he said, some American units simply shot those who surrendered. They didn’t know what to do with them, couldn’t trust them behind advancing Allied lines, lacked the manpower to process and guard them . . . His own unit, he always told me, didn’t shoot prisoners. But he knew that it was occasionally done. A tragedy. As General Sherman famously said, “War is Hell.”
Posted from Newport Beach, California
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