Little known WWII story....

[THE PILGRIM]

Gen. Robert Cardenas, American Hero

I get some Email from Gen. Cardenas on one of my military loops.
You are probably thinking who? When Chuck Yeager dropped out of that B-29, Bob Cardenas was flying the B-29. He also flew the YB-49.
On 3/18/44 he was flying a B-24 he shot down over Germany. He tried to get to Switzerland, but bailed out in Germany and swam across a lake to Switzerland. There he joined other Allied airmen in an interment camp.
Later he checked out Swiss pilots in B-24s and B-17s which had landed in Switzerland.
Then with help he escaped and got back to England. He also did a bunch of things after that! Including test flying captured German planes including the ME-262.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cardenas

 

[therevjay]

There is a lot of unknown stories of ww2.

Has anyone heard of the Ustase? It was a Croatian fascist regime in ww2 and their Jasenovac concentration camp. No one has ever heard of it but these guys were worse then the Nazis they emulated. Guards competed in who can kill the most prisoners. Some guards kills numbered in the thousands. Sadistic torture. It is estimated that they killed at least a 100k people. Their camp was considered the most brutal out of all camps in Europe. A German general visiting the prison said "....This camp has reached the hight of hideousness. .."

And yet no one hears about it

I've read about the camp, and the Ustase. I've also read that several SS officers were horrified at how the prisoners were killed. If it upset people like that I don't even want to know any more about it.

 

[rwsmith]

When word started getting out....

Morally, there's nothing to choose between Hitler, Stalin and the Japanese militarists (no single dictator).

It's a matter of Charles Manson versus Jeffrey Dahmer, versus Little Nicky Scarfo.

People emphatically stated that there was no way the Germans or Japanese could do such things because they were too cultured and civilized.

 

[reddogge]

In reading "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by Wm Shirer he mentioned the Nazis had exclusive dinner parties for high up officers and their wives and high ups in the party and after dinner for entertainment they would go out on the veranda and have a shooting gallery. Except the targets were Jewish prisoners.

How sick was that?

 

[HOUSTON RICK]

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "

 

[rwsmith]

I can't say I 'like' this....

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "

I didn't want to 'like' this one, but thanks for elucidating. Words just can't convey it.

Update: I just looked into it and 'Nanking', the documentary I started this thread with was based on Iris Chang's book.

 

[Onomea]

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters...." Ya know, I don't believe that. Find me a man on this forum who has a daughter who will say it is conceivable.

I will say that, of course, the "Rape of Nanking" was an atrocity.

By the way, the Japanese have apologized for their role in WWII quite a few times. Here is one list: List of war apology statements issued by Japan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Here we are, what, nearly 70 years later... Seems to me, time to move forward.

 

[cmort666]

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

I was on usenet soc.culture.japan at the time and it was interesting to see the Japanese ultra-rightwingers... and Western neo-Nazis pretending to be Japanese trying to "debunk" the book. As usual, they only made themselves look like bigger jackasses.

 

[Arik]

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang may she rest in peace. The research arguably drove her crazy and she never recovered and ultimately committed suicide about 10 years ago:

"The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000-80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, and nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practices, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks and burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of 'bestial machinery.' "

I didn't want to type this in my original post but this is basically what the Ustase did in the concentration camp. Use kids as bayonet practice. Infants would be tossed in the air and the guard would try to land it on a bayonet all the wile taking bets on how many attempts it would take. Other guards had throat cutting competitions. One guard killed over a 1000 people in one night. Another guard killed a man slowly by cutting off body parts piece by piece for refusing to acknowledge his buddy as a saint.

What people do to each other is just repulsive.

 

[JH1951]

What people do to each other is just repulsive.

My thoughts exactly. We never cease to amaze me.

 

[armenius]

The Rape of Nanking was the greatest unpublicized atrocities in recent years until Chang's excellent book .I have been aware of this since I was about five years old and saw a Movietone News showing Jap soldiers throwing a baby into the air and catching it on their bayonet tips,and an abandoned infant left in a rail yard.These images were burned in my memory,therefore I bought the book when it came out.
The atrocities were so bad a Nazi working with Seimens Xray asked Hitler to intervene.There is a monument to him and he has been called the Chinese Schindler.
Now we have a new problem,is it time for a new Crusade?

 

[-db-]

I don't put much stock in the babies bayoneted tales. You can find that particular claim made about any and every enemy anyone's ever faced for at least the past century. So far in this thread alone we've got the Ustaše and the Japs doing it and everyone's heard the Nazis supposedly did it. If you Google the topic, it goes back to WWI when Germans supposedly did it to Belgian babies, a gruesome bit of British propaganda. The claim has also been made against the Russians in WWII. The Khmer Rouge also supposedly did it. As recently as 1990 the same tale was told about the Iraqis in Kuwait. And so on...

Start adding up every army that's ever bayoneted babies and it ends up being all of them. It's all bogus.

 

[armenius]

Perhaps the film was early photos hoping?I have seen the identical scenes in documentaries .

 

[goldenlight]

From an American perspective, the Japs and the Nazis are everyone's favorite boogeymen for obvious reasons, but the brutality and scale of the Russian communists' (and their eastern Euro cohorts) crimes make Unit 731 and T4 look like childplay. Dig deeper than Wikipedia and find out what the NKVD used to get up to, for starters.

Josef Stalin is generally credited with killing 10 million MORE people than Hitler. Hitler, about 40 million; Stalin, about 50 million. The truly horrible thing is that a huge number of that 50 million were Russian citizens. People who Stalin though MIGHT, at some time, become a threat to him.

At one point, Stalin ordered that everyone who wore glasses be killed. His 'reasoning', if you can call it that, was that people who wore glasses must be doing so because they 'damaged' their eyes from reading books. Stalin didn't like people with any significant amount of education. They werew a threat to him. So he ordered that they be killed.

Even Hitler was not that insane.

 

[cmort666]

At one point, Stalin ordered that everyone who wore glasses be killed. His 'reasoning', if you can call it that, was that people who wore glasses must be doing so because they 'damaged' their eyes from reading books. Stalin didn't like people with any significant amount of education. They werew a threat to him. So he ordered that they be killed.

Completely and utterly false.

Look at a random sampling of photographs of Soviet citizens, both workers and higher ups. Eye glasses are common.

You're confusing Stalin with Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge dictator of Cambodia who created a Luddite police state.

Stalin slaughtered millions of people, frequently on no more basis than a parking ticket quota; but for wearing glasses? Nope.

 

[Snapping Twig]

The heavyweight and undisputed champion mass murder was and still is...

Mao.

He is responsible for an estimated 77 million.

In any event, I'm delighted in the knowledge that hitler was a drug addict and this horrible weakness allowed him illusions of adequacy and led to his over riding his generals and war planners - shortening the war through error.

 

[cmort666]

Regarding the "Stalin killed people for wearing glasses" claim:

Lavrenti Beria

Beria was head of the Soviet secret police after Nikolai Yezhov was removed and executed by Stalin. He was the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1953.

He survived Stalin, only to be killed at the behest of Khruschev.

Clearly spectacles weren't much of a hindrance to his career.

 

[ibewbull]

My keyboard is SNAFU so links to research below.

Stalag Wisconsin: Inside WWII Prisoner-of-War Camps - Book

War Against The Weak - Home Page


The information in these links may change your life.
I was amazed at the lost and manipulated I was taught.

Eugenics for one thing.

 

[Smoke]

Deaf people regard Alexander Graham Bell as we regard Hitler.

Bell believed that Deafs should be sterilized, forcibly if necessary, placed in institutions and not allowed to marry hearing people so that the "deaf gene" could be bred out of humanity.

I can sum all of human history up in one sentence
"Human beings are evil"

 

[Smoke]

Start adding up every army that's ever bayoneted babies and it ends up being all of them. It's all bogus.

Or it's all true