Fraternization between one's own troops and enemy civilians has been a command problem and a soldier's pastime as long as armies have existed. Odysseus knew it; the Chinese reputedly frustrated successive invasions by diligently practicing it; US General Headquarters in the German Rhineland after World War I forbade it but quartered troops on civilians-with predictable results. It was bound to be a problem again in World War II, if only because the Army regarded itself as the guardian of the health and morals of the young men placed in its hands.
For SHAEF, in the summer of 1944, fraternization seemed to be among the least urgent questions of the war, one which could wait until the fighting was finished. There the matter rested for another month, until 22 September when two cables arrived, one from Washington, the other from Moscow.
American troops had begun occupying a small corner of western Germany southwest of Aachen eleven days before, and the press photographers had filed pictures showing German civilians, generally women and small children, greeting US soldiers.
http://www.army.mil/cmh/books/wwii/Occ-GY/images/p08.jpgUS troops and German civilians (September 1944).
This and a few other pictures like it provoked the President's order against fraternization.
Therewith began what for the next ten months the staffs strove manfully to depict as a righteous, even noble, enterprise - the SHAEF nonfraternization policy - about which the troops, unconcerned with presidential or public opinion, preferred to develop various and mostly scurrilous ideas of their own.
No comments:
Post a Comment