TheWilhelm Gustloff: A disaster history would like to forget

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The relevant factor is not "civilian ship" or "war ship", but hospital ship or not. It could be well argued that the III Haag Convention of 1899 has become Ius Cogens in 1945. If this is the case the Soviet Union, would had to maintain the rules of this convention - even if the Soviet Union was not a signatory power.

The said convention puts hospital ships under special protection, but only under certain conditions: The particular ship must be communicated to all to be in this function, shall not have any military function and must be subject to the right of a search by the other power. This was not the case with the Wilhelm Gustloff (which was de-jure a military ship) nor with the Lusitania in World War I.

What exactly is your POINT Dussel?





ruveyn you're a PUNK. By your logic I could argue that the attack on Pearl Harbor was NOT an outrage but perfectly legit from a legal P.O.V. even though it was an intentional act of war. Most of those killed where naval servicemen and not civilians and it was even logical from the Japanese perspective to cripple/disable the US pacific fleet. The war against Germany had ALREADY been WON! Comparing the sinking of this ship to bombing a factory with a nursery on its rooftop is pretty pathetic.

The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff was an act of supreme cowardice on behalf of a spineless submarine captain with no balls whatsoever.

The point is that international law protects in a war certain types of ships: mainly hospital ships, which are declared and communicated as such and under certain circumstances. None of those criteria were meet in the case of Wilhelm Gustloff; therefore it was a legitimate target. The sinking does not constitute a war crime.



No - Japan was in breach of international law. The Hague Convention III, Opening of Hostilities, of 1907 declares that actual hostilities can be only open after a formal declaration of war is communicated to the hostile state. Japan declared war some hours after (!) Pearl Harbor. Therefore it was a breach of international law, because Japan and the USA are signatory powers.

Maybe he did not have balls, but he had torpedoes and his orders. Your moral indignation is totally irrelevant. In real life sh*t happens and in war even more so. War is a nasty business. You really should get used to that.

Read Wm. T. Sherman's letter to the city fathers of Richmond on the nature and purpose of war.

Now, once again: What is war all about? Answer: killing the enemy and busting up his infrastructure and assets. The purest and most complete form of war is wiping out the enemy to the last man, woman and child. However, war rarely goes that far.

Robert E. Lee once said at Fredricksburg that it is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow to like it.

ruveyn

There were lots of other brutalities commited by the allies that have been largly air brushed from history as well.

What about the bombing of Hamburg? A city that was indescriminatly bombed by allied plains causing massive civilian casualties that was also a largly socialist city that had not supported hitler at all.

Terrible things happend to civilions on both sides during the war and that is worth remembering

Hamburg was full of Nazis. You might say that "Bomber" Harris cooked a lot of Hamburgers one fine night. Since the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi it was well that Hamburg and Dresden were put to the torch. The Germans sowed the wind when they elected Hitler as Chancellor. Eventually they reaped the whirlwind. They lived by the sword and eventually perished by the sword.

Remember there are no "innocent" civilians. Who do you think works in the factories to make the weapons of war? Civilians. Who bears the male children to become soldiers? Civilians. Who cheers the troops into battle? Civilians.

The same goes for all the Japanese civilians. They obeyed their god-emperor and they payed the price for their obedience.

In a war sh*t happens and it flows downhill rapidly.

ruveyn

But there was only a very small amount of citezens in Hamburg that actually supported Hitler, they were much more supportive of the communists. So they didn't vote for Hitler and were killed anyway, not all germans were nazis but the allies made no such distinctions.

I'm not trying to say that it was entirly wrong of the allies, and certainly nothing was done to Germany that wasn't first done to Britain but sometimes people from the allied countries tend to forget that the german people suffered greatly too and they were not all Nazis.

Hmm not likely to happen. One thing you should know is Russia doesn't aplogise for anything. Secondly it was meant to have gone through several reforms during the soviet era, so it has already divorced itself from previous baggage.

Say an independent sate such as Estonia want to take down Stalin statue. Putin personally gets involved. Organised gangs of ethic Russians start rioting, which is what happens.

Russia does not apologise and it doesn't take criticism.

^ Well that was what i had roughly said <.< oh well... But yeah, if you need to find out more, go and seek information about the Nachis, which are the Putinian youths <.< I read they were responsible for a net attack on a sattelite country of Russia when said country tried to get closer to the europeans. <.< (i think it was one of the Est/Lest/Litu-a/onia)

I could also point to the current president of Ukraine (viktor outchenkto? urk, i can't spell it at all) who was most likely poisoned by the Russians to make him lose the elections (in favor of the pro-kremlin party) the first time he ever represented himself. Poor guy got completly disfigured but he still won, heard he had to be injected with doses of the antidote every few hours... (i'm not sure if he still has to do that, i recently read he's got problems with the pro-kremlin russians of his country...)

Last edited by phil777 on 28 Apr 2009, 1:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Russia is STILL much weaker than the US and feels quite threatened by NATO expansion in terms of the Missile Defense Shield.
You're wrong if you think there arent diplomatic ways to coerce Russia into compliance about something like this.




OOOOOOOOH! Mr tough guy, eh?
I could care less about William T Sherman and Robert E Lee's thoughts on war BTW.

Hal... If you don't know ruveyn's background after much time here, then you should know he needs to be taken with a grain of salt.... =/

QFT

they have much bigger and more obvious things to appologise for, but let's face it- they never will.

That is just wrong - "War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfil our will." (Clausewitz)

The goal of a war is not necessarily the destruction of the enemy, but to force him to fulfil something he would without force. Even World War II can be definied this way: The allied goal was to stop the German aggression ones-for-all (see e.g. the speech of Chamberlain on 03 Sep. 1939 in the House of Commons, informing the House about the State of War).

Such radical goals are in warfare the exception. The most wars in modern history (since ca. 1500) had very precisely defined and limited goals.



You will hardly find an example (except the mad policy of the Hitler-Regime in eastern Europe and the War of the Palatine Succession) after the Middle Ages. If wars became extreme brutal against the civilian population than this mostly a civil war (classical examples: the suppression of Northern Rebellion by Elizabeth I, the English Civil War, the suppression of Jacobian Rebellions in Scotland, the Huguenot War in France, the Vendée War in France, the Spanish Civil War, the Russian Civil War and the Thirty Years' War).



This does not make wars less horrible, but the horror is not the goal, but a means. To quote Clausewitz again: "If the wars of civilised people are less cruel and destructive than those of savages, the difference arises from the social condition both of states in themselves and in their relations to each other. Out of this social condition and its relations war arises, and by it war is subjected to conditions, is controlled and modified. But these things do not belong to war itself; they are only given conditions; and to introduce into the philosophy of war itself a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. "

Evolution of war topic

War was not enough. This is why guerrilla warfare evolved, and then terror became the ultimate weapon. It is much more successful and can be prolonged more efficiently than conventional battles.

He's an idiot. Trying so hard to sound tough since he hasnt fired a shot in a war in more than 60 years....

As much as I despise ruveyn's obvious unconcern for anybody but himself and his family it should be noted that those in political power from the USA which proclaims freedom and civil rights and refuses to properly prosecute the political thugs who approve of torture down to the smaller ugly fry like Mugabe and his corrupt like, all are in perfect accord with ruveyn.