Would you say you were afraid to turn your back on kids because they might kill you?
From a personal point of view, I wouldn't care if someone was 14 or 84, if they had a gun and were trying to kill me, I'd be scared of them!
Would we? No, I do not think so. I believe that there were/are many in the U.K. and U.S. that believe we would have been better off joining the Germans (not me I hasten to add).
From a personal point of view, I wouldn't care if someone was 14 or 84, if they had a gun and were trying to kill me, I'd be scared of them!
I don't get what you are saying, they weren't afraid of them, they just sent them to POW camps! Not like the SS.
From a personal point of view, I wouldn't care if someone was 14 or 84, if they had a gun and were trying to kill me, I'd be scared of them!
Just a gun pointing at you is one thing but a fanatical bunch of troops took Lord of the Flies to a NEW height.
Very interesting gentlemen! reminds me of this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Happened_Here
and this;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Went_the_Day_Well?
On this thread people have talked about how the movie expresses frustration that the Germans fought on even when the outcome of the war was clear to see, but I'm thinking that that might have been the best result.
After all, if the German leadership had been able to negotiate a surrender earlier in the war, all of those fanatical SS and HY wouldn't have got themselves killed, and would have spent the immediate post-war period as terrorists and suicide bombers, I guess.
Interesting. I just recently a picked up a book called Resisting the Nazi Invader by Arthur Ward which discusses the creation of the Auxiliary Units (Auxunits) by the British in the early days of the war. The Auxunits, recruited largely from the Home Guard, were trained to conduct guerilla warfare in the event of a German invasion and occupation of Britain.
The Hitler Youth would have done it too. :doh:
As a kid, it never made sense to me how easily the Germans and Japanese submitted to allied control without a great fuss.
Now that I know far more about the nature of totalitarian/dictatorship cultures, it's in a way more confusing why we didn't have an insurgency in Germany and Japan for a long time after WW2 was over. But then again, you're not dealing with a theocracy like in the Philippines after the Span-Am war or the Middle East at pretty much any time in history...
Japan had kind of both of those. The Emperor was a dictator and god like. Dictatorships are easy to take over as the people are used to acquiescing to force. Theocracies are harder as they have two layers of dictators in the sense that you have a dictator AND a religious heirarchy to take over. Usually the religious heirarchy will never acquiesce to outside forces unless they are of the same mindset.
Another major factor is that aside from fanatics, the general population had had their belief in the lies of the leaders totally shattered by Allied air power. Food and fuel shortages reduced the will to resist dramatically, to the point in Japan where street parties were thrown when the 'God- Emperor' made his radio broadcast that 10,000 year empire was finished- not very patriotic of them.