This is off the subject of the thread and must beg pardon of the OP, but there is no better evidence than first hand experience and so I must relate it.

In '78 or '79 I had a summer job with the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station in the Cotton Lab at the far end of Agronomy Row. I worked the cotton plots in the Brazos River bottom and elsewhere around campus and worked under Dr. Byrd. For the life of me can't remember his first name, but he was educated at Clemson and was breeding cotton for disease resistance and to shorten the growing season so two crops could be grown in South Texas each year. Dr. Byrd was a fighter pilot in the war and shot down over German occupied territory and captured. He was held by the Germans until his prison camp was overrun or "liberated" by the Red Army. He much preferred the treatment of his German captors than the Soviets despite the fact that the prison population were Allies of the Soviets. He had little love for Russians.

That's because the Russians basically held US POWs hostage until certain aspects of the end of the war were worked out.

HollywoodBQ said:

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Thanks for sharing that. The difference in the Japanese tour versus the English language tour reminds me, earlier this year, I saw the movie Hacksaw Ridge become available on the in-flight entertainment on Qantas, United, Etihad, etc. I took a trip to Japan where I flew JAL. Needless to say, Hacksaw Ridge was NOT available on the JAL flight.

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LOL....I remember sitting in the Movenpick hotel outside Frankfurt watching Hogan's Heroes in German with English subtitles. Just always thought it was a strange thing to be on German television....not cable.

jickyjack1 said:

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That's what I was trying to get across -- probably ineffectually. "Race hatred" is a handy go-to for sociologists, but in the case of the Japanese before and during WWII there was no distinction -- they hated everybody who wasn't specifically Japanese.

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To this day the Japanese refer to Koreans as "dog faces".

That is interesting, I'm surprised they would show it as it would violate their laws against displaying Nazi regalia. Wonder what they did when Major Hochstedder came on scene with his swastika armband?

BQ78 said:

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That is interesting, I'm surprised they would show it as it would violate their laws against displaying Nazi regalia. Wonder what they did when Major Hochstedder came on scene with his swastika armband?

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This link says it was first broadcast in Germany in 1974 on the Armed Services network and then quickly removed...and then was generally broadcast starting in the 1990's. This link even says it became a smash hit in the 1990's and was titled "A Cage of Heroes." The link says since it was illegal to say "Heil HitIer" in Germany they would always dub in "How High Is Your Corn?" when the show had a "Heil Hitler"....that's pretty damn funny. I saw it there in 1999:

http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html


As surprising as watching Hogan's Heroes in Germany in German with English subtitles was.....it wasn't nearly as surprising as discovering a huge portion of the actors that played Germans in Hogan's Heroes were Jewish. The following Germans in Hogan's Heroes were played by Jewish actors:

Sargent Schultz (John Banner) was Jewish.

General Burkhalter (Leon Askin) was Jewish.

Major Hochstetter (Howard Caine) was Jewish. Changed name from Cohen to Caine.

Corporal LeBeau (Robert Clary) was Jewish....didn't play a German of course.

Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) was half Jewish....father German Jew, mother Catholic.

Robert Clary (LeBeau) was probably the most amazing of them....he was put in a German concentration camp and still had the tattoo on his arm. His parents and four siblings were murdered by the Nazis.

Most of John Banner's (Schultz's) family including his parents perished in the Nazi death camps. He escaped by immigrating to the US in 1935.

Leon Askin (Burkhalter) was beaten senseless by the SS and then escaped to Paris and immigrated to the US in 1940. He spent a short time in a prison camp in France before immigrating. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz.

Howard Caine (Hochstetter) immigrated with parents from Germany in 1939 to New York at the age of 13 and eventually served in the US Navy. He spoke 32 foreign languages and dialects.

This fascinates me: http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html

HarleySpoon said:

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BQ78 said:

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That is interesting, I'm surprised they would show it as it would violate their laws against displaying Nazi regalia. Wonder what they did when Major Hochstedder came on scene with his swastika armband?

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This link says it was first broadcast in Germany in 1974 on the Armed Services network and then quickly removed...and then was generally broadcast starting in the 1990's. This link even says it became a smash hit in the 1990's and was titled "A Cage of Heroes." The link says since it was illegal to say "Heil HitIer" in Germany they would always dub in "How High Is Your Corn?" when the show had a "Heil Hitler"....that's pretty damn funny. I saw it there in 1999:

http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html


As surprising as watching Hogan's Heroes in Germany in German with English subtitles was.....it wasn't nearly as surprising as discovering a huge portion of the actors that played Germans in Hogan's Heroes were Jewish. The following Germans in Hogan's Heroes were played by Jewish actors:

Sargent Schultz (John Banner) was Jewish.

General Burkhalter (Leon Askin) was Jewish.

Major Hochstetter (Howard Caine) was Jewish. Changed name from Cohen to Caine.

Corporal LeBeau (Robert Clary) was Jewish....didn't play a German of course.

Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) was half Jewish....father German Jew, mother Catholic.

Robert Clary (LeBeau) was probably the most amazing of them....he was put in a German concentration camp and still had the tattoo on his arm. His parents and four siblings were murdered by the Nazis.

Most of John Banner's (Schultz's) family including his parents perished in the Nazi death camps. He escaped by immigrating to the US in 1935.

Leon Askin (Burkhalter) was beaten senseless by the SS and then escaped to Paris and immigrated to the US in 1940. He spent a short time in a prison camp in France before immigrating. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz.

Howard Caine (Hochstetter) immigrated with parents from Germany in 1939 to New York at the age of 13 and eventually served in the US Navy. He spoke 32 foreign languages and dialects.

This fascinates me: http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html

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This is mind-boggling. First-class sleuthmanship on the part of someone; if the poster, congratulations (given that it is factual).

BQ78 said:

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That is interesting, I'm surprised they would show it as it would violate their laws against displaying Nazi regalia. Wonder what they did when Major Hochstedder came on scene with his swastika armband?

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It is legal to use Nazi symbols and stuff as long as it is in a museum, educational, media or historical manner. Germany has made quite a number of WW2 flicks that OBVIOUSLY use the proper period pieces. See Das Boot and Downfall as an example. Great flicks, smash hits in Germany and completely accurate in the use of all manner of nazi regalia and symbols. It is illegal for the general public to own, display or use certain symbols of the Third Reich.
Hell...Valkerie was filmed in Berlin and they used a lot of the actual sites fully decked out just like they were in 1944 for the filming.

Duh, that makes sense, although I do know that media does not include computer games as some companies have to take some symbols out of the software to sell in Germany (swastika, lightening SS and skull and crossbones. The last one is funny because that was a Prussian symbol that goes back at least to the Napoleonic Wars).

HarleySpoon said:

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BQ78 said:

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That is interesting, I'm surprised they would show it as it would violate their laws against displaying Nazi regalia. Wonder what they did when Major Hochstedder came on scene with his swastika armband?

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This link says it was first broadcast in Germany in 1974 on the Armed Services network and then quickly removed...and then was generally broadcast starting in the 1990's. This link even says it became a smash hit in the 1990's and was titled "A Cage of Heroes." The link says since it was illegal to say "Heil HitIer" in Germany they would always dub in "How High Is Your Corn?" when the show had a "Heil Hitler"....that's pretty damn funny. I saw it there in 1999:

http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html


As surprising as watching Hogan's Heroes in Germany in German with English subtitles was.....it wasn't nearly as surprising as discovering a huge portion of the actors that played Germans in Hogan's Heroes were Jewish. The following Germans in Hogan's Heroes were played by Jewish actors:

Sargent Schultz (John Banner) was Jewish.

General Burkhalter (Leon Askin) was Jewish.

Major Hochstetter (Howard Caine) was Jewish. Changed name from Cohen to Caine.

Corporal LeBeau (Robert Clary) was Jewish....didn't play a German of course.

Colonel Klink (Werner Klemperer) was half Jewish....father German Jew, mother Catholic.

Robert Clary (LeBeau) was probably the most amazing of them....he was put in a German concentration camp and still had the tattoo on his arm. His parents and four siblings were murdered by the Nazis.

Most of John Banner's (Schultz's) family including his parents perished in the Nazi death camps. He escaped by immigrating to the US in 1935.

Leon Askin (Burkhalter) was beaten senseless by the SS and then escaped to Paris and immigrated to the US in 1940. He spent a short time in a prison camp in France before immigrating. His parents were murdered in Auschwitz.

Howard Caine (Hochstetter) immigrated with parents from Germany in 1939 to New York at the age of 13 and eventually served in the US Navy. He spoke 32 foreign languages and dialects.

This fascinates me: http://propagander.tripod.com/hh.html

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I think Howard Caine was born in Tennessee and had a Southern accent. His family moved to New York from Tennessee when he was 13. Still a pretty cool dude, though.

I don't know, the Germans shooting millions of jews (and non jews in so called anti partisan actions) alongside the starving of over 3 million Soviet POWs and a million citizens of Leningrad is pretty brutal.

It is an intetesting thing that the mass rapes of Germans (and non-Germans) by the Soviets on their way to Berlin are well accounted for in the historiography. German rapes in the East, however, are much less studied. In fact, they are barely mentioned in the history, including archives. We know the these rapes where very common in ghettoes, before and during shootings, at the platforms while the jews awaited deportation, and when they had reached the camps but accounts are far less prevalent. There was a law forbidding this type of behaviour but since the victims werr almost always murdered afterwards, it held no real weight.

I'm not sure any one tops the other. The Rape of Nanking and Korean Comfort Women, numerous massacres of entire villages in the Philippines accompanied by mass gang rapes are just a few things that are right up there.

Yeah, I think JR69 is right. Kinda depends on your perspective. Many terrible things happened. My father in law survived Lenigrad. I'm pretty sure he would tell you the Germans were far worse than the Soviets.

I bet he had some unimaginable experiences. Over a two year siege, a million civilian deaths, millions more military deaths. Not to mention it was one of the most important battles of the War.

Relative pilot in new Guinea where if a pilot went missing he was considered executed by the Japs !

Bought one of the first Toyotas !

RPag, I am sure he did. I never met him, but my wife has told me some of the things he experienced. WWII was terrible for the US, but for those who lived in the places it was fought it was beyond what I can imagine.

The Japanese got a lot of attention because of Pearl Harbor, The Phillipines, and the less well remembered Savo Island (near Guadacanal).
Times are given in this report, which makes it shocking so much damage was done to our Navy so quickly:

As I stated in another post my dad was in New Guinea and Guam and one of his brothers was captured in the Philippines and survived the Bataan death march and was a prisoner of war in Japan until Japan surrendered. There were four brothers total. The oldest went to the Aleutian Islands and the youngest was in the 3rd Army in the European theater. They all made it home alive. They would talk amongst themselves about the war and they would always agree that the Japanese were a different animal than the Germans. They all agreed that the japs had no mercy and were fanatics in killing because they believed they were a superior race and everyone else was beneath them.
My dad said that the Japs believed that you were a coward if you were captured and they had absolutely no human respect for prisoners. My uncle in the European theater said the Germans were feared but that they did at least seemed to respect Americans, whereas the Japanese loathed them.

Late comer to this thread, as well.

I've been wanting to ask this question for a long time, since we're still on the Pacific topic. My understanding of the competing plans between MacArthur and Nimitz after the Marshall island campaign, was Nimitz wanted to go after Formosa (Taiwan) to cut off ALL the sea lanes to Japan. That would have left Japan getting supplies from Korea and northern China. I know MacArthur wanted Pelilieu invaded,, which was a gawd awful battle, because of potential aircraft issues towards a Phillipine invasion.

Of course, Roosevelt went with MacArthur's plan for the Phillipines. For this particular topic, I'm not as educated, but it seems to me Formosa would have been much better strategically, and probably casualties. However, I very much look forward to any comments.

Securing 14,000 square miles vs. 5 would be my guess. Although those 5 miles are probably only rivaled by Iwo Jima in casualties per square mile.

BQ78 said:

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Securing 14,000 square miles vs. 5 would be my guess. Although those 5 miles are probably only rivaled by Iwo Jima in casualties per square mile.

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I've taken a bigger interest in that decision in the last 10 years.

I now can't wait for some of our military guys, along with Titan, etc., to chime in.

Aggies Revenge said:

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That's because the Russians basically held US POWs hostage until certain aspects of the end of the war were worked out.

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1946 - Navy - San Diego - talked to two weathermen who were in Vladivostak , Russia during the war. They said nothing about being mistreated while there. They told some funny stories about stocky Russian Army women who lived in same barracks as the men ! And Army officers ordering men to do things a normal officer would never do !