Yup. Not allowed. I recall an incident from around 20 years ago where a US Navy Captain, given the choice of which port to spend Christmas, let the crew vote on it. Word got back to the Navy and he was relieved of duty. The military is NOT a democracy.
In practice, what I would do is to have the Officer issuing the order be very specific, and respectfully mention any reservations I had about the order. In almost all cases, he would be very thankful that I had brought up issues that he had not noticed or known about
Excellent. Neal Stephenson, in Cryptonomicon (WWII-era story) had a slightly different take, where this didnât happen:
âThis âsir, yes sirâ business, which would probably sound like horseshit to any civilian in his right mind, makes sense to Shaftoe and to the officers in a deep and important way. Like a lot of others, Shaftoe had trouble with military etiquette at first. He soaked up quite a bit of it growing up in a military family, but living the life was a different matter. Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process. The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order Iâm not going to bother you with any of the detailsâand your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officerâs shoulders by the subordinateâs unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.â
That is one of my favorite books. And another thing about orders, when an Officer or NCO declines to follow an order, and convinces others including subordinates to also disobey, we start wandering into the territory of âincitement to mutinyâ, which is punishable by death even in peacetime circumstances.
I somehow fail to grasp why someone would willingly submit to such a barbaric system.
That oath is only as honorable as the things you have to do because of it. Taking the oath does not absolve anyone of responsibility.
If you had reason to believe it would be a good thing, but it turned out not to be: time to admit youâve made a mistake and to get out at the next opportunity. If you still have reason to believe that the good things outweigh the bad things: thatâs great, keep going.
But please donât hide behind your orders. History has taught us that itâs not a very good excuse.
Well, people do have doubts. The people involved have not explained any action they took to any independent investigation. And the Pentagon completely squandered any credibility they might have had by coming up with several contradictory made-up excuses during the first few days after the incident.
Or, to make up an analogy:
Someone gets run over by a car. The driver says, âHe owed me money!â. Police look at him suspiciously. The driver then changes his story: âHe had a gun!â, then realizes that the police would have found that gun, and changes his story again: âIt was an accident!â. The driver then reviews videos from his own dashcam, which he wonât show to anyone else, and then concludes: âI really did nothing wrong, it was just an accident. Accidents happen. But Iâll try to drive more carefully in the future.â
Would you believe that driver, or would you suspect heâs hiding something?
Not anymore, unless you count the âwaiting for their turn in the incineratorâ pile a stockpile. Most of them have heavy internal corrosion which makes them difficult to use or to destroy without killing people down wind.
Well, the plan was to drop it if Japan didnât surrender first. We certainly wouldnât have dropped it after they surrendered, that would have looked really bad. Iâm at a loss for what sort of plan you think we should have had. More leaflets that they didnât read? No, we didnât really expect them to surrender because they had spent years immersed in anti-surrender propaganda and their civilians had at times (Okinawa iirc) thrown themselves off of cliffs en masse rather than surrender. So no, we werenât planning on winning that easily. Yes, we wanted to know the relative effectiveness of the bomb types because we were planning on making more and dropping them during the invasion.
Thatâs exactly what I did to come to my conclusion.
The problem with Nazi crimes is that some of them pale in comparison to the others. So when I say something was ânot widespreadâ, that is a relative term. If found several accounts of family members being harassed by police or arrested. I have found no accounts of family members being formally sentenced to death or killed outright (but we know that âbeing arrestedâ by the Nazis could lead to death, especially late in the war).
They arrested relatives of partisan, resistance fighters and political dissidents (Count Stauffenbergâs family being among the most well-known victims). In some areas, the threat of arrest was used against the families of deserters (for exampe Franz Thaler in South Tyrol).
As for deserters, about 30,000 deserters were sentenced to death, 23,000 were actually executed. Their families were not killed. The total number of deserters is estimated at 350,000-400,000.
By now, thereâs a monument in Vienna to honor deserters from the Wehrmacht. And there are still no reports of killed relatives. And the people who fight the political fights necessary to get a monument erected right in front of important government buildings are not the kind of people who would try to hide anything like that.
I donât know, warn at least the government about the deliberate extermination of civilians by the hundreds of thousands using a never-seen-before weapon? Wait more than three fucking days before killing another 100,000 civilians? Drop the first bomb on a military target and give them time to figure out what would happen if dropped on a city center?
And then of course there are the philosophical questions. If youâve been attacked and youâre fighting a âjust warâ, how many more innocent lives is it right to sacrifice in order to get an unconditional surrender rather than just a conditional one?
I bow to your superior research over my anecdotal comment based on what Germans have told me.
I have before on Boingboing cited Ritter von Thoma, who decided to surrender to Montgomery because the war was lost, and once a war was lost there was no justification for any further casualties. I donât have heroes (cf Brechtâs comment) but I admire von Thoma.
