Thread by @ZachWeiner

From Chuck Yeager's autobiography:

Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall [1944] our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort.

Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population.

Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people.

It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it. If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody refused, as I recall) that person would have probably been court-martialed.

I remember sitting next to Bochkay at the briefing and whispering to him "If we're gonna do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side. That's still my view.

By definition, war is immoral; there is no such thing as a clean war.

Once armies are engaged, war is total. We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between "innocent civilians" and its military machine.

The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops. And, because German industry was wrecked by constant bombing, munitions-making was now a cottage industry, dispersed across the country in hundreds of homes and neighborhood factories,

which was the British excuse for staging carpet bombing and fire bombing attacks on civilian targets. In war, the military will seldom hesitate to hit civilians if they are in the way, or to target them purposely for various strategic reasons.

That's been true in every war that has ever been fought and will be fought. That is the savage nature of war itself. I'm certainly not proud of that particular strafing mission against civilians. But it is there, on the record and in my memory.