Richard Reeves: How should we treat enemy prisoners?

[struggle4progress]

By Staff Report
Universal Press Syndicate
Posted Jun 08, 2009 @ 11:34 PM

BERLIN — On Sept. 14, 1948, Capt. Kenneth Slaker of Lincoln, Neb., was making his sixth flight as a Berlin Airlift pilot, bringing food and fuel to the World War II enemy capital, which was blockaded on land and on rivers by the army of the Soviet Union. The United States Air Force, along with Great Britain’s Royal Air Force, was trying to keep alive more than 2 million people in West Berlin, which was surrounded by East Germany and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of the Red Army ...

“The Russians say they will shoot down any aircraft that strays out of the Berlin air corridor, and that captured airlift pilots will be treated as spies. ... If you should find yourself down in the Soviet Zone, we cannot say that you should turn yourself in, or that you should try to escape. There is no published or firm policy on this, and it would be up to you or your crew as to what action you would want to take.”

Both engines of Slaker’s C-47 cut out over East Germany’s Harz mountains. He and his co-pilot, Lt. Clarence Steber of Memphis, Tenn., bailed out less a thousand feet above the ground. Slaker landed in a potato field and was unconscious for four or five hours. He heard German voices when he came to at dawn and crawled into a forest. Standing and turning, in great pain, he walked straight into an East German farmer ...

“Americans were good to me,” Schnabel said in workable English. “Americans capture me, save my leg.” He pulled up his pants to show scars on his leg, which had been put back together in an American field hospital after he was run over by a tank. To make a long story short, Schnabel recruited friends and smuggled Slaker across the border to an American checkpoint in West Berlin ...

http://www.sj-r.com/opinions/x986603048/Richard-Reeves-How-should-we-treat-enemy-prisoners

[Kerrytravelers]

1. Reeves was one of my J-School professors.

I can't get the article to open up. I'll try again later.

Thanks for the link. :hi:

[struggle4progress]

2. Just double-checked the link: it works for me, though I closed the tab before

all comments loaded; you might want to check whether your browser setting wait for full loading before display

[Cobalt-60]

3. Like they've won a game show

That would have all but the most fanatical lining up to surrender.
Mistreating prisoners seriously reinforces the enemy will to fight.

[GTurck]

4. Unfortunately...

The conflicts of the 21st century have a strong hint of racism and religious intolerance. The Germans caught up in WWII were white and European so there was the ethic of kinship. Hitler was a master of exploiting differences in order to get and keep power.
I don't think this is right. I just know that most see the color of the skin or the position for prayer before they see anything else. Even in the deeply integrated city I live in; in schools, houses, worship, and sports; the separation and suspicion goes on. We no longer help automatically because we suspect and distrust and assume so much that it seems strategic to ignore the pain of those we are not immediately connected with.
Sad but also Tragic, it puts us on a road many say they don't want to follow but do not have the will to resist..