Dominick

Jul 30, 2014

I like when the narrator goes "This is where we came in!" It's almost like they realize how ridiculous this all is.

Twenty years from now the guards kid was fighting alright..against guerrilla fighters and North Vietnamese in South East Asia and they were going to lose that one.

Ahh, America..you always have to be fighting someone

and if you don't its the 1930's all over again! Didn't you know the Soviet Union is reforming and Putin want s to take away your freedom to shop at Walmart?!

Jeremy Bentham

Aug 2, 2014

Great movie! Being the jingoistic myrmidon that I am I thoroughly enjoyed it. I even have my own copy on DVD. They sure don’t make inspiring training films like that anymore. Of course that was made back in the days when Hollywood produced the training and propaganda movies for the Armed Forces and all the Liberals were completely in support of the country’s war effort. Along with this film I highly recommend watching the History Channel production of “Nazi Guerillas”, documenting the Nazi “Werewolf” guerilla movement, established by the Party to oppose Allied occupation of German Territory. “Nazi Guerillas” will provide the historical context in which “Your Job in Germany” was made; it was produced to prepare American soldiers for what they might face while serving with the occupation forces. As Bill Mauldin observed in one of his Willie and Joe Cartoons “I don’t think the Krauts like being liberated much”. The U.S. Army had reason to believe their occupation forces would be met with a savage guerilla campaign intended to drive them back out of Germany again. And they were. In fact the Sunni Arab Insurgency in 21st Century Iraq very much resembled the Nazi Werewolf movement. For that matter the whole Iraqi Ba’ath (Resurrection) Party was modeled after the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists (the Ba’ath moto was “Liberty, Fraternity, Socialism”). The Werewolf guerillas committed many acts of assassination, sabotage and subversion toward the end of the war and in the months and years following the official German capitulation, but the movement largely petered out by 1947. The Werewolf movement didn’t have the legs of the Iraqi Sunni Insurgency mainly because most of the German people didn’t support it; they were war weary and more importantly feared that the Allies (particularly the Soviets, French and British) would be provoked into exterminating them all if the Werewolf resistance went too far. In spite of the U.S. Army leadership’s desire that the American soldier be aloof and stern in his dealings with the German people, things didn’t work out that way. Most American soldiers are gregarious, generous softies who are kind to children and animals, respectful to women and old people and are suckers for a hard luck story. For example, a German lady who worked as a secretary for the U.S. Army where I was stationed related the story of her first encounter with the American Army at the close of World War II. She was an ardent National Socialist and believed all the Nazi government propaganda about the atrocities the American gangsters were certain to commit against the German people when they took over. Thus it was to her profound dismay that she found herself alone out on the street on the day when American forces first entered her city. She described how she stood frozen in terror, as American tanks with soldiers riding on them drove down the street in her direction, convinced that she was about to be raped, tortured and murdered. But then as the tanks rode past her one of the soldiers threw her a candy bar and called out, “How’re you doin’ Baby?”

I also highly recommend watching “Your Job in Japan” for a historical comparison. Interestingly enough, this training film is much more forgiving of the Japanese people (they were led astray by their leaders) than “Your Job in Germany” is toward the German people, even though both films were produced by the very same people.

Jeremy Bentham

Aug 3, 2014

Well James my collection of old Loompanics titles is actually quite meager. All I can remember of it is that I have the Bradley Steiner book on straight razor fighting in a box somewhere. That will come in handy should I ever want to establish my own version of the 1930’s Australian razor gangs. Although we are way past that’s sort of thing in America now, aren’t we? On the other hand I imagine that the threat of disfiguring injuries like razor cuts to the face served to terrify people into compliance, which was probably the intent of the original razor gangs who controlled vice in OZ’s major cities back in the day.

As for “10,000” American gangsters in post WWII France, I can’t say I ever read anything about it. I don’t believe it’s possible. Certainly there are American criminals everywhere just as there are American servicemen and American tourists everywhere. However, I don’t see how American criminals would have been able to operate in France in such large numbers for a host of reasons. First of all, France already had a well-established organized crime network post WWII, particularly the “Union Corse” (Corsican Mafia). The Union Corse is just as ruthless, disciplined and resourceful as their Sicilian counterpart (they set up the “French Connection” for example). The Union Corse and other French gangsters fought with the Resistance during the war, so they were experienced killers and guerilla fighters. The French gangsters would also have had home town advantage against any interlopers; all the corrupt officials would have already been in their employ. So there was no crime power vacuum in post WWII France that would have allowed American mobsters to move in and take over the rackets without a fight. I don’t see that the American criminal class of the day had any special skills, attributes or resources that would have allowed them to sweep aside the well-established local gangs. Second of all, I can’t see that the French authorities would have had any real difficulty dealing with American criminals on their soil. France was a sovereign allied power not an occupied defeated enemy country, so any American residing in France post war would not have had any immunity from French law. The French police would have been able to arrest an expatriate American and beat a confession out of him just like they did with everyone else. Regardless of the low opinion we 21st Century Americans might currently hold of French military prowess, the French police are very tough and very mean, and VERY proud of the fact that they are tough and mean. Further it’s much easier to get a conviction in a French criminal court than it is in an American criminal court with its adversarial system. First off in the French system you are presumed to be guilty until you prove yourself innocent, so the burden of proof is on the accused. Then the jury in felony cases consists of three judges and six to nine civilian jurors; just a two thirds majority vote is needed for a conviction. Major drug trafficking and terrorism cases are tried by special courts with a panel of seven judges; only a four to three majority vote is required for a conviction. Keep in mind too that post WWII France still had the guillotine and the penal colony in French Guiana for dealing with serious bad actors.

Anyway, for all the above reasons the story just doesn’t ring true to me. Rather I’m inclined to believe it was concocted by anti-military Leftists seeking to embarrass the U.S. Military by pointing out in a hyperbolic way that some young Americans just don’t know how to behave themselves in public. No kidding!

Jeremy Bentham

Aug 3, 2014

I take it back. Part of it at least. Just out of curiosity I did a couple of internet searches and finally came up with the location of the old Loompanics article you referred to.

Johnny Sold His Gun: The Untold Story of US Outlaw GIs in WWII Europe

by Chet Antonine—copyright 1992

groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/dixieperspectivecompanion/conversations/topics/2903

This is a different situation from American G.I. gangsters supposedly establishing themselves in France. I CAN believe that American Army deserters took advantage of the chaos of war to rob and loot and engage in black marketing, AND that European civilians aided and abetted them. After all for a time the Guinness Book of Records listed the looting of the German gold depository by American Soldiers and German Civilians at the end of WWII as the biggest robbery in history (and you thought “Kelly’s Heroes” was just a movie). Kirk Douglas even starred in a movie in 1953 about U.S. troops chasing French girls and engaging in black marketing in newly liberated Paris called “Act of Love”. The screen play was written by a French man and doesn’t make American soldiers look very “gentlemanly”. I’ll bet you didn’t know your dad or granddad was such a horn-dog. But “Soldiers are not plaster saints”, as Rudyard Kipling observed.

I also recommend reading -Roll Me Over “An Infantryman’s World War II” by Raymond Gantter, Presidio War Classic (Ballantine Books 1997). Gantter recounts all sorts of misbehavior by G.I.’s in the war in his memoir (as well as atrocities committed by the Germans). He was a thirty year old married man with two children as well as an idealist when he entered the Army, so he had no sympathy for looting and the other sorts of delinquency that younger troops often saw as acceptable under the circumstances. But as Gantter himself observed, given the opportunities that the chaos of war presented to commit crimes it is noteworthy and laudable that the over whelming majority of American soldiers stayed honest. So if ten thousand troops out of 12 million American servicemen went rogue, that isn’t that shameful a story in my book. Particularly given the misbehavior that the American people are willing to tolerate from their elected leaders nowadays in exchange for the promise of a share of the money confiscated from other people.

Jeremy Bentham

Aug 4, 2014

Glad to help James. I printed out the article so that it would be easier for my old eyes to read and went through it. About half of it rings true to me based on my readings of history and my experience in the Army and half just strikes me as hyperbolic fault finding. For example, the part about the Paris police submitting a complaint to the U.S. Government in 1920 about "1,500" doughboy deserters tells me the French police didn't really have a problem they couldn't handle, they just wanted to stick the Americans with the bill for deporting the trouble-makers (Europeans are good for stuff like that). Otherwise the French could have shipped them off to Devil's Island along with "Papillion" , and probably did. The article claims that some 50,000 soldiers were listed as AWOL in the European Theater by war's end (after 30 days it is considered desertion) and that only 9000 were tracked down by 1948. Does that sound true? Yeah, probably so. I do know that the U.S. Army had the equivalent of a division (about 15,000 soldiers) out of action for VD on any given day during much of 1918 (and that was when catching VD was a court martial offense), so losing so many soldiers by "accident" during a high intensity war isn't outside the realm of possibility. Some of the AWOLs though were probably just the result of sloppy accounting. I know from some experience how hard it is to keep track of people under those kind of circumstances. That was in the days when soldiers didn't even wear nametags on their uniforms too. Wars are destructive,chaotic and generally untidy. That's why you always want to avoid fighting your wars on your own territory. For example, the French lost some 15,000 to 20,000 civilians to the Allied bombing during the invasion of Normandy. Liberation came at a high price for France.