[lit-ideas] Re: Willie Pete, well, okay, a little bit

  • From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 07:00:05 -0500

John: It was used against Germany and Japan in WWII

Eric: One of the more deadly recapitulations I've read -- this one versus Japan in WW 2 and versus Iraqis in Gulf War I -- was the use of bulldozers to bury entrenched positions.

When no white phosphorus was immediately available, for whatever reason, and faced with an entrenched enemy that refused to surrender, bulldozers were called in, and under suppressing fire, the bulldozers simply buried the troops alive in their redoubts.
Bulldozers were used a lot against the Japanese in the later island campaigns and against the Iraqi sand fortifications in Gulf War I.

The latter use is particularly brutal, given Saddam's strategy of using his raw conscripts (children, the elderly) as human shields for the Republican Guard. Saddam used the same strategy against the Iranians: send the infirm and untrained to the front lines and use them as fodder to drain the enemy's firepower, then call in the Republican Guard to counterattack. In Gulf War II of course, we just kept advancing.

However I wonder if strategies like Saddam's shouldn't be labeled as war crimes in themselves? It's a particularly cruel way of throwing away the lives of raw recruits.

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