Electronic Signature Legitimateness for Military Leave Policy in European Union

How to eSign a document: electronic signature legitimateness for Military Leave Policy in European Union

they say those who were really there never talk about it but this isn't always the case Eugene Sledge and Robert Leckie lived through experiences that many of us cannot even begin to comprehend and wrote acclaimed Memoirs that give us a glimpse of what really went on in the Pacific in Europe George Wilson fought from Normandy to Germany with f company 22nd regiment making it out alive when so many of his comrades did not his autobiography if you survive is a valuable document of the struggle and suffering in the European campaigns there's no right or wrong way to process trauma some opt to share their experiences others try to forget them Sledge leki Wilson and the millions of other Americans who returned to their Homeland after 1945 would have had a great deal in common all had made sacrifices put their own lives at risk gain friends lost friends and served in the uniform of their country but there would have been differences too real differences World War II was exactly that a World War while George Wilson served in Europe Sledge and lekki would have been in action on practically the opposite side of the world across this divide of thousands of miles the campaigns the locations the enemies and the objectives that each faced would have been barely recognizable all of these men would have suffered immense trauma and experience Things That Shook them to the very core the nature of this trauma would have been very different in essence there were two types of American soldiers those who fought in Europe and the Mediterranean and those who fought in the Pacific very few would experience fighting in both theaters this is why after 1945 after victory in Europe and victory over Japan these two American soldiers would have found it difficult to relate to one another it's not a case of who had it worse or who suffered the most it's simply a Divergence of experience a trauma divide that impacted an entire generation of Young Americans this is our topic for today as we look at just how this trauma divide was formed and examined the terror of conflict through two very distinct lenses for these young American soldiers the idealism and naivety of Youth would have been stripped from them in the most violent of ways never to return [Music] on December 11 1941 at five minutes past three in the afternoon Eastern Time President Franklin Roosevelt declared a state of war with the Axis powers in Europe Senator Tom Connolly was at his side watching hand recording the exact time of the Declaration the Americans had entered the European theater up until December 1941 the United States had maintained a policy of neutrality while nominally on the side of the Allies the U.S had stopped short of actually joining the conflict and directly forbade its servicemen from operating in foreign militaries there were some exceptions America had secretly supported Chinese air units in the southwest of the country providing men and material to defend China against a potential Japanese invasion of Burma and the Flying Tigers were already operating in this region even before a formal declaration of war despite this the USA's outward face was one of Peace of isolation this all changed on December 7th when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor war was declared immediately and War on the Axis powers in Europe followed only four days later but these two declarations were very different Japan had attacked the United States sunk its battleships and killed almost two and a half thousand of its citizens this wasn't necessarily the case with Germany other than a few isolated U-Boat attacks the United States had been mostly left alone by the axis forces in Europe Hitler was caught off guard by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he hadn't expected such a bold move from his Asian allies he was surprised but impressed perhaps a little too impressed Hitler felt that a swift victory in the Pacific executed by Japan's formidable armed forces would leave the Japanese free to put the squeeze on the Soviet Union from the East so on December 11 1941 Hitler overestimated his Japanese allies and declared war on the United States roosterfeld had no choice but to follow suit with the Declaration of his own but declaring war and Prosecuting a war are very different things Germany and Italy while antagonistic had not struck against the United States and despite speculation to the contrary there was absolutely no chance of a German invasion of the USA the war in Europe posed no existential threat to America while the war in the Pacific could be framed as retaliation and a battle for survival the European theater would take on a different complexion this would need to be a moral conflict a fight for the forces of goodness and Justice preservation of America's democratic values in Europe in the face of access totalitarianism from our Vantage Point some 80 years later this seems pretty straightforward when faced with a crime so heinous and horrifying is the Holocaust how could there be any other option but go to war in fact it wasn't quite as simple as this the American government and indeed the American people knew about Hitler's persecution of Jews long before the outbreak of the war the United States admitted many refugees from Mainland Europe as the true magnitude of the Holocaust begun to become known and turn to many others away it's also important to remember that anti-Semitism wasn't confined to Nazi Germany it existed in the United States too and Ken Burns acclaimed documentary the US and the Holocaust he describes how the United States government was reluctant to overplay these moral aspects of American involvement in the war in fear that the American people would not consider ending the plight of European Jews to be a worthwhile cause it wouldn't be until the liberation of the concentration camps in the spring of 1945 and the harrowing newsreel images of human beings pushed to the very Brink that the American public truly confronted the reality of the Holocaust and what this meant for Humanity there's a famous photograph taken just after the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 of American soldiers walking hand in hand with a line of tiny Dutch children the children were not more than four or five years old wear the long laid tunics that are traditional in the country white bonnets caps spelled with a K on their heads and wooden clogs or clompan on their feet for the American GIS this would have felt very different to what they were used to back home where kids wore more modern dresses and trousers and leather shoes or plimsoles of canvas and rubber the American troops in Europe would have had something of a culture shock the linguistic boundaries in France the Netherlands Belgium and Italy would have been difficult to overcome and the towns and Villages they passed through would have been worlds away from those that they left home in Nebraska Missouri Texas or California and yet at the same time not so far away the United States is a relatively Young Nation less than two centuries old in the 1940s and while people came from all over the world to start a new life in America the majority of soldiers serving in the armed forces were over European background perhaps several Generations removed or just one or two generations removed in some cases for many American soldiers there may have been a sense of reconnection with lens they'd heard about through grandparents or older family members they might have felt a closer link to the soil on which they fought compared to the soldiers fighting further east in the Pacific this may have brought its own trauma around 1.5 million Italian Americans fought in World War II roughly 10 percent of the total deployed forces many of these soldiers would have been in direct opposition with Italian forces killing and being killed by troops with a shared Heritage and culture in the Far East American troops saw action in the Solomon Islands Papua New Guinea Palau the Philippines on the islands of Japan themselves and in other locations across the Pacific the people the languages the cultures and the Landscapes these soldiers encountered would have been completely other to anything they had known back in the States being deposited into a world so different to anything these young men had encountered before a world filled with death and destruction would have brought with it its own kind of Terror there were Japanese Americans serving in the United States armed forces even as their families back home were rounded up in internment camps 33 000 Japanese Americans served during the conflict many in Europe with others acting as translators and interpreters in the Eastern theaters around 800 would give up their lives in an American Uniform but for the majority of American soldiers in the Pacific this would have been a bewildering and frightening world whether this made it easier to compartmentalize the trauma on their return home to fight it to one side is something that happened long ago in a location far far away is unclear what is clear is that soldiers in Europe and soldiers in the Pacific experience the horrors of war in their own ways each no less legitimate and horrifying than the other but unique and distinct when American troops landed on the beaches of Normandy with their Allied comrades in 1944 it was June by the time the offensive and the war ended it was almost a year later this meant that troops faced a winter at the front and winter and Western Europe can be severe few events encapsulate the misery of winter 1944-1945 like the fighting that took place in the Arden Belgium in December and January here the Allied Advance had halted on the frontier of the German fatherlands they dug in disheartened by the failure of operation Market Garden in the Autumn the Allies became content to chip away at the axis lines with tactics not dissimilar to those seen in the first World War but the German forces had other ideas despite disagreement from a number of generals Hitler ordered a huge counter-attack this would become known as the Battle of the Bulge named for the enormous Dent the Germans made in Allied Alliance it would eventually go down as an Allied Victory but this Victory would come at a significant cost Allied Forces sustained some 75 000 casualties with around 10 000 killed or missing in action Germany would suffer up to 120 000 men and tons of material losses that Hitler could ill afford the traumas experienced in those 31 days of fighting and the stories of heroism and sacrifice are too extensive to list here we've covered some of these in previous videos and will certainly be talking about others in the future instead we're gonna focus on one specific aspect of this Clash the conditions the conditions were nothing short of brutal icy roads made Logistics and resupply difficult tanks and trucks skidded off icy roads or just froze solid overnight blizzards and freezing rain made coordination almost impossible while fog and winter storms rendered air power largely useless for long periods then there was the impact on the men themselves wounded soldiers succumbed to the cold before they could be found and treated frostbite and trench foot were widespread in the ranks knocking thousands of troops out of action in the Pacific Theater conditions were somewhat different fighting in the jungles of Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and on the papalan peninsula temperatures soared while Monsoon rains turned the ground some mulch in the sweltering fettered conditions disease was Rife dysentery ran rampant more than six out of every 100 soldiers at its peak The 374th Troop Carrier received tainted turkey meat one Thanksgiving leaving troops incapacitated hepatitis A and B were common too and around 50 000 soldiers were hospitalized with Hep B in March and April 1942 after receiving infected vaccine malaria was a regular occurrence and the quinine tablet soldiers received to treat the disease offered no cure only masking the symptoms Dengue Fever scrub typhus berry berry and jungle rot all decimated the American ranks becoming Insidious enemies that brought Allied Forces to their knees other diseases like cholero were also problematic but American forces dealt with this wealth education and strict hygiene protocols kept this at Bay the punishing conditions of the South Pacific were almost unique to this theater no more or less horrifying than those of the Arden just different of course it was the same for the Japanese of more than 1.5 million Japanese deaths in World War II around 60 percent were caused by disease American involvement in the European and Mediterranean theaters began with two of the most amphibious Landings in history Operation Torch in Morocco and operation Overland in Normandy but despite these aquatic Beginnings the fight was largely land-based from the brutal winter conditions of the Arden to the rugged hillsides of Monte to the urban Warfare of Paris and US schuffenberg American soldiers in Europe found themselves on a dogged Overland push toward their objectives sometimes they moved swiftly other times they became bogged down snared by the landscape or by a sudden counter-attack but the aim was always to push the front line closer and closer to Berlin fighting in the Pacific was different yes there were Overland advances and fighting in urban centers but the campaign was better known for its island hopping amphibious engagements and the ticking off of key Milestones on the march to Japan a key example of this is the Battle of Iwo Jima another moment of the war immortalized by a famous photograph the Clint Eastwood film Flags of Our Fathers depicts the raising of the American flag at the summit of Mount surabachi the Island's highest point this image has become legendary as have The Men Who erected the flag but the battle remains controversial few battles of the war were as costly for the American armed forces as this one some 6 800 American Marines lost their lives with almost three times as many wounded the airfields that the Americans secured did prove useful with over 2 000 emergency Landings performed on the island however only around 10 escort missions flew from iwajima in the final months of the war and the true impact of the bombing raids launched from the islands is disputed by the time iwajima was cleared on March 16th almost a month after the bloody campaign began the United States already had its eyes on her next Target the island of Okinawa as soon as one hard-fought objective was ticked another one reared its head we need to be very careful as we approach the final Point civilian deaths were a very real part of the second world war and wherever there was fighting there was loss of life among non-combatants in total more than two-thirds of those who died in the conflict were civilians we can't shy away from these realities or we must treat them with the proper care and consideration for the troops advancing into Germany in the spring of 1945 the scale of human suffering and misery wrought by Nazi forces on the civilian population would have become horrifyingly clear around the fringes of Nazi concentration camps emaciated human beings clung to life abandoned by their gods and existing at the very limits of human endurance Behind These still living human beings evidence of what had taken place here gas Chambers mountains of stolen possessions shoes glasses baby clothes the images of these industrial facilities of death and suffering would become part of the cultural fabric of the second world war and part of the Allied understanding of what this war had been all about for those back home the Holocaust was no longer something of rumor or conjecture it was no longer Up For Debate it was concrete reality American families had lost Sons husbands fathers Brothers perhaps they could take some small comfort that those losses had not been in vain there would be many atrocities in Europe the Nazis killed indiscriminately in French Villages as they sought to put down the local resistance and Hitler himself would authorize the destruction of women children and the elderly in the fight against partisans in Yugoslavia the Allies would commit their own atrocities too across all theaters the firebombing of Dresden killed tens of thousands of civilians while the atomic devices dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed civilian populations in a manner never seen before these harrowing examples of Slaughter certainly shouldn't be forgotten but for most American soldiers returning home from Europe it would be the Holocaust and the brutality of axis forces that would leave the deepest psychological impact this is where we see some symmetry between the European and Pacific Theaters and some shared ground between the soldiers who fought in each the Holocaust was fueled by a number of factors but the idea of racial superiority the supremacy of the Aryan people over all others was arguably the most important in the Pacific and in the Far East the Japanese shared similar ideas social conditioning LED Japanese soldiers to feel genetically and racially Superior to their Chinese counterparts for example facilitating the wholesale and murder and extermination of Chinese civilians during the occupation of Nanjing and other locations across the country racism formed the basis for other parallels too SS physician Yosef Mengele became Infamous for his medical experiments on prisoners of the Nazi regime in the Far East similar atrocities were carried out at Unit 731 as Japanese military researchers tested horrifying weapons on their Chinese captives from an American perspective there may have been differences in terms of visibility American troops may not have witnessed the atrocities in China directly and may not have understood the scale of Japan's own genocidal programs until later they would however have understood the brutal treatment that faced Allied pows in Japanese camps across Eastern Asia and they would have seen the way in which local populations were slaughtered and brutalized across the region they would have also seen the Bushido code in action or at least the mangled interpretation of this Century's old way of combat the doctrine under which Japanese troops fought and died it fueled the Kamikaze attacks late in the war and the suicidal charges of defeated troops valuing honorable death over the ignomy of surrender this may have given the Americans some insight into why pows were treated so badly under this Doctrine surrendering troops had brought shame upon themselves and had given up their right to human decency and dignity more than this though such ways of fighting would have left immense psychological scars on those who encountered them firsthand this was never about quantifying tragedy or pitting one form of trauma against another instead what we're trying to do here today is better understand the trauma divide that existed between soldiers returning to America from Europe and from the Pacific these soldiers experienced two different Wars within the same larger conflict the trauma was intense in both cases and unique to each theater over time we hope these scars may have faded become a little easier to manage and deal with some soldiers put their experiences into words either in books and TV documentaries or simply in stories they told their families and friends in the decades following the war others kept them locked away referring to repress these memories rather than relive them regardless of the matter in which these men worked through their trauma none would forget what they went through during those years in the 1940s taking the true horror of war with them to their graves even today these memories are very real for so many people in 2021 around 122 000 Veterans of American second world war campaigns were still with us still remembering what they saw on the Battlegrounds of Western Europe and on the islands of the Pacific the friendships they forged and the brothers they lost but what do you think of this topic how did surviving soldiers process the horrors they endured and go on with their lives after the war let us know all that and more in the comments section below and as always guys thank you so much for watching and I hope you learned something new foreign