Schweinfurt.  Many years ago, I heard the saying: "Save one for Schweinfurt" from a couple older gents who were crewmen on bombers during WW2 in Europe.

Supposedly there were signs printed up of Halsey's words and posted throughout the PTO...  I suppose it makes it semi-unofficial orders?

Gives a whole new definition to the term 'food fight'.

It was probably "real In is mind" lol

The war in the ETO had a giant mood swing in the aftermath of the Battle of Bulge.  The SS massacres of captured Americans, the ever growing discoveries of German atrocities, and a grinding war of attrition that left the average front line American not wanting to be the last one to die and wondering why the Germans wouldn't just quit.

In short, "fuck 'em" often became they attitude.

@Riter
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Thanks B5Sluggo.  I tried finding my copy of Company Commander but couldn't find it.

What a pretty girl!

This - my uncle was with the 7th Marines. Said that if you did it right you didn't have to deal with them.

Second row from the top, fourth man from the right.
Attached File

Early on, at Guadalcanal, the Japanese started it.

From then on the entire Pacific campaign was one of exceptional cruelty on both sides.

Long before Iwo there was pretty much an unspoken no prisoners policy.

They killed civilians during the occupation of Germany, after the war. Per my grandfather.
To stop the nazi loyalists and snipers.
If a soldier was shot by a sniper, they would go into homes in the area and just drag them to the street and shoot them. Men and women. My grandfather drove a tank under Patton during WWII and a truck with mounted machineguns during Korea. He only volunteered some information, usually had to directly ask him or show him something that would bring back a memory. He did and saw some crazy stuff. He passed years ago. I went and saw the movie Fury. It was so close to the stories he told me back then.

My dad was a B-17 navigator and shot down over Berlin. German civilians with a rope were about to hang him when a German police officer showed up.
At the police station a cop took a towel from his personal pack, handed it to my dad and pointed to a sink where he could wash up. His face was completely blackened from the fire in the plane  and he was bloody from a shrapnel wound to the head.
A couple months later while in a POW camp,  they could hear US ground forces getting closer.  Some SS troops came to the camp wanting to remove or kill (not sure which) some prisoners. The German camp guards protected the prisoners by shooting it out with the SS.
Cruelty and kindness.

I think it's important to note that in times like those amidst all the confusion and emotional turmoil, most folks don't carry around an encyclopedia full of operating procedures. A few officers do I'm sure., but not the average Joe..
I have no doubt that these type of killings happened quite a lot  and other then a few high profile cases were simply never reported or simply no attention was paid to it.
I suspect the truth lies in a grey area somewhere in between war crimes and operational necessity. And with anything there was several instances where these killings were extreme enough that they could be classified on either side of that grey area.
I don't wouldn't think many machine gunners were taken prisoner on D-Day for example..
I Also doubt that many smaller units or special operations took many either.
You can also bet the normal Joe was seeing alot of escape attempts when an officer was not looking….. I would also go as far as saying there was most likely an unspoken administrative expectation of this in many circumstances. Said officer realized there was something important that needed to be attended to in that moment… Handle this will you Joe?

When you're worried about supply lines, medical resources,  and speed of troop movement ,  well sometimes you have to drop the dead weight. It's not a pretty thought.. but reality isn't always pretty.
I don't judge them, I'm grateful for the sacrifices that were made.I'm grateful that that burden was shouldered by my fathers so that I didn't have to.

That is sweet sweet vengeance

What is it good for?

On the Allies side ... during the Normandy invasion what was an Airborne unit suppose to do with surrendering Germans?  There wasn't an established route to conduct a prisoner to a designated area.  If you released them there was a chance you'd meet them again under different circumstances.  Pragmatism prevails.

On the Axis side ... as the Germans smashed through the vast expanses of western Russia ... did they want to be slowed down by herding / feeding POWs?

The Old Testament is full of this treatment of POWs.  

Why fight them twice?

OP ... to single out the SS while every nation likely did this isn't a fair treatment of history.  Condemn murder regardless of who did it or Condone murder regardless of who did it.  To show bias renders your opinions less palatable to some.  My grandfather fought in the Pacific. His father fought the Germans in the first Great War and so forth.  I am not, in any form or fashion, pro-German or Nazi but having lived in Germany during the 1970s and seeing residual evidence of the Allies' carpet bombing campaigns leads one to be impartial when it comes to doling out judgements about wartime behaviors.

Again, I love America. This is the greatest nation to ever exist.  Liberty is God given, and I thank Him often for it.  As a man of faith I value human life immensely as I'm commanded to "love" people.  I hate fascism (which ALWAYS results in mass deaths) regardless of the origin, but lets be far to history and acknowledge it is written by the victors.   Untold numbers of innocent people died in World War 2 INTENTIONALLY as a result of acts from both the Axis and Allies.  This makes killing surrendering combatants seem smaller by comparison.

25,000 civilians died in the Dresden bombing campaign.  Dresden has virtually ZERO strategic or tactical value.

GaryT776 - I never denied that prisoners were killed by all sides and discuss it briefly in my book.  The singling out of the SS as an organization is deserved and their reputation for brutality is supported by numerous examples of the SS killing prisoners both soldiers and civilians alike.  Little wonder that American soldiers on the Western Front and the Soviets had no love for the SS.  An exception of honorable treatment by SS victors was at the Vosges Mountains' Battle of Reipertswiller where one battalion of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division, was captured after some very tough fighting.  No executions and the SS Gesbirgjagers fed the Americans afterward.

About the only other group more deserving of being wiped out were the Japanese army & navy.  As bad as the German PoW camps were (and they forced our soldiers to work and starved them), the Japanese were more brutal.  Besides beatings, executions there was also "medical" experimentations by Unit 731.  It isn't such a bad thing that most Japanese who fought the Americans were killed (or committed suicide).  Lightning Joe Collins fought both in the Pacific (division commander at Guadalcanal) and in Europe (VII Corps Commander) and was well qualified when he said the Germans were better organized as an army (superior combined arms) but that the Japanese were more fanatical.  Unlike the Germans, few Japanese surrendered.

Regarding Dresden, I know a survivor who was a child at the time.  His apartment by the Elbe was never touched and bombs fell into the Elbe or the next street over and their building remained unscathed.  Lucky them (post-war he came to America and became a California Highway Patrolman).  As to what purpose the bombing served, it was an attempt to prove Douhet's theory of airpower.  Sure the bomber can always get through, but bombing a civilian population into submission doesn't break the civilian spirit like Douhet advocated.  Luftwaffe couldn't break the British by bombing London and the RAF/USAAC couldn't break the Germans.  Besides damaging the war industry (but production under Speer increased in 1944), the air campaign's one achievement was draw an already overstretched Luftwaffe fighting on three fronts to a fourth front: home defense.  Blame Douhet and his adherents in the RAF (notably Bomber Harris) and Army Air Corps.

War by its very nature is evil and cannot be moralized.  It is best that it is avoided.