[dragoon500ly]

One of the objections to the War Crimes Tribunals is that they tried to place the blame for carrying out orders to commit war crimes squarely on the shoulders of the military officers involved. After all, they should have realized that these were illegal orders and refused to carry them out (this is the simple version).

One of the problems with this view is that for most of the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries, one of the requirements of the military was to obey any order passed along by a superior officer ending with orders issued by the monarch at al. Again, this is the simple form.

The prime defense of the war criminals is that they obeyed the orders passed down to them. Their code of honor, their sworn military oath required
"unquestioning obedience" to the state. Reading through military journals, and various newspaper articles from that period make the point that what the German and Japanese officers did was, in many cases, not very different than those actions performed by Allied officers.

But wars have always been brutal, bloody, callous affairs. People die in some of the most horrible ways possible and often they die alone and in terrible agony.

But when a soldier in the middle of a fire fight has to make a split-second decision to fire on a fleeting target, and discovers afterwards that he shot an unarmed civilian, does that make him a war criminal?

When the elected leader of a nation, based on the best information presented to him, faced with the possibility of hundreds of thousands of losses on both sides, makes the decision to use a new weapon, unknowing of the terrible after-effects of that weapon. Is he a war criminal?

I don't believe that these actions warrant being tried as a war criminal. That title belongs solely to those swine who go out of their way to rape and murder non-combatants.