good article that Shayne, a retrial on manslaughter charges seems most apropriate under the circumstances.
This thread has had me in an emotional retrospective mood all day, this is what's been going through my mind. My mothers partner years ago was an RAF pilot on bombers during WWII, shot down twice, once over Newcastle where he was badly burnt, he became one of the first "guinea pigs" for plastic surgery, they grew a new nose for him out of his cheek (and you couldn't see any scar tissue either, amazing doctoring for the time) the other time he was shot down over Paris, he, and a couple of his crew were in hiding with the resistance, the local Gestapo lined up a bunch of villagers to be shot if the bomber crew were not handed in, no-one would hand them in, even some of the people lined up to be shot knew where they were but refused to co-operate with the Germans, even in the face of death. The crew handed themselves in to the local French police before anyone was murdered. He told me about being driven round paris given a guided tour by a member of the French Secret police who spoke perfect english after studying at Oxford the same year he himself at been at the same university. I asked him why he didn't give the policeman the good news and leg it, he explained the Germans would have repeated the murder squad thing until they were captured, so he sucked it up. He was tortured, badly, by the German Gestapo.
Many years later he went to France on some comemorative type thing, met some members of the resistance who had helped him and his crew, some of the villagers who had been lined up, the policeman who had given him the guided tour, and the German officer who had tortured him.
We talked for hours, I didn't say much, I was 19yo been in the Navy for a year, he was in his 70's suffering from cancer in his leg, heavily dosed up on morphine, yet he remembered everything as if it were yesterday. After the Gestapo finished with him, he was sent to a POW camp, as he was driven through the gates there was an appell call, the OIC read out all the names of the POWs who had been killed during an escape, he recalled a great many of the 50 names read out, it was Stalag Luft III, they made a film about it, some of the older members will no doubt remember it, the POWs were let out of the trucks in a field after capture, and machine gunned.
I asked him what he felt towards the German officer who had tortured him, when they met years later. He said they just hugged and cried for a long moment, like long lost brothers, no words were exchanged.
Imagine that.
I'm not sure why I posted this, I guess just to point out that peculiar things happen in wars. I guess Sgt. Blackman wishes he could take it back, I guess a lot of folks over the years wish they could have taken it back too. Personally I think Sgt. Blackman should be given another chance at a fair trial.
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