From that diary link: "CW3 Dan Adkins said to the television, 'kill 1,000 for every hostage killed. No need to discriminate either.'"
Much as I wholeheartedly support our troops, I have to be honest and say that this idea of mass reprisals -- and without discrimination, which apparently means just rounding up insurgents
or civilians -- for the deaths of American troops reminded me of this:
In some occupied areas in which the Nazis had to contend with well organized and active guerrilla units, they applied a simple rule: they would massacre one hundred nearby civilians for every German soldier killed; fifty for every one wounded. Often this was a minimum that might be doubled or tripled. They thus killed vast numbers of innocent peasants and townsfolk, possibly as many as 8,000 in Kraguyevats, 1,755 in Kraljevo, and overall 80,000 in Jajinci, to name just in a few places in Yugoslavia alone. Most executions were small in number, but day by day they added up. From an official German war diary: 16 December 1942, "In Belgrade, 8 arrests, 60 Mihailovich supporters shot;" 27 December, "In Belgrade, 11 arrests, 250 Mihailovich supporters shot as retaliation." A German placard from Belgrade announced that the Nazis shot fifty hostages in retaliation for the dynamiting of a bridge. On 25 May 1943 the Nazis shot 150 hostages in Kraljevo; in October they shot 150 hostages in Belgrade; fifty hostages in Belgrade in August 1943; 150 Serbs at Cacak in October; and so on. In Greece, as another example, the Nazis may have burned and destroyed as many as 1,600 villages each with populations of 500 to 1,000 people, no doubt massacring many of the inhabitants beforehand. Overall, the Nazis thus slaughtered hundreds of thousands in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece, and France; and millions overall in Poland and the Soviet Union.
(from:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NAZIS.CHAP1.HTM)
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