Would dropping hand grenades and gasoline on top of a combined group of Nazi's and their wives be considered a war crime. I am assuming that the women are innocent, a bit like the Jews in the gas chambers when Zyklon B was dropped on them. Was the gasoline meant to make the deaths more painful?
Someone had already considered the collateral damage to be worth it.
Yes it was a war crime.
A war crime, in the course of the mission that the Dirty Dozen was commissioned to accomplish?! The Hell you say.
It was gratifying in a cinematic sense, for sure--and controversial in its time, to boot! Modern auteurs like Tarantino and PT Anderson only wish they'd invented these tropes. --Can't fault the writer or director of this film for their finesse or grasp of dynamic, it's a complete pastiche. Now, when Telly Savalis knifes that poor woman, perhaps THAT is a "war crime," but he's a psychopath--and we've known that since his first monologued introduction.
It ain't nice, but it makes for a brilliant war picture.
"Only a fool would say that." --STEELY DAN
I'm no expert, but I wouldn't have thought so. In WWII it was generally considered to be acceptable to kill civilians in the course of combat - what's the moral or legal difference between a Lancaster blowing away a house with civilians in it and dropping a hand grenade down on top of civilians?
Remember, the Germans in the cellar had not surrendered; merely retreated to a safe location to await reinforcements. Nor was it a civilian shelter being targeted; the objective of the mission was not to kill civilians, but the German officers. I'd say that made the cellar a justified target and the civilians acceptable collateral damage.
And no, the gasoline wasn't simply to make it crueller. Just to ensure maximum casualties. Grenades don't cause that big of an explosion, they primarily kill by shrapnel. Many officers could have been hiding behind furniture, packing crates, whatever. Even other bodies can protect a person from shrapnel, hence stories of a guy saving lives by diving on a live grenade. So the gasoline was intended to spread fire in the cellar, use up oxygen, and fill the place with smoke to make sure as many people as possible were killed. Nasty, but no worse than using a flamethrower. And flamethrowers were used by all sides in the war.
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If I could stop a rapist from raping a child I would. That's the difference between me and god.
As has been said by others, air raids took a substantial civilian toll in WW2, often as collateral damage. For example in 1943 scores of Dutch civilians in Amsterdam were killed by either American or British bombers when they raided a German-run factory. Many bombs aimed at the factory rained on a nearby working-class neighbourhood. I read a Dutch newspaper article about a commemoration of the event. The article treated it as a tragedy of war, tactfully skating over the nationality of the bombers. Enough Dutch civilians died in Allied bombing for the Nazis and their Dutch collaborators to work it into their propaganda. The same in Belgium, France and so on.
If it was a war crime it was the kind being done every day in WW2. Perhaps the up close and personal nature of the killings in the chateau shocks people today and there was certainly some reaction at the film's original release, when WW2 was still a relatively recent memory.
"Chicken soup - with a *beep* straw."
It's war and it was ordered Ernest Borgnine to blow it up.
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