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Forgotten Tragedy · Plausibly Live - The Dave Bowman Show Podcast

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History is strange, it's alien, and it won't give us what we
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would like to have. Dave Bowman is with us and the
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headline at billmic.com is all Canada and not your national
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anthem. That's where we lived in our
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first hour of the show. But in our fifth paragraph down
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in that post, you've got links to both Dave Bowman and his page
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and the Dave Does History page as well, so you can catch up
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with Dave and everything he does.
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Linked up for you there on the show page today at billmick.com.
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Dave Anniversary this week of the Battle of the Bulge, and
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you're going to take us there. What's on your mind this
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morning, Sir? It's the last Dave does history
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for the year, Bill, so. That's true, it is.
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It was kind of with some interest that I was yesterday.
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As you noted, the Battle of the Bulge began in 1944, but it was
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this day, December 17th, 1944, when one of the most harrowing
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episodes of World War 2 occurred.
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It's a stark reminder of the atrocities that arise when the
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rules of war are abandoned and human life is devalued.
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As I said, on December 17th, 1944, during the Battle of the
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Bulge, soldiers of the Waffen S S under the command of Jochum
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Piper executed 84 unarmed American prisoners of war at a
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crossroads near Malmady in Belgium.
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The act of brutality violated the Geneva Convention.
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It left an indelible mark on the history of warfare.
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And yet, decades later, the massacre is more or less
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relegated to a footnote in the larger narrative of the war.
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This forgetfulness carries with it a dangerous cost.
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It diminishes lessons that we might draw from, and it weakens
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our collective resolve to confront and prevent further
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future atrocities. The Malmady massacre exemplifies
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not just the horrors of war, but the deliberate cruelty of
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ideologies that dehumanize their opponents.
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These American soldiers, many were very young, very
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unseasoned, were denied the most basic rights as prisoners of
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war. Survivors of the massacre
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recounted being gunned down in cold blood, some even executed
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at point blank range as they lay wounded or just pretended to be
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dead. The massacre was not, by the
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way, an isolated event. It was part of a broader
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campaign of terror designed to intimidate Allied forces and
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expedite the German advance during the Arden offensive.
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The events at Malmady encapsulate the extreme lengths
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to which authoritarian regimes will go to enforce control and
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to sow fear. But as time has passed, our
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collective memory of these events has grown faint.
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In the post war years, geopolitical concerns and Cold
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War pragmatism often overshadowed justice.
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Figures like Joachim Piper, convicted of war crimes, instead
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saw his sentence commuted, and over time his infamy fades into
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obscurity. This erosion of memory reflects
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a troubling societal tendency to simplify history, focusing on
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triumphs while neglecting darker truths.
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Such forgetfulness allows the moral urgency of events like
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Malmody to dissipate, leaving us vulnerable to repeating the same
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mistakes. Remembering the Malmody massacre
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is not just an exercise in historical reflection, it's an
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ethical imperative. By confronting the full weight
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of such horrors, we reaffirm the values that underpin civilized
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society, respect for human life, the rule of law, and the
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necessity of holding perpetrators accountable.
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Forgetting malmody risks not only dishonouring the victims
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but also eroding those moral frameworks which ensure justice
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and humanity will prevail even amongst the chaos of war.
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As we reflect today on this tragedy, we must recommit
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ourselves to preserving these memories because they continue
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to teach and warn future generations.
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That reflection begins in 60 seconds on WMMB.
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Dave Bowman with us with Dave does history as we look at the
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Battle of the Bulge. Dave, as you described this
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event and and the ongoings around it, first thing that came
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to my mind, it was the series Band of Brothers.
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Probably our closest recollection we can get to
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something like that. And yet it it can't touch it, I
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don't think. It's like anything, just because
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it's on film, it can give you a taste somewhat like the somewhat
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like the Tom Hanks film did. But at the same time there's I
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was having a conversation with a veteran once about the movie
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Fury, which I I enjoyed the movie Fury.
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I thought it was a little bit, you know, obviously it's a
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story, it's not reality, but, but one of the things he said
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about the movie was it can't capture the smell, it can't
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capture the sound. You just, you can't relate those
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things. And so while we can remember
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these things and we, we imagine the fury, the frozen fury of the
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1st 2 days of the battle of the Bulge.
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We can watch it on TV and we can get a good idea of it.
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But it just doesn't really capture the, the entirety of it.
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And the, the feeling of when a shell goes off and the
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concussion and the way it compresses your body and the
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sound and the smells, those things are missing.
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But it doesn't mean we shouldn't look at it.
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Oh no, not at all. Of course, one of the compelling
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things about Band of Brothers was that they had the surviving
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soldiers at the time it was produced at the end of each of
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those episodes talking about what went on there.
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And I thought that was powerful. Yeah, speaking with a World War
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2 veteran who has been in something like this is it's an
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eye opening experience. My best friend's father fought
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at Anzio in Italy, not the Battle of Bulge, but it was, it
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was remarkable because not so much what he would say, but a
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lot of his silence, the things he would not talk about.
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And it's, it's something I wish we had recorded it, but back
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then we didn't have that ability.
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So there you go. On December 16th, 1944, the
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Germans launched the battle of what would become the Battle of
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the Bulge. They called it the Ardennes
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Offensive. The idea here was to drive
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through the Allied lines, reach the port of Antwerp, split the
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Allied armies in half and essentially do what they had
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been doing earlier in the war with the blitzkrieg.
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You know, divide, drive through, conquer, surround and and
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isolate. It was the war was just going
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really well for the Allies in Europe by December of 44, you
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got to understand that the nobody wants to die in the last
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minutes, days, hours of war. And so things were going so well
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for the Allies, in particular the Americans.
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It was kind of like a, you know, we're we're we're pushing
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forward, but we don't want to, you know, we don't want to do
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anything stupid at this point. And so it was winter time, of
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course, you know, nobody, everybody believed that the
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Germans were already beaten. It was just a matter of
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convincing them, just like 1918 all over again.
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What they didn't know, of course, was that the Germans had
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stripped everything they could find, formed a, a giant armored
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core. And we're going to try to to, to
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drive through to the ardent. What made this one different,
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though, was the approach that the Germans were taking in all
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of their war. I mean, war is hell, folks, but
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this one, somehow or another, it was like it wasn't just the last
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roll of the dice. It was like we're we're going
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down, we're going down in flames.
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And so all of the rules of war, the, the Geneva Conventions were
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literally ordered out of existence.
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We're going to put commandos in American uniforms, which is
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against the conventions. You can't do that.
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But they did it anyway. And they dropped, they put these
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guys behind the lines and sowed confusion.
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They changed Rd. signs and you know, sent units the wrong way
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and congregated a lot of confusion in the communications.
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The leader of one of the the units, Jochum Piper, is a Waffen
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s s officer. He is a committed Nazi and his
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orders are to advance as rapidly as you can, take no prisoners,
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and above all, so fear convince the Americans, who you know, are
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generally recognized as not being the best soldiers in the
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war, but they are recognized as being the most creative soldiers
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in the war. In other words, one of the
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things they talk about is don't leave anything behind on the
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battlefield that the Americans can use because they will turn
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it into a weapon and they will use it against you.
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So they're not the best soldiers in the sense of standing up and
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discipline and all that, but they are very inventive and
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creative. So don't take any of them
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prisoner because they will cause problems for you and so fear.
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Now, Yocum Piper interprets this order to mean literally take no
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prisoners, can't leave them behind me because if I leave
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them behind me as I bypass, you know, places and and that kind
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of thing, they're behind me. And I don't want them behind me
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because then they mess with the supply units and the roads and
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that kind of stuff. So he interprets that to mean
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eliminate everybody that you find.
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Do you believe that was the intent of the order?
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I believe it was, yes. Did it ever say that in writing?
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You know, it's like so much stuff with the Nazis.
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You know, it's you got to read between the lines sometimes.
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The bottom line is when he reaches the the crossroads there
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at Malmody, they have captured an American unit that is a
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brand, basically brand new unit. It is not necessarily a
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frontline combat unit. It's an artillery observation
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unit. And they've got them there.
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There's, you know, several hundred of them.
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What do we do with them? Well Melody at Melody on
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December 17th, 1944, Piper has his men line these guys up and
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they shoot them dead and leave them in the snow to freeze.
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We get to the details of all of that in our next segment.
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Your calls welcome in our final segment of this hour as we
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continue with Dave Does History here on Bill Mick Live, the
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Battle of Malmody and the events there.
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Wow. Coming up on WMNB, our weekly
11:07
dive into history. Dave Bowman joins us on Bill
11:11
Mick Live. Richmond Transmission and Auto
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Service this hour. Sponsor of the program.
11:17
You want to follow WMNB on Instagram?
11:19
You find us at WMNB Radio and I'm pulling the wrong pot down
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the whole time I'm talking. There we go, that's better.
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And we're talking the Battle of the Ball bulge, the anniversary
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of the the start of that thing yesterday and today in 1944, the
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Malmody Massacre. And Davey are getting ready to
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take us there. Yeah, I want to be clear here.
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We're not. There have been thousands of
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books written about all this stuff and I don't want to get
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bogged down in the details because I think there's a bigger
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picture here that I want to get to.
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But it was this day, September 17th, 1944, that the German
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advance became it. It became clear by late the
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previous evening that this was a major advance.
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This was this was not just a hit and run kind of thing.
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This was this was Panzer tank divisions.
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This was this was the entire German army was coming down the
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road. The 285th Field Artillery,
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Battery B soldiers, about 100 of them, 120 of them were ordered
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to retreat back towards away from the front lines.
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Now, these were guys that were not heavily armed.
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They weren't basically we're talking about jeeps and
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binoculars. They have some special equipment
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because their job is to pinpoint where enemy artillery is coming
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from. So their job is to figure out
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where the enemy guns are so that they can be counter batteried.
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And they are specially trained for that.
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As they're withdrawing, what nobody realizes is that the
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German advance has already bypassed them.
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They're already behind the the front line, as it were.
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And of course, as they close in on the the rail, the road
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crossing there at Bastion or not Bastion Malmody, they are
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captured. They really have no, no means of
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fighting back. And so Piper's Waffen s s group
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catches, captures them. They immediately take the
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Americans into a a field right there next to the road and
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search them, make them, you know, stand there in this
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freezing cold weather because it's one of the things I think
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we forget about bulge, the bulge.
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It was cold, cold, cold. They make them stand there and
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then without warning, without any discussion, without any, you
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know, anything, they just start shooting these American
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prisoners of war. At least 84 are killed.
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There are stories of the Germans, the Nazi troops,
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wandering through the bodies, delivering coup de The problem
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that the Nazis have is that they don't kill everybody.
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There are survivors of this attack.
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And of course in an era when retribution is going to be
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coming post war, I guess you could argue, at least from a
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Nazi perspective, that's probably a mistake.
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But they do leave survivors behind.
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And those survivors, of course, managed to get the story out of
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what has happened here at Malmody.
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The stories combined with everything else that's going on
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the the German commandos behind the lines in American uniforms,
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the, the pure almost blitzkrieg approach of this has caused a
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lot of consternation in the American lines.
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There's, you know, just freezing.
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They, they don't know what to do.
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The 101st Airborne quickly cut off at Bastion, and this story
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making the rounds about American prisoners are just being
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summarily executed. This causes a great deal of
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reaction in the American lines and the American troops who
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realize that all of a sudden that there's no point in
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surrendering now because these these Nazis are they're being
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full Nazis. And that probably does more to
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stiffen American resistance than supplies or anything else would
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have done. It's a huge mistake tactically,
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strategically, functionally by the Germans to do this, but they
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did it anyway. The impact on the morale becomes
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a rallying cry for the Allied forces.
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We have to stand up because these people aren't taking any
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quarter and that means we have to win.
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So, Dave, that it, it did inspire resolve and
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determination because there was nothing other than that.
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In so many ways, I mean, that's really what it comes down to.
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And we've all seen the famous scene at Bastion in Band of
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Brothers or even the Battle of the Bulge movies or Patton or
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anything like that where a General Hodge is is asked by the
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the German commander to surrender in his famous reply.
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Nuts. We're not no, we're not giving
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up to you. And Bastion holds out Patton's
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great line. You know, we, we got to hurry up
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because any man that will say that deserves to be rescued
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sends the 4th Armored rushing forward and so forth and so on.
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I'm not here to rehash the entirety.
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The Battle of the Bulge. As I said, there's plenty out
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there if you want to read it. What I need you to understand
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today is after the Malmadi massacre and after this stiffens
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resolve in the American forces and the Allied forces, after the
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battle is won and after the war is over, Jochen Piper and his
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merry band of whatever you want to call them are arrested for
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war crimes. They are charged with the
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Malmadi massacre, with the summary execution of 84 American
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prisoners. They are charged under the
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Geneva Convention and they are tried much as the Nuremberg
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trials went on for war crimes and war crimes against humanity.
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Anybody know what happened to him?
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Nah. Why not?
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Doesn't this seem like it should be?
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We're forgetting history, yeah. Doesn't it seem like this should
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be one of those things that we know intimately well?
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And yet, even though Piper and some of his other men are
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convicted and sentenced to death for their war crime at Malmany,
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none of them will be executed. Things change.
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And you know, as situations change, as as geopolitical
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situations intervene, suddenly sometimes things become, I don't
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know, I don't want to say less important, but maybe they get
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overshadowed by larger things. You've got bigger stories out of
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World War 2, You've got D-Day, you've got Hiroshima, Pearl
18:32
Harbor, Midway. You've got this natural decline
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of collective memory with each generation.
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I mean, if you've ever talked to World War 2 veterans, you know
18:43
what I'm talking about. We get to events like Malmody.
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They either get simplified or they get overlooked in the
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curriculum. You're trying to write a
18:53
textbook about World War 2. I I I shared this earlier about
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my American history class American history.
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The professor said that the most important deal, the most
19:04
important event from 19 from 1865 to today was World War 2.
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And we spent in seven weeks a combined 14 minutes on World War
19:13
2. Malmody not going to make get
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mentioned in that. And then when you have the
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politics, the geopolitics that gets involved with it, it
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becomes even stranger. And one American senator really
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pushes to have Piper and his group not forgiven, but at least
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has their sentences commuted and allows them to go free because
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it's a better situation in the Cold War than it is in the in
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the context of World War 2. And it's Senator Joseph McCarthy
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who pushes for that. Really interesting.
19:53
We continue with Dave does history in moments on Bill Mick
19:57
live, Richmond transmission and auto service.
20:00
This our sponsor of the program. You've got the number if you
20:03
want to weigh in. We'll get to calls later in this
20:05
segment as we wrap up. Dave does history on a Tuesday
20:08
talking about the massacre and malady as part of the battle of
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the balls. And I guess, Dave, I guess.
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The creating resolve by showing there is no advantage to
20:23
surrendering your troops because they're all going to die if you
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do it. Bad mistake on the part of the
20:28
Germans there. And, and you hate to see things
20:31
like this go on, but thank God it rallied those troops, if
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that's the phrase we're going to use.
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Well, in in the big strategic picture was the bulge that that
20:44
big of a deal? Yes, it delayed things, but it
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didn't it didn't change the ultimate ending.
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The bigger question to me becomes one of, you know, we
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talk about this all the time about rewriting history to our
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own advantage to to use history in a way that I don't know it.
21:06
It fits our agenda. And after the trials of Jochen
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Piper and the Waffen s s and after they were tried and
21:13
convicted of a war crime and sentenced to death, it just sort
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of it, it didn't fade away because there were too many
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people who remembered it at the time.
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But as time goes by into the 1950's, the geopolitical
21:28
situation shifts so much that the position of the United
21:33
States becomes more along the lines of it's more important to
21:37
be anti communist than it is to punish former Nazis for war
21:43
crimes and crimes against humanity.
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And this effort, he didn't found the effort, but he became one of
21:49
its major spokesman is Eugene McCarthy.
21:53
Yes, that Gene McCarthy who begins to criticize the United
21:56
States Army for its prosecution of Jochim Piper.
22:00
It says that the prosecution coerced him, that they forced
22:05
statements, that they forced, you know, admissions and that
22:09
sort of stuff. And so through this political
22:12
pressure, Jochim Piper and others that were involved in the
22:16
Malmody massacre are not just not prosecuted, not just not
22:22
executed. Bill, they're allowed to go
22:24
free. They are simply sent on their
22:28
way because in the view of some in the United States government,
22:33
it's more important to focus on the communists and communist
22:36
expansion than it is to focus on correcting, punishing, whatever
22:42
you want to call it an actual war crime.
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There are those that have an issue with this at the time.
22:49
There are those who say, well, let's just move on.
22:51
It was ten years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years ago, whatever
22:55
you want to, however long you want to look at it.
22:59
And so it leaves us with these challenges.
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If we can do that with a, if we can do that, the winning side,
23:07
the United States can do that with an incident like Malmody.
23:11
What happens to the rest of history that gets simplified or
23:15
overlooked or forgotten and it becomes very difficult to
23:22
grapple with those uncomfortable truths of wartime atrocities.
23:27
It becomes very problematic when some are punished, like the
23:33
captain and crew of the U852, the only U boat crew executed
23:38
for war crimes, but others are let go like Joachim Piper.
23:43
What happens to Joachim Piper after that?
23:46
Anybody know? Not a clue, I was going to ask.
23:49
You. I'm not going to tell you
23:50
because I want you the listener. Maybe Bill, I'll tell Bill after
23:55
the show, but the rest of you can go look it up.
23:56
I want you to go. I want you to go look it up.
23:59
I want you to see what happened when other people didn't forget
24:04
about war crimes and the understanding of the
24:08
consequences of allowing these kinds of things to go
24:12
unpunished. Historical amnesia, of course,
24:16
risks repeating past mistakes. We had a caller during one of
24:20
the breaks that wanted to talk about Ukraine.
24:21
We're not going to talk about that today.
24:23
But if we had properly punished Jochen Piper and others, would
24:29
others then have said, oh, maybe I shouldn't do those things as
24:34
opposed to ignoring them? If we as as a nation had stood
24:39
up and said these things are wrong and we are going to carry
24:42
them out and the geopolitical situation be damned, what
24:47
message would that have sent we? We talk about drawing parallels
24:53
between the past and the present and the future, but somehow or
24:57
another, December 17th, 194484 Americans were murdered during
25:05
the war and to this day, technically no one was ever held
25:11
accountable. And that should stick in our
25:14
craw. And I hope that it does.
25:19
We're back in 60 seconds on WMMB podcast for this show, including
25:24
Dave does history top of the page in the on demand podcast
25:27
section at billmake.com Florida Roundtable podcast.
25:30
Right beside that, David, as you concluded our look at the Melody
25:35
Massacre massacre and, and you've referenced the Geneva
25:39
Convention many times through the presentation this morning.
25:46
Have we tried to do something that really can't be done?
25:50
Is the Geneva Convention designed to civilize war?
25:56
And it's certainly not a civilized thing.
26:00
I think you could make the argument that the Geneva
26:02
Convention is based on the principle as, as you know,
26:07
Madison once wrote, if men were angels, this is how we would
26:10
behave. But it's also a little bit of
26:15
what some people might call victor's justice because, and I,
26:21
you know, again, I don't want to spend a lot of time in this.
26:23
There were atrocities on both sides.
26:27
The ones on the Nazi side, for the most part, were punished.
26:30
Some on the Japanese side were not because it didn't fit the
26:34
geopolitical position. And of course, the ones on the
26:38
American side, we're ignored. Uncomfortable truths of history.
26:47
Wow, isn't that interesting. Got some calls to get to.
26:50
We're going to begin with line one.
26:51
You're up on Bill Mick live. Good morning.
26:53
Good. Morning Bill Ed in Melbourne.
26:55
Yeah, it. Looks like this s s officer
27:00
worked for a Porsche and Volkswagen and later moved to
27:05
France. That is true.
27:08
OK, good start on that. Let's go to line 2.
27:11
You're up on Bill Make Live. Good morning.
27:14
Merry Christmas to you, Bill, and very Merry Christmas to you,
27:17
Dave. I wish you and your family a
27:18
very Merry Christmas to this Brody.
27:20
Happy Hanukkah to you as well. The I was very surprised that
27:33
you brought up that movie Fury and saying that you like that.
27:37
I agree. I'm just going to leave one
27:40
comment and and hopefully you can explain something to me.
27:46
War is I don't want to get too deep into war as hell, but war
27:53
usually the the victors usually write the stories and that's how
27:59
it's always been through history.
28:01
You know, there's, there's been bad things done on both sides of
28:05
of war. You know, it's just hell.
28:08
And I just but the victors usually, you know, will write
28:12
the history saying we did nothing wrong and the Nazis or
28:16
the Romans or the the Muslims did everything wrong.
28:20
But I just want to leave it at that.
28:23
And just to let know everybody know that, you know, just hold
28:30
your people close to you and just remember and honor them.
28:34
And as long as you remember them, they are never dead.
28:37
That's all. Merry Christmas and happy
28:39
Hanukkah. Thank you, Brody.
28:40
Appreciate that, Dave. Any commentary there?
28:43
Yeah, he was. I'm I'm not sure what I was
28:45
supposed to answer to him. I didn't catch.
28:48
A question there, but yeah, I enjoyed the movie Fury because
28:53
it's a, it's a fictional story, but it is it strives for at
28:59
least period accuracy and it was intense.
29:03
It was very, very intense. And I enjoyed that.
29:06
But as again, as I, as I talked about with the World War 2
29:09
veteran that I was talking to about it afterwards, it doesn't
29:13
capture the sound, the smell and the fury of it.
29:17
And that's, that's unfortunate. So.
29:19
But there's no way to do that. Yeah, that's true.
29:22
Line 3, Good morning. You're on Bill Mick live.
29:25
Good morning, Mario. Cape Canaveral during World War
29:29
2. We were.
29:30
We were. Killing hundreds of thousands of
29:32
civilians in Japan, we killed hundreds of thousands.
29:35
Europe killed hundreds of thousands.
29:37
The Germany, hundreds of thousands of civilians.
29:40
I think by the time the war was over, we were kind of calloused
29:44
about the idea of killing, you know, a few dozen, you know,
29:48
innocent soldiers who were just all right, murdered.
29:52
But I mean, there was just hundreds of thousands, maybe
29:53
millions of civilians killed during World War 2 or, you know,
29:58
by, by, by, by the American, by the Allies.
30:01
And so I think we were just kind of calloused.
30:03
But I, I don't think it, it had as big a, an impact as it would
30:07
thinking about it today, you know, from our perspective.
30:13
Well, it in the broader context, this was one of the charges that
30:17
was made against at the Nuremberg trials was war against
30:20
humanity, war against civilians. Now keep in mind that under the
30:23
1929 Geneva Convention, there was no prohibition against Total
30:28
War against civilians. That was it wasn't wasn't
30:30
covered until after World War 2, and most of the Nuremberg defend
30:35
defendants paid for that crime with their lives.
30:39
But yes, you could also argue that the Allies, the Dresden
30:42
bombing, the fire bombings of Tokyo, which killed far more
30:46
people than the two atomic bombings did, could have been
30:50
considered in the same vein if we had lost.
30:54
But again, it's one of those uncomfortable things about
30:57
history. One of the greatest submarine
30:59
heroes of World War 2, Mush Morton was accused of the same
31:04
thing. The cry the crew of EU 852 was
31:07
accused of machine gunning survivors in the water, which is
31:11
covered under the Geneva Convention by the way.
31:13
But in in any case, he was downgraded from a Medal of Honor
31:18
to a Navy Cross because of that incident, and unfortunately he
31:23
died in October of 1943 when his submarine was sunk anyway, so
31:27
nothing ever came of it. But yes, you're right, war is
31:31
hell. There are tragedies on both
31:33
sides. As far as who writes the stories
31:36
with a singular exception in history, you're right, the
31:39
winners write the histories. The singular exception being the
31:43
American Civil War. For some reason.
31:45
There are three to four times as many books being written by
31:48
Southerners as there are Northerners.
31:50
But the bottom line is we we took an approach to this that
31:57
we're kind of forgetting these things.
31:58
And Yocum Piper was convicted, sentenced to death, and was not
32:03
executed. In fact, he was allowed to go
32:05
free because of the geopolitical position that communism was more
32:09
important than executing a a known Nazi.
32:14
That's interesting. Have we learned the lessons,
32:17
Dave? As human beings, you'd have to
32:20
say no again, as you watch what's happening in the world
32:24
today. We this is like right out of the
32:27
Old Testament bill where God tells the Israelites to do
32:30
something. They don't do it.
32:31
And what happens? Bad things.
32:33
If we had, if we had carried out these executions, we had carried
32:38
out these things, perhaps it would have sent a different
32:40
message. But we allowed politics to
32:43
intervene and, well, here we are.
32:47
Oh, that's our last Dave Does history for this year, hopefully
32:51
back the second week of January, but we'll keep an eye on the
32:54
schedule, Dave, and stay in touch and make that happen.
32:56
Thank you much, Sir. It's a very good Dave Does
32:59
History. Today, I appreciate that.
33:05
Check out more stories from history@davedoeshistory.org.