Word: commandeering
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...order or command must be lawful for obedience to be required. No person in the Armies of the U.S. can be convicted of disobedience to an illegal order. Of course the burden of proof that a given order was illegal lies on the person who disobeys it. He had better be very certain that it is illegal before he dare disobey-particularly in war. Corollary is the responsibility of the person giving the order for its legality...
Twice George ("Old Blood & Guts") Patton had been stripped of his command. The first time was after a public furor in the U.S. over his slapping and abusing a shell-shocked soldier in a Sicilian hospital. (Technically, he remained head of the Seventh Army, but it was a phantom Army with no divisions.) For the old war horse, that was a bitter period. One day he visited Fifth Army headquarters before Cassino, borrowed Mark Clark's Packard, and in this conspicuous vehicle rode recklessly up to the front lines. When he could ride no farther...
...second time he lost a command was last October, when "Ike" Eisenhower yanked him out of the Third Army command which had made him Military Governor of Bavaria; he had belittled the differences between Nazis and anti-Nazis, likening them to those between Republicans and Democrats. He got the Fifteenth, a paper Army doing paper work, compiling a history of European campaigns...
...prosecutors last week were trying to prove that the Nazi Leadership Corps, Elite Guard (SS), Storm Troops (SA), Reich Cabinet, Gestapo, High Command and General Staff were criminal organizations, and to draw the line so as to include a third of those who were willing members. Assistant U.S. Prosecutor Robert G. Story called for the conviction of some 600,000 officers of the Leadership Corps, ranging from Reichsleiter to block leaders...
...Poland the face of UNRRA was Canada's Brigadier General Charles M. Drury, 33, who commanded the 4th Canadian Division. Drury, a scion of one of Canada's wealthiest families (armaments), had accepted his UNRRA command with a faint dislike of Poland and the Poles. Swiftly and publicly he changed his mind. More remarkable, perhaps, Drury had overcome Polish Government suspicions that UNRRA would be used as a political weapon...