Quote:
Originally Posted by Sliver
Hey CC, during your time in the armed forces, were you ever given an order you refused to carry out?
I always wonder about that in the army. Obviously it wouldn't function well if soldiers could pick and choose the orders they accepted; however, it is possible to receive an order that would be wrong to carry out. An extreme example is obviously all of the Nazi soldiers that were just carrying out there orders that led to the death of millions of jews in WWII.
Hopefully as a Canadian you never had to deal with something quite so horrible, but did you ever have to say "no" to a superior officer? If you were to say no, what sort of punishment could you expect? Are there failsafes in place so that if you are being ordered to do something wrong (like say burn a village full of civilians a la Vietnam) you could refuse on some sort of grounds that would force your superior to rethink his decision?
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And in an effort to keep this on topic, anybody ever been to Germany on November 11? I wonder how they approach Remembrance day.
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It was pretty much beaten into us that we could refuse an order that we felt was unlawful. the international and national courts refuse the whole "I was just following orders" defense.
However if you did refuse an order you could still expect to be arrested and have to defend your refusal through the military court system so you'd better have a damned good reason.
did I ever refuse an order, minor stuff, ignoring the prescribed ambush site could have been sited as a refusal of orders from a senior NCO, as it stood I did take some punishment from that NCO that was outside of the court system.
In WWII there wasn't a mechanism in place for the refusal of orders, especially in the German, Japanese or Russian militaries where refusal would earn you an immediate bullet. In the Western Militaries it was likely that you would dangle from a rope after a court marshall.
The war crimes tribunals at the end of the war established the fact that obeying a direct order was not a legal defense, but the quandry was based around the fact that most privates and lower NCO and lower CO's had the concept of blind obedience beaten into your skull when you were indoctrinated into the militaries culture. Because of that it was very rare that you saw junior officers and NCO's punished and executed it was mostly those who issued the orders.
I was never given an order that went contrary to my moral code, if anything the officers in charge were well aware of the boundaries that men would and wouldn't cross.