"Atrocities were comitted by both sides...."

General Chuck Yeager, pages 62 - 63.

"Atrocities were comitted by both sides.

"That fall [most likely of 1944] our fighter group recived orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort.

"Our seventy - five Mustangs were asigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved.

"The object was to demoralize the German population.

"Nobody asked our opinion about whether were were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort.

"We weren't asked how we felt about zapping people.

"It was a miserable, dirty mision, but we all took off on time and did it.

"If it occurred to anyone to refuse to participate (nobody refused, as I recall) that person would have probably have been court - martialed.

"I remember sitting next to [his buddy] Bochkay at the briefing and whispering to him: If we're gonna to do things like this, we sure as hell better make sure we're on the winning side.

"That's still my view.

"We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple...."