War Diaries Talk

No prisoners taken?

  • erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be by erik.schaubroeckscarlet.be

    "The gun teams should be killed". Why make all the arrangements for sending back prisoners and here they just kill the gun teams.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I think, in this case, the gun teams were to be killed in order to prevent them from disabling their guns and the British orders were to capture the guns in usable condition.

    Posted

  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    I suspect gun team refers to the horses, rather than the men. This would stop the Germans being able to recover the guns easily. The horses would obviously be trained differently and with different words of command to those the British Army used, so the British wouldn't necessarily be able to use the German horses to take the guns away themselves. The Germans were also very short of horses, so it would be hard to replace any lost this way. Even the UK had to resort to getting horses from Canada and the US, but the British blockade of Germany made it almost impossible for the Germans to get hold of horses from anywhere outside the Germany itself or any occupied territory.

    Posted

  • David_Underdown by David_Underdown moderator

    To expand on this slightly the official term for the men manning the gun was the gun detachment I think, or slightly less formally the gun crew.

    Posted

  • ral104 by ral104 moderator, scientist

    Thanks for that, David. It certainly makes more sense that the gun team is referring to the horses. I suppose in practical terms these were treated as any other captured equipment would have been - put to use where possible, destroyed if not.

    Not good news for the horses, of course.

    Posted

  • cyngast by cyngast moderator

    I agree that it does make more sense that the team were the horses.

    I think it's hard for us now, at a time and in a place where horses are used primarily for recreational purposes, to imagine such a utilitarian attitude toward them.

    Posted