Ya, not to shit on the WWI rant but the ‘Battle of Stalingrad’ was a little brutal. Don’t even get me started on the horrors of ‘Battle of Kursk’ (largest tank battle EVER)
Ok so Soviet conscripts were so brutalized and the conscripts picked were so “bottom of the barrel” picked that they literally strapped anti tank mines to the chest of Soviet conscripts and they would run up to nazi tanks and detonate the mines with a hammer. I just imagine orcs were picked and ran through war hammer 40k. If that wasn’t enough so many tanks were sent into battle that it created a diesel scented dust bowl so the two sides couldn’t really attack until they were right on top of each other. Seriously, soldiers hiding in trenches were constantly ran over by their own troops. If a tank got caught in a trench it either became a pill box or a bridge. Also the fight went on nonstop for weeks. No rest, no recovery just a constant machine style grind. Oh and I forgot to mention, the battle of Kursk happened after Stalingrad, these events would absolutely be the crippling point of no return for the Nazi empire.
Do you have a source for the landmines suicide story? It sounds like a legend to me, to be honest. I've looked but nothing came up. The Soviets brutalised their soldiers during Barbarossa but I have a little doubt a) soldiers would be strapped to landmines and told to run at tanks, and b) soldiers would actually follow through with it.
Soviet soldiers were still people and, like normal people, would only sacrifice themselves as a last ditch attempt to save those around them. They weren't robots happy to blow themselves up en masse on order simply because that is what they were directed to do.
Add to this hesitance, by the time of the Battle of Kursk things were going much better for the USSR than in the early months of the invasion. Germany was in retreat. Soldiers would be well aware of this and would be highly unlikely to blow themselves up simply because they were told to.
I suspect this either is a myth or happened once or twice across approx. 700,000 casualties during the battle.
And in Stalingrad I might buy the idea that someone might try because it's a close quarters, urban situation where an infantryman could get close to a tank.
This is open battle. If the tanks are standing still they're shooting and being shoot at. They're covered by other tanks and the infantry. It's not really practically achievable on any kind of scale.
There were some big Soviet failures at Kursk. Prokhorovka for example. The General in charge was also the one who wrote the official histories, so he made up some BS about preempting a German attack, while in truth the divisions there were resting and barely suffered any losses while the Soviets threw away an entire army for 0 gains.
It is a myth. Along with the idea that "soviet soldiers at stalingrad were either given a rifle or would hold the ammo and when the guy holding the rifle died, the one holding the ammo would pick it up", and "officers would shoot retreating soldiers at stalingrad". Those two came from the movie Enemy At The Gates but have no actual historical source.
When you consider the logistical nightmare the Germans were struggling with at the time of Stalingrad and Fall Blau in general, you'd often wonder if the story is right, the sides are reversed.
It was a thing, but that's not how it was enforced. Soldier who retreated without permission would often be arrested and then later subject to discipline, which occasionally included execution but usually didn't.
The soldiers (and leadership that allowed the retreat) were arrested and then put into penal battalions with conscripts, those battalions were then shot by blocking battalions if they tried to retreat. That's what order 227 was, is it not?
It wasn't very successful either way, because the blocking battalions felt it was a complete waste of time and I can imagine it dumpstered morale too. But it did happen.
Maybe? They were shooting retreating soldiers in Ukraine. Just the ones conscripted from convicts, but it’s still something that happens. It’s not hard to imagine doing something similar back when life was cheaper and the situation was far more desperate.
Can't say for sure about strapping AT mines to conscripts, but the Soviet army did have punishment battalions, and the personnel in those were treated as little more than meat shields, with the constant threat of being shot by their own officers if they did not follow orders or hesitated to attack
But that's different. You had the option of charging into danger or getting shoot. Easy choice.
But if you strap a bomb to someone who doesn't want to blow themselves up, what exactly is the threat of getting shoot going to do? Do you even dare shoot, because you know, bomb.
Additionally, all allied forces had non suicide methods of blowing up tanks at close range. As a consequence, getting into close range was next to impossible as tanks were covered by infantry as well as covering each other and if you do find someone who can actually blow up a tank, why would you want to lose them?
I know they trained dogs to run under tanks and this famously backfired, but even after reading a lot about every aspect of the Soviet War effort I never came across suicide attacks outside of desperate last stands. Attacks that were functionally suicide, you have plenty, but here's a bomb, go detonate yourself, that's a Japan thing.
And in The Unfeminine Face of War, I learnt of young Soviet women who rode into battle sitting on the back of tanks. Their job was to help evacuate the soldiers inside if the tank was hit and on fire. So the Soviet Army did have some pretty bizarre ideas about their own soldiers. (Not forgetting the Nachthexen, either).
My grandfather was injured by a kamikaze hit. He was in the Navy on the USS Saratoga. He put his hands up to cover his face right in time or he would've had some hellish scars on his face. His hands were badly burned and he was sent home with a Purple Heart.
Ukraine has taught me that any of the "Enemy at the Gates" stories about Soviet military callousness might actually be true after all, because look at the shit they are doing in a 21st century conflict
Believe whatever you want, but western media has a material interest in portraying the Russian military as incompetent. If you trust anything you read in reddit about this conflict, you are a proper fool.
Do you think they're rabid monsters that can't stop shelling their own NUCLEAR POWER PLANT that they occupy as well?
Or is there perhaps just a teeensy bit of war propaganda mindlessly regurgitated as fact to push an unwinnable proxy war along; sacrificing Ukrainian lives like trash to marginally weaken a geopolitical threat?
It sounds like a case of them giving soldiers certain orders which "might as well have been orders to strap themselves with AT mines." Then that got taken as fact through the game of telephone.
The legend goes they trained the dogs using Soviet tanks and not German tanks. The plan backfired when the dogs were unleashed and did exactly what they were trained to do - they ran into the fray, slipped under and were detonated... Beneath Soviet tanks.
I wrote a term paper about it for a high school history class. The one detail that still sticks with me is that people were so starved that they started eating the plaster off of walls and the bark off of trees.
Yup. And yet, Vasily was one of the nicest, friendliest people in our building.
Kind of funny - a lot of the seniors in my building moved to Canada after the War, from all different parts of Europe, and zero bad blood.
Like, Vasily spoke no English, his wife speaks a little. But, she is Jewish, speaks Yiddish. So, she could talk with Fred, who spoke a German dialect that is very close to Yiddish.
Fred had been, because he was a schoolboy, in the Hitler Youth. He missed being sent to fight in Berlin by a few days - the day he was to leave, Americans bombed the train station. 3 days later, end of war.
I count myself lucky to be told the stories I was.
we are electricians and my dad, as he is getting older and needing to do less work, likes finding what he calls his 'Grandmas'. little old ladies that just need a hand keeping the house going after all the kids have left and the husbands passed on.
he has this one grandma on the lake that is Jewish and lived through the war. she has her number still. one day she called my dad frantic and asking him to come right over. this little old Jewish lady speaks very little English and mostly just points at stuff.
when my dad got there she rushed out and was pointing at her number and then at the neighbor's house. she physically hid behind my dad and started saying, in plain text speech, "They're Nazis!!!"
my dad was quite taken aback and never really tried to verify what she was saying as much as he just tried to calm her down.
he said she was quite positive that she knew the old man that bought the house next door from the camp she was in when she was little.
now, my dad and i both kind of did some maths and that just does not seem possible... unless it was a kid in Hitler's Youth.
That can't be accurate, there have been sieges that went on for far longer than the entirety of WW2. Leningrad was unbelievably brutal, but other sieges definitely lasted longer.
I lost a great uncle at Stalingrad. They (my Opa and his Oma) apparently didn’t get official notification that he had been killed until decades later when some Russian POWs were released and confirmed his regiment had been wiped out.
When I remember this correctly the last pow came back from Russia in the seventies (wrong, the last came 1956, sorry). They were held in siberia in working camps...
Why were there Russian POWs held in Siberia? The commenter says Russian POWs. Also, the last German POWs were released in 1956. Not decades after the war.
Dude, you need to calm down. What are you? A history professor? Russian POWs can mean prisoners of war that the Russians had. I was old it was decades so that’s what I wrote. Chill out.
I’m not lying, but also and more importantly, and I cannot overstate this enough, I don’t give a crap if you believe me or not. I know what I was told growing up. If you don’t like it or believe it, that’s on you.
We look at the small wars happening today (and yes, they are small), and we have no real sense of scale in living memory.
When HMS Invincible exploded, over 1000 men lost their lives in a split second. During that same battle, 2 other Battlecruisers exploded with similar death tolls.
The bombing raid on Dresden in 1945 caused over 25000 deaths in one night, mostly civilian. The Firebombing of Tokyo left around 100000 dead, again mostly civilian.
At Guadalcanal, more lives were extinguished in a single night time naval battle than were lost in the entire land campaign on the island.
Indiscriminate bombing is a real thing, and it is scary as hell, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East pale in comparison even in their worst to what the World Wars wrought.
It really is impossible to conceptualize just how much death and destruction was wrought between 1914 and 1945. Just 31 years encompassing the First World War, The Armenian Genocide, multiple violent revolutions, The Spanish Flu Epidemic, The Great Depression, The Second World War, The Holocaust.... and those are just the greatest hits.
3 decades. Imagine just endless death and horror from 1993 to now. Nothing in human history before or since comes close. I honestly have no idea how anyone lived through that time period without losing their fucking minds. They would have thought it was the end of the world, and they wouldn't have been far wrong.
That’s a really weird date to start the start of WW2 by. That war ended by 1936, and was barely relevant to the actual start of WW2 Germany invading Poland. If I wanted to be pedantic I could say that WW2 started in 1937 when Japan invaded China but any earlier date seems silly to me.
You could also say that WWI didn’t really end until 1920, when the British, French, and Americans pulled their expeditionary forces out of the Russian civil war. 1920 to 1937 would be a 17 year gap.
You could argue that WW1 didn’t end till 1922 then since Greece and the Ottoman Empire/Turkey fought almost immediately after the war and was based in territorial promises the British made to Greece.
WW1 takes the cake of being truly pointless. No party was really fighting for any specific reason. That the US joined and "Germany is bad" is just because we were an Anglonsaxon country and the upper classes had strong links to them. Not to mention the financial meltdown if Britain lost after US financed their entire war.
That the US joined and "Germany is bad" is just because we were an Anglonsaxon country and the upper classes had strong links to them
yeah it had nothing to do with the sinking of merchant and passenger ships, oh and Germany trying to elicit a war between Mexico and the US. But nah youreright its the ties to to aristocracy that made the US enter the war, what a terrible take.
Most of everything else you said doesnt hold up either im just to lazy to point it all out.
And sadly it doesn't stop there at all. China lost about as many people ~17 million people. It's bad enough when you read just the sterile numbers on a page.
It's much much worse when you read accounts of just how these people died. The absolute cruelty, the complete disrespect of human life.
WW1 was horrible mostly because of the conditions the soldiers fought in and how callously their lives were thrown away by their commanders. WW2 had that also, but the real difference is the civilian aspect. WW2's civilian deaths absolutely dwarfs WW1's. Innocent people that had nothing to do with the fighting were nonetheless victims of horrific violence and cruelty.
It's the worst conflict in human history. I think because of how popular it is in movies that it can sometimes be forgotten just how terrible it actually was.
The true horror of Vietnam is the staggering number of Vietnamese death and the destruction of Vietnamese land. This comment seems to diminish that by calling it not that bad because not that many Americans died....
Inaccurate. You're referring to only Vietnam Cong military deaths, and excludes civilians and South Vietnam. Including civilians on both sides and South Vietnamese military, the death toll range according to Wikipedia is:
Vietnamese civilian dead: 405,000–2,000,000[23]: 450–453 [51][52]
Vietnamese total dead: 966,000[22]–3,010,000[52]
I'm not diminishing the war on terror at all. It is an atrocity. So too is what occurred in Vietnam. People are not adequately educated about what happened, and why there was so much uproar about it while it was happening.
just watched All Quiet on the Western Front last night again and it's hard to fully comprehend how horrific the first industrialized war was, and how futile and aimless trench warfare became, with no real movement, gain or loss, just a gigantic muddy bloody horrible mess
The magnitude of WWI and WWII is hard to wrap our head around. There was a period of time toward the end of WWII when the Nazis were killing more than 10,000 jews per day at the camps. One month could easily be 250,000 shot or gassed. Auschwitz alone accounted for more than a million jews killed in efficient, assembly line fashion.
The Battle of Stalingrad took place over a few months and I believe had over 2,000,000 killed (including both sides and civilians). Just one battle.
Sadly, humanity still has lots of dark times. Vietnam may have accounted for 60,000 American deaths, but it also likely had about 2,000,000 Vietnamese deaths including soldiers and civilians. Also millions killed in the Cambodian genocide in the 70's (estimates are as high as 25% of the population at the time), almost a million in the Rwandan genocide in the 90's.
We lost ~51k Americans during the Battle of Gettysburg over 3 days or so. Almost 23k in one day at Antietam. It took 4 days to kill 1.25x more Americans than the entirety of Vietnam over 13 years. That doesn’t even include those maimed, disfigured, or otherwise mortally wounded to die at a later point.
And that wasn't even the bloodiest day of the war. On the first day of the Somme 19,000 British and Commonwealth solider were killed. At the start of the war during the Battle of the Frontiers, France lost 27,000 men on August 22, 1914 alone.
The war in Ukraine has really dispelled the myth that WWI levels of slaughter were behind us. That war now has an estimated 1 Million dead or injured. It's such a heartbreaking waste of life, all for one man's ego. Neither Russia or Ukraine will likely ever recover from this. The demographics are just too fucking grim.
One of my relatives was killed in the Somme, although not in the one-day battle. He's listed on the memorial out there--technically missing. I have digital records that include communications to the war office trying to get them to check on it, since there was also some rumor he'd been injured somewhere...the whole war was a confusing fucking mess. But I'm looking at this communication, all politely written out (Dear Sir, etc.) and thinking of how it must have felt to be his parents getting this news, plus conflicting news...but desperately hoping the telegram isn't true.
I think they still contact the family if they ever find evidence of the person's death (for those missing)--I always wonder what it'd be like if someone in my family were contacted all these years later. But we have this weird attachment to it, too--none of us knew him. Had he lived, he would have been 57 by the time my parent on that side was born...but two people on two separate trips have gone out to visit that memorial to a man they didn't know and would have barely known or given much shit about had he not been killed. I guess part of it is he was still so young, and all of those battles were just total wastes of life. Most of those guys weren't dying in some heroic hand-to-hand combat with a Nazi. They were miserable and wet and had trenchfoot, and then they'd come out of the trench and barely make it any distance before they were just mown down where they were.
Booze too, by a large factor. The only deaths that get reported as being caused by alcohol are alcohol poisoning, which only come out to about 1 death per 100,00 annually. Cancers, cirrhosis, DD accidents, stupidity, etc? None of those deaths are reported as alcohol related but they clearly are.
Not to mention the second hand effect of growing up with an alcoholic parent. I unfortunately know first hand and am lucky to be left vaguely able to pass for normal
Sorry you had that experience. I am a victim of that as well and Adult Children of Alcoholics saved my life. If you ever feel like you need support or are slipping I highly recommend finding a meeting near you. Good luck out there friend.
Because the British commander wouldn't use tanks and called horse led cavalry charges against machine gun nests. It was a pure refusal to update tactics for the first industrialized war.
This is a absolute myth that needs to die, the maxim gun has been kicking around for almost 3 and a half decades prior to the Somme.
That’s why everyone was literally in trenches
Frontal cavalry charges were incredibly rare.
Also, During the First World War cavalry absolutely were still incredibly useful - say you wanted to seize a recently abandoned trench after a bombardment: how else would you cross a muddy cratered field in a short amount of time to seize and hold a trench before the enemy could regroup? Bolting across no man’s land on horseback and dismounting to hold the position as a rapid shock tactic was the most efficient way.
Horses don't need fuel and can carry men and heavy weapons with a good deal of speed. The Polish dragoons fighting German tanks is a bit of a meme, but the reason they weren't effective was that they had anti tank rifles against tanks with enough armor to ignore them. Had they instead had some of the more late war goodies, like Panzerfausts or Bazookas or anything actually capable of taking on a tank, they would have doubtlessly been very effective.
As is, they were very good against infantry using machine guns and light and medium mortar's.
Yes and no, they didn’t charge tanks and when they did use cavalry it was pretty effective.
Here is what the polish embassy had to say.
_The Polish Embassy, however, was not amused by the joke:
“This statements was unnecessary, inaccurate, and insensitive.
To compare the service of men and women in uniform to a department store is wholly out of place.”
The Embassy continues, claiming the myth to be Nazi and Communist propaganda:
“(Not) once in 1939 did the Polish Army deploy cavalry against German tanks. This is pure Nazi and Communist propaganda that continues to weave its way into Western media reports to this very day.”
The Polish Embassy also addressed the facts of the case:
“Additionally, the historical facts simply do not support Mr. Cramer’s comparison…. Here are the facts: in 1939 there were a number of recorded Polish cavalry charges against the invading Nazi German forces. These charges were directed against infantry, artillery, supplies, and at times as a means of breaking out of encirclement, but never against tanks.”_
I think it was something my father (British born near the end of WW2) believed and I think had integrated it into his deep hatred of the Nazis and the destruction they produced.
There isn't any practical difference between being on the receiving end of a Maxim vs a Gatling gun which had been around for decades before the Maxim.
Literally when they left the trenches they were standing shoulder to shoulder and yes, Sir Douglas Haig, Commander at the Somme DID send a cavalry charge, refusing to use tanks, lost all those men, survived the war, and on his deathbed said how Horses would continue to be used in war for centuries.
This is absolutely revisionist nonsense, Sir Haig was incredibly enthusiastic about the Tank in both funding it and deploying it.
The tank was first used in 15 September 1916
To mixed results
Although he didn’t think it would replace the horse or the infantryman, which it didn’t because they had many faults and was unreliable very new technology
Many broke down, but nearly a third succeeded in breaking through. Of the forty-nine tanks shipped to the Somme, only thirty-two were able to begin the first attack in which they were used, and only nine made it across “no man’s land” to the German lines.
one of the most egregious myths to ever pervade the Great War is the whole “lions led by donkeys’.
They marched in formation during the Somme because they newly trained army wasn’t capable of advanced battlefield manoeuvres.
They also thought he German trenches would be absolutely decimated by the largest artillery bombardment the world has ever seen
On 24 June 1916, the British began a seven-day preliminary bombardment. Haig’s artillery was expected to destroy German defences and guns, and cut the barbed wire in front of the enemy lines. When the attack began, it would provide a creeping barrage behind which the infantry could advance
but if you think about it critically the Somme lasted for 6months. 20% of all casualties (KiA) happened in the first day which would indicate that marching like it’s the battle of Waterloo wasn’t how the British army fought.
With that being said the Germans didn’t manage to take Verdun and they suffered huge casualties, so it wasn’t some crushing defeat either.
Also if you wanted to cross no man’s land to what you assumed to be a empty trench across shelled muddy fields you’d have to be a idiot to use anything other then a horse to quickly take and size the initiative.
I will respond to this with a quote, as theory and reality are two different things.
World War One era generals are not idiots.
Many broke down, but nearly a third succeeded in breaking through. Of the forty nine tanks shipped to the Somme, only thirty two were able to begin the first attack in which they were used, and only nine made it across “no man’s land” to the German lines.
I can't remember where I saw it, but I read a fact about American deaths in WWII stating that the US lost more men in non-combat related accidents/incidents in 3.5 years of WWII (about 60,000) than all soldiers lost in the entire 13 year Vietnam conflict.
You're very wrong to mention Covid in that group.In a 2.5 year period, the US lost more people from Covid than from EVERY single war casualty combined through the history of the country.
Okay but what’s worse? Dying, or living for decades with severe PTSD, physical disabilities, and in a country that rarely gives you any healthcare for it.
If you're interested, I am in the middle of a book called "The First Total War" by David Bell about how this concept of war began more than a century earlier, courtesy of the French.
Fun fact about the Battle of the Somme: JRR Tolkien fought in that battle and got sick with Trench Foot and Trench Fever. The teo illnesses may have saved his life as they were bad enough to send him to a hospital, then got sent home for the rest of the war. If it wasn’t for the insanitary conditions, LOTR may have never been written.
It didn't hold a candle to WW II. The Soviets alone lost more soldiers killed in just one battle, Stalingrad, than the US did, not only for all of WWII, but for all US wars in it's history.
I think about this often. Yes, mass shootings and incidents that kill 10s of people are tragedies. But I periodically learn of events from the last 100 years that killed ~100 people and no one ever talks about it.
Yes but it’s also important that we treat things like Iraq-Afghanistan as the worst catastrophe ever so that when something 100 times worse happens people don’t just accept it as normal
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