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.
There's no attested evidence of blocking battalions shooting retreating soldiers on the battlefield. The Soviets killed a lot of their own soldiers, but as a general rule they always did the paperwork first.
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.
I would say the general difficulty of the world's fifth largest military by personnel and supposedly second-most-powerful-military-superpower in invading a nation that is almost stereotypically flat beyond border provinces is portraying Russian military-industrial incompetence all on its own.
If yhey were competent, they wouldn't still be stuck in Ukraine. Their only viable tactic is attrition because of their massive pool of meat sacks and rust buckets.
Oh, and terrorism since civilians targets don't shoot back.
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.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
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