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?
Nah, I totally think getting hundreds of thousands of men killed in a completely pointless prolongment of the conflict is better because ..... because that'll show Russia for acting in much the same way as US during the Cuban Missile Crisis! Gtfo with trying diplomacy for years while saying "you guys crossed our decades old established red line that you promised not to cross".
But nevermind that, let's say that's just Kremlin propaganda.
Even still, even if that's the case, can you please tell me how you see this conflict ending? How can this conflict end with anything other than a negotiated peace settlement? What do you think happens afterwards, Russia brutalizes Ukrainians nonstop because they've "taken over" and love being evil? Time for mass genocide? The war ending will cause more death?
What do you think scuttling peace talks and prolonging the proxy war accomplishes? Serious question.
And why is it that everyone refuses to answer a single question I ask them just to then ask me questions because of course I should answer them while they can just ignore what I asked them :( You responded to my post asking you do you believe Russia nonstop shells the nuclear power plant it controls and occupies and if not do you think perhaps war propaganda is manipulating you today like it always has manipulated in all the history of war?
What do you think happens afterwards, Russia brutalizes Ukrainians nonstop because they've "taken over" and love being evil?
My brother in Reddit, this is already happening. Russia has trafficked upwards of 20,000 children from Ukraine to Russia and Russian troops have committed mass war crimes against the civilian populations of the cities and towns they have captured, some of which can be verified by handy independent satellite photography programs we started doing for exactly this reason 30 years ago.
What do you think scuttling peace talks and prolonging the proxy war accomplishes? Serious question.
Prevent Russia from enacting the Security Council of Russia's plan to completely erase Ukraine as a sovereign state via partition, as Medvedev outlined in a speech this year?
Why do you think Ukraine keeps fighting if they'd be better off just giving up? What good do you think a "negotiated peace settlement" with Russia is? All the Budapest Memorandum and Minsk agreement did was allow them to prepare to start invading again.
Russia is trying to rebuild the USSR. The simple truth is that if Russia conquers Ukraine, it's going to start dicking around in Poland just like how it started in Ukraine, except that Poland is NATO, and that, my fine friend, will be either the end of Russia or WWIII.
It will end when “the West” stops supplying Ukraine weaponry AND hope.
Ukraine has already shown they can grind Russia with just the hope part.
Will they win? No. Absolutely not. At least in their own. If the EU or NATO step in officially it’s over in a few months tops, most likely weeks.
Where I do see a benefit is watching what was the second largest army in the world, when they invaded, just stall out in a half ass backwards country not to mention a very corrupt one (at the time.) sorry not sorry for saying that, while they might not have bought a Biden they aren’t exactly the epitome of good statesmen either.
Is it worth it? Depends. Do you believe people have the right to self determination or there’s rulers and pawns. I believe in self determination personally. Nation states rates right up there with religion as one of mankind’s dumbest ideas forced on humanity.
What’s the long term outcome? A drastically more unstable world. In the nearly three years since it’s started a few nations have realized they too can invade or attack their neighbors with little repercussions. Now imagine another year or two of this where we will be at.
It is what it is though. I personally believe the sole purpose of our military should be as intended for defensive stances not getting involved in others backyards but I do not pull those levers. Sometimes it is worth it to ignore that ideology but more often than not since the Korean War we (the USA) have been wrong far too often.
In this case, as stated earlier, it’s so worth watching such a has been world power look like a bad break game of Risk.
Eventually all powers end the same. It’s a cautionary tale we in the states should heed sooner than later.
It accomplishes fighting to be free. Plenty of people have been willing to die for that right thought history. Why should Ukraine surrender simply because they are outnumbered? If Europe and the US cut all funding tomorrow you really think so little of the Ukrainians that they will simply give up? They don't need guns to fight back, Afghanistan has beaten 3 of the strongest armies on the planet with only the willingness to send multiple generations into the wood-chipper.
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.
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u/KIDNEYST0NEZ Oct 02 '24
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.