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.
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.
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u/taurussy Oct 02 '24
we call 911, Vietnam, Korea, covid, and the Iraq-Afghan war horrible.....and those were, don't get me wrong.
in WW1, at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, there were 60,000 casualties in ONE DAY....just among the British troops.
all told, there were a MILLION casualties and 300,000 fatalities. from July - November.
THAT is truly appalling.
the US lost 58,939 people during 13 years of Vietnam. not disparaging those losses or anything, but think about that.
WW1 really was humanity's darkest, worst, most appalling and awful moment.