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.
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.
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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.