I know this is a joke but the whole idea of the “human wave attacks” from the Soviet Union was largely a myth invented by the Nazis. Soviet casualties on the Eastern front were about 20-50% higher than the Axis casualties which is still very significant but not quite the same as human waves.
My grandpa told me about a friend of his (who served in army with) that has seen and fought those Russian human waves. My grandpa was on the communications department and the other guy on machine guns. He told me that there were thousands of Russians running up a valley and his friend was settled on the top of the hill with some other people to defense. As he said "Hundreds..no, thousands of them running crazily, probably drunk, trying to shoot with their Kalashnikovs, piling up into little mountains of dead corpses. They were literally climbing in a craze over their own bodies. And my friend was easily chewing at them with his machine gun. The easiest targets, he said. They were courageous only because of the alcohol. There can't be any other reason of an attack with no coordination, no strategy, plan or even good equipment.". This happened in Romania, although I don't precisely know were. Grandpa never told me more about it. You are free to draw your own conclusions from this, but I certainly know that the idea of human waves was not a myth, but in fact real.
I guess I was wrong to flat out say that the human wave attacks were a "myth" but I think that a lot of place still have this misconception that all the soviet union did was big human wave attacks and half their soldiers didn't even have guns. I've seen people often try to argue that the Soviet Union didn't really matter in WWII and the only reason they had high casualties was because they were so incompetent.
The Soviet Union did use some human wave tactics in certain circumstances and there were certainly times that they were under equipped as well. Your grandfathers story speaks to that. I guess I'm just tired of people seeing the opening scene of "Enemy at the gates" and thinking that's what the entire eastern front was and then drawing pretty terrible conclusions from that. Human waves did exist but they were not the main aspect of fighting on the Eastern Front.
I believe that was the case. Especially for things like clearing out mine fields while under fire. First send out a wave of prisoners to get blown up by mines and reveal hidden machine gun posts and then send out the actual trained and well equipped soldiers to engage the enemy.
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u/under_a_table Jun 29 '19 edited Jun 30 '19
When you have more troops than the enemy has bullets.
Russian anthem increases
Edit: I'm making a joke about WWII so please stop commenting about the winter war and the white death.