How did soldiers deal with the absurdly high casualty rates in WWII?
Imagine the sheer number of times some of those men had to watch someone die.
How did soldiers deal with the absurdly high casualty rates in WWII?
How did soldiers deal with the absurdly high casualty rates in WWII?
Imagine the sheer number of times some of those men had to watch someone die.
As a soldier, you only have a limited amount of information. Yes, you might see a lot of people die. But you dont know shit about casualties on the large scale. The guy fighting in greece doesnt know what going on in the pacific and the guy in russia isnt aware of whats going down in africa. (beyond the most surface level propaganda stuff)
I was reading about SS men on the Terek and one rifleman's diary said a failed attack resulted in about a thousand men killed on one hectare of land
theres a photo in the australian war memorial of turk and australian doctors during a ceasefire sorting through the dead bodies in a trench. theres probably about 15 to 20 bodies in a stretch of trench the length of someones house.
complete bullshit. soldiers back then received and sent letters and also had vacation. people also noticed their sons dying off like crazy on the eastern front. they knew very well what was going on at the various theatres.
>How did soldiers deal with the absurdly high casualty rates in WWII?
WW2 had a high absolute death count, but not an out-of-the-ordinary amount in comparison to their relative population
the US only took about 2% casualties compared to their population, even the soviet union took about 11% losses of their total population
the 30 years war was arguably worse relative to the population
>Imagine the sheer number of times some of those men had to watch someone die.
they simply rotated out depleted units to be rebuilt or joined together
so they would send recuperating units to quiet fronts where their replacement troops could learn the ropes in relative safety
the cut-off rate was usually about 1/3rd casualties before the unit was unfit for combat
so even in battles with extreme attrition, no single unit actually had to shoulder the losses by themselves
>the answer is unironically "apes together strong" and spreading the burden of combat across multiple units
This is missing the Forrest for the trees.
Company level is the highest you can go where interlocking cohesion from man to man exists.
Regents were the divisions mean of planning. Companies executed under regimental (or BT) if a company met contact. It was as planned and a single company would lose half its force in such an attack, such things have a very clear effect on the company even if the division, or RG/BN maintained good strength. These companies would be rotated to reserve but the men would never recover and like wise the company wouldn't either.
That's concentrated in most of the male population in a mostly young military age band
You understand this is fucking 1 American for every 50 dying, right? Can you comprehend how insane that is?
They just kinda did, fucked a lot of them up afterwards.
By being a man
A good goy, slave of the state.?
Not all of them were Soviets, anon.
My dad went to the former Yugoslavia with the British Army back in 1992/1993. I remember him being drunk at my 6th birthday party and I was kicking a football in the back garden with my friends and he suddenly stood up and yelled at us to stop and to go inside.
Took him another 10 years to tell me it was because a few months prior on his deployment they came across an entire village of Christian Croats who had been slaughtered and the first thing they saw was a bunch of Muslim kids kicking a severed head around in the mud. The Bosnians had come through and just beheaded everyone and stuffed their bodies down the well. They had to request recovery vehicles to assist them winching the bodies out and it took forever laying the bodies out on the grass and trying to match the heads. He said at first he threw up a couple of times and then there wasn't anything left to throw up and eventually the smell stopped bothering him but he never forgot their faces.
fucking hell
war is worse than hell because only in hell the guilty suffer In war every moment is suffering even to the one who did nothing wrong
War is also worse because it actually exists
Muslims are a blight on the Earth
Islamophobia isn't a real thing, The concern is very rational
The Serbs were castrating dudes by hanging them by the balls until they tore off, and the Croats were doing plenty of war crimes too. There's nothing the Muslims did in that war that was any more savage than what their Christian neighbors were up to.
T. Orthodox
>The Serbs were castrating dudes by hanging them by the balls until they tore off,
Ah, yes.
And the israelites were gassed and put inside ovens.
Seriously, you can't hang somebody by the balls. They will literally rip apart before you put any type of meaningful tension on them.
You can, there are some BDSM videos of people doing it.
>They will literally rip apart before you put any type of meaningful tension on them.
Yes, that was the point, they were using this method to castrate dudes, they weren't just trying to leave them up there for hours.
>And the israelites were gassed and put inside ovens.
The holocaust happened.
you can literally go online and find videos of people doing these things
Kek,good thing the US stopped the justified genocide of these subhuman and has caused tens of millions more to invade Europe.
>the US stopped
too bad they also stopped the bombing of serbia
US hates Whites and Christians. Accept it.
Obviously, since they stopped bombing the servs
>balkans
>white
Serbs killed more Christians than they do muslims. The U.S. wasn't the one deliberately turning Europe into another warzone.
that's why every president of America except one was a white christian
>serbs
>White
>othodox
>Christian
found the globohomo cuck
>globohomo
But enough about russia.
Found the seething serbgroid
You can find similar stories involving Serbs or Croats. Those wars were a mess, there were no good guys. just varying degrees of genocidal conduct.
>Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, "Come." I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer. —Revelation 6:1–2
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
homosexual contrarian atheist
you dont deserve capital letters or correct punctuation
I'm on his side, I think The Hobbit is better written than The Bible.
Ummmm, sweaty, those were the good guys. Don't you dare go questioning NATO here
US had a system renaming "replacements" with "reinforcements" they had 4-6 weeks of training and were sent on suicide missions, if they made it out they became part of the group.
Fighting in the bocages made American GIs very war weary, and casualties recover slower. Once the breakout happend causultie recovery sped up. Americans were very quick to become jaided to the war and killed a lot of PoWs
The British army can only be looked at theater specific since they change attitude and doctrine based on the year. In early Africa the British army was demorlized and acted very passively, quick to retreat and slow to attack. Causlties were a common thing and rotting corpses in the desert was a very unpleasant sight. Many soldiers got battle fatigue very quickly due to the environment, the foreign place they are in and homesickness. Casualties were often pressed into fighting as walking wounded. This changed under monty to a more logical army and things improved but that's really the only time monty shinned
In Normandy different regents had different views. Scottish soldiers who never saw the victories in Africa but only defeat often fled and were very ineffective as they knew what death and defeat was. The majority of the British army was said by bradly to be "addicted to artillery" as they never advanced without lots of guns.
I can write a lot more about Russia and Germany but that will be a long fucking post
Bong were slow to attack yes, but they didn't retreat from combat commonly and when they did did so in good order.
>In Normandy different regents had different views. Scottish soldiers who never saw the victories in Africa but only defeat often fled and were very ineffective as they knew what death and defeat was.
Very vague. What specifically are you referring to? Scots fought in all theatres and had no less experience than any other part of bong land.
If you are referring to the 51st Highland Div's performance in the Normandy campaign - a much discussed topic, you are badly misunderstanding it.
51st Highland Div was a territorial Army (pre war reservist div) unit which became one of the best regarded infantry divisions in the army. Gaining much high praise from many including Monty calling it the best division in the army. It was very experienced.
However it did not perform well at all in the Normandy campaign. The reason for this is leadership changed when the div was moved from the Med to WE, it was improperly trained for Europe after several years in the desert and it's commander was unpopular. When the commander was replaced it's performance improved again.
if you're still here I'd love to see your post on the Soviets & Germans. it fits with OP's topic; how the hell do the individual companies (& by extension individual soldiers) deal with the utterly insane casualty rates that they simply couldn't replace? You say the Scotts were traumatized by their exposure to defeats, how about the Eastern front where the war was the most hell-on-earth war could probably ever get?
By not being a sissy zoomer
They probably would think:
>heh that won't happen to me! I won't die!
Till a 7.92 decides to say hello their face, like the guy in your pic.
Whoa there buddy, are you lost? I think you meant to go to /gif/.
they were unvaxxed uncut chads
I think they reacted in multiple ways. One way being reluctant to get to know the new guys coming in as replacements, as they were more likely to die next than the veterans. Also these were strangers, in a place where all that remained familiar was your remaining old buddies.
1.you are porn addict pajeet
2. Implying that Americans act don’t like droids whenever they find something anti White to do regardless of why they think they’re doing it
>Calls someone else pajeet
>Makes the most incoherent ESL babble of a post
Raja, I...
I served in the Ukrainian army and every single operation we participated resulted in serious casualties, and only one time nobody died (one guylost his foot though). How did I cope with that? I don't know myself, it was something akin to hypnosis. You just turn off your self-preservation instinct.
some thing but I just live in detroit
they were suckin n fuckin so much they barely had time to notice
The casualty rates for the Wehrmacht and the Soviets look pretty bad but they are averages across the whole armed forces, including the millions who worked in logistics or administrative duties and were less often in harm's way. The death rate for generic frontline riflemen or tankmen over the course of the war must have been absolutely horrendous. How was it decided which conscripts would go to the front and which ones would get the relatively safe jobs? If it was purely based on physical fitness then it must have created serious incentives to make yourself as sickly looking as possible prior to the medical exam.
Uncle fought in Yugoslavia and killed several people and saw trenches full of liquidated villages. Not WW2 but equally as horrifying. He copes with sauna, crossfit, drinking, and weed
UNPROFOR I assume?
Yeah
Same for my uncle, he was in a unit Which saw action in every theatre of the croatian war.
He's pretty fucked up from it, drinks a lot and can't take crowds
Submarines in WW2 had an extremely grim casualty rate, something like 25% of all submariners died. Of course, that’s basically the result of everyone aboard dying the moment they take a hit. So someone who survived would not have seen much death.
>something like 25% of all submariners died.
Maybe for all nations combined.
For the krauts, which arguably used submarines to the largest extent, 75% of submatiners died at sea.
How many died at land?
the other 25%
1. Very badly
2. Alcohol
dont think the video games made any of it look fun, id be happy they didnt forget about it at all
>video games isn't a form of entertainment
World at war at its hardest difficulity was pretty hard.
World at war made me hate the japs and their shitty grass strategies.
And old west cowboys were watching WW2 veterans watch TV shows and their kids play with toys about the worst day in their lives
>worst
Make it "last".
>be grandpa
>ukrainian farmer
>hate russia
>see nazis come, feel relieved
>get put into a fucking nazi labour camp
>witness death, starvation, all the likes
>get out, have choice between going to Canada or back to the USSR by whoever liberated them
>choose canada
and here i am, a leaf.
On the topic, he was fucked up for life after that. Alcoholic, beating, screaming at shit, just the full nine-yards of PTSD. I imagine most WW2 vets were like this, and part of the reason people say those people were "tougher" back then or more "old school", is probably just because they were constantly doing drunk violence due to PTSD
the 5 years after WW2 must have been a fucked up time for any place with a lot of vets. And I can't even imagine the scale of this when Soviet troops returned their homes, that must have been hell on earth; straight of the video game series Diablo
American perspective
>In a total war you expect heavy casualties and you deal with it because you are fighting a war so important that your sweetheart Nancy and your kid sister are working in an ammunition plant and your kid brother has been collecting tire scraps for the war effort. Your mother has a freedom garden and your father buys war bonds. Every facet of society is engineering itself to fight this war, your death, while not welcome, would be a sacrifice for the good of your country, who did not instigate the war but will damn well finish it. Sure it's all a numbers game and your more likely to get fragged by artillery than die a glorious death assaulting an encamped position, but either way you don't doubt the need for the war.
War has been obsolete since the atom bomb shelved total war in first world countries. That's why all our half measure wars since have not achieved their aims; from Korea to Afghanistan, limited warfare has always meant limited success, even when your K:D is 10000:1
>Imagine the sheer number of times some of those men had to watch someone die.
op said, before returning back to his video games and mountain dew
>op said, before returning back to his video games and mountain dew
i wrote with a wry smile, thus totally dominating him on our secret online discussion platform
1. western soldiers didn't die that much.
2. germans thought they were gods on earth and had no better duty.
3. eastern soldiers were dead if they didn't fight so it was a wash.
Went home, got decent middle class bluecollar jobs or an education and woke up screaming and clutching an imaginary rifle at 4AM for the next 50 years. ask me how I know
Dark humor, alcohol and plentiful local women of the night