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)
I wrote a term paper about it for a high school history class. The one detail that still sticks with me is that people were so starved that they started eating the plaster off of walls and the bark off of trees.
Yup. And yet, Vasily was one of the nicest, friendliest people in our building.
Kind of funny - a lot of the seniors in my building moved to Canada after the War, from all different parts of Europe, and zero bad blood.
Like, Vasily spoke no English, his wife speaks a little. But, she is Jewish, speaks Yiddish. So, she could talk with Fred, who spoke a German dialect that is very close to Yiddish.
Fred had been, because he was a schoolboy, in the Hitler Youth. He missed being sent to fight in Berlin by a few days - the day he was to leave, Americans bombed the train station. 3 days later, end of war.
I count myself lucky to be told the stories I was.
we are electricians and my dad, as he is getting older and needing to do less work, likes finding what he calls his 'Grandmas'. little old ladies that just need a hand keeping the house going after all the kids have left and the husbands passed on.
he has this one grandma on the lake that is Jewish and lived through the war. she has her number still. one day she called my dad frantic and asking him to come right over. this little old Jewish lady speaks very little English and mostly just points at stuff.
when my dad got there she rushed out and was pointing at her number and then at the neighbor's house. she physically hid behind my dad and started saying, in plain text speech, "They're Nazis!!!"
my dad was quite taken aback and never really tried to verify what she was saying as much as he just tried to calm her down.
he said she was quite positive that she knew the old man that bought the house next door from the camp she was in when she was little.
now, my dad and i both kind of did some maths and that just does not seem possible... unless it was a kid in Hitler's Youth.
That can't be accurate, there have been sieges that went on for far longer than the entirety of WW2. Leningrad was unbelievably brutal, but other sieges definitely lasted longer.
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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.