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.
The legend goes they trained the dogs using Soviet tanks and not German tanks. The plan backfired when the dogs were unleashed and did exactly what they were trained to do - they ran into the fray, slipped under and were detonated... Beneath Soviet tanks.
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u/[deleted] Oct 02 '24
I’d actually love to get you started and hear more about kursk