What would have been the shittiest combat role to fulfill in WW2? Talking either infantry, navy or airforce...

I second that motion. 3 out 4 submariners operating a U-boat in the Kreigsmarine died. 40,000 men went to sea, only 10,000 came back alive.

Is this the highest outside of penal battalions and stuff?

That's mostly just because Germany lost the war. American submariners had a much higher survival rate, simply because they were fortunate enough to be on the winning side of the war. However, I'll concede that submariners on the losing side of a war are uniquely fucked because they essentially get no opportunity to surrender. An infantryman can surrender if he is surrounded, or if his position is overrun. A submariner never gets that opportunity.

Pretty sure Chinese anything had it worse.

Kamikaze pilots had higher fatality rates, but other than that, U-boats were the worst.

Uh, I thought that was a given...

>Kamikaze pilots had higher fatality rates

If you didn't die in your kamikaze attack, you're not a very good suicide bomber.

being on the eastern front

>get fucked by germans
>get fucked by soviets
>get fucked by winter
>get fucked in stalingrad
>get fucked retreating to germany
>get fucked if you surrender
>get fucked randomly because of moral
>civilian? get robbed, fucked then killed in case you become a partisan

>A woman? Rape is literally the best-case scenario for you.

Depends on how finely you divide up your branches of service. Soviet pre-war forces in Europe had a terrible survival rate, much worse than overall Soviet survival forces. Early war British bomber crew had about a 17% chance of surviving a tour of duty, but that went up as they went along and attritted away the Luftwaffe.

That is true that it didn't help that Nazi Germany was on the side of the losers but still 3 out 4 not surviving the war as a submariner is pretty fucked. I wouldn't have chosen that position if I had the option to do so. Still 3 out 4 not making it out alive. I don't know if that is worse than only 6,000 German POWs surviving their captivity after the surrender at Stalingrad. I don't know if it is or not.

being a polish soldier. you barely manage to hang on, you get raped from the front and back, and then, if you're REALLY lucky, manage to escape and fight for another army, possibly dying or killing your own countrymen who rise up in the form of partisans. or, as it was in the west, never even return because communists took over and you decide to settle in where-ever you were when the war ended. so much uncertainty and so much effort to not really even be rewarded.

ignore the name, it keeps fucking auto placing it, just set my name to that to troll that namefag retard dominican

German submariners died en gros because they had no means of defending themselves against Allied submarine detection systems, which were by 1942 so perfected they made any German venture in the Atlantic a one-way ticket to the bottom of the ocean. By 1943 they couldn't even leave Bay of Biscay without getting killed.
>they survived because they won
wew

And there were cases of captured U-Boat crews that surrendered while on the sea. Otto Kretschmer was captured in 1941 and sat on his ass in England as PoW for the rest of war. One U-Boat commander, i forgot his name, was taken to US as PoW and later got shot by the guards when he tried to escape the camp he was held in.

Would you think that being captured as a submariner would be a better fate than drowning in the middle of the ocean?

Forgive me for my ignorance but isn't drowning one of the most painful ways to die?

Infantry is always the shittiest role in every conflict.

Obviously. You could consider yourself extremely lucky if you managed to pull yourself out in the midst of attack and signal for surrender. Most U-boat crews weren't given such privilege when attacked by Allied ships.

Also found the guy i mentioned above, it seems he was afraid of being charged for war crimes.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Henke

Supposedly at high depths, the pressure hull of a submarine has a tendency to fail catastrophically and kill everyone inside instantly.

the hardest and the most intense combat roles were always scouting missions behind enemy lines with the goal of looking at the enemy disposition or capturing an enemy officer.

>isn't drowning one of the most painful ways to die?
it's pretty peaceful once you realize you're going to die from what I've heard

UBoat crew had a higher chance of dying than kamikaze pilots.

Did the Chinese even have an organised army in WW2?

I drowned once but I blacked out the panicky deathy part, only remember the peaceful floating and looking up at the light on the surface.

They had several, which was part of the problem.

wut who told you

Wtf? How?

Kamikaze missions can and did end without dying. For example pilots might not find their targets. Uboat missions were months long and usually ended with people dying.

The book A Perfect Storm had an entire section on this.

They had an account by a British sailor who was in a sunken ship and started recalling his grade school English teacher telling him that drowning was like falling asleep on a peaceful summer day, and immediately thought "what a faggot"

He managed to get out of a hatch with his life vest on, blacked out, and woke up at the surface.

The consensus was that the initial stages of drowning are extremely baneful, but at the edge of unconsciousness you start to get relaxation and euphoria.

All you diefags need to understand that dying isn't that bad. It's about HOW you die. That's the purpose of the thread.
>be young Japanese pilot
>fly your Zero into American carrier
>die honorably

>be Russian infantry
>run away
>get shot by NKVD friendly fire

These both involve death, but one is clearly more favorable than the other.

>months long
More like 3-4 weeks at most. They simply had no fuel or provisions for such long patrols.

>More like 3-4 weeks at most.
Most successful patrols were months long, dumbass. Some took as long as 200+ days.
uboat.net/ops/top_patrols.htm

Poor G*rmans in that pic. Those sorry bastards won't know that in a few years they will be dead, wounded, sick, missing, or captured by the enemy.

American casualty rates were lower because they were facing the Japanese who had incredibly bad anti-submarine warfare.

It's not. 100,000 Germans were captured in Stalingrad. 6,000 survived their gulag stay. That's a 6% survival rate. U-boat crews had a 25% survival rate.

Further, the gulag POW's would have suffered for years until they died. A Uboat crewman would have suffered for a few minutes at most while he drowned.

they wore skulls for a reason

top bantz lad

how, you both died for nothing

>If the men survived and occupied their objective, they were rounded up and used again in the next assault.

Unless they were wounded. Penal battalions were having three month term, or until the wounding in battle.

>barrier troops

Barrier troops were, mostly, operating a bit further from the frontline - in the villages and cities where potential deserters could wind up.
The "shooting squads" at the frontline were used in WWI, IIRC (Though I don't remember which one ordered the shooting of the deserters on field - Vrangel, Denikin or Brusilov)
Also have heard that Hitler was... more eager in this part.

>at least soviet shtrafbat's chance of surviving improved in the later years.

Nyeh, you would still get sent in the shittiest situations.

>>be Russian infantry
>>run away
>>get shot by NKVD friendly fire

comrade, friendly fire isn't a thing in NKVD.

This, comrade. Sometime commissar shoot for treason not yet committed, though

Yes, Republic was the main stay of the army for China.

not if the carrier is out of action.....

even if you were wounded, there be long as fuck check ups to make sure the wound wasn't self inflicted

>feeling bad for Ukrainian traitors
lol

Flamethrower operator. The horrors of lugging a roughly 60-70 pound canister of fuel in a war zone should be obvious. There's a reason why the average battlefield lifespan of a Marine operator was estimated at merely 4 minutes.

also the fact that any flamethrower operator that was captured would be immediately executed because everyone on every side hated them

Chindits had it pretty shitty.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindits

italian air force

allied bomber crew. needed 100 sorties to go home, average number of sorties before death was 7

think on this

to be fair, I think that statistic was for new inexperienced crews during the absolute worst time of the war

but they had qt3.14 Korean comfort women.

No, you black out and won't be awake for the end.

U.S. navy seabees (naval construction) had it pretty rough. They island hopped with marines. Pretty much they built fortifications, and air strips on the front line but lacked the training or numbers of infantry. They were never really sent to the rear.

They did, but had horribly outdated doctrines and equipment. With US assistance, they reached some level of competence

and most of the ~700 U-boats Germany launched during the war were sunk without a single kill

>garbage fighter jets that fell apart with one shot
>submarine torpedo made for kamikaze attacks

What did the Chinese have that was worse than this?

Living in Poland. They lost the highest % of population of all countries durin WWII

The life expectancy for a tail-gunner in the RAF was ~2 weeks
Overall Bomber Command mortality was 48%

The worst places/people to be in WWII would be either a German soldier Captured by Soviets or a Soviet infantryman during the early days of the Eastern Front... Or a German paratrooper during the invasion of Crete

Fuck the soviets.
Just fuck them.

Don't worry bro, the weapon usually worked against them because the dogs would rather seek T34's instead of enemy armor, because that was what they were trained on

>Use dogs to defeat the fascist dogs
pottery

>training of anti-tank dogs continued after World War II, until June 1996
Russians are fucking dumb

>be Chinese peasant
>get taken from village by Jap soldiers
>be forced to dig nests and bunkers for the Japanise war effort
>get shot with the rest of his fellow slaves so that no knowlage of the defenses leak out.

Just can't win.

...

>To prevent that, the returning dogs had to be shot, often by their controllers and this made the trainers unwilling to work with new dogs. Some went so far as to say that the army did not stop with sacrificing people to the war and went on to slaughter dogs too; those who openly criticized the program were persecuted by "special departments" (military counterintelligence).[3]

Why didn't they just use captured German tanks for training? Surely they could snatch a two or three for that purpose.

...

Infantry for Russia, Navy for Japan, Airforce would probably go to Russia or Britain during the battle of Britain.

They were falling back too quickly for that, even if they did it it would have been difficut to capture any amount of usefull test tanks. topple that with a shitty doctrine which meant little motivation for captureing equipment they could not easly take with them.

>They were falling back too quickly for that
After 1941 they weren't, save for 1942 and German offensive down south. On northern and central fronts things were pretty calm. Front around Leningrad was essentially WW1-lite, trench warfare everywhere.

Hell, they could just use burned/destroyed German tanks. They could use fucking decoys. Anything but their own tanks.