Meat Grinders throughout Veeky Forumstory

>A FUCKING GRAIN ELEVATOR

What are some battles or fights that were a complete murderfest for all parties involved?

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Verdun.

It was designed as meat grinder, to take the hills and wear down the French. Pretty sinister stuff, especially since there were nearly a million casualties combined and that about 300,000 of those were killed.

Battles of Rzhev

>Due to the horrific losses suffered by the Red Army, the campaign became known by veterans and historians as the "Rzhev Meat Grinder"
>Soviet sources:
362,664–433,000 killed
768,233 wounded or sick

The Battle of Cannae

Roman Polybian style Army completely destroyed by Hannibal's invading Italian Army

Romans:
45,500 infantry killed
2,700 cavalry killed
17,800 infantry captured
1,500 cavalry captured

Carthage:
5,700 (Polybius)
* 4,000 Gallic
* 1,500 Spanish and African
* 200 cavalry

>Grain elevator
That shit was real?

all of the maps in red orchestra 2 are based off of real locations, yes

>enemy sets out to murder your entire people
>one up them by killing even more of your own men
Why was Zhukov so based?

someone's gotta clean up after stalin shits the bed

>Throughout the afternoon, Confederate engineers scrambled to create a new defensive line 500 yards further south at the base of the Mule Shoe, while fighting at the Bloody Angle continued day and night with neither side achieving an advantage, until around 12:00 AM on May 13, the fighting finally stopped. At 4 A.M., the exhausted Confederate infantrymen were notified that the new line was ready and they withdrew from the original earthworks unit by unit. The combat they had endured for almost 24 hours was characterized by an intensity of firepower never previously seen in Civil War battles, as the entire landscape was flattened, all the foliage destroyed. An example of this can be found in the Smithsonian Museum of American History: a 22-inch stump of an oak tree at the Bloody Angle that was completely severed by rifle fire. There was a frenzy to the carnage on both sides. Fighting back and forth over the same corpse-strewn trenches for hours on end, using single shot muskets, the contending troops were periodically reduced to hand-to-hand combat reminiscent of battles fought during ancient times. Bodies piled up four and five high, and soldiers were forced to pause from time to time and throw corpses over the parapet since they formed an obstacle in the way of the fighting. Dead and wounded men were shot so many times that many of them simply fell apart into unrecognizable heaps of flesh. Surviving participants attempted to describe in letters, diaries, and memoirs the hellish intensity of that day, many noting that it was beyond words. Or, as one put it: "Nothing can describe the confusion, the savage, blood-curdling yells, the murderous faces, the awful curses, and the grisly horror of the melee." Some men claimed to have fired as many as 400 rounds that day. May 12 was the most intensive day of fighting during the battle, with Union casualties of about 9,000, Confederate 8,000; the Confederate loss includes about 3,000 prisoners captured in the Mule Shoe.

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Holy shit, I've never heard of this

>Dead and wounded men were shot so many times that many of them simply fell apart into unrecognizable heaps of flesh

fuck

shit like this is the reason why people call the ACW the first modern war.

An Loc is a good one.
>South Vietnamese request B-52 strike about 1km to front of position
>it is explained to them that the absolute minimum strike zone for B-52s is a 1x1 kilometer box
>yeah we know
>210,000 pounds of high explosive hit the box
>minutes pass
>South Vietnamese request B-52 strike 500 meters to front of position

what's terrifying about Verdun is that most of the men who died there never even saw any enemy soldiers with their own eyes.
They just got blown to bits by the intense as fuck artillery bombardment. That area was shelled so heavily that even after 100 years it's a red zone and going outside cleared areas is like walking through a minefield - you're bound to stumble upon an unexploded shell (or a gas shell) and blow yourself up and no one is going to bother looking for your body there because it's a sure suicide mission.
>messynessychic.com/2015/05/26/the-real-no-go-zone-of-france-a-forbidden-no-mans-land-poisoned-by-war/
>Farmers in less dangerous re-populated “yellow” and “blue zones”, still hit shells every year, exploding their tractors and narrowly escaping death by the remains of a hundred year old war. In Verdun, there are road signs to indicate a dumping grounds for farmers to leave the shells they’ve plowed up on their land to be collected by authorities.
>They call it the “iron harvest”, in which nearly 900 tons of unexploded munitions are recovered each year by Belgian and French farmers after ploughing their fields. More than a century later, there are still large quarantined parts of the red zone where 99% of plant and animal species perish. Clearing the red zone is an extremely dangerous job, and fatal casualties from gas shells are not uncommon amongst munitions removers.
>Authorities estimate that if they continue working at the current rate, it could take anywhere from 300 to 700 years to complete.
Other experts believe the Zone Rouge will never be fully cleared of its unexploded munitions.

>Tfw I get the reference

>Dead and wounded men were shot so many times that many of them simply fell apart into unrecognizable heaps of flesh.
This pleases the Yankee's eternal thirst for Southern blood

doesn't seem worse than its surroundings, looking thru google earth

Most of the dead were Union though

>The Germans?
>A trifle...

I've always been curious about how common the "meat grinder" trope is in war, and I legitimately wonder if it's just a terse way to say that a lot of people died in those areas, or if those areas were literally strewn with giblets and gore. If so, is there a resource for pictures of these hellscapes?

If you're thinking little bits of meat and blood, then not really, as it would quickly get mixed in with mud and dirt. But the dead were everywhere, and they were frequently buried right there into the trenches, so people were pretty much constantly surrounded by death.

>soviet sources
lol

This is some WH40K shit.

Battle of New Orleans

Murica
>pirates
>slaves
>militia
>several hundred regular troops

Calipahte of Bongistan aka England
>fuckton of redcoats
>fuckton of ships

3000 limeys dead including 3 Generals

and the War was over when the battle happened..

Should have been posted in the last stand thread rather than the meat grinder thread.

when you picture the British charging the berms and then reaching them and realizing that someone forgot to bring ladders and Americans just shooting down on them without cover..

it's a meat grinder

Verdun

>South Vietnamese request B-52 strike 500 meters to front of position
Wait. The Vietcong continued to move through intense bombing or the South were willing to bomb their own?

>The guardsmen were very pleased to see us, and immediately began cracking army jokes and making funny remarks. We had two Maxim guns, one light machinegun, two anti-tank rifles, three tommyguns and a radio set.
>At dawn on the 18th a German tank carrying a white flag approached from the south. ‘What’s going on?’ we thought. Two men showed themselves from inside the tank, a Nazi officer and an interpreter.
>Through the interpreter the officer tried to persuade us to surrender to the ‘glorious’ German army, as defence was useless and there was no point in our sitting it out any longer. ‘Get out of the elevator now,’ insisted the German officer. ‘If not we will show you no mercy. In one hour’s time we will bomb you all flat.’
>‘What a cheek,’ we thought, and gave the Nazi lieutenant a curt reply: Tell all your fascists they can go to hell in an open boat! You two ‘voices of the people’ can go back to your lines, but only on foot. The German tank tried to back away, but a volley from our two anti-tank rifles stopped it.
>Soon after that enemy tanks and infantry about ten times our strength attacked from south and west. After the first attack was beaten back a second began, then a third, and all the while a reconnaissance plane circled over us. It corrected the fire and reported our position. Ten attacks were beaten off just on September 18th.
>We were very careful with our ammunition, as it was a long way to bring up more, and a difficult trip. In the elevator the grain was on fire, and the water in the machineguns evaporated. The wounded kept asking for something to drink, but there was no water nearby. This was how we defended our position, day and night. Heat, thirst, smoke – everybody’s lips were cracked.

Andrei Khozyainov 92nd Independent Rifle Brigade
Jonathan Bastable (ed): Voices From Stalingrad

Does anyone else get a boner imagining female soldiers in world war 1 dying in mass infantry rushes, with machine gunfire scything through their ranks and tearing into all of those soft young bodies, leaving some dead others dying and trying to crawl to safety through the mud, bleeding out slowly all alone in no man's land, the fear on their pretty grime-smeared young faces as they realize they are going to die out here, frigid and alone, that they will never see their family again, that they will never be mothers, that they will rot out here and be slowly picked apart by grows, their beautiful youthful bodies wasted as they rot away in the mud.

I feel a deep satisfaction thinking about this, sexual but also beyond sexual. I'm not sure what it means.

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good read desu. thanks

It's not what you see that kills you.

>Unexploded shell
>Unexploded mustard gas canister
>Arsenic in water
>Soil pollution to lead + arsenic

>roughly 1/16th of France is uninhabitable

Brutal.

Better than German sources which considered the Panthers captured by the red army at Kursk to be in long term storage.

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and that's somehow incorrect?

The Italian Front has to get some sort of record for the sheer number of casualties incurred in such a tiny area. 4.5 million men were killed, wounded, or captured in a battle space smaller than Serbia.

wew lad

You'd figure if "99% of plant and animal species" perished in the red zone, it would look different on a satellite map.

its not like Third battle of Kharkov is responsible for the creation of Kursk salient

Indeed

Do hand crank ones work or do I need an electric one?

With their tax rates it's more like 16/16th

Ecology isn't like that, though. Because there are adequate conditions for 1% of species (and it seems to be a variety of marsh grass), that species will thrive in that area.

Even wastelands are not wastelands truly, desu.

The phrase (as it's interpreted in modern times) first started applying (at least in the West) during the Napoleonic Wars and beyond. Advancements in mobilization, logistics, weaponry, (artillery especially), command and control, and discipline made it practical for two armies to wreck each others' shit to a catastrophic degree in a single engagement. During the previous two millennia, very few soldiers would actually perish in an average engagement. Warfare was over which side would break first in the field so that the winner could follow up by pillaging and wreaking havoc on infrastructure.

We use the word 'decimated' in modern times to refer to catastrophic losses, when it was originally just suffering 10% casualties in a fighting formation, a laughably low figure by WW1 standards, where a regiment could suffer 50% casualties in a single day.

tl;dr it's a semi-accurate, catchall term for how shitty pitched battles in modern warfare are.

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It means you're pretty deeply fucked up. Also, not a lot of females in these conflicts, historically.

Seek help, man.

That farmhouse or whatever it was at Waterloo

How different would the Eastern Front have been if Stalin had not insisted on a 1942 Spring Offensive?

Probably a much harsher German defeat in 1945 or earlier.

vintage pasta

Better than Soviet sources which claim to had destroy more tanks and guns that they were at other battles

I didn't know that. pretty cool

not all, but a lot. "Apartments" isn't a real place. It's a copy of an RO1 map, "Danzig". Which had nothing to do with the real place.

>3,000 Limeys dead
Actually, only 386 died.
Hardly a meatgrinder.