Which is the worst battle in history in terms of the horror of what soldiers experienced on the ground and why?

Which is the worst battle in history in terms of the horror of what soldiers experienced on the ground and why?

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en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island
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The Russians and Finns fought battles (reinforced companies, say 300 guys) where everyone died. Winter time deep powder snow and around -130F. Due to guns freezing they ended up fighting hand-to-hand with bayonets, shovels, axes, etc. while wearing snowshoes and skies.

ww1 battle of sommes and verdun(e)

One thing that gets me about battlefields from the great war and especially just verdun is the sheer number of corpses to deal with. When you've got this ground which has been fought over and shelled for so long eventually everything around you is just a churn of mud and bits of bodies.

The battle of Stalingrad, in particular the fight for Mamayev Kurgan, seems pretty rough.

Hilarious stuff. Would watch.

The problem with making a movie about one of these battles is the whiteness. Everything covered in snow, and both sides wearing white clothing and gear. I am not sure how credible people would find hand-to-hand combat on snowshoes, but these are well documented from Russian, Finnish, and German sources. German officers were present in the area as observers and saw some of the results first hand. They thought both sides were retarded for fighting at those temperatures.

Fun Fact: these battles are the reason the M-16 has to function full-auto at -130F.

A MP style gig would be hilarious, some filter capeshit style color playing like blue tint meme could be done so it doesnt hurt the eye.

Blood could be shown black, and freezing in mid-air (or squirt).

WW1, no doubt
The whole thing was an unholy mix between a medieval slaughterhouse and a open-cast laboratory to test all kind of new weapons on conscripts

Sounds like a good time

Something comic-like like 300?
Could be cool but I think its too goofy to include the duck walking people in skis.

Zack Snyder's Winter War. Shit, I'd watch it.

Would stalingrad qualify ? I always wondered how fucked up it would be to be caught between 2 dictatorship which treat the other camp like animals and force their soldiers to fight to the death.

>the M-16
>full-auto
what year is it, 1967 or 2017?

Yeah, it would be a mix of gore and comedy. Guys with frozen bloodscicles sticking out of them while they flail around on skies in a couple feet of powder. Still a lot of white though. Save money on green screening I suppose.

>13th Guards Rifle Division
>Most accounts state that of the 10,000 men of the division that crossed the Volga into the Battle of Stalingrad, only between 280 and 320 of them survived the struggle.

ah yes

Stalingrad is THE meat grinder, the Soviets fed troops in bit by bit as it was needed intentionally to keep the Germans occupied while they got Uranus ready

Battle of Gettysburg was 'mildly unpleasant'. Sure, the casualty count isnt the highest in world history, but we are talking 1860s era technology, making the 40k-50k number pretty horrific.

I think you are exaggerating a bit too much with -130. Care to name your source or on of those battles?

The U.S. Army's original specification was for the rifle to operate full auto from 130F to -130F. Very difficult to do, and requires a major redesign. Most countries that contemplate using a rifle sub-zero issue a seperate winter rifle. Much cheaper.

He's exaggerating by 100 degrees, the coldest recorded temperature of the war was -43C/-45F in Karelia

Eugene Stoner for one. Others were memoirs of Finnish and German officers. Mannstein I think was one.

Are you sure about that? Nowhere is there a recorded low of -130F, you'd literally fucking die almost instantly in -130F weather

Also the book 'Fighting in Hell'. Anthology by various German officers, one of whom was an observer with the Finns. Only one I can put my hand to, but it says -130.

Fuck. Damn Germans. It actually says "-130 degrees of frost". Still really cold.

And I am freezing at -10C.

Thanks

Stoner probably said the same thing. This was many years ago and I posted from memory. He was talking about the problems with firing guns at full auto in sub-zero weather, and how the Army built a giant walk-in freezer for test firing. My apologies to Mr. Stoner and the Board. Not my intention to mislead.

This, there was no worst place in history than WW1 trenches, Stalingrad seems like a fairytale in comparison

>living in muddy holes in ground alongside literal rats
>no dry, clean ground, no hygiene whatsoever, lack of rations
>whole day is filled with endless artillery shelling, trembling the ground
>landscape all around is torn to pieces with no life in sight
>all your friends and brothers in arms are dying like flies
>you might explode from artillery hit any second
>you might get caught up in a gass attack and drown your lungs in your own blood
>only time you actually take control of the situation and do something is when you run out of the trenches and sprint five hundred meters towards gunfire and certain death

Do not forget lice, ticks, and fleas. Also foot rot.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Ramree_Island

"That night [of the 19 February 1945] was the most horrible that any member of the M. L. [motor launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left.... Of about one thousand Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about twenty were found alive."

Stalingrad
Gettysburg
Verdun/the Somme
Battle of Berlin
Battle of Sarikamish

The entire fucking Italian Front during WW1

>fighting in the fucking high alps
>best way to advance is to tunnel under enemy positions and blow up entire mountains, burying everyone alive
>get picked off by marksmen with no room to hide or maneuver
>one mis-step and you fall to your death
>logistics completely fucked
>freeze to death

>Over 2 million casualties on both sides.

#trenchfoot

Stalingrad

All of this, with the exception of gas attacks, was a feature of the Eastern Front of WWII.

>We knew the slow method of torture [at the Mau Mau Investigation Center] was worse than anything we could do. Special Branch there had a way of slowly electrocuting a Kuke—they'd rough up one for days. Once I went personally to drop off one gang member who needed special treatment. I stayed for a few hours to help the boys out, softening him up. Things got a little out of hand. By the time I cut his balls off, he had no ears, and his eyeball, the right one, I think, was hanging out of its socket. Too bad, he died before we got much out of him.

Elkins, Caroline (2005). Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-07363-9. UK edition. p87. As cited in en.wikipedia.org "Mau Mau Uprising"

So WWI was indeed worse? Since it was all that plus gas attacks

Well, the guy you're replying to is wrong.

Both sides used gas on the Eastern Front, but in limited ways.

The Eastern Front is worse due to Einsatzgruppen and anti-"partisan" operations.

Do van trips with commissary carbon monoxide vapes count as a gas attack?

No battle in WWII stayed long enough at the same place to turn the landscape into a lunar desert partially made of human flesh. Visually it makes a difference.

id say that battles in Flanders were much worse, raining at Verdun was nothing compared to the floated territories in the Belgium.

>no posts about Iran-Iraq war
Basically the same thing as WWI but sand

Dulce et Decorum Est

By Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

bump

>he fell for the all quiet on the western front meme.

this question is fucking stupid
shut the fuck up about your stupid contests about who is stronger? who would win? who had the biggest gun? who has the biggest dick? who could piss the further away?
any human death is a tragedy in itself
that's all there is to know
you are just an over protected child
keep playing your videogames i guess

Everytime I feel like shit, I always think to myself: at least I’m not in Stalingrad

I remember dreaming I was a German soldier when I was reading about Stalingrad.

Fortified positions would probably be less white with all the dirt being flung up by artillery/mortar fire.

>military observers takes note of the ridiculousness of winter war with the current technology
>invades russia
>what did they learn by this?

Passchendaele

>Electrified swamps
Jesus Christ Saddam

Whistles, shouts and more gun fire
Lifeless bodies hang on barbed wire
Battlefield nothing but a bloody tomb
Be reunited with my dead friends soon

Many soldiers eighteen years
Drown in mud, no more tears
Surely a war no-one can win
Killing time about to begin

Yep, military history helps keep my problems in perspective.

Author / songwriter?

Evidently chicken town

>get sad
>remember I don't have to sit in a wet, dirty, shit-incrusted trench with rats as I watch my friends drown in mud and shellholes outside as I'm constantly being shelled and shot at by machine guns
>feel a little better
WW1 haunts my dreams.

Sorry meant for

Iron maiden, Passchendaele

One of the greatest world poems

projecting

I would say battle of raate road. One of the non-purged soviet leaders had a great idea to split Finland in two. Needless to say, it failed. The russians sent a thin convoy deep into Finland, and finns used "motti tactics" to basically split up the column into small surrounded concentrations of isolated russians. The finns racked up a k/d of 20+. Some russians even resorted to cannibalism in the freezing dark forests(pic related, hope i wont get banned). Just imagine being an ukrainian conscript alone in a freezing dark forest where all you can hear are finnish skis and occasional screams.

The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -128.6F in Antarctica... I think you meant -30F or C

Did you read your own link? It's unconfirmed at best and likely a hoax.

>(pic related, hope i wont get banned
Doubt it. I've posted lots of NSFW historical pics and never got banned.

wow.... its a wonder that any of them came home if thats what it was like..... jesus....

Cannae has got to be in the top ten.
>Outnumber the enemy by 40,000
>Can't possibly lose
>Will avenge those Romans who have fallen to this one eyed Phoenician
>Oh man we're pushing them off the field keep going
>how'd they get on our flanks
>we're surrounded
>we're dying
>stop pushing Marcus no one can move
>it's so crowded I can't even kill myself I just have to wait

Rzhev, Stalingrad, Eastern Front in general.

Cannae.

Get boxed in early on and spend multiple hours being crushed to death with tens of thousands of others.

The scale of the death aside, you know the shame of letting Rome down as you take BBC on all sides.

Teutoburg and Dien Bien Phu also come to mind.

Imagine how many sexual harassments you could get away with though

lol, edgy XDDD

I remember reading somewhere that some Romans dug holes in the ground and buried their heads so they would suffocate

Not sure how true that is though

On the Pacific Front it had to be Tarawa and/or Peleliu, 1696 Marines and 4690 Japs (the entire Garrison) dead over 3 days or 2300 Marines and 10695 Japs dead over 3 months of brutal CQC and in shitty conditions

The Battle of Cannae for an honorable ancient mention.
Really tho, something outta WW1: Verdun, Sommes, the whole war was terrible and you can kinda look at the whole western front as a four year battle if you wanted to. 4 years of hell on earth.
Stalingrad is infamous of course and the winter war was alot worse than most people know, it's almost forgotten among all the chaos of the time.
Those 500 guys killing each other in the snow with just steel sounds like some mythical horrible shit.

Flinders and the Somme

The Battle of Antietam
I can't believe I'm the first person posting this ITT. Literal rivers of blood. Not a meme.

lincoln was such a faggoty fucking autist

Battle of the Crater
Battle of Austerlitz
Battle of San Jacinto
Verdun
Battle of Okinawa

Kokoda.
Under trained, under equipped and underfed great depression kids battling in the middle of a muddy, dysentery ridden jungle against Japs.