Suicide torpedoes were proposed by the Polish military in 1939 and the program appears to have gotten as far as signing up recruits but to my knowledge none were ever deployed.
The Nazis planned to use similar suicide tactics with a manned version of their V-1 cruise missile. They built and flew prototypes, but Hitler was persuaded to drop the project before it was put to use.
Formalized suicide attack programs with purpose-built hardware are chilling to think about, but there is also a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. On both sides of WW2, there are cases of pilots trying to crash into the enemy after realizing their fate was sealed anyway. This may have happened with an American B-26 at the Battle of Midway, and one of the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor apparently announced his intention to do this before the battle (in both cases they missed their target.)
The Russian army also had some chilling tactics. Basically they had more soldiers than guns during the battle of Stalingrad. So they sent them in pairs where one person was supposed to pick up the gun in the (likely) case the other person got shot. To prevent people from refusing orders, they simply shot anyone running the wrong way. Ordering people to march towards (almost) certain death is probably as old as war is.
What set the Japanese apart is the fanatical culture that resulted in people volunteering for this. The modern equivalent would be suicide bombers.
> The Russian army also had some chilling tactics. Basically they had more soldiers than guns during the battle of Stalingrad. So they sent them in pairs where one person was supposed to pick up the gun in the (likely) case the other person got shot. To prevent people from refusing orders, they simply shot anyone running the wrong way. Ordering people to march towards (almost) certain death is probably as old as war is.
This was depicted in the film Enemy at the Gates (2001)—and probably other, earlier films, I'd expect—and then strikingly similarly (i.e. they likely deliberately modeled their version on the scene from the film) in the first Call of Duty game (2003), back when that series was all WWII shooters.
It should be noted this was false at Stalingrad, and "Enemy at the Gates" has a terribly inaccurate depiction of that battle.
There are no reliable sources stating that the Red Army [1] had more soldiers than guns by that time. Just some pop culture from a terrible movie that has somehow permeated into "knowledge" about the Eastern Front.
[1] also wrong to call it "the Russian army", it was the army of the Soviet Union and had non-Russians.
I've heard that they did order soldiers to advance through mine fields (effectively de-mining a path through them using abundant human bodies) or face the NKVD. The calculation was simple: you might survive the minefield but you had a 100% chance of being executed for refusing the order.
I tracked down Eisenhower's conversation with Zhukov, and note how -- in context -- sounds a lot more reasonable, with not one single mention of NKVD shooting their own troops:
> "“Highly illuminating to me was his description of the Russian method of attacking through mine fields. The German mine fields, covered by defensive fire, were tactical obstacles that caused us [the western Allies] many casualties and delays. It was always a laborious business to break through them, even though our technicians invented every conceivable mechanical appliance to destroy mines safely. Marshal Zhukov gave me a matter-of-fact statement of his practice, which was, roughly, ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out the channels through which our vehicles can go.’”"
That order was issues during the battle of stalingrad. Not a step back. Basically they had a rear guard tasked with shooting anybody running the wrong direction.
Enemy at the Gates was of course a dramatized version of the situation. But basically the notion of shipping in fresh meat across the Volga to replenish troops lost in the city was very real. And running the wrong way was lethal. And in terms of casualties this probably was one of the largest battles ever with extreme losses on the Russian side.
Unfortunately, Order 227 -- "Not One Step Back" -- has more than a few issues as depicted in Enemy at the Gates.
First, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand (we were talking about shooting troops who refuse to walk into minefields; something absurd in the context of Stalingrad). This matters because this crazy conflation of "everything Soviet" in WW2 makes honest discussion impossible. It's like people have a hodgepodge of random ideas, mostly taken from movies and videogames, and when you object to one they fall back to another misconception that is only tangentially related.
Second, blocking detachments weren't used in this way at Stalingrad, and were mostly about preventing troops from routing, not shooting them. Of course if you have detachments in the combat zone (as depicted by Enemy at the Gates) they will be shooting at Germans (and being shot at by them!), not shooting at their own possibly retreating troops. A cursory reflection on what "facts" from Enemy at the Gates should tell you the movie is bonkers: it simply cannot be true that there weren't enough guns and bullets to provision soldiers, and also that NKVD had plenty of guns and bullets to shoot at their own troops!
Order 227 was mostly about officers. Officers were considered traitors if they ordered unauthorized retreats, which in this context -- a war of extermination -- makes a lot of sense. Blocking detachments mostly stopped troops from panicking (but did not shoot them in the back while retreating, that depiction is so ridiculous it boggles the mind someone would believe it literally!) and NKVD acted like military police. Most soldiers retreating without orders were sent back to the front, possibly (but not always) to penal battalions in difficult sectors. Some were shot, as expected in times of war.
> Enemy at the Gates was of course a dramatized version of the situation.
No, it simply crosses into ridicule and falsehood. It's a completely absurd movie depicting tactics that weren't used. Or stating outright falsehoods like "more soldiers than guns", which demonstrably didn't happen at Stalingrad.
> But basically the notion of shipping in fresh meat across the Volga to replenish troops lost in the city was very real.
Yes, but that's not what's under discussion, is it? Stalingrad was a meat grinder for both Soviets and Germans.
> And running the wrong way was lethal.
If by that you mean "getting shot by NKVD and blocking detachments", that's mostly fictional. As in "it didn't happen at Stalingrad". An actual Soviet soldier was likely as good as dead when he set foot on Stalingrad, but that's because he was going to get killed by Germans. Go read about the battle instead of relying on Enemy at the Gates!
> And in terms of casualties this probably was one of the largest battles ever with extreme losses on the Russian side.
It was one of the bloodiest battles of World War 2. The Soviets (not Russians!) suffered greatly, but the Germans and their Axis allies also suffered a huge blow in terms of personnel. See what I mean? I confront you on falsehoods, you retreat to a technically true but completely unrelated random fact.
Your understanding of the Red Army is incorrect. Please cite academic sources (so not Enemy at the Gates, awful movie) showing that at Stalingrad the Red Army had "more soldiers than guns".
>a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand.
In USSR/Russia such attacks by Soviet soldiers (using say your body to close the machine gun embrasure) have been widely celebrated. Where is similar behavior by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian forces in today's war is blamed by Russian propaganda on "Ukrainian nationalists being pumped full of drugs".
My recollection from Cussler's version of the story was that the detachable torpedo on their bow (the idea was to ram a pointy torpedo on the bow of the sub into the enemy ship, detach, then it blows up on a delay so the sub could escape, IIRC) got stuck and didn't detach properly.
All that's known for sure (since it was found and raised a few years ago) is that it was close enough to the explosion for the shockwave to kill the crew, but far enough away to not damage the sub itself.
Historically, torpedoes were bombs on the end of sticks that you'd ram the enemy with, but these were generally not intended to be suicide weapons (the stick was for safety.) Self-propelled torpedoes came later, and the original bomb-on-a-stick sort of torpedo may now be called "spar torpedoes."
The Hunley was not a suicide torpedo. It was a new and highly dangerous submarine. The crew died shortly after sinking the Union’s Housatonic, but their death was accidental rather than a necessary part of the attack method.
IIRC, things may have gone according to plan. That is the suicide was accidental, but it was designed in. They didn't understand that shockwaves would travel further underwater and getting to safety may not have been possible.
That's frightening, first crew drowns in it, so they raise it off the seabed, clean out the bodies and send in another crew who also drown. Then they raise it again for a third crew to take over. At this stage I'd be like "mister, thanks but no thanks".
To gain time for a retreat they cooked soup for the attacking underfed Russian soldiers. The ruse was successful.
> The Soviets were hot on their heels at first, but once they reached the steaming pots of soup the scent was simply too much to resist. The hungry Soviet troops clambered over each other to grab some of the soup, inadvertently giving the Germans more time.
I never found a source for this, but I once heard that during the Second Punic War the Roman senate stalled Hannibal's army in a similar manner, using prostitutes.
There would need to be some very specific circumstances for this to work. The general rule of all cooking is that it takes much longer to cook food than to eat it. So spending time cooking soup, rather than fleeing, would be a net loss of time. Whatever time the Russians were delayed eating your soup would be less than the time you were delayed in making it.
The only way it would work would be to just put the pot over the fire and run. Without someone watchin it, the window of time between soup getting hot and soup burning/boiling into nothing would be slim. A more likely version might be that starving Russian troops were so hungry that, upon finding ingredients left out, they stopped to make soup themselves.
throw some ingredients in a pot, put it on the stove, and high tail it out of there. if it takes 20 minutes for the Russians to show up there's a nice fresh pot of lentil soup waiting for them
The history of warfare is full of cases in which the side that had just chased away the opponents became disorganized in looting, and then was overrun by a counter-attack.
Interesting is that some post below this one there is a small book with a washed-up version of Shinto, that is the ideology that lead to this and other war atrocities.
The ideology that led to this and other war atrocities was Western imperialism. State Shinto[0] blended the Imperial government's authoritarian doctrine with religion in a similar way that Nazism did with German culture, but was more a matter of propaganda than religion. In particular, emperor worship was an invention of the state and not an aspect of traditional Shinto practice.
It's not something special to Shinto. Similar programs have been proposed and developed (if not actually carried out) in many other ideological contexts. The Chinese used suicide tactics against the Japanese, as did the South Koreans against North Korean tanks. America built a man-portable nuclear bomb and although it came with a timer, the soldiers who were trained to deploy it believed this would be a suicide mission.
Buddhism was also used to support the war. Are you going to claim that Buddhism is an ideology that led to war atrocities?
Btw Shinto wasn’t even made into an official religion until the Meiji restoration, really it should be thought of as Kami worship, and depending on the Kami it involves very different things. Buddhism and Shinto were also heavily syncretised until the Meiji restoration. The Buddhist bodhisattvas and Buddhas were even made into kami iirc
> Are you going to claim that Buddhism is an ideology that led to war atrocities?
There is nothing special about Buddhism. Any ideology can be used to justify atrocities and none of them should be considered unimpeachable. Just ask the Rohingya.
Yes but I don't see them making that claim, but they should. Maybe you misread my comment, I wasn't saying "are you even going to claim that _Buddhism_ has led to war crimes?", I'm asking if the poster will also commit to that point, since they must also do so logically
Simply saying that "Shintoism" led to atrocities is a massive oversimplification of the Japanese during WW2.
This topic is so complex and Japanese culture (especially pre-WW2 culture) is so complex that I hesitate even to comment on it. Ever since the war ended scholars have been trying to make sense of the unique cultural stew that led to the atrocities, mass suicides (civilian and military), and organized Japanese units continuing to fight into the 1950s and individuals as late as the '70s.
Shintoism, Bushido, Zen Buddhism, the imperial system with a living-deity emperor, and anti-western colonialism (just to name a few) all played into it.
"The advantages of human guidance throughout the craft’s trajectory proved to be of little use in practice, with kaitens causing minimal damage to the enemy"
I wonder if it could've been more successful with more warhead
I don't think the issue is that they didn't do enough damage on a hit, rather that the mostly missed their targets. WWII torpedoes, even the relatively excellent Japanese versions, didn't have a good hit rate in the war. Steering with a periscope in choppy seas while managing ballast levels and in less than ideal conditions is incredibly difficult. While the crews were trained that training couldn't be too comprehensive as the Japanese training corps were already stretched thin and all training resources spent on these pilots are ultimately lost on their first mission.
Even in the article the success they noted was against an anchored ship, something you are much more likely to be able to hit with a conventional unguided torpedo.
There is also the environment of the war itself and logistical problems with these devices. The article notes that they can't be carried in a regular torpedo tube, so they had to be attached as a parasite on the top of the sub. But this prevented the sub from doing crash dives, which were vital to staying alive when allied fighters and bombers appeared overhead, which was a constant threat by the time these were available. They were just underdeveloped and then the war was over. Shortly after that people started working out self-guidance systems for torpedoes and the the book was forever closed on these man guided systems.
There is a manga series based on the history of the "kaiten", called "Tokkou no Shima" (特攻の島), which is pretty good.
It depicts the commander of a kaiten-bearing submarine as lying to his superiors and reporting that each of the kaiten launched from his submarine sunk US ships, when in fact none of them hit their targets. It is implied that reporting anything but success was unacceptable, and the Japanese military leadership expanded this program because of being misled by such false or exaggerated reports.
It's incredible that some cultures keep falling back to a standard of lying all over the command chain when it should be blindingly obvious to everyone how inefficient it is. If rumors are correct, Russian military is now doing that in Ukraine and a lot of their poor performance derives from it.
This website has one of the unique implementations (in a good way) of hijacking the browser's "Back" button.
As you scroll, and each story comes into focus, the URL changes to identify that story. This is good if the reader wants to share a story she is currently reading, and needs to copy the URL.
But when you press the "Back" button, instead of just changing the URL to that of previous story's, and scroll to the previous story, it takes you through your whole history on the website, all the way back to where you came from; back to HN, in my case.
Interesting, to say the least.
I'd love for it to _not_ bother cycling/scrolling through previous stories, as it's taking me back to where I came from.
"The Type 1 suffered from water leaking into the pilot and engine compartment, but due to the nature of the weapon, solving these issues was a low priority."
Interesting how I scroll onto this while finishing up Dan Carlin's Hardcore history series about Japan/Pacific WW2 history. Still can't really grasp what life would have truly been like then.
The Japanese had an almost unbelievable fire and intensity.
61 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadFormalized suicide attack programs with purpose-built hardware are chilling to think about, but there is also a broader class of suicide attacks that include impromptu decisions and last resorts which seem easier to understand. On both sides of WW2, there are cases of pilots trying to crash into the enemy after realizing their fate was sealed anyway. This may have happened with an American B-26 at the Battle of Midway, and one of the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor apparently announced his intention to do this before the battle (in both cases they missed their target.)
What set the Japanese apart is the fanatical culture that resulted in people volunteering for this. The modern equivalent would be suicide bombers.
This was depicted in the film Enemy at the Gates (2001)—and probably other, earlier films, I'd expect—and then strikingly similarly (i.e. they likely deliberately modeled their version on the scene from the film) in the first Call of Duty game (2003), back when that series was all WWII shooters.
There are no reliable sources stating that the Red Army [1] had more soldiers than guns by that time. Just some pop culture from a terrible movie that has somehow permeated into "knowledge" about the Eastern Front.
[1] also wrong to call it "the Russian army", it was the army of the Soviet Union and had non-Russians.
Though it’s not related to Stalingrad afair.
> "“Highly illuminating to me was his description of the Russian method of attacking through mine fields. The German mine fields, covered by defensive fire, were tactical obstacles that caused us [the western Allies] many casualties and delays. It was always a laborious business to break through them, even though our technicians invented every conceivable mechanical appliance to destroy mines safely. Marshal Zhukov gave me a matter-of-fact statement of his practice, which was, roughly, ‘There are two kinds of mines; one is the personnel mine and the other is the vehicular mine. When we come to a mine field our infantry attacks exactly as if it were not there. The losses we get from personnel mines we consider only equal to those we would have gotten from machine guns and artillery if the Germans had chosen to defend that particular area with strong bodies of troops instead of with mine fields. The attacking infantry does not set off the vehicular mines, so after they have penetrated to the far side of the field they form a bridgehead, after which the engineers come up and dig out the channels through which our vehicles can go.’”"
That order was issues during the battle of stalingrad. Not a step back. Basically they had a rear guard tasked with shooting anybody running the wrong direction.
Enemy at the Gates was of course a dramatized version of the situation. But basically the notion of shipping in fresh meat across the Volga to replenish troops lost in the city was very real. And running the wrong way was lethal. And in terms of casualties this probably was one of the largest battles ever with extreme losses on the Russian side.
First, it has nothing to do with the topic at hand (we were talking about shooting troops who refuse to walk into minefields; something absurd in the context of Stalingrad). This matters because this crazy conflation of "everything Soviet" in WW2 makes honest discussion impossible. It's like people have a hodgepodge of random ideas, mostly taken from movies and videogames, and when you object to one they fall back to another misconception that is only tangentially related.
Second, blocking detachments weren't used in this way at Stalingrad, and were mostly about preventing troops from routing, not shooting them. Of course if you have detachments in the combat zone (as depicted by Enemy at the Gates) they will be shooting at Germans (and being shot at by them!), not shooting at their own possibly retreating troops. A cursory reflection on what "facts" from Enemy at the Gates should tell you the movie is bonkers: it simply cannot be true that there weren't enough guns and bullets to provision soldiers, and also that NKVD had plenty of guns and bullets to shoot at their own troops!
Order 227 was mostly about officers. Officers were considered traitors if they ordered unauthorized retreats, which in this context -- a war of extermination -- makes a lot of sense. Blocking detachments mostly stopped troops from panicking (but did not shoot them in the back while retreating, that depiction is so ridiculous it boggles the mind someone would believe it literally!) and NKVD acted like military police. Most soldiers retreating without orders were sent back to the front, possibly (but not always) to penal battalions in difficult sectors. Some were shot, as expected in times of war.
> Enemy at the Gates was of course a dramatized version of the situation.
No, it simply crosses into ridicule and falsehood. It's a completely absurd movie depicting tactics that weren't used. Or stating outright falsehoods like "more soldiers than guns", which demonstrably didn't happen at Stalingrad.
> But basically the notion of shipping in fresh meat across the Volga to replenish troops lost in the city was very real.
Yes, but that's not what's under discussion, is it? Stalingrad was a meat grinder for both Soviets and Germans.
> And running the wrong way was lethal.
If by that you mean "getting shot by NKVD and blocking detachments", that's mostly fictional. As in "it didn't happen at Stalingrad". An actual Soviet soldier was likely as good as dead when he set foot on Stalingrad, but that's because he was going to get killed by Germans. Go read about the battle instead of relying on Enemy at the Gates!
> And in terms of casualties this probably was one of the largest battles ever with extreme losses on the Russian side.
It was one of the bloodiest battles of World War 2. The Soviets (not Russians!) suffered greatly, but the Germans and their Axis allies also suffered a huge blow in terms of personnel. See what I mean? I confront you on falsehoods, you retreat to a technically true but completely unrelated random fact.
"Common knowledge" is not knowledge, not in "modern Russia" either. Cite one academic source, please.
In USSR/Russia such attacks by Soviet soldiers (using say your body to close the machine gun embrasure) have been widely celebrated. Where is similar behavior by Ukrainian soldiers against Russian forces in today's war is blamed by Russian propaganda on "Ukrainian nationalists being pumped full of drugs".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunley_(submarine)
He's listed on wikipedia's page for inventors killed by their own inventions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_th...
(Also they named the submarine after him after he was killed by it. Kind of morbid.)
I understand there is a serious and dire aspect to this, not specific to the polish.
Still recruiting for this is too close to exploiting vulnerable devastated individuals
Here's one I found particularly interesting in light of current events and reports of looting:
"How German Soldiers Used Lentil Soup as an Effective Defense Mechanism Against the Soviets"
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/lentil.html
To gain time for a retreat they cooked soup for the attacking underfed Russian soldiers. The ruse was successful.
> The Soviets were hot on their heels at first, but once they reached the steaming pots of soup the scent was simply too much to resist. The hungry Soviet troops clambered over each other to grab some of the soup, inadvertently giving the Germans more time.
The only way it would work would be to just put the pot over the fire and run. Without someone watchin it, the window of time between soup getting hot and soup burning/boiling into nothing would be slim. A more likely version might be that starving Russian troops were so hungry that, upon finding ingredients left out, they stopped to make soup themselves.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Shinto
Btw Shinto wasn’t even made into an official religion until the Meiji restoration, really it should be thought of as Kami worship, and depending on the Kami it involves very different things. Buddhism and Shinto were also heavily syncretised until the Meiji restoration. The Buddhist bodhisattvas and Buddhas were even made into kami iirc
There is nothing special about Buddhism. Any ideology can be used to justify atrocities and none of them should be considered unimpeachable. Just ask the Rohingya.
This topic is so complex and Japanese culture (especially pre-WW2 culture) is so complex that I hesitate even to comment on it. Ever since the war ended scholars have been trying to make sense of the unique cultural stew that led to the atrocities, mass suicides (civilian and military), and organized Japanese units continuing to fight into the 1950s and individuals as late as the '70s.
Shintoism, Bushido, Zen Buddhism, the imperial system with a living-deity emperor, and anti-western colonialism (just to name a few) all played into it.
I wonder if it could've been more successful with more warhead
Even in the article the success they noted was against an anchored ship, something you are much more likely to be able to hit with a conventional unguided torpedo.
There is also the environment of the war itself and logistical problems with these devices. The article notes that they can't be carried in a regular torpedo tube, so they had to be attached as a parasite on the top of the sub. But this prevented the sub from doing crash dives, which were vital to staying alive when allied fighters and bombers appeared overhead, which was a constant threat by the time these were available. They were just underdeveloped and then the war was over. Shortly after that people started working out self-guidance systems for torpedoes and the the book was forever closed on these man guided systems.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siluro_a_lenta_corsa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_torpedo
which also includes some other countries' versions (it seems like the Italian SLC might have been the most-used of these).
It depicts the commander of a kaiten-bearing submarine as lying to his superiors and reporting that each of the kaiten launched from his submarine sunk US ships, when in fact none of them hit their targets. It is implied that reporting anything but success was unacceptable, and the Japanese military leadership expanded this program because of being misled by such false or exaggerated reports.
As you scroll, and each story comes into focus, the URL changes to identify that story. This is good if the reader wants to share a story she is currently reading, and needs to copy the URL.
But when you press the "Back" button, instead of just changing the URL to that of previous story's, and scroll to the previous story, it takes you through your whole history on the website, all the way back to where you came from; back to HN, in my case.
Interesting, to say the least.
I'd love for it to _not_ bother cycling/scrolling through previous stories, as it's taking me back to where I came from.
Funny that.
(Looks like something you'd see in Tatooine.)
The Japanese had an almost unbelievable fire and intensity.
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-Superno...