Post first-person accounts of historically significant events. Leave sources if you can.
At 10:00 p.m., a salty army corporal led his four-man tank-killer team made up of Ōmagari and two sailors. They kept to the shallow trenches as they moved slowly towards the ambush zone. Ōmagari admired the NCO's ability to keep them together in the darkness. Around 4:00 a.m., they arrived at the ambush site to the smell of decay. Dead bodies, in various stages of decay and dismemberment, carpeted the ground. The moonlit area was a killing field. Some of the dead were felled by flamethrowers that burnt off their flesh to expose glistening bones. The corporal whispered for the men to lie down amidst them. Ōmagari was numb inside, so had little trouble dragging bloated corpses by the feet. He sat down and leaned back into the pile of shattered men.
>>488500
Before getting into his own position, the NCO crawled over piles of the dead to check on each man. He squirmed up next to Ōmagari and whispered, "You stand out like a sore thumb, sir. You don't look dead." Ōmagari wasn't selling it as a corpse. If the flamethrower tanks spotted him they would torch the whole group. The corporal instructed Ōmagari to smear blood on his face, and cover himself with intestines and organs. Ōmagari balked at coating his body in the guts of his countrymen. The NCO spoke through clenched teeth that if Ōmagari didn't convince the Marines he was dead, the flamethrower tanks would burn him and the others alive.
The NCO pulled his bayonet from its metal sheath and brought it down hard against a dead man's torso, splitting the belly open. He pulled out a slippery mass of viscera. He handed the bayonet to Ōmagari and pointed to another corpse. With the fate of the mission at stake, Ōmagari accepted the glistening bayonet. Ōmagari tried to open the buttons of a dead man's jacket, but the corpse was too bloated so he sat up on his knees and swung the bayonet down into the dead man's abdomen, hacking through the uniform and exposing the dead man's organs. Ōmagari used the tip of the bayonet to fish out a long string of intestines. Ōmagari unbuttoned his own jacket and stuffed the entrails inside. He hacked off a large section and inserted it into a tear in his pant leg. Seeing this, the NCO was satisfied and crawled away. "The dead were no longer seen as human beings, but as objects. Even the dead were called to fight," Ōmagari said.
Bernal Diaz
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I was going to link some archive.org translation but they appear to mostly suck.
B-52s over Hanoi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozSZ6Kj5-A0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ftgk2LRi0w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9A0851AEsLk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECGKCD-pqiM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqoT1iUvDN4
...Fifteen other American bombers landed safely or crash-landed in Switzerland that day. Some of them had been fired on by Swiss pilots and flak gunners. This was not unusual. By the end of the summer of 1944, over a thousand Americans would be in Swiss hands, held under military guard and forbidden from leaving the country for the duration of the war.
In the last two years of the war, the “benevolent hosts” of the American airmen threw 187 of them into one of the most abhorrent prison compounds in Europe, a punishment camp run by a sadistic Nazi. One of these unfortunates was Daniel Culler. Culler was never told why he was sent to Straflager Wauwilermoos, or for how long. As he passed through the gates of the prison, his military guard whispered to him. “I’m sorry to bring you to this hellhole. Watch your every step. There are some awful men in here, and you are so young.”
“What happened to me that night, and many more to follow, was the worst hell any person ever had to endure,” Culler wrote in his searing prison memoir. A group of Russian prisoners held him down, stuffed straw in his mouth, and sodomized him repeatedly. “Coming from a small farming community, I never heard of men doing to me what they did. I... hadn’t even been with a girl, except to hold her hand and give her a light kiss on her cheek or mouth. I was bleeding from all the openings of my body, and I prayed to God to take my life from me.”
>>488533
He was raped again the next morning and forced to have oral sex with several of his assailants, who stuck sticks in his mouth to pry it open. After being knocked unconscious, he awoke to find blood running down his throat. Too weak to move, and with his hands tied behind his back, he was thrown into the waste ditch outside the barracks. “When I finally came to my senses, I crawled from the ditch and tried to wipe myself with straw. I noticed something was hanging from my rectum, and realizing it was skin from the inside, I tried to push it back in.”
Within days Culler’s entire body was covered with boils from the lice and rats in the feces-contaminated straw. The rapes continued and became more violent. He began to vomit blood and an unknown yellow substance, and he developed chronic, bloody diarrhea.
When Culler was finally taken from Wauwilermoos and given his day in court, he discovered that Swiss justice was a mockery. The military court proceeding was conducted entirely in German, and when it was over, Culler was handed an English translation of the transcript. He would be sent back to Wauwilermoos without medical treatment and for an unstated period of time. The transcript did not contain a single word of his oral testimony describing his rape and the conditions inside the prison. The final indignity was a bill Culler received for 18 francs—compensation for the court’s time and trouble.
Back in prison, Culler was tormented by a loud ringing in his ears—the result of beatings suffered at the hands of the Russians. They had been transferred, but sitting alone in a corner of the barracks, wrapped in a thin blanket, Dan Culler felt he was losing his mind. “The last I remember at Wauwilermoos, I was acting like a madman, trying to stuff straw down my throat so I could not breathe. After that everything went black.”
>>488541
Dan Culler woke up in a Swiss military hospital, and after a few days he was transferred to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Davos, near the Austrian border. From there he escaped to France on September 26, 1944, the way paved for him by his pilot. With the help of Air Force personnel stationed at the Swiss consulate, Lieutenant Telford paid some Swiss operatives to orchestrate his entire crew’s escape and hand them over to the Maquis. As they crossed the border on foot, Swiss guards opened fire on them, wounding Telford in the ankle. The Telford crew was flown back to London in an Eighth Air Force C-47 cargo plane with a group of other internees—English and American—who had recently passed over the border.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1960/11/first-wave-at-omaha-beach/303365/
Able Company has planned to wade ashore in three files from each boat, center file going first, then flank files peeling off to right and left. The first men out try to do it but are ripped apart before they can make five yards. Even the lightly wounded die by drowning, doomed by the waterlogging of their overloaded packs. From Boat No. 1, all hands jump off in water over their heads. Most of them are carried down. Ten or so survivors get around the boat and clutch at its sides in an attempt to stay afloat. The same thing happens to the section in Boat No. 4. Half of its people are lost to the fire or tide before anyone gets ashore. All order has vanished from Able Company before it has fired a shot.
Within seven minutes after the ramps drop, Able Company is inert and leaderless. At Boat No. 2, Lieutenant Tidrick takes a bullet through the throat as he jumps from the ramp into the water. He staggers onto the sand and flops down ten feet from Private First Class Leo J. Nash. Nash sees the blood spurting and hears the strangled words gasped by Tidrick: "Advance with the wire cutters!" It's futile; Nash has no cutters. To give the order, Tidrick has raised himself up on his hands and made himself a target for an instant. Nash, burrowing into the sand, sees machine gun bullets rip Tidrick from crown to pelvis. From the cliff above, the German gunners are shooting into the survivors as from a roof top.
Captain Taylor N. Fellers and Lieutenant Benjamin R. Kearfoot never make it. They had loaded with a section of thirty men in Boat No. 6 (Landing Craft, Assault, No. 1015). But exactly what happened to this boat and its human cargo was never to be known. No one saw the craft go down. How each man aboard it met death remains unreported. Half of the drowned bodies were later found along the beach. It is supposed that the others were claimed by the sea.
>>488571
By the end of fifteen minutes, Able Company has still not fired a weapon. No orders are being given by anyone. No words are spoken. The few able-bodied survivors move or not as they see fit. Merely to stay alive is a full-time job. The fight has become a rescue operation in which nothing counts but the force of a strong example.
By the end of one half hour, approximately two thirds of the company is forever gone. There is no precise casualty figure for that moment. There is for the Normandy landing as a whole no accurate figure for the first hour or first day. The circumstances precluded it. Whether more Able Company riflemen died from water than from fire is known only to heaven. All earthly evidence so indicates, but cannot prove it.
By the end of one hour, the survivors from the main body have crawled across the sand to the foot of the bluff, where there is a narrow sanctuary of defiladed space. There they lie all day, clean spent, unarmed, too shocked to feel hunger, incapable even of talking to one another. No one happens by to succor them, ask what has happened, provide water, or offer unwanted pity. D Day at Omaha afforded no time or space for such missions. Every landing company was overloaded by its own assault problems.
By the end of one hour and forty-five minutes, six survivors from the boat section on the extreme right shake loose and work their way to a shelf a few rods up the cliff. Four fall exhausted from the short climb and advance no farther. They stay there through the day, seeing no one else from the company. The other two, Privates Jake Shefer and Thomas Lovejoy, join a group from the Second Ranger Battalion, which is assaulting Pointe du Hoc to the right of the company sector, and fight on with the Rangers through the day. Two men. Two rifles. Except for these, Able Company's contribution to the D Day fire fight is a cipher.
https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/g/gall-chechnya.html
Across town on Pervomaiskaya Street, a long, broad avenue leading in from the airport, another fierce battle was raging where the 81st Motor Rifle Regiment came under ambush as it drove into town. Strung out for a mile along the avenue, the whole column came under fire from Chechen fighters positioned all the way down. Fighters were suddenly on the attack, running out in search of more tanks, plundering what did not burn for weapons and ammunition. By evening they gathered in the centre of the town, swarming around the market-place and moving towards the railway station.
The Maikop Brigade had occupied Grozny's railway station by early afternoon, parking its tanks and APCs in the square in front, facing the Presidential Palace, several hundred yards away down Orjonikidze Prospekt. They were unaware that they were a target for a very hostile and fierce Chechen resistance. Some members of the Presidential Guard even remember one Russian soldier poking his head out of the tank hatch to ask them where he could buy cigarettes. The Chechens answered him with a bullet to the head.
The Chechens took up positions in the depot buildings behind the railway station, the post office to the right and the five-storey building opposite. Over the radio they called on the Russians to surrender, warning them they were surrounded, but the Russians replied they had their orders and would not. Ryabtsev was standing under the arch of the railway budding when a bullet nicked his uniform. It was early evening, still fight, he remembered. It began slowly, with sniper fire and machine-guns rattling from nearby buildings. As the Russians answered with the big guns mounted on their armoured vehicles, the Chechens blasted them from the side with rocket-propelled grenades.
>>488592
Within hours the square had turned into a horrific inferno of burning tanks and dead bodies. Ryabtsev was shot in the legs trying to haul a heavy machine-gun into the railway station building. He dragged himself behind the tanks and was pulled in through the window to a room that filled rapidly with wounded soldiers. Nikolai Zarovny, another young conscript, wag inside his light tank firing the gun when an anti-tank grenade seared into the side, bursting like a fireball. His clothes on fire, his face and hands scorched, he yanked open the hatch at the back and leapt out, stumbling over the dead bodies of his comrades as he dashed blindly into the station building. Badly burnt, he joined the growing number of wounded in the impromptu field hospital. As the fighting raged through the night, Ryabtsev remembers drifting in and out of sleep, hearing loud explosions and someone saying another tank had been hit.
The commander of the Brigade, Colonel Ivan Savin, radioed all night for reinforcements but none came. Kim's unit only made it to the station at five in the morning but was in no position to help. His vehicle was hit in the street by the Presidential Palace around three in the afternoon. His team leapt free and made it into the light tank ahead. Fifteen of them then took cover in a building until the early hours of the morning when they managed to duck and weave their way to the station buildings. At midnight the men stopped for fifteen minutes while their commander offered them a swig of vodka. It was by now New Year's Day but they had little to celebrate.
>>488595
The end results of the New Year's Eve battle were devastating for the Russian side, with the first Russian armored column alone losing 105 of its 120 tanks and armored personnel carriers.
The entire first battalion of the Maikop Brigade, more than 50% of the 81st Regiment, and hundreds of men from the remaining units had been killed. A high-ranking Russian General Staff officer later said "On January 2nd, we lost contact with our forward units." According to Maskhadov, some 400 Russian tanks and APCs in all were destroyed.
Russian Colonel General A. Galkin reported 225 armored vehicles lost during the first month and a half of the war, including 62 tanks.
Most of the Spetsnaz detachment troops surrendered to the Chechens, "after wandering about hopelessly for three days without food, let alone any clear idea of what they were supposed to do."
A Russian Lieutenant Colonel was quoted when he returned from Chechen captivity as saying, "the only order was to go forward, without explanations as to what they should do, where they should go, and whom they should capture." Meanwhile, highly mobile Chechens attacked even the Russian second-echelon forces outside the city, raiding an artillery battalion.
chechens are scary bunch
>>488676
>>488676
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08El1n6B7SA
>>488728
what?
>>488533
jesus christ, poor bastard.
>>490099
1994 wasn't 25 years ago.
