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Comment by llm_trw | Hacker News Reader

There were not trenches in WWII.

It was a war of maneuver from start to finish, which is why it was so much more destructive than WWI.

>Russia supposedly lost 40,000 soldiers in Ukraine last month alone

Do not believe Ukrainian numbers any more than you believe Russian numbers.

One thing we have learned from this war is that a core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat. With the current recruitment crisis in the West I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a push from the agencies to make future generations more right wing.

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> There were not trenches in WWII.

Not WWI-style, but I think there were a number of trenches. For example, Fortress Europe (Germany's efforts to secure Europe), consisted of a number of Maginot Line-style entrenchments and tunnel complexes.

I think that the Eastern Front also had a lot of that stuff.

I believe that the Ukraine War is now featuring trenches, and I know that the Ethiopia/Eritrea War featured classic WWI-style trench warfare.

WWII was real bad, and was one of the first modern wars to claim more civilian lives, than military. I think that's sort of become a standard feature of most wars, these days; even the small ones.

I'm currently trying to figure out how my father[0] got a Silver Star, in Belgium, in WWII. He never told us, and the St. Louis fire destroyed his main records.

It affected him badly. I think he fought in a similar fashion to this story. He was in mechanized artillery, but saw plenty of bad stuff, and was wounded twice.

[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/MikeMarshall.htm

that was a cool life your dad lived! hard, but he saw a lot and i'm sure became a better person because of that hardship. from eagle scout to omaha beach to CIA to idi amin-adjacent; wow!

thank you for sharing. i enjoyed reading a little bit about your dad's exploits. /salute to Mike Marshall.

Re your father; wow, what a life. Thanks for documenting that for us.

My grandfather became a Navy navigator, B25s I think, right as the war ended. Chased hurricanes in the Pacific. I was the only person in the family to ever get much out of him about it in the last years before he passed.

Even in peacetime operations, he watched many colleagues die in storms, fog, and from accidents. I think everyone who served then saw how arbitrary death could be, and how the entire service was designed to operate around the necessary assumption that lives would vanish for nothing - and that everything else had to keep humming along.

Provides a very different perspective than the modern era.

The Battle of Kursk (for example) would like to have a word:

The Central and Voronezh Fronts each constructed three main defensive belts in their sectors, with each subdivided into several zones of fortification.[148][149][150] The Soviets employed the labour of over 300,000 civilians.[p] Fortifying each belt was an interconnected web of minefields, barbed-wire fences, anti-tank ditches, deep entrenchments for infantry, anti-tank obstacles, dug-in armoured vehicles, and machine-gun bunkers.[151] Behind the three main defensive belts were three more belts prepared as fallback positions; the first was not fully occupied or heavily fortified, and the last two, though sufficiently fortified, were unoccupied with the exception of a small area in the immediate environs of Kursk.[150][152] The combined depth of the three main defensive zones was about 40 kilometres (25 mi). The six defensive belts on either side of Kursk were 130–150 kilometres (81–93 mi) deep.[152] If the Germans managed to break through these defences they would still be confronted by additional defensive belts to the east, manned by the Steppe Front. These brought the total depth of the defences to nearly 300 kilometres (190 mi).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kursk

> core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat

The opposite lesson from WW2, where having genocidal right wing nationalists tended to start the wars which you would then lose. The RWNs in Ukraine are even cited in the Russian causus belli (yes, obviously that's BS and it's an unjust invasion).

RWNs in Europe also tend to be pro-Russia. Possibly because Russia is paying them, possibly sheer contrarianism. Either way it's going to be difficult to divert them from divisive, fictional "enemy within" anti-immigrant discourse to the real threat from Russia.

You should ask the average US vet what they thought about the Indians then.

>Look ma, we made grandpa's genocide into a game for 5 year olds.

> RWNs in Europe also tend to be pro-Russia. Possibly because Russia is paying them, possibly sheer contrarianism.

Both, but mainly it's because of a common enemy - the liberal-democratic west. Russia has very little in common with conservatives in the west when it comes to lifestyle (divorces, suicides, drugs, hiv, alcoholism, abortion are at record levels there - much higher than in most western countries) - but it promises "conservative values", hates liberals and delivers anti-LGBT legislation and that's enough for far right.

It's not unlike the nazi alliance with communism before WW2. Both wanted "liberal global order" gone.

That's a funny rewriting of history given that it was the west which refused the USSRs offer of an alliance against fascism.

The "rewriting" is literally what happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German%E2%80%93Soviet_military...

And it started in 20s already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Rapallo_(1922)

Soviet russia helped Germany work around the military restrictions that were placed on them after WW1.

When are you referring to? Because it was a German/USSR alliance which started the war by invading Poland .. and then switched sides to Allied aid to USSR to fight Germany .. and then back again immediately once Germany was defeated. All very realpolitik. USSR had no interest in a free Eastern Europe either.

> One thing we have learned from this war is that a core of genocidal right wing nationalists makes you country extremely difficult to defeat. With the current recruitment crisis in the West I wouldn't be surprised if we don't see a push from the agencies to make future generations more right wing.

Ye see Alternative for Germany. Providing weapons for Azov et al. removed alot of social dogma around supporting those kind of movements that NATO would bomb "becouse nazis" if they were not picking on the right ethnicity.

Dunno why 'people' pretend this is not a thing. There are more or less fascist paramilitaries roaming around and collecting men for the trenches. Men who btw also are barred from fleeing the country.

Perhaps in the narrow definition of "trenches" your first statement is true. However, a ".. war of maneuver from start to finish ..." is certainly not true. I suspect the combatants in the house to house fighting in places like Stalingrad and Leningrad, did not consider that as "maneuver". Nor did the Americans & Japanese soldiers at Okinawa.

Certainly there was much more maneuver in WWII - blitzkreig - but it lasted a long time and armies were not in constant motion all that time.

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