What do you think was the worst possible “job” a fighting soldier could get in WWII?
I vote for flame thrower operator. Every time you appeared on the battlefield, you became the number one target for all the enemies nearby. If they hit your fuel tanks you most likely burned to death. If they captured you they probably murdered you for killing so brutally their comrades. Even if you survived, you had to see every day the results of your work. Screaming, charred soldiers, slowly dying for their burns. I have never seen memoirs by a flame thrower operator: I wonder if any of them wanted to write down their experiences.
Soviet penal battalions cleared minefields by running through them, were sent into battled armed with sticks, and other things that would be comedic if they weren’t real. That’s probably the worst.
The German Type XIV “milk cow” submarines were favorite targets of the allies and had fatality rates of above 50%, for one example of a unenviable German job.
On the other end of the scale, I had a history teacher in junior high who was a general’s aide in Europe. Whenever they finished taking a town, his job was to get a generator crew and find the local ice cream parlor so they could save the ice cream.
As a true “job” I would imagine body recovery. I worked with a WWII veteran who described going into a German bunker, seeing dead soldiers, and then one’s face moved. It was the maggots…
Also a guy from Vietnam who had a diabling fear of insects after seeing a particular type of beetle eating on bodies.
Late war U-boat crew is pretty nasty. They’re the branch of service that had the highest casualty rates as a percentage of total members during the entire war, upwards of 75%. While in the early war, it was a relatively safe and productive gig, during the late war it was awful. They would have submerged the vast majority of the time because being on the surface even for a few minutes would probably get you spotted and attacked by an aircraft. Your giant diesel engines operated through a snorkel, and every time a wave went overtop, the engines kicked and the air pressure in the sub suddenly dropped, causing an uncomfortable percussion and inner ear discomfort. Every few seconds, 24/7, except in very calm seas.
There were so many effective allied units hunting you down that you spent all day mostly clinging desperately to survival by hiding rather than being the attacker. You’d spend most of the time in terror as hydrophones picked up ships a few miles away that might be allied hunter killer groups. Hiding near your depth limit, hearing the hull of the sub lurch and pop, hearing the pinging of the sonar that might have found you, or might still be searching.
And if you were a crewman in 1944 or later, not only are you probably a 16-17 year old, surrounded by the sea wanting to crush your boat that’s now not exactly made of the best material and engineering due to wartime supply shortages and sometimes even sabotage, but your odds of coming home are pretty slim. You’re probably going to die, in terror, hearing the sonar pings of the ships above hunting you, hearing their engines overhead suddenly cut off because they knew they were overtop of you, hearing and feeling a trail of explosions getting even closer to you - until the walls burst, cold seawater starts flooding your compartment, and you can feel your sub sinking to the bottom of the ocean.
On the Allied side, I’d imagine that combat engineers didn’t have it very good. If the regular soldiers got bogged down due to pillboxes or other obstacles, guess whose job it was to go take the obstacle out under fire and get the rest of the guys moving again?
Kaiten pilots. Basically Kamikaze submarines. They’d stuff you into an oversized torpedo, point you in the general direction of the enemy and let you go. The cockpit for the driver was only just big enough to fit a person in. Blowing yourself up was probably a relief.
EDIT to add: If anyone here visits Chicago stop by the Museum of Science and Industry. They have a real U-Boat that you can tour. It is an interesting experience and it will amaze you that people could live in such a thing.
Ball turret gunner in a USAAF bomber. Impossible to get out of, if the plane is going down. Actually, being any member of a bomber crew was pretty bad-high casualty rates. I also think being a “sapper” (combat engineer) was pretty bad.
It’s hard to imagine a worse job than that faced by Japanese soldiers defending Iwo Jima.
The Japanese on Iwo Jima KNEW they had no hope of survival, much less victory. The best they could hope for was to hide in their bunkers or tunnels, sneak out occasionally to kill as many Americans as they could, and wait to be burned to death by flamethrowers.
At the Battle of Stalingrad several western sources suggest that Soviet troops were being sent to the front in pairs, with one gun per pair (you might remember seeing it in the film Enemy at the Gates and in the first Call of Duty game.) The historicity of this is questionable but it seems like a pretty awful way to be sent into the field.
Losses per sortie were much higher for RAF bomber crews than for the USAAF. I don’t really understand why since the RAF was flying at night and the Lancasters were a bit safer than B-17s.
), my vote goes to German submariner. Very low survival rates, and many must have died very badly.
