Paratrooper over Normandy
get shot down, lose your squad, single-handedly defeat 7 ss infantry, blow up a power station
Become a POW, get tortured, escape, sent to Stalag III-C POW camp in the east
Escape again, run all the way to the front, joined GUARDS CAPTAIN ALEKSANDRA MOTHERFUCKIN’ SAMUSENKO’S BATALLION IN THE 1ST GUARDS TANK ARMY
Fight in advance to Berlin, get wounded
In a Soviet hospital, get a personal visit by Marshall of the Soviet Union Zhukov
Return to US, reunite with your family a couple days after they held your funeral
Get married in the same church by the same priest that held your funeral
Encountering a Soviet tank brigade in the middle of January, he raised his hands, holding a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes, and shouted in Russian, ‘Amerikansky tovarishch!’
:comfy-cool:
Every time I read a story about some American or Soviet WW2 veteran I think it’s the coolest person who ever lived, then I learn about someone new who is also the coolest person who ever lived
On the opposite end of that spectrum was that loser who fought for Finland, the Nazis, then the Americans (in Vietnam). And in real loser fashion he died in a helicopter crash, didn’t even have the dignity to let the PAVN shoot him.
TIL that the British soldier that used medieval weaponry to kill Nazis and carried bagpipes around fought alongside Tito’s Yugoslav partizans in 1944, but beyond the weird/cool gimmick and that specific military campaign, he wasn’t as cool as some of the other examples.
Jack Churchill, my favorite anecdote about him was after the war he would chuck his bag off the train home from work. People thought he was nuts. Turns out he was just throwing it into his own yard so he wouldn’t have to carry it back home from the station.
You might have found the one good american soldier.
There’s like a decent amount of fun historical biographies of American soldiers in ww2, like how soldiers of the 157th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Division poured rounds of justice into some of the nazi death camp guards during the liberation of Dachau or whistling while looking the other way while freshly liberated prisoners acquired justice from their former captors in the forms of blunt force trauma.
There may not be as many tales of justice as on the Eastern Front, but there’s always interesting nuggets waiting to be discovered
My personal favorite is during the liberation of Ebensee, where the prisoners roasted guards on the crematorium trays.
The Nuremberg hangman who lied about having hanged people before and did it shitfaced.
After the Nuremberg executions, Woods stated: I hanged those ten Nazis … and I am proud of it!
Also August Willich. He fought during the Palatine uprising in 1849 (with Engels as his aide-de-camp), and emigrated to America where he became a Major General in the Union Army. He also thought that Karl Marx was too conservative and challenged him to a duel, which Marx refused.
I think there were plenty of good American soldiers in WWII, they just had a wildly different reason to fight than the US government
One of the things that Audie Murphy did, in addition to his war feats like firing a machine gun from atop a burning tank to halt a German assault was to publicly talk about getting mental health therapy. At the time there was a stigma around men that sought mental health care. Pretty cool move in my book.
There were a couple who joined Fidel. The Abe Lincoln brigade in the Spain Civil War. The guy who wanted to duel Marx for being a :LIB:
There were also a handful that defected to the DPRK, and some POWs who were treated so well by the Chinese PVA that they decided to stay. I think that’s where the Americans invented the term brainwashing from because they couldn’t conceive of someone wanting to leave for China/North Korea.
There were also a handful that defected to the DPRK
Dresnok. Was still alive in Pyongyang up until a few years ago. The man who runs Koryo Tours finally found him and did a documentary with him. Fascinating. He was a real piece of work, he used to beat the crap out of the other American defectors in DPRK. Jenkins was another one, married a Japanese lady and escaped in a big drama that captured the hearts of Japan at the time. The other two, Abshier and Parrish, died in the 1980s.
Another documentary, They Chose China , deals with the US POWs who defected to China after the Korean conflict. Fascinating. They made some propaganda films and their words about how horrid America is and how racist are still current today.
Victor Grossman defected to East Germany in 1952 out of fears of being 1984d by McCarthyism and he’s still a communist to this day at age 95.
I actually saw him earlier this year, but I didn’t get the chance to speak with him as he was busy. Not like I’d knew what to ask either tbh.
This man was fully committed to killin’ Nazis.
