It wasnt just kids. The Viet Minh used suicide lunge mines during the First Indochina War, and in the Second against the Yanks the Viet Cong used suicide bombers as well.
Suicide bombers as resistance tactic in WW2
- Thread starter AdA
- Start date
To who? The populace? Doubt it, these are the Nazis after all. Foreign support? Most of the resistance movements were communists, and partisan wars are hardly clean. Hell normal war isnt clean ether. If being communist didnt stop the Allies from giving them support than a little thing like this isnt.
Snake Featherston
Banned
Except that they did continue the fight with the means of guerrilla war. Suicide bombing is ultimately self-defeating, the partisans did exactly what irregular war does best.
Snake Featherston
Banned
It's pretty much not going to work in Western Europe, or if it does it proves a gift to both the Nazis and the Soviets, the Soviets in that Communist movements (which Moscow will by its usual method forbid entirely from this move while encouraging it in the anti-communist movements to weaken them) will start looking more professional and normal in a moral sense, the Nazis in that this is not going to work any better here against them than it did in the 21st Century against the USA, less so, in fact.
Snake has it right, Suicide boming is the act of shooting yourself i nthe head hoping the bullet will pass throught the mess you just made of your skull and hit the bad guy you're standing next to.
I think you are agreeing with me. Suicide bombing would have been self-defeating and discredit the resistance in the eyes of many in the occupied populations.
As well as i nthe eyes of the allied armies they would have needed to liberate them.
You need an ideology that glorifies death for this sort of thing to be possible, as people aren't going to do it out of pure tactics, and you'll need the ideology to be popular if it isn't going to be counterproductive. What you need, then, is a Resistance that is more like the Fascists. Essentially this requires a very far-back PoD that has WWII a stomping match between different types of nutter rather a war between democracy and totalitarianism.
Expect they were doing so in relative secrecy, only incredibly well-informed people knew what was going on or what Generalplan Ost really entailed, and of them only a few morally principled people cared. Hitler's speech about the invasion of the USSR doesn't mention Living Space once, neither does his speech announcing the defeat of Poland. Nazi Propaganda maintained that the each move the Nazis took was nothing to do with conquest or extermination, but an act of self-defence from a 'ludicrous state' that was committing genocide against Volk German communities (Hitler's justification for attacking Poland) or a Soviet that was poised to attack Germany at any moment and was ravaging 'brave Finland.'
Many people, too many people in fact, would simply dismiss such stories as allied propaganda. Hell, the US dismissed such stories because they sounded like bad propaganda. It was only when troops marched into the camps that people really faced facts.
Expect they were doing so in relative secrecy, only incredibly well-informed people knew what was going on or what Generalplan Ost really entailed, and of them only a few morally principled people cared. Hitler's speech about the invasion of the USSR doesn't mention Living Space once, neither does his speech announcing the defeat of Poland. Nazi Propaganda maintained that the each move the Nazis took was nothing to do with conquest or extermination, but an act of self-defence from a 'ludicrous state' that was committing genocide against Volk German communities (Hitler's justification for attacking Poland) or a Soviet that was poised to attack Germany at any moment and was ravaging 'brave Finland.'
Many people, too many people in fact, would simply dismiss such stories as allied propaganda. Hell, the US dismissed such stories because they sounded like bad propaganda. It was only when troops marched into the camps that people really faced facts.
Maponus, than kyou ,that was very good, I just did not think of those points in time, but you did, well done.
No western guerilla group/terrorists have ever adopted suicide bombing tactics. Being largely secular and politically motivated it's simply not a tactic that's going to be acceptable, 'live to fight another day' is the maxim, and applies to WWII resistance groups as well.
The most effective resistance groups were those that tied down Axis resources either looking for them or defending against attacks, groups that went in for suicide tactics would not have lasted long.
Even when undertaking missions like the assassination of Heydrich where the odds of survival were poor they didn't just strap bombs to themselves, it's a cultural difference I just don't think could have been overcome.
The most effective resistance groups were those that tied down Axis resources either looking for them or defending against attacks, groups that went in for suicide tactics would not have lasted long.
Even when undertaking missions like the assassination of Heydrich where the odds of survival were poor they didn't just strap bombs to themselves, it's a cultural difference I just don't think could have been overcome.
Probably, but allied armies are going to liberate them regardless of what they do. I doubt if the anti-nazi resistance movements really had much of an impact on the overall outcome of the war. Ford trucks, C-47s, T-34s, Shermans, P-51s, destroyer escorts, Spitfires, and Lancasters did that. I would agree that it would affect the willingness to most allied powers to accept them as legitimate future rulers of the newly liberated countries. In the Soviet sphere, many would end up in mass graves. In the west, they'd probably at best be labelled as unbalanced extremists and excluded from the political process and at worst, forced into exile.
Snake Featherston
Banned
It's worth noting that this wasn't exactly used by *non* Western armies of the time until Japan ran out of anything else to do with its airplanes.
Yeah, the great Marriannas Turkey Shoot kind of left an impression, didn't it?
Snake Featherston
Banned
That and the growing sophistication of US fighters, bombers, and fighter-bombers of the land and carrier variety leaving Japanese weaponry in the dust. If Japan wanted to use them at all, it ran out of anything else to do with them. By comparison the Imperial Army *did* show a growing skill in attrition war in the battles for individual islands, but attrition wasn't exactly going to help Japan. Even if US will theoretically could have cracked with sufficient casualties, Japan never had the will or the power to inflict them without doing worse to itself.
Yes, i nthe end, this get's us back to suicide bombers being an act of self defeating impotence that contributes not one thing to that given side's victory.
Snake Featherston
Banned
But will contribute greatly to the USSR's own strength post-WWII as I really can't see the Soviets doing this. *They* will see the most glaringly obvious propaganda point to make out of this (see, they hate their own ideologies/lives so much they blow themselves up, they're a bunch of failures) and so will quietly ban it for their own followers on pain of death, if necessary, while ensuring that the non-communists are the only ones that use it and are targeted by Moscow's propaganda as much as anything else.
Well I think you have to have a certain cultural underpinning to embrace such tactics even if you have reached desperation point. Towards the end of the war in Europe the Nazi's did try such tactics with manned flying bombs but the backlash, 'moral'(in so far as you can use that term in Nazi Germany) as well as pragmatic meant it never really got anywhere.
Also look at Britain in the summer of 1940 when invasion seemed imminent and the survival of the nation was at stake. Some pretty nasty tactics were embraced but to the best of my knowledge suicide attacks weren't among them.