swanjolras:okay, let me just— wax rhapsodic about the 1077th anti-aircraft regiment for a bitin 1941
swanjolras:okay, let me just— wax rhapsodic about the 1077th anti-aircraft regiment for a bitin 1941, germany invades russia, and it goes spectacularly. the soviets are still reeling from the fact that hitler doesn’t want to share poland, stalin’s convinced that the nazis won’t go after the ussr until they’re finished with britain, and the luftwaffe manages to smash through a fuckload of the russian army pretty damn quicktheir army is seizing ridiculous amounts of land in russia, and when they seize the land, they seize the people living on the land; and the nazis, who consider eastern europeans to be racially inferior, are treating those people like they’re something less than humannow, word of this is getting back to moscow and leningrad; it’s all being published in the newspapers, to stir up righteous fury against the germans, because the russian bigwigs know that the soviet people are going to need approximately a metric fuckton of vim and vigor to survive the german campaignand, yeah, they’ve heard about it in stalingrad, the atrocities that the germans are committing against any eastern european they find, what they’re doing to the villages, what they’re doing to the womenand there are a bunch of women— no, girls, really, barely out of high school, my age— who hear about this, and know what the nazis could do to them, and know the dangers and the risks of coming face to face with the germanswho have probably lived long enough in soviet russia to know that this is not a government that has its shit together; who probably know even before they sign up that they will be undersupplied, barely trained, and deliberately made into cannon fodder— dead, or captured, whichever is worsewho, knowing all this, decide to volunteerwho are trained to be an anti-aircraft regiment, whose goddamn NAME is the 1077th ANTI-AIRCRAFT regiment, who are prepared to fight AIRCRAFT and who are promptly faced by a line of approaching german tanksand, with shitty guns and little training, kick off the battle of stalingrad by stopping those german tanks in their tracks for two full daysi’m not sure if the phrase “my heroes" has ever been more appropriate tbh -- source link