HoldDear [none/use name]
Zhukov, hailed as the savior of Moscow
Savior of Siberia, too. He repelled the Japanese in 1939 at Nomonhan. This was no border clash, the Japanese were bent on a full scale invasion and would not stop until they got to Lake Baikal.
the nearby Reichstag, the old German parliament building, abandoned after an arsonist set it ablaze in 1933
The actual “blaze” was a small fire in one corner of the building, quickly extinguished. William Shirer has a part in of of his books where he gives an eyewitness account of walking through it just after the fire was put out. Most of the buildng was unaffected, but all factions in German politics immediately worked to take advantage of the situation.
Unfortunately our society has nothing to say to a lot of young men. We despise them and want them to go through life lost. This man identified a void and jumped into it. We should have had something for these lost young men, but we just chuckled that they were lost.
Of course it didn’t happen like in that dumb movie. But the Soviets really did use human wave attacks. They were frontal infantry attacks without support. The Japanese did the same thing with their Banzai charges. Human wave attacks work sometimes, something that never gets mentioned. Heck, even the US army used a version of this primitive tactic enabled by their semi-auto rifles, “marching fire”.