While there were some lunatics who enjoyed World War II, it was a nightmare for most. No one was
truly safe from suffering and death, though there were some jobs which sucked more than
others. While an argument could be made for most any job, in this video, we're going to
discuss seven which we think were among the worst, excluding the obvious ones like standard infantry.
The United States Army Air Forces changed the nature of war with bombers such as the B-17
Flying Fortress, and while the B-17 Memphis Belle survived the war with all of her crew intact,
many B-17 crewmen lost their lives flying daytime missions over German-occupied Europe in the Second
World War, with their ball turret gunners being a particularly juicy target for enemy fire. The
ball turrets themselves were lightly armoured and sized for a hobbit, and the gunners operated their
turrets from fetal positions, sticking their feet in up against the plexiglass and folding
the rest of their bodies in after. There wasn't room for a parachute in these death-spheres,
so if their craft was going down, a gunner would have to unseal the locked door separating them
from the cabin and strap one on; this, I'm sure, was easier said than done. Ball turret gunners
were also far more exposed to the elements, and it gets damn cold thousands of meters up in the air.
American poet Randall Jarrel's poem about
gunners in Sperry ball turrets summed the experience up well:
From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Using the right ammunition against the right sort of fuel tank, one could make
flamethrower fuel tank explode, melting its wielder and scorching the men at his side,
though this wasn't as common as it is in video games, and operating a flamethrower was a sucky
job for a variety of other reasons. The fuel tanks were heavy, meaning their operators moved slow,
and they had to get up close to be in an effective range, throwing hellfire from a standing position.
And when they were spitting flame, they may as well have been crying, "Hey, shoot the guy wearing
me!" As well as being cumbersome, flamethrowers were also terrifying -- for both those on the
receiving and delivering end. Watching someone burn alive, even your enemy, can't be a pleasant
experience, and it certainly would've left an emotional scar on anyone who wasn't incinerated
in the process. Fear of a peeling, screaming death made flamethrower operators one of the most
hated battlefield foes, meaning more soldiers targeted them and fewer took them prisoner.
US veteran Hershel "Woody" Williams described how, on Iwo Jima, he was
tasked with clearing a concrete pillbox with a flamethrower. Cover by four other marines,
he stuck the thrower's mouth in one of the pillbox's air vents and cooked his
enemy alive. He also recalled another battle, in which he melted down a Japanese bayonet charge
and took note of the machine-gun rounds literally ricocheting off his fuel tanks.
Combat engineers or sappers had it rough too. Their duty was to pave the way for the rest of
the army, constructing fortifications, roads, and bridges and clearing or setting land mines and
traps, among other things. In this way, they were sort of front line troops, and they often had to
work in harsh conditions with minimal equipment, forced to improvise as best as they could.
Stan Hodson of the British Army recalled how the Royal Engineers
often built things from salvaged materials and in one instance used
the bloated corpses of dead horses as anchors for telephone lines.
And British Royal Engineer Alderman Bill Astle described the life of a sapper in an
interview with Bedford Museum, England: "You never ceased to train. You were always on demolitions,
live demolitions and studying mines as they were discovered. Sometimes later
on you found yourself dealing with one that you’d never dealt with before and
to say the least your hands used to shake a bit because at any time they could go off."
Each to their own, but I'd hate to be trapped in a pressurized metal tube under the waves. Both the
Allies and the Axis employed submarines in World War II, and life for any submariner would have
been terrifying, but the submariners of the German Kriegsmarine had it rough as the war dragged on.
In the early days, which were referred to by the Germans as "the Happy Time," German U-boats were
master of the sea, carrying out nighttime surface attacks and sinking hundreds of Allied ships.
Though the Allies soon developed antisubmarine tactics, bringing U-boat submariner casualty
rates up to more than 75%. Allied aircraft learnt how to spot and destroy U-boats from the sky, and,
using sonar, their boats and subs hunted them almost to extinction. On top of this,
submariners were constantly exposed to changes in pressure as waves lapped over their sub's diesel
engine snorkels. The diesel fumes themselves could also fail to vent, and various other accidents,
such as the batteries powering the diesel engines catching fire, could lead to the
death of the entire crew. If a sub was hit by torpedoes or other types of enemy fire,
water would burst into the compartments, and anyone who survived the initial detonations
would slide into the abyss, drowning in the dark salt sea as their submarine imploded.
Not too far from the end of the war, German U-boat U-1206 was ultimately
put under the waves because someone took a sh*t. A poorly sequenced opening of valves
following said sh*t led to the hull of the U-boat filling with sewerage and seawater,
which flooded the batteries, generating toxic chlorine gas and forcing her to the surface,
where she was attacked by British patrols. U-1206's commander, rather than letting
his sub fall into enemy hands, scuttled it. One submariner died in the British attack,
three drowned as a result of the scuttling, and the remaining forty-six were captured.
While some soldiers were assigned body recovery and disposal jobs basically full time, most came
face to face with a corpse during the war, and many had the grim duty of moving or disposing
of one. Bear in mind, not everyone died clean. Men were blown to ribbons, charred to crisps, bloated
with maggots, rotted to the bone. And often these men were allies, friends. It was hard, messy work.
The US 612th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company was a unit dedicated to locating,
identifying, and burying dead American soldiers. Part of why they did what they did was to boost
morale, but another important factor was sanitation. Private Thomas J. Dowling of
the US 612th described what it was like seeing the faces of the dead: "Some stared wide-eyed;
others had died in the middle of a scream, and their mouths hung open. Others had no
face at all." In the Normandy Landings, the unit had to cut free corpses which
had been entangled in landing craft propellers, and, in colder operations,
they sometimes had to thaw frozen bodies just to identify them. Often, the unit had to give
corpses a hasty burial before returning later, exhuming them, and reburying them properly.
Private Dowling also recalled how much of a psychological strain of the job:
"Not many of us were killed, but we died in different ways. The work was nightmarish, and it
ate at our hearts… cracked some of us, darkened the spirits of others, and numbed the rest."
Worse still, some prisoners -- such as those selected to survive in Sobibor -- were made to
clean corpses out of extermination camp gas chambers in the Second World War.
This must have been a horrific task, especially as the unfortunate souls
carrying it out were essentially slaves -- bound, perhaps, for a similar fate.
One of the absolute worst jobs of World War II must have "serving" in a penal military
unit -- a unit comprised of men convicted of military offences. These men were to be
imprisoned or killed for their crime anyway, so militaries such as the German and Soviet
mobilised them in what were basically suicidal front line forces. If the convicts tried to flee,
they were usually shot dead by barrier troops. Shtrafbats were Stalin's response to Hitler's
penal Strafbataillons. Many Soviet shtrafniki or "punishees" were men convicted of desertion
or cowardice, while others were Gulag inmates. To serve in a shtrafbat was to many a death sentence,
though shtrafniki could atone for their crime by sustaining a significant injury or performing a
significant heroic deed. Some shtrafbat missions even included running through
and clearing minefields, and it is estimated, overall, that they suffered casualty rates of
more than 50%, which was between three and six times higher than other Soviet units.
One Soviet penal unit survivor recalled: "In the first company, out of 198 soldiers who were
assigned, only six survived. I then served in the second company [...] They threw us into the most
dangerous sectors, sending us to almost certain death, at first even without artillery cover."
Now, this last one, funnily enough, is a bit of a stretch. For anyone who didn't cling to Imperial
Japanese doctrine, being a kamikaze pilot must have seemed like the worst job ever, though we
mustn't forget that dying for the emperor was a great honour to some Japanese pilots.
Japanese kamikaze pilot Hisao Horiyama was a devoted subject of the emperor,
though Japan surrendered before he got his chance to prove it. A veteran of the war,
Horiyama said: "Dying was the ultimate fulfilment of our duty,
and we were commanded not to return. [...] I felt bad that I hadn’t been able to sacrifice
myself for my country. My comrades who had died would be remembered in infinite glory,
but I had missed my chance to die in the same way. I felt like I had let everyone down."
There were many terrible jobs that needed doing in World War II, though those were just
seven of them. Can you think of any others? And, in general, what did you think of this
video? Would you like to see a second part to it? Please let us know down in the comments.