For a nation at war, new recruits are vital assets that must be closely guarded.
After all, you can’t keep an army in fighting shape without replacing
battle casualties. But some of the fighting nations of the Second World War didn’t see
things this way, putting their recruits through absolute hell. In this video,
we run through the worst basic training programs unlucky recruits could find themselves in.
You’d expect elite British forces like the Special Air Service and Parachute Regiment
to lose recruits during training, and sometimes they did, but there was a third aerial force
that lost FAR more recruits in training accidents than either of them: the Glider Pilot Regiment.
Parachuting soldiers onto an objective was pretty hit-or-miss during the Second World War.
Airborne soldiers were often scattered over a vast area, and many lost their equipment as soon
as they were out of the plane. One solution to this problem was glider-borne troops.
A platoon of soldiers packed into a plane with no engines would be towed in range of
its target by another aircraft. The tug plane would detach when they got close,
and the glider could fly silently to its target, where it would crash-land and deploy the troops.
It wasn’t such a terrible idea, except for one thing: to maximise the element of surprise,
pilots would crash pretty much on top of their objective.
These objectives were usually command bunkers or gun emplacements — not airfields. Top brass
knew this, so they incorporated it into the glider pilot’s training program. Makes sense
from the general’s perspective, until you realise they were *ordering novice pilots
to crash a plane into a building*, or crash-land as close as they could to one.
Surprising no one, casualties in training were obscene. A visiting US Air Force observer noted:
“[The] British glider troop’s training camp nearby appeared wasteful of human life to
the point of disregard; few days passed, it seemed, that a ... flag-draped coffin,
escorted by troopers in red berets, did not rumble by on the way to the British Army cemetery.”
But the Americans couldn’t be too disparaging about British deaths in training because
they weren’t much better. In fact, their aircrew death rate was a whole lot worse.
In 1941, the United States began gearing up for war, and that meant they needed both planes and
people to crew them. New designs were rushed through production,
and aircraft were often leaving factories without proper testing.
The worst of these rush-job planes was the B-24 Liberator,
which aircrews dubbed the [2]“Flying Coffin.” Despite a growing heap of mechanical issues,
top brass decided to make the B-24 the USAAF’s primary heavy bomber. It got the job done,
but it could be a deathtrap for its crew. Between 1942 and 1945, B-24s had 1,713
accidents, killing 2,796 aircrewmen. But when you look at the big picture, things get worse.
During the Second World War, 15,000 USAAF airmen were killed in training accidents
in the continental United States. The main culprit was mechanical failures, which commonly locked up
pilot controls and killed the engines. Faults with electrical wiring were common too, and these meant
a pilot had to deal with an onboard fire while trying to fly the plane. It might surprise you,
but these accidents were by far the biggest killer of USAAF personnel. Of the 65,164 planes lost by
the USAAF during the war, 42,216 — 65% — were lost in accidents and not in combat.
They may not have had to contend with the harshest discipline or the toughest conditions,
but the USAAF aircrews faced something much worse — a legitimate chance of death every time they got
behind their aircraft’s controls. And this was all before they even caught sight of the enemy.
Before we get to the absolute
worst basic training in World War Two, we’ve got a few honourable mentions.
First up is the Soviet 161st Rifle Division, which fought at Smolensk from August 1941.
Standard Soviet infantry training was supposed to last three months,
and despite what the war movies show, it nearly always did. Rare were the occasions
when recruits would be given rifles and thrown straight into the cacophony of battle,
but it happened — in one case, to recruit Ivan Shelepov, of the 161st Rifle Division. He had been
conscripted from his workplace in late August and sent to basic training. But before he'd been there
two weeks, the Germans made a major breakthrough near Smolensk. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet
soldiers were encircled and facing annihilation at the hands of the Wehrmacht. Emergency troops
were desperately needed, so Shelepov and the other recruits were piled onto a train and sent to the
front. They were thrown into a frontal assault the next morning and took horrendous casualties.
A dislocated ankle saved Shelepov’s life, and he later remarked “It was quite a feeling - just an
hour ago I was a civilian, and now I have a rifle in my hands. I knew war was scary,
but I could never imagine such an all-embracing horror … it is impossible to describe.”
“It was quite a feeling - just an hour ago I was a civilian, and now I have a rifle in my hands. I
knew war was scary, but I could never imagine such an all-embracing horror … it is impossible to
describe.” Pilot training was split into three phases: basic, advanced, and combat, with pilots
spending 4 to 6 weeks at each stage. This worked fine at the basic stage, where novice pilots
learnt to fly in pre-war training aircraft. The problems lay with advanced and combat training.
Very few experienced instructors were available, as frontline squadrons needed as many capable men
as they could get. For the same reason, Spitfires and Hurricanes were also reserved for these units.
The final nail in the coffin was the British weather — which is famous for being awful.
When combined, these factors meant many new pilots went to their squadrons,
in this critical stage of the Battle, with virtually no experience in their warplanes.
While it’s not the worst training regime by far,
any training has got to be better than none at all.
But there was one nation where basic training was so brutal
that its consequences can still be felt today. This dubious honour goes to Imperial Japan.
While every other nation trained its soldiers to fight, Imperial Japan was training its men to die.
It was all part of the Yamato Damashii — the Japanese
martial spirit the government was obsessed with.
Soldiers were taught that any order given by an officer was the divine will of the Emperor. To
question divine will was basically treason, and if the Sergeant heard, it could get a soldier killed.
Army officers tended to believe their soldiers were, at heart, undisciplined brutes who only
understood violence. In training, beatings were handed out liberally, often for the tiniest of
infractions. NCOs would sometimes order their recruits to beat each other to near-death. These
sadists often got carried away, and it wasn’t uncommon for a recruit to be beaten until he died.
But the worst part was that these beatings never stopped. In the field,
Japanese veterans were often beaten until they were incapacitated by newly-minted officers
looking to make a name for themselves. Even General Tojo, the head of the Japanese Army,
beat his subordinates when he felt they weren’t up to scratch.
For the soldiers at the bottom of the pile, it was hell. Anything short of fanatical loyalty to those
in senior positions could easily result in broken bones and ruptured organs. They were treated like
animals, and when they were let off the leash in occupied areas, that’s exactly how they treated
the local civilians. The infamously barbaric way Japanese soldiers treated recently-captured POWs
mirrored their own treatment in basic training. Brutalised from day one, these soldiers had it
in them to commit the worst atrocities of the war. But there’s still no excusing what they did.
THOSE were stories from the absolute worst basic training programs of the Second World War.
But what do YOU think? Would YOU have signed up to the USAAF knowing the risks? How would
YOU feel if you were rushed from training to the front line after just two weeks? Were YOU
aware of just how brutal Army training was in Imperial Japan? Let us know in the comments!