There's something almost poetic about a last stand. It's that classic back-against-the-wall,
underdog situation, in which a group of soldiers hold a position against overwhelming odds.
Irrespective of who wins, last stands are often characterised by heavy casualties on both sides,
often with the defending force inflicting far more casualties on the attacking force than might be
expected. Last stands come about for a number of reasons, some tactical, and others more emotional.
Tactically, the position in question might be too valuable to simply give up. In other words, losing
it might cost the defenders the war. A defending force might also make a last stand to tie the
enemy up and buy their allies time. Emotionally, the defenders might have high morale and believe
it is their duty to fight with tooth and nail until either they're dead or their enemy is.
Facing the prospect of torture and certain death if they surrender,
some might even take the third option, and fight to the bitter end. Of course, not every single
person in every last stand in history would have wanted to fight until they were dead,
and, on the ground, all the blood and guts and screaming probably didn't feel all that poetic. In
this video, we're going to delve into five of the most famous last stands of the Second World War.
After smashing the Italians in Operation Compass, a good chunk of the Allied forces in North Africa
got sent off to fight in Greece and the Middle East, leaving those who remained
to deal with Axis reinforcements led by Erwin Rommel. During Operation Compass, the Brits and
the Australians had captured the vital Libyan port of Tobruk. When the operation was over,
they left a force, composed largely of the 9th Australian Division, in Tobruk to defend it.
Between the 10th of April and 27th of November 1941, Rommel surrounded and laid siege to the
Allied position, hitting it with a number of ground assaults and shelling it to hell. Despite
a numerical disadvantage, as well as limited equipment and supplies, the troops at Tobruk
held out until the third Allied relief operation, Operation Crusader, successfully lifted the siege.
Throughout this time, the Allies fought in intense heat with little water to slake their thirst;
they also had to contend with illness, fleas, and flies, and often operated
out of caves. In the end, though, while they sustained almost 6,000 casualties,
they managed to inflict more than twice as many on Axis. They also managed to tie Rommel's
forces up in Tobruk for around eight months, after which he gave up — at least for a time.
While the defenders came out on top in that particular last stand, this next example
is far, far more tragic. The Warsaw Ghetto in Poland was the largest ghetto of the war,
and an absolute nightmare for the Jews trapped inside of it.
Thousands perished inside, while hundreds of thousands were deported from the ghetto
to extermination camps, where most met a horrific end. Over the summer of 1942 alone, at least
254,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto were sent to Treblinka extermination camp to die. Some of the
Jews remaining in the ghetto knew that they would be next and decided to stand up to the Nazis.
As per a resistance fighter who survived what came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, this
way, they could at least "pick the time and place of [their] deaths." The Jewish resistance groups
The Jewish Combat Organisation and The Jewish Military Union banded together, trained a little,
and then used what weapons they could smuggle and craft to revolt. They fought from the nooks and
crannies of the ghetto with homemade explosives such as Molotov cocktails, among other things, and
managed to gain control of the ghetto for a short while. But Nazi reprisals were swift and severe.
Using flamethrowers and such, the Nazis turned the ghetto into an inferno, smoking-out combative and
non-combative Jews alike, and then capturing them or gunning them down. Some 13,000 Jews perished
in this doomed last stand, with 6,000 of them burning alive or succumbing to smoke inhalation.
If that wasn't bad enough, most of the ghetto's remaining 50,000 residents were sent off to die
in extermination camps anyway, and only 16 Nazis were killed in action. It was, however, a symbolic
last stand, more than anything — a demonstration that the Jews would not go quietly into the night.
Just after the Japanese bombed the Americans at Pearl Harbour,
they began their invasion of the Philippines, a major step in their mission to control
Southeast Asia. The Philippines were defended by some 150,000 American and Filipino troops,
and while the Battle of the Philippines would see the vast majority of those men killed,
wounded, or captured, the defending forces didn't go down without a fight,
making a tremendous last stand on the Bataan Peninsula. Under the command of American
general Douglas MacArthur, most of the 120,000-odd Allied troops on the Philippine island of Luzon
worked their way to the peninsula while fighting off of their back foot and inflicting significant
casualties on the Japanese. This occurred over a period of three months, during which time,
some 75,000 Japanese troops were either killed or well and truly tied up in the fighting, and thus
unable to contribute to operations elsewhere. In the words of MacArthur's intelligence officer, for
instance, "[...] [B]ecause of Bataan the Japanese never managed to detach enough men, planes,
ships, and material to nail down Guadalcanal." What many Allied soldiers in Bataan may have
ended up regretting, however, was surrendering to Japanese forces on the 9th of April 1942. Of the
76,000 Americans and Filipinos left alive enough to raised the white flag, the Japanese forced
the vast majority into the infamous Bataan Death March, with only about 10,000 to 12,000 managing
to escape the march and take the fight back to their brutal captors via guerrilla operations.
On the other side of the coin, the Japanese mounted an uncompromising defence of the island
of Iwo Jima against the Americans between the 19th of February and 26th of March
1945. While the strategic significance of the invasion remains a topic of debate,
the United States wanted to take Iwo Jima so they could use it as a stepping-stone
airbase between their forces in the Mariana Island and the Japanese Home Islands. To achieve this,
they sent in some 110,000 military personnel, with marine units comprising the majority of
the invasion force, and with over 500 warships providing naval support. The defenders numbered
just 21,000 at most, but they were under the command of Japanese general Tadamichi Kuribayashi,
who knew he couldn't win the battle but wanted to cripple the Americans nonetheless. They
dug in deep, setting up tunnel networks and camouflaged artillery positions, among a range
of other defences, to slow the American offensive to a grinding halt and do as much damage to them
as humanly possible. When the marines landed, they were torn apart by Japanese shells and snipers
and then forced to clamber uphill through volcanic sand to face a fanatical enemy head-on. In classic
Imperial Japanese style, the defenders refused to surrender, opting instead to hold out in their
tunnels and fight the invaders to their dying breath. As many as 18,375 Japanese troops were
either killed or marked as MIA in the battle. With this in mind, just 216 were taken prisoner — and
these were the ones who were too wounded to fight back or kill themselves. The Americans sustained a
total of 26,000 casualties, which was around 23.6% of their starting strength. The marines did take
Iwo Jima, but this was after five weeks of the bloodiest fighting in that theatre of the war.
Speaking of blood, we can't make a video on last stands without paying heed to the
battle that killed Germany's momentum on the Eastern Front and, in turn,
precipitated the Red Army's war-winning thrust back into the heart of the Reich — the Battle
of Stalingrad. This was a last stand of terrible yet epic proportions,
set in motion by Hitler's obsession with capturing the city named after his arch-enemy,
Stalin. To cut a long story short, the Germans spilt into Stalingrad in August 1942 and drove
the Soviets eastward into the heart of the city and right up against the banks of the River Volga,
taking a ridiculous 90% of the city in that initial assault. At the beginning of the fight,
the Germans boasted around 270,000 troops, while the Soviets had quite a few less — around 187,000.
Many Soviets perished in the initial assault, but they just refused to let go of what little
territory they still held on the Volga's west bank. In this time, both sides brought in hundreds
of thousands of reinforcements, though many of the troops fighting for Germany weren't German
and thus weren't nearly as prepared to die as the Soviets were. Bolstering their numbers to
as high as 1,140,000, the Soviets launched a counteroffensive that unmade their enemy.
Ultimately, they killed hundreds of thousands of Germans, Italians, Romanians, and Hungarians
and then surrounded Hitler's prized 6th Army. Running low on supplies, and contending with
the Russian winter on top of actual Russians, the 6th didn't stand much a chance, dying a slow death
in a city that refused to keel over despite how hopeless things might have seemed at one point.
The success of this last stand came at no small price, however, with the Soviets sustaining
some 1,130,000 casualties from the 23rd of August 1942 to the 2nd of February 1943.
Of course, these are just five examples of World War II's most famous last stands. So what do you
think? Would you like us to follow this video up with another five hectic last stands? If so,
which last stands would you like us to include? Please share your thoughts in the comments.