Some military units of the Second World War were thrown into the toughest battles
again and again. Each time, they rose to the challenge,
earning names and battle honours that terrified their adversaries. In this video,
we tell six stories of the most feared and battle-tested units of the Second World War.
As Wehrmacht reinforcements were brought up from reserve to replace depleted frontline units
during Operation Barbarossa, they heard terrifying stories. The veterans told them
about a rarely seen infantry unit they called the “Black Death.” The men of this force wore formal
black uniforms and were infamously tenacious and stubborn. They regularly fought to the death.
The Black Death units the Germans were talking about were actually
Soviet sailors. In the rush to put as many troops into the field as possible,
the Red Navy stripped its ships and bases of any spare men and, with them,
formed several Naval Infantry Brigades. Taught to fight on ships where retreat is impossible,
these men quickly earned a reputation for stubborn defences even Stalin was proud of.
Their finest hour came in February 1943, as part of the Caucasus Campaign.
The 83rd Naval Infantry Brigade landed on Cape Myskhako, establishing a beachhead
behind German lines. The Germans threw their full weight behind their counter-attack,
alternately bombarding the 83rd from the air and launching panzer assaults.
The 800-man brigade held out against several thousand Axis soldiers for 225 days, shutting
down the key Novorossiysk port and opening the way for the liberation of the southern Caucasus.
There’s a good chance that, during the war, the Black Death Infantrymen
found themselves up against elements of an elite German unit. This unit was arguably
the most elite of the SS divisions, and its war diary reads like a laundry list of major battles.
We’re talking, of course, about the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.
This unit was put together in 1923 as the Fuhrer’s eight-man personal bodyguard. As Hitler recognized
the value in a military force loyal to him alone, recruitment ballooned. This personal guard
morphed into the Waffen-SS, but at its core, the 1st Division retained the Leibstandarte
Adolf Hitler name. They had first dibs on new equipment and a reputation for Nazi fanaticism.
The division fought in Poland, France, Greece, and the Soviet Union, and in the battles of Kharkov,
Kursk, and the Ardennes, but their finest hour may have been right at the end of the war.
During Operation Spring Awakening in March 1945, the 1st SS Panzer Division,
which by this time was critically short of supplies, men, and tanks, managed to destroy
seven full Soviet infantry divisions before being forced to retreat by overwhelming Soviet numbers.
1st SS Panzer Division was also accountable for many war crimes against civilians,
as well as both Soviet and American POWs.
Far from the muddy hell of the Eastern Front, an elite force of Japanese pilots was
rewriting the rules of aerial warfare. Known as the 343rd Naval Air Group,
these pilots were the last line of defence in the Japanese air war.
By late 1944, Japan was losing the air war. Every experienced pilot killed was
an irreplaceable loss, and after the catastrophic defeat at Leyte Gulf,
the Navy was in hot water. Commander Minoru Genda, a decorated fighter ace
and the Japanese Navy’s top aviation expert, aimed to turn things around with a crack unit.
In December, he established the 343rd Naval Air Group. The Navy’s best pilots, the top ten of
which had shot down over 200 planes, flew the cutting-edge Kawanishi N1K-J Shiden fighters,
which matched the American Corsairs and Hellcats. In their first battle, the 343rd
annihilated two Hellcat squadrons without a single loss. On another occasion, Flight Warrant
Officer Kensuke Muto single-handedly fought off 12 Hellcats, destroying four and scattering the rest.
Sadly for the Japanese, the formidable 343rd
and its Shiden fighters came too late to seriously impact the war.
While the 343rd may have come too late to make a difference, one American unit had
been fighting on the ground for the entire Pacific campaign: the 1st Marine Division.
This unit served with distinction in the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa, but it was
their tenacity in the Solomon Islands that first put fear in the hearts of their Japanese enemies.
During the critical battle for Henderson Airfield, 700 marines of Lieutenant Colonel
Chesty Puller’s 1st Battalion held a 2,500-yard line against an entire Japanese infantry regiment.
On the night of October 24th, the Japanese attacked.
One machine-gun section under the command of Sergeant John Basilone
mowed down an entire Japanese company, which had attempted to charge the marines.
Puller’s force held the line throughout the night despite repeated attacks.
The Japanese recognised the marines’ fighting spirit and put out a special communique.
It read: “The Americans on this island are not ordinary troops,
but marines, a special force recruited from jails and insane asylums for bloodlust. There
is no honourable deaths to prisoners, they are … run over by steamrollers.”
Later, as the 1st Marine Division advanced into the Pacific, a report from one of its officers
famously epitomised the fighting spirit of his unit. From Colonel Shoup during the Battle of
Tarawa: "Casualties many; Percentage of dead not known; Combat efficiency; we are winning."
Wars aren’t won by killing all enemy personnel;
they’re won by sapping enemy resistance. This is why some technology, like a Stuka’s siren,
is designed primarily to cause fear rather than kill. The Soviets recognised this but
were probably working with a tight budget, so they said: "Why not both?"
The result was one of the least accurate but most fearsome weapons of the Second World War: Katyusha
rockets. For those who don’t know, a Katyusha is a truck with rails mounted on the back.
Most commonly, 16 rockets were loaded onto these rails and fired off in one cataclysmic volley.
Deployed in Guards Mortar units, each battalion had 12 trucks and
could therefore fire 192 rockets per volley. With that many rockets raining down, Katyushas
didn’t need to be accurate to devastate their target.
Katyusha units became synonymous with fear for the Wehrmacht and often caused obscene casualties. On
July 14th 1941, an NKVD Guards Mortar Battalion fired a single volley from seven Katyushas into
German troops concentrated in a marketplace. The effect was immediate. Armoured vehicles
were destroyed. Trucks were blown to pieces, and the surviving infantrymen bolted from the town.
A Wehrmacht artilleryman, Franz Frisch, describes a soldier’s fear of Katyushas:
“...a sound known only in Russia, the Katyusha rocket launcher, which we called ‘the Stalin
organ’ ... It was the most shocking and terrifying thing I ever encountered.”
So far all the units covered have been regular forces,
but this one was organised a little differently. By far the most successful resistance group of
the war (and the first in history to have an air force) were the Yugoslav partisans.
The elite fighters of the Yugoslav partisans were incorporated into its very first unit, the 1st
Proletarian Brigade. Relying on manoeuvrability and initiative, this unit fought battle after
battle against the Wehrmacht, Italians, and Fascist sympathizers across Yugoslavia.
Artur Phelps of the Fifth SS Mountain Corps remarked that the Partisans of
the 1st Proletarian Brigade excelled as light infantry and in mountain warfare. He believed that
even though they were armed with stolen weapons and wore mismatched uniforms,
they were a serious and disciplined enemy force.
Winston Churchill agreed, stating to the British Parliament in 1943, that,
“These stalwarts were holding as many Germans in Yugoslavia
as the combined Anglo-American forces were holding in Italy south of Rome.”
Part of what made the unit so effective was its mix of ethnicities.
It was not tied to a single area and was free to exploit opportunities wherever they arose.
Basil Davidson, the Chief of Special Operations Executive Yugoslavia, suggested it was the
occupying Germans themselves who created the perfect scenario for partisan resistance,
stating, “Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Macedonians, Bosnians, Christian and Moslem, Orthodox and
Catholic, sank their differences in the sheer desperation of striving to remain alive.”
Some Yugoslav Partisan units were guilty of massacres against so-called
collaborators, but that’s a political minefield, so we’ll leave it at that.
THOSE were six stories of some of the units most feared and battle-tested by the end of
the Second World War. But what do YOU think? Could Stalin have won the war faster with a
whole army of Black Death naval infantry? Do YOU think 343rd Naval Air Group could
have made a difference had they formed earlier in the war? What do YOU think it
would have been like to survive a Katyusha bombardment? Let us know in the comments!