(And just to balance my reference to that lowest of low points in American cultural output, I am currently reading Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which crushingly examines the sacrifices made by Russians…)
It was a running joke that the higher-up Nazis were constantly threatening to have the lower-level fuck-up Nazis reassigned to the Russian front, which was regarded more or less as a death sentence.
I want to scream and point at this chart every time I see praise for the human stories of Godzilla -1.0, a movie about the need for Imperial Japanese forces to redeem themselves for failing to protect Japan against the big, scary Americans
Don't forget that a very large number of those "military" deaths were among the MILLIONS of people who farted crosswise on a Tuesday in Stalin's Russia.
They were brought to the front, given sharpened sticks, told to charge the enemy, and shot if they didn't.