#761st

Like, I've always been interested in World War II, but all of the coolest stuff was done by marginalized people who did their badassery in spite of their setbacks.

For example, Daniel Inouye was a Japanese American who spent the early years of the war in an Internment Camp in the US. When he got out, instead of being rightfully pissed, he enlisted. In a battle, he got shot in the abdomen. Ignoring the wound, he took a handful of grenades and started personally taking out a whole battlefield of Nazi tanks. When his arm was shot off by a rifle grenade, he pried the live grenade from his severed hand, and threw it at the Nazis through a narrow firing slit. He ignored his battalion telling him to withdraw and instead kept fighting until he passed out from blood loss. He was treated in a field hospital, then continued to fight with one arm until the war ended. He later served as a Senator for Hawaii. I never learned about Daniel Inouye in history class. I learned about him on Drunk History.

Then there's the 761st Tank Battalion. The 761st was a primarily Black battalion. This battalion did a lot of crazy things, like breaking Germany's Siegfried line and backing up the Russian army in Austria. When they were trapped by the Nazi infantry, Commander Ruben Rivers abandoned his disabled tank, took control of a second tank and continued to fight, forcing the Nazis to withdraw. By the end of the war, they had won battles in Germany, France and Austria, beating back the Nazis at every turn. Most were only honored posthumously and decades later. I learned about the 761st through recreational reading.

Another fascinating group were the "Night Witches" or "Nachthexen", the 588th Regiment of the Soviet Air Force. An all-female bomber regiment. Because they were an all-female regiment, they were given all the crappy secondhand equipment. They were flying repurposed crop dusters and only ran night missions. The craziest part is that these crop dusters were really loud and they were being shot down before they could drop their bombs. So they would fly out near their target, climb straight up, coast over the target, cut their engines, free fall, drop the bomb, restart the engines midair (which sometimes took a few tries) and then get out of there before the Nazi anti-aircraft artillery found them. The Nazis called them Nachthexen or Night Witches because the sound of a silent plane gliding past sounded like the sweeping of a witch's broom. That sweeping sound was the only warning that a bomb was about to land. The 588th was the most successful bomber unit in any Air Force in the whole war. The Night Witches weren't honored until the early 2010s. I learned about them on Pinterest.

Godlike: Come Out Fighting — An Overview

In 1944, the 761st “Black Panthers” Tank Battalion was one of the first African-American combat units to serve in World War II. The average American tanker lifespan was 15 days fighting before being sent to the rear. However, the Third Army followed principles eerily similar to that of slave masters: work the blacks until they drop. The Panthers fought constantly for six monthswith no relief…