Editing Death Korps of Krieg (section)

== Vraks, and Forge World Stupidity ==
[[File:Death Korps Engineers-Tunnel Fighting.png|400px|thumb|right|The Death Korps doing their best to recrate the mine at Messines]]
Now, for all that the soldiers of Krieg are supposed to be some of the hardest bastards in the Imperium and willing to sacrifice their lives in an instant if that's what is asked of them, there comes a point where going any further with that characterization crosses the line between "grimly awesome" and "over-the-top caricature". There's really nothing '''wrong''' with this since 40k originally started out as a parody setting, just so long as the writers meet one simple condition:

'''It has to be ''intentional''.'''

When [[Imperial Armour]] released their [[Vraks]] trilogy, it was '''supposed''' to be an example of how dark and gritty siege warfare could become, and therefore a textbook example of how the Death Korps operates. Prior to this, they were written as pragmatic, capable, dedicated, and ''utterly ruthless'' soldiers who combined the tactical sense you'd expect from a professional soldier who had been trained from birth with a willingness to sustain whatever amount of casualties are required to achieve their objectives on the battlefield; meeting their deaths without the slightest hesitation, and making sure that the Emperor's foes paid as high a price for those deaths as they could arrange.

Instead, we were shown a teeming mass of "soldiers" who amounted to little better than shambler zombies with guns; utterly incompetent and suicidal to the point where they were more concerned with killing ''themselves'' than the enemies of the Imperium. The most sterling example of this has to be walking over minefields to clear them, something that could easily be accomplished with far less cost in men and materiel by using vehicles with dozer blades as [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mine_roller mine rollers]. They literally have to be convinced that there are better ways to fight the Emperor's foes than marching into the teeth of enemy fire until they run out of ammunition by their damn ''[[Commissar|Commissariat]]''; political officers whose entire job revolves around two things:

1. Inspiring soldiers through sheer hammy charisma.

2. Discouraging cowardice through the not-insignificant accomplishment of successfully being more terrifying than any enemy a Guardsmen might be facing at the moment. In a universe where said enemies might be [[Chaos|the Legions of Hell]], [[Tyranids|an endless swarm of alien horrors from beyond the stars]], [[Orks| a race of sentient bioweapons whose extreme bloodlust is matched only by their uncountable numbers]] or ''[[Night Lords|genetically-engineered superhumans whose entire schtick revolves around being the most nightmarish motherfuckers in existence]]''.

The sheer wastefulness of the Idiot Korps' tactics is so great that it becomes impossible to take any of the books seriously, and the setting is left poorer for it. If the Death Korps actually fought like they're described in Vraks then in all likelihood the Imperium would have long since discarded them as a useful fighting force due to how needlessly and exorbitantly wasteful they are of lives and materiel, and we would like to remind you that the Imperium measures the casualties of war in ''planets'', not men.

Now to be fair, part of this characterization is likely caused by taking the cultural memory of WWI-- the idea of men mindlessly charging into Machine Gun emplacements across a no-man's land ripped apart by artillery and chemical weapons-- and porting it into 40k. Viewed this way much of the above make sense: Death Korp Tactics are wasteful because in popular memory that's all World War I was-- lions lead by donkeys who charged bravely if mindlessly into certain death. The problem comes when you try to get into the head of an entire culture whose goal is doing just that: this leads to the Death Korps being stupid and fighting stupidly. In the end when Forge World tried to portray a WWI-style mud and blood conflict, they fumbled because turning an already pretty grimdark conflict up to the 40k required 11 on the old grimdark dial was bound to push it into [[grimderp]] territory if handled poorly... and it was.

TL;DR: In essence, the Vraks trilogy wanted to recreate the muddy hell holes of WWI in 40k, and in the process turned the Death Korps from something much like the Red Army during WWII into [[Skub|a poorly-researched/malicious portrayal of the Red Army during WWII.]] ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basij#History Or a slightly better researched/malicious portrayal of the Iranian army during the Iran-Iraq war.])

Thankfully, they're generally portrayed in lore usually as being unafraid of death but not willing to waste their lives (so they can kill more of the Emperor's enemies). In fact, with their heavy tanks and numerous grenadiers and their engineers, the Death Korps seems more like a mashup of various real life successful ways the trenches in WWII were ultimately defeated. Their machines and units imply the Death Korps is more of a "line breaking specialists" army than a "dig trench and sit there forever" army, with their trenches used more like forward bases and mustering points for their breaching attacks than as their main method of defeating the enemy.