Do you believe this story? This joke, which is similar to "1000 Japanese troops entered Myanmar swamp and were eaten up by crocodiles", spread like a raging fire, from the X digest at the end of the 20th century to the station tabloid, and then jumped into the network of 2 1th century.
As a person of 2 1 century, if you still believe in this thing, you might as well believe that Bavarian white sausage will incarnate Jesus when the bell rings at noon.
Well, let's think about it.
Everyone knows that the area where the Germans fought at that time was a corner of North Africa. The German-Italian Coalition forces fought mainly near Egypt and Libya in the early stage, and fought in Algeria and Tunisia in the later stage.
There is no primitive jungle in these places, only Gobi, desert and desert, which is one of the driest places on earth.
Otherwise, why Rommel's nickname is "fox in the desert" instead of "fox in the jungle"?
Rommel's legion and his opponents are always worried about only "water", enough water for the army to drink and enough water for the vehicle to cool, which breaks their hearts.
Otherwise, the story that the Germans found the Italians cooking noodles in the water and tried to kill them would not have spread.
We can look at the climate in Egypt, and the introduction is like this:
Egypt has a dry and hot climate. There is little rain in the country, and the annual precipitation is only 50-200mm. The Nile Delta and the northern area adjacent to the Mediterranean belong to the Mediterranean climate, with hot and dry summers and mild and rainy winters. Most of the rest areas belong to tropical desert climate, and the temperature difference between day and night is large, up to 40. From April to May, "Pentecostal wind" blew, flying sand and stones, damaging animal husbandry and agricultural production.
And Libya's introduction:
The northern part of Libya has a Mediterranean climate along the Mediterranean Sea, and the rest has a tropical desert climate. The average temperature in summer is 35, the average temperature in winter is 15, and the average annual precipitation decreases from 600mm to 30mm from north to south. Sabha in the middle is one of the driest areas in the world, and the hot air from the southern Sahara desert is a common natural disaster in Libya.
The Sahara desert is in North Africa, and the battlefield is also in the southern Mediterranean. There can be no "African primeval forest" here, and there will be no army ants in the rainforest.
If you want to find large virgin forests, you have to go to Central Africa and West Africa, such as Central Africa, Cameroon, Kenya, Congo, C? te d 'Ivoire and Equatorial Guinea.
For example, Comoe National Park in C? te d 'Ivoire is a very representative tropical jungle in Africa, and the great forest in Congo has always been the birthplace of various jungle stories.
Not to mention Egypt, although Libya's green coverage area accounts for 58% of the country's total area, it is mainly because the Mediterranean climate is a bit dense, there are many grasslands, trees are sparse, and the range of human activities is small, and it is still not up to the point of "big primitive jungle".
So the conclusion is clear. The Mediterranean climate does not produce any "dead army ants". This climate is the same as that of Greece and Italy. We can't find "tropical rain forest" in the tropical desert climate zone.
The army ant is a creature in the Amazon river basin of South America, belonging to the superior ant subfamily, sometimes called the "new world army ant".
The creatures called "African army ants" are "driver ants", sometimes called "driver army ants". It is an ant in the subfamily Armillarinae, with more than ten classifications.
This kind of marching ant belongs to "Oriental marching ant" (yellow ant) in China. Their main characteristics are running around, eating the prey they meet and biting each other to form an ant colony to protect their weak offspring, but the latter usually choose to build nests.
There are only three subfamilies of marching ants, namely marching ants subfamily, marching ants subfamily and swimming ants subfamily.
You can basically think that the army ants that harm eggplant, watermelon and radish in China are not much different from their cousins in the jungle, except that one eats meat, preys on insects, reptiles and even large animals, and the other lives on plant roots.
In the past, they were described by some obscure papers as a horrible ant tide like the devil's March, and they were constantly rendered by film and television works.
However, with the progress of natural science, the scientific community has already overturned the idea of monsters. These ants are actually not that terrible. Most of them prey on insects. If people don't step on death intentionally, it is not easy to form life risks.
The size of an army ant colony is usually 2-20 million, the marching range is only about 100 meters, and the moving speed is 20 meters per hour.
They usually walk and eat all the way, and then they are eaten by other animals, such as some insects and birds.
The ant tide of 100 m is rumored to be an ant wave of 10 km; Ants of 3-6 mm are rendered into giant worms as thick as peanuts and run fast.
An army of 1800 people can cover more than 100 meters, not to mention a more dispersed marching formation. They can't even eat one.
Let's take a cinema as an example. There are 20 chairs in one row, 9 rows are 180 chairs, and 10 rows are 200 chairs. Even the largest IMAX cinema has only about 300-400 seats.
Borrowing the data of domestic IMAX, the IMAX hall of a cinema is 367 square meters with 398 seats. To take 1800 people, you have to open 4.5 such cinemas.
The walking speed of human beings is much faster than that of 20m/h army ants. When walking normally, people's speed is 5km/h, running speed is 26-30km/h, and long-distance running is16-18 km/h.
Expect an ant colony with a width of 100 meters to eat 1800 fierce Germans at a speed of 20 meters per hour? I believe it anyway.
Ants in North Africa mainly belong to the genus Sagittarius, which are widely distributed in Angola, Israel, Libya, Tunisia, Mali and Saudi Arabia.
Only this kind of ant can survive well in the extreme environment of North Africa. They can even tolerate hot sand as high as 70℃ and move at the hottest time of the day to get sunburned biological corpses in the desert.
If Rommel's soldiers die in the desert, maybe some of their remains will become food for the Saharan silver ants.
In fact, the number of German Afrika Korps is not large. Rommel's "African Army" is mainly composed of 15 and 2 1 two armored divisions and the 90th light division. Many troops are Italian, with a total of only 40 thousand people.
An infantry regiment has more than 3,000 people, an armored regiment 1500 people, and an armored grenadier regiment has just 1800 people. If 1800 people are really eaten by army ants for nothing, it is definitely a historical event, which is enough for Rommel to be sprayed to death by Hitler.
After Rommel presided over the African army, the big strategic direction was Cairo, Egypt, and then he basically kept fighting the bloody sand port. Since Alaman, he has been making things out of nothing, and the allies have been pushed to Tunisia, the northernmost part of Africa, and then to Sicily.
Only at the beginning of the war, the Italian army attacked Kenya, Somalia and Sudan through occupied Ethiopia, but in 194 1 year, the British counteroffensive almost killed the Italians, which led to the intervention of the Germans.
Therefore, if you have to make up such a story, the Germans are not suitable, but the Italians in the early days of the war are unwilling to tell it. After all, their army was huge and disorganized, but at least they fled to Kenya, and they didn't want an army to break off diplomatic relations like Rommel.