Sabaton - Smoking Snakes

[davidn]

I've really got into Sabaton ever since seeing them as an opening act a couple of months ago. Because of their song subject matter, which varies between war, soldiers, warfare, tanks, battles and fighting, I had assumed they would be too violent for me - but they were hilarious on stage, having fun with their tough metal image, and the singer Joakim Broden is incredibly nice despite looking like two bears stuffed into a man-suit.

They were so amazing that I came away with their latest album, Heroes, which is about people who did extraordinary things during the second world war - and I spent the entire next day Googling WW2 history because they had made it so interesting. One of the album's singles, Resist and Bite, tells of the time when due to an error in getting orders through to forces, 40 men armed with rifles were essentially left to defend the whole of Belgium - which they did so fiercely that when the Germans eventually defeated them after eighteen days, they demanded to know where the rest of the force they had been fighting were. And Hearts of Iron is for a Walther Wenck, a Nazi general who disobeyed his orders to defend Hitler's bunker in the final days of the war and used his men instead to hold a safe passage out of Berlin to the west, evacuating an estimated quarter of a million citizens. Have you seen that video on Youtube with Hitler shouting furiously in the film "Downfall" and it's subtitled to make it look like he's been banned from XBox Live or something? The actual scene is of him finding out that this was happening and he was definitively losing the war.

This one is called Smoking Snakes, which was a title that leapt out at me as particularly strange at first, but it has an amazing story behind it. In Brazilian Portuguese at the time of World War 2, you didn't say "When pigs fly" to say that something is impossible - you would say "When a snake smokes" (as in with a pipe in its mouth). And people would say that Brazil would join the war when a snake smoked - but they eventually did, declaring war in 1942, and their forces were nicknamed after this expression. The subject of the song sounds like pure Metal Gear Solid, but it really happened (except without all the singing robots) - a group of three soldiers from these Cobras Fumantes sabotaged Nazi operations against overwhelming odds before eventually losing their lives. And because of them, the phrase "a snake will smoke" is still in use in Brazil - but now it means "something incredible is about to happen", almost the complete opposite of what it meant before.

And I think that's really nice.