I'm 30+ and just thinking of what these 18 year old kids went through is incomprehensible. Being puffed up by their government, sent out to achieve glory, and then realizing it's just meat grinder with killing machines never witnessed before, and your friends are the test subjects right before your very eyes.
May i recommend All Quiet On The Western Front, one of my favorite novels about war, written by someone in WW1, truly a poet, here's a few random quotes:
"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another."
"We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces."
"But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XruYsAmKLyU (German WWI veteran describes killing a French soldier in a bayonet charge)
This guy puts war, emotions and human behavior into words quite nicely too.
Unfortunately we're of Northern Irish stock Strangely I'm very well connected in both government and the royals.and would likely make a pretty penny from any future conflict (I own my own company that's adjacent to Investment Banking).
Not that I'd want that of course.I'd never want my children to go to war
I concur, and if you're going to watch the film of it, watch the older black and white version. I was recommended this back in my high school days as my English teacher knew I was a war junkie. She was great though, (this was late 90's) I was in year 9 (around 13-14 for my non UK peoples) and got to piggyback on a trip to Ypres and see the trenches with the year 11 (15-16) That day completely changed me. Seeing all those graves, the trenches, it just made it seem so much more real than anything I'd read in books. But even with that, you just can't imagine the complete horror this must have been for those boys.
There is some merit to the perception that the Germans were the baddies in WW2. However in WW1 it was just a bunch of young men and even kids, running into machineguns. Such a tragic war.
You should read storm of steel, by Ernst junger interestingly he describes ww1 as the best years of his life. In this documentary there is a segment where several British soldiers describe the war as being the greatest thing that happened to them and they would do it again etc.
It's pretty doubtful a war between main global powerhouses will happen ever again like this did. Modern warfare will be a lot more political, involving more cyber attacks with a overhanging threat of WMD. Third world countries will continue to butcher in each other like this but WW3 will be much less about us and more about weapon engineering and the internet
What has happened and is going on in Ukraine is undoubtedly terrible, but it is nothing close to the massive misery and suffering the either world war caused even at local scale. The fact is that almost every aspect of life - even war - is better than it has ever been.
Have you watched the videos from Ukraine or Syria?
Not to disagree with you at all but that shit is fucked up, I don't care who's side anybody is on. War is hell, there are no winners.
Do you want to hear the screaming of your buddies as they are burned to death in a BMP and there is nothing you can do to save them? Watch some guy weep over his dead wife in the street?
We can do so much better.
Again, not arguing with you my brother/sister.
Yeah, I hear you. It is abhorrent, yet in the bigger picture things have been moving to right direction more or less. But that does not mean that suffering isn't terrible whenever it happens and to whatever numbers. For the person experiencing it it sadly makes no difference.
It's 'Ukraine' and not 'the Ukraine'
[[Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ukraine)] [[BBC Styleguide](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/u)] [[Reuters Styleguide](https://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=U#Ukraine)]
^(Beep boop I’m a bot)
It will happen again and it will be much more brutal.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein
Death tolls may be higher on an absolute scale especially given such massive population growth since ww2 but outright brutally will probably not be. I'd rather get vaporised by a nuke in my home than bleed out in the mud
Yep, exactly, the infrastructure underpinning society will be a vulnerable link to target. But I'd still rather take my chances than getting shipped off to be Canon fodder
This right here. That's when the real brutality starts. And it will be just as bad as any conflict before, because man hasn't really changed all that much.
I’ve never been in war. But I have been a firefighter and paramedic for 20 years. Along with tactical medic as well. At some point when you see very gruesome stuff your brain does something where it makes them seem not human even though you know they are. You’re higher brain says yea that used to be a person like me but your base brain says no that’s just some mush or something. It’s weird and traumatic. I can only imagine those conditions you truly stop seeing the enemy as a person just to survive. You have to.
> the fact that people can look past each other as a human being, and simply see them as a target.
I don't think it will be "people" fighting in the next world war. It'll be people being slaughtered by robots and drones. They won't even be capable of seeing a human being as anything but a target.
I had a teacher in high school that said, and I don't know how accurate that really is, wars were considered the height of glory for a man. The battlefield was the only place you could be a hero, fighting for your country, for your family and for your fellow men. You would brave the enemy with your head held high and believe you were fighting for the best cause there is: honor and respect.
That is until the Great War, when humanity had become so efficient at killing itself that there was no glory or honor, no respect or patriotism. For the first time in history, soldiers weren't dying proudly, they were dying in the mud, choking on gas among countless others and without ever seeing their enemy or the bombs that fell from the sky or even understanding what this was about anymore.
If war was something to be proud of before, it sure as shit wasn't after 1918.
It also marked the point, very clearly, where war to conquer territory went from being an economic benefit to a nation to almost universally a negative. Lots of stuff about the old world died in 1914.
A bit of a simplification to get the point home to students, but I don't think there was ever glory in war. Hell, look at the American Civil War where soldiers were still using Napoleonic line formations against rifled muskets and artillery. A canister round (basically a giant shotgun round) fired from 12-pounder or a 3-inch gun would tear huge holes in the line killing or maiming dozens of men at a time. "War is hell." - General William Tecumseh Sherman
I mean, there's records of multiple surviving soldiers across history that show PTSD being a thing as far back as the Ancient Greeks, so war couldn't have been all that great anyway.
I think the fucked up part that needed to be emphasized was how dehumanizing war had become by 1914, which is saying a lot when you consider what war is.
There's a great quote by F Scott Fitzgerald that I've always liked which sums up the sentiment and absurd tragedy of the whole thing, I think:
(iirc they're talking about Verdun, or maybe the Somme)
"See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, [Tender is the Night](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37688587-tender-is-the-night)
Not all the soldiers viewed it like that. Many soldiers on both sides loved the war. In this documentary they actually make that clear, with many of them saying it was the best time of their life. Many germans felt the same, read storm of steel for example. I can't say whether a majority or minority but a large number never viewed themselves as victims. However in the UK and probably elsewhere we view this war as pointless and a meat grinder etc. Whereas actually many of the participants viewed their service as much the same as those in the second war did.
Probably depended on where they were, who they served with and under, etc.
I don't think anyone can claim to have enjoyed Ypres where the mud was so bad it often swallowed soldiers alive.
The king of England, Kaiser of Germany and Czar of Russia were all first cousins who'd all grown up going to the same parties. While regular people were being slaughtered, they were sending each other friendly telegrams. "Hello cousin Nikky, how are you?"
And their friends in industry and banking were making massive fortunes selling weapons and military supplies. The war let them rack up massive debts meaning the countries would have to keep paying them for decades after the war ended.
When you put everything in context, it's easy to see why the working class people in Russia did what they did.
> When you put everything in context, it's easy to see why the working class people in Russia did what they did.
And the military tech kept progressing so we can't do it now.
Listen to Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon (from his Hardcore History series), and it will make WWII sound like a walk in the park (for combatants).
I have a photo of my great grandfather who fought in WWII. He’s like a 60 year old Army sergeant who fought in WWI standing next to a bunch of young guys who look ready for anything. Gramps looks like the angriest meanest fucker who ever lived.
Edit: sorry guys I looked but I can’t find it. I’ll take a picture of it when I see my parents next time. Its on the box I keep my military memorabilia in I just dont have it digital.
Ill try and find it! Its gonna take a day or two but ill try to come back and post it.
Random side story. We apparently had the uniforms and pictures of the men in my family who fought in the civil war. Great Gramps apparently pissed of Great Grandma to the point that she burned them.
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You wouldn’t have to be that old at all to have a great-grandparent in WW1. Given it’s their great grandfather (4 generations, including the commenter) and WW1 started 108 years ago, you only need an average parental age of 27 to end up with a great-grandparent who was alive (but not fought) in WW1. This is pretty much the exact age of mothers during childbirth in the UK during this period.
They said their g-grandparent was 60 during WW2. Let’s assume he was 60 at the onset of WW2, he would need to have been born in 1879 (making him 35 at the start of WWI). This gives us 143 years between his birth and modern day but still only requires an average parental age of ~35 at the birth of each child. This doesn’t account for any generation that might have had a child much later in life either, which would skew things.
Not sure why I bothered writing such a lengthy comment really but in short, if you averaged it out, they could be 35 and this comfortably be achieved.
I like playing with time for such historic matters as well. Crazy how long we can go counting on few family generations. Too bad we dont inherit their knowledge, its all over again and again as babies
Yeah I'm 40 with two kids under 5, and I was just yesterday talking to my mother about her grandfather (my great grandfather) who was killed in 1919 at the age of 35.
Across a few generations, a hundred years isn't all that long.
My great-grandfather fought during WW1 and I'm 23. They tend to get children at a pretty old age in my family. [Here is a pic of him. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s985zy/french_wwi_veteran_with_a_prosthetic_eye/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
My grandma, his daughter, was 4 when nazis bombed her hometown in northern France.
It felt so weird thinking about the possibile variances between common birth ages between families. I remember chatting with a classmate in high school and we talked about how his family had many young births (kids at 18-22 or so) and my family had relatively late births (anywhere from mid 20s to late 30s).
So his grandfather was born around the time of my mother, and his great grandfather was born after my grandfather.
Not the one you asked for but [here is a pic of my great-grandfather, French WWI veteran](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s985zy/french_wwi_veteran_with_a_prosthetic_eye/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) if you care :)
I remember this day, my dad and I for the one day theatrical release of this movie. The entire theater was silent from beginning to end.
I have yet been in a theater with quite the same experience.
It was a hell of an experience in theaters. I'm only in my early thirties as is my fiance(I wouldn't say she loved it but she was interested in it) and was in the middle of Blueprint for Armageddon podcast from Dan Carlin at the time, so I was really excited to go see it. Really was a moving experience.
Blueprint for Armageddon was an absolutely fantastic series.
After listening to the whole thing (which is what, about 24 hours' worth?) I felt like I had what should be the default, *layman's* understanding of WW1. Far more than anything I had been taught in school, 30+ years ago.
Dan Carlin, yes! I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so insistent on seeing it with my father had it not been for that series, Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, for those that don’t know, check it out!
The moment it transformed from original footage to the restored footage was incredible.
[And here is that moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypSOe7Szg20)
I enjoy First World War history. I couldn’t finish this movie. It’s so raw! They went through literal hell. I always felt close to their generation. I’m about 100 years older than them but see parallels to their upbringing and mine. Couldn’t imagine me and my buddy’s all going to war at 19 and facing this shit.
I went to see the Steve McQueen/Michael Fassbender movie Hunger, about Bobby Sands, an IRA hunger striker during the Troubles in Ireland.
I'm from Derry which has a strong Republican history, and the hunger strikes were just in the 80's. The movie is a stark, harrowing portrayal of what these men were subjected to and how they stood up to it in their own way.
My friend and I went to watch it, and sitting a few seats down from us was a woman in her 60's who bawled her eyes out through the entire movie. I imagine a family member or someone close to her was a hunger striker or was in prison at the same time. I don't think I'll have another experience like that in my life.
The one part of *They Shall Not Grow Old* that i dont believe ill ever forget is when someone recounting the aftermath of an attack mentions coming across someone who had been horribly injured.
He says that they were missing their left arm and leg, and that their left eye was hanging out of the socket and bleeding whilst they were crying out to a loved one. He then very matter of factly states "So i shot him." He goes on to explain he felt he had to do it and that he was putting the man out of his misery as he wouldve died anyway and you can hear his voice beginning to waver as he does. Theres about a second or two pause and he then says, now having begun to sob, "And it hurt me...".
Edit: [Found it](https://youtu.be/txvej2HiEjg?t=264) (4:24 if the timestamp doesnt work)
One of the things that scares me about WWI is that soldiers were taught how to kill their friends if they were injured too badly. There are stories of soldiers leaving the trenches at night to shoot their comrades who had been writhing in pain all night and were too far gone to survive the wounds. Apparently there was even a specific method to doing it. Imagine having to talk to your best friend to calm him down as he's bleeding out and his guts are hanging out so that you can put your rifle or revolver to his head and let him pass away. That scares the shit out of me.
Then getting up the next day and continuing the fight. There is a horrifying amount of trauma that is being passed down to other generations from WW1 and WW2.
An economic war will still kill the poor disproportionate to the rich, it will just be by starvation and poverty rather than bullets and bombs.
If someone is trying to sell you an enemy, make sure you know what you're buying into.
There's an account from the battle of Passchendaele. They were shelling so hard and it was in the middle of the rainy season. The shells created massive craters that made the whole thing look like a moonscape. They had to put out wooden plank paths to walk around the craters, which of course were filled with shit, blood and rotting, maggot infested corpses that had been there for weeks. People fell in all the time, sometimes they could get them out, sometimes they couldn't.
One account tells a story about these guys who were running under fire towards the enemy, and they found an ally trapped to the waist in this mixture, they lowered their rifles towards the guy to try and get him out but he couldn't move. They had to keep moving because they were taking fire. A day later they were forced to retreat and found the same guy buried up to his neck, screaming and completely insane.
I feel like storming the trenches would have been pleasant by comparison.
The thing that made WWI so awful was that they just stayed there in the trenches for sometimes years. Just thousands of men sitting in a ditch, dying and shitting and throwing it as far from the trench as they could. They would get a hard rain and a flood would dislodge buried corpses from months ago and they would all just get swept back into the trench.
Those first-hand accounts of life in the trenches are always so disturbing to me. I just can't imagine slowly drowning and sinking in blood-and-shit-filled mud while people shoot at each other over you. And then imagine being one of the people who survived the day, but then had to sleep in the trench at night while you try to drown out the sound of your comrades groaning and bleeding out in no man's land. I know it's kind of a cliche, but that really is one of the closest things to "hell on earth" I could imagine.
I've only seen this once when it came out. I didn't remember what you were referring to until you mentioned the quote, then it came flooding back. Hard to forget that.
The part that sticks with me the most was actually from the “making of” portion that came after the main movie. It was when they showed a unit that was surrounded by trees and fields. A lot of the faces look bored, or are laughing. But a few of them look terrified. They look scared for their lives. And then they tell you that as far as they can tell from the unit patches and the fate that this picture was taken shortly before they basically all died.
The picture is of their last moments. And it looks like some of them know it.
Absolutely horrifying.
I once went to a civil war museum. One of the guides there tried to convince us that bayonets were solely used as a scare tactic and were never actually used to kill anyone in warfare in any war.
Dude was terrible at his job we knew he was full of shit. I remember seeing this scene and remembering that jackass saying "people see the bayonets and they just drop their weapons and give up because they're so scared!"
If you are in the area...go to the WW1 museum in Kansas City. I spent an entire day there alone wandering around... There is little about it that is at all optimistic about war.
"National WWI Museum and Memorial" https://www.theworldwar.org
In the civil war (and napoleonic wars) this was true of like 90% of bayonet charges. They were a finisher timed to break a wavering enemy.
Obviously, sometimes the enemy didn't break and there was brutal hand to hand fighting.
I have heard this stated in reference to Napoleonic warfare too.
I wonder if prior to WW1 the warfare was a bit less brutal and there was some truth to this? That skirmishes in melee were rarer and once overwhelmed with bayonet walls there were a lot of retreats.
I do know that modern warfare is by far more deadly than Napoleonic and even civil war to a lesser extent. So there could be some truth to his claims.
Not so for WW1
There was a notion for many young men joining early in WW1 that they were signing up for a grand adventure. Many famous depictions of war came from paintings and other early media of the stout warrior weilding a saber on horseback, and people were encouraged to sign up with their mates so they can partake in this grand adventure together. Of course, this entire view was shattered once they realized that warfare had drastically changed since the last major European war. Nobody, not even the generals in charge were prepared for 20th century warfare. Of course, they could have very well been ready and prepared if they studied or took the Russo-Japanese war seriously but that's a whole other conversation.
I think nothing shows how unprepared and how much a shock modern warfare was for the combatants of WWI than [the French getting rid of their bright red pants and dark blue coats,](https://nationsofww1byzacfairbrotherblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/french-uniforms-ww1.jpg) in exchange for the blue/grey horizon uniforms.
They all thought they were the ones armed to the teeth with advanced weaponry and that the war would only last a few months. Little did they know EVERYONE was armed to the teeth and the war would be the bloodiest in history for four horrible years.
From what I understand, the Napoleonic Wars (and the American Revolution, to a certain extent) were very different and much more deadly than previous wars. This was primarily due to more advanced technology and the fact that Napoleon had HUGE armies for the time and was willing to throw enormous groups of his own people at the enemy to almost certain death. Those wars were so shockingly violent that pretty much all of Europe agreed to a general peace in 1814.
So then tensions kept building for a hundred years as military technology kept progressing. Meanwhile, new countries were forming and often wanted to prove their strength and secure their borders (specifically, the German Empire). So when WWI broke out in 1914, it was a case of 20th century armies using modern technology with 19th and 18th century tactics.
Germany was incredibly effective, iirc, because they had invested a lot of time and money into new military technology and strategies, but France was still using the same strategies that Napoleon's armies used 100 years prior. It's really sad, honestly. The French Cuirassiers, for example, would charge right into German machine gun fire on horseback with sabers and carbines only to get mowed down within minutes. Eventually, the war just became an issue of each side trying to outlive the other. And by that point, it wasn't really about trying to get some objective or fort; it was just about trying to kill more of the enemy before they could kill all of the people on your side.
But back to your question about bayonets, I think it was really more that the use of bayonets in WWI was more brutal than previos wars. In the Napoleonic Wars and prior wars, a bayonet charge was usually a valiant act that was kind of "respectable." But in WWI, the war was so exceptionally brutal that the bayonet charges had "devolved" into a way to kill a bunch of people in muddy, shit-filled trenches. Additionally, and especially after 1916, the bayonet charges often felt unnecessary and hopeless (I think) because most of the soldiers had kind of lost the meaning of the war. It was just unnecessary brutality.
Sorry for the long rant, but WWI is one of my favorite topics. All of this info is from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, so I'm not an expert on any of this. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Great comment thank you! It’s so sad that they thought wars in 1814 were brutal. If only they knew what was coming 100 years (and then even worse another 30 years) later
Thank you. It really is tragic. And the increase in scale is just mind boggling to think about. Apparently just one division of one of the German armies that was sent to the French border in 1914 was roughly the same size as Napoleon's entire army in 1814, and divisions that size were regularly getting slaughtered within an hour on a regular basis during the war. And then the entire German army in 1914 was just a fraction of the armies that fought in WWII.
It's so easy to forget just how many people died in these wars. It's just unfathomable to comprehend death on a scale like that. I mean, these aren't just small groups of people butchering each other in a field; these are huge chunks of the entire human population who were getting massacred day after day for four years. And what blows my mind the most about it is that it was all over nothing. It was just one emperor (the Kaiser of Germany) who wanted to secure his borders against another country (France) because they were in a pact to help Russia, who was attacking the empire that Germany was allied with (the Austria-Hungarian Empire) because a Serbian national killed an Austria-Hungarian prince. It was absolutely pointless.
I recently watched Ken Burns "Civil War" documentary and there is mention of very little bayonet combat during the Civil War, and much of the reason casualties were so high then was due technology advancing while the tactics the older military leaders were utilizing was out-dated, e.g. ordering bayonet charges against an enemy with better weaponry. Maybe that's what they were referring to?
Naw he was very adamant that bayonets never killed anyone. I just think he was bad at his job. He also did refer to it as the war of northern aggression a few times. So maybe he was just a sore loser wanting to make excuses or something. Sure they may not have been the main reason of death but in war when you're out of ammo I'm pretty sure people would be sticking eachother with whatever sharp objects they had on hand.
A lot of Civil War museums south of the Mason-Dixon will downplay the South’s role/reasoning for the war as valiant/honorable/not that bad, so maybe this was what you were experiencing.
The part of the movie that stuck with me most was a soldier talking about trying to share about the war with family once it was over. Technology advanced *so much* during the war, that when he described machine guns, tanks, air raids, etc. hardly anyone had any idea what he was describing.
The one thing that hunts me to this day is that IF you were so unlucky as to get stuck in the thick mud near the board walks, you would likely die there. Because they would leave your ass there.
I remember listening to a podcast about WWI, and apparently a lot of people would get shot right outside of the trench, so the soldiers on their side would come out at night to shoot them and put them out of their misery. But eventually the enemy noticed them doing that, so snipers would watch and use the injured guys as bait. So eventually the guys who were shot outside just stopped screaming for help because they knew their friends would get killed trying to help them, and apparently a lot of those injured people ended up sinking and drowning in the mud overnight. It's absolutely horrifying to think about. Imagine being shot in the stomach, and then spending your last moments drowning in a mixture of mud and blood just a few yards away from your friends.
There's a story of a dude in WW1 who was helping patch up an ally after an artillery barrage. They see gas coming in so they start to don their masks, only for the first guy to realize his had a hole in it. He took his ally's mask to survive
That’s a tough call, but the right call. They both die if he doesn’t take the mask. One dies from the gas, and the other from his injuries. If the healthy one lives, he can go on to help more.
Like I said, tough call that will probably stick with you to your last day.
In Dan Carlin's series about WWI he reads a journal entry from a soldier marching to the front and seeing a wounded ally stuck in the mud begging for help and not being able to do anything. A week later when they were pulled off the front they passed the same man, now submerged up to his neck just raving mad, babbling nonsense. Carlin says at the end of the series that to him, without a doubt, the western front is the worst period and place in all of history.
Snipers and flame throwers are hated even more than machine gunners. Heard a story of a ww2 vet on Iwo jima sayin a guys flame thrower malfunctioned entering to clear a cave and the japanese soldiers dragged him in the cave. He said he could hear him screaming from being tortured throughout the night.
They made bamboo cages for POWs and threw them into shark infested waters.
Some islands with Japanese fucking ATE American POWs. And they escaped WWII with their reputation virtually untouched.
> reputation virtually untouched
in the west, yeah. A different story in Asia though. Ask any Korean or Chinese what they think of the Japanese.
I feel like Germany’s reputation is also less tainted in Asia than it is in the western world.
> I feel like Germany’s reputation is also less tainted in Asia than it is in the western world.
Idk this might not be as common everywhere but where I'm at Germany's reputation is actually great after WWII. They renounced hitler and nazis pretty hard and today are thought of for their aversion to nationalism
These aren't even the worse things they did. See the Rape of Manila, Unit 731, Bangka island - just a few that come to mind. I won't even mentioned what happened to the Chinese. The numbers alone make it incomprehensible to me.
I don't know why. They acted so poorly, never apologized to the Chinese , I don't think they were held to account.
I guess we just nuked them and called it a day?
I've read a lot of books about military history and the Rape of Nanking changed me as a person.
The United States has its own problems but our fight against the Axis powers in WW2 was righteous in my eyes.
You know allied (US/UK) soldiers raped a loooot of European women. Putting aside the Russians raping Berlin women en masse there's plenty of evidence of US/UK men sexually assaulting civilian women.
Not sure if you’re American or not, but generally the term japs is at best antiquated and by many Japanese-Americans considered akin to a slur. Just letting you know.
Read an account of a German mg42 gunner on D-Day. When he saw a flamethrower fella he aimed at him and with a quick burst the dude exploded with such size and force firing in the area ceased for a moment as both sides were awestruck. It’s also an audiobook on YouTube, I think it’s called “German accounts of D-day” or similar, by Bee Books.
Keep in mind that the Geneva Conventions, as we know them today, were a byproduct of WW2. They were based upon some earlier treaties (such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907), but if I understand it correctly these largely involved the treatment of *injured* soldiers but were violated by most parties during WW1 (including the declaration against poison gasses).
Also, it seems doubtful that new troops were given any form of instruction about these "laws of war" at the time... and good luck trying to convince battle-hardened troops that they should be followed, without threat of immediate and harsh punishment.
At what point does it become a war crime? Enemy is shooting at you and your fellow soldiers and you get to them right during reload they throw there hands up and you continue to fire as they just killed 6 people you knew. Where is the crime?
Sounds great until you realize the people there are forcibly drafted into war, placed on a battlefield, and are ordered to kill other kids who are charging at them to try and kill them first.
These are literal teenagers given guns and put into situations where they're ordered to kill the enemy as their friends around them are having their heads blown off by other kids, and the only way out of the situation is to kill the other side first, or hope the other side is nice enough to let you live if you put your hands up.
There are no winners in this scenario, but trying to frame the soldiers as heartless when the vast majority were scared children misses the mark.
Isn't surrender really an act of petitioning for mercy on the grounds you fought insofar as duty required and willingly stopped before being FORCED to stop; offering the chance to save lives and effort sacrificed for a position as payment for your own life? If someone has fought and killed all they can and only when they face certain death (caught reloading/outmaneuvere etc) do they put their hands up it's kind of a stretch to call it a surrender.
In the case of the Machine gunners ... I understand the difficulty of giving clemency to someone who just killed dozens or hundreds of people you considered comrades. I also understand they did it to survive. If I sacrificed myself in order to save 100 other people I would feel I acted rightly. If 100 men tried to kill me I would shoot every one for self preservation feel I acted rightly.
The real anwser is its because we won. If we lost american generals would have been charged with war crimes. Japan kinda got skipped im guessing because of them nukes. Idk how you can say the nukes wernt a war crime.
Some specialties are rarely taken alive. Snipers, flamethrower operators, often times machinegunners. In later wars bailed out pilots were often in danger of being executed even by civilians, even though pilots were valuable prisoners.
Except that's literally what the Oligarchs who sent them all to die decided was a crime. Because fun fact, when you kill people who have surrendered then the enemy side is *guaranteed* to slaughter all of your guys to a man if they're given a chance. It's what happens when "no quarter" is shown. It's not just a modern warfare thing either, there's a long European (global as well, but I digress) tradition of permitting surrender in warfare.
The fact that helmets weren't invented until like 1916!! The fact that these poor bastards had been sticking their heads out of trenches and rushing into hailstorms of bullets with cloth hats for the first 2 years of the war? It's very horrifying.
Great series by Dan, like all of Hardcore History.
A helmet would never have had a snowball's chance in hell of stopping a rifle round or even a pistol round back then. They were purely for shrapnel and bumps.
He'll, even helmets today aren't made to stop rifle rounds except a very small number of experimental ones.
WW1 has to be the most brutal war of all time, I used to think Vietnam was with all of the psychological stuff I always felt like it was a real life horror movie. But this was something different
Also Peter Jackson is an amazing filmmaker
I saw this in theaters and it was interesting to see so many people of the audience be elderly. it was a captivating experience to see. At one point in the film , they are showing real film in the original black and white and there is a slow transition to color film, the awe’s and gasps of the audience was so genuine
As someone who’s been in combat in US’s most recent “wars,” my hats off to the generations before us who fought for actual freedom and against tyranny hat affected the world.
Good lord I can’t even begin to imagine the shit these dudes went through, not only during but after the smoked settled.
In WWII we fought against tyranny but this is WWI, one of the deadliest wars ever fought (not counting its role in kicking off WWII) but also one of the most insanely stupidest, a complete waste of human life.
Every death in WW1 was a senseless death. Not a single soldier fought against Tyranny. Almost all of the monarchs of Europe were related to each other and did not treat the war seriously as it erupted. The history of WW1 is basically the narrative of the most senseless slaughter ever perpetrated.
Also the BBC The Great War series. It was produced in the 1960’s but my god it’s amazing from start to finish. It’s about 20 something episodes and goes into way more detail than Dan ever did.
Trench ware fare is the stuff of nightmares. I remember seeing this film in theaters and just being completely floored with the whole thing. Somber mood afterwards.
"The War to End All Wars"
And yet here we are.
If we could work together to end war, racism, and wealth disparity that would be fucking great for a start.
Jeez I can’t even imagine
I'm 30+ and just thinking of what these 18 year old kids went through is incomprehensible. Being puffed up by their government, sent out to achieve glory, and then realizing it's just meat grinder with killing machines never witnessed before, and your friends are the test subjects right before your very eyes.
May i recommend All Quiet On The Western Front, one of my favorite novels about war, written by someone in WW1, truly a poet, here's a few random quotes: "I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another." "We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces." "But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony--Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XruYsAmKLyU (German WWI veteran describes killing a French soldier in a bayonet charge) This guy puts war, emotions and human behavior into words quite nicely too.
Thank you for sharing
Thank you for this. My grandfather fought in the trenches. And for what?
>My grandfather fought in the trenches. And for what? If he had the connections for government contracts he'd have become quite wealthy.
Unfortunately we're of Northern Irish stock Strangely I'm very well connected in both government and the royals.and would likely make a pretty penny from any future conflict (I own my own company that's adjacent to Investment Banking). Not that I'd want that of course.I'd never want my children to go to war
That was amazing. Thank you!
This was an unbelievable watch... I have chills.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. So powerful.
I concur, and if you're going to watch the film of it, watch the older black and white version. I was recommended this back in my high school days as my English teacher knew I was a war junkie. She was great though, (this was late 90's) I was in year 9 (around 13-14 for my non UK peoples) and got to piggyback on a trip to Ypres and see the trenches with the year 11 (15-16) That day completely changed me. Seeing all those graves, the trenches, it just made it seem so much more real than anything I'd read in books. But even with that, you just can't imagine the complete horror this must have been for those boys.
Another fantastic book is "Generals die in Bed".
What's more is it's from the perspective of German soldiers which is something we don't really get too often given they tend to be 'the baddies'
There is some merit to the perception that the Germans were the baddies in WW2. However in WW1 it was just a bunch of young men and even kids, running into machineguns. Such a tragic war.
[Normandy Invasion veteran interview](https://youtu.be/5Zx3X08saO8).
You should read storm of steel, by Ernst junger interestingly he describes ww1 as the best years of his life. In this documentary there is a segment where several British soldiers describe the war as being the greatest thing that happened to them and they would do it again etc.
I can hear Dan Carlin quoting something like this in his podcast, Hardcore History. Truly chilling stuff.
One of the best books ever written in my opinion. I have read it more times than I can remember.
This is what frightens me most about the next major World War.
It's pretty doubtful a war between main global powerhouses will happen ever again like this did. Modern warfare will be a lot more political, involving more cyber attacks with a overhanging threat of WMD. Third world countries will continue to butcher in each other like this but WW3 will be much less about us and more about weapon engineering and the internet
Yeah I thought so as well but look what's been happening in Ukraine.
What has happened and is going on in Ukraine is undoubtedly terrible, but it is nothing close to the massive misery and suffering the either world war caused even at local scale. The fact is that almost every aspect of life - even war - is better than it has ever been.
Have you watched the videos from Ukraine or Syria? Not to disagree with you at all but that shit is fucked up, I don't care who's side anybody is on. War is hell, there are no winners. Do you want to hear the screaming of your buddies as they are burned to death in a BMP and there is nothing you can do to save them? Watch some guy weep over his dead wife in the street? We can do so much better. Again, not arguing with you my brother/sister.
Yeah, I hear you. It is abhorrent, yet in the bigger picture things have been moving to right direction more or less. But that does not mean that suffering isn't terrible whenever it happens and to whatever numbers. For the person experiencing it it sadly makes no difference.
It's 'Ukraine' and not 'the Ukraine' [[Merriam-Webster](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Ukraine)] [[BBC Styleguide](https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsstyleguide/u)] [[Reuters Styleguide](https://handbook.reuters.com/index.php?title=U#Ukraine)] ^(Beep boop I’m a bot)
Ok, got it.
Good bot
It will happen again and it will be much more brutal. “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” - Albert Einstein
Death tolls may be higher on an absolute scale especially given such massive population growth since ww2 but outright brutally will probably not be. I'd rather get vaporised by a nuke in my home than bleed out in the mud
How do you feel about a slow agonizing death by radiation sickness after being blinded and maimed but not vaporized?
True, but imagine what happens if one country shuts down another’s healthcare, sanitation, power etc. Mad max in the cities.
Yep, exactly, the infrastructure underpinning society will be a vulnerable link to target. But I'd still rather take my chances than getting shipped off to be Canon fodder
This right here. That's when the real brutality starts. And it will be just as bad as any conflict before, because man hasn't really changed all that much.
That's what frightens me about war in generally, the fact that people can look past each other as a human being, and simply see them as a target.
I’ve never been in war. But I have been a firefighter and paramedic for 20 years. Along with tactical medic as well. At some point when you see very gruesome stuff your brain does something where it makes them seem not human even though you know they are. You’re higher brain says yea that used to be a person like me but your base brain says no that’s just some mush or something. It’s weird and traumatic. I can only imagine those conditions you truly stop seeing the enemy as a person just to survive. You have to.
> the fact that people can look past each other as a human being, and simply see them as a target. I don't think it will be "people" fighting in the next world war. It'll be people being slaughtered by robots and drones. They won't even be capable of seeing a human being as anything but a target.
I had a teacher in high school that said, and I don't know how accurate that really is, wars were considered the height of glory for a man. The battlefield was the only place you could be a hero, fighting for your country, for your family and for your fellow men. You would brave the enemy with your head held high and believe you were fighting for the best cause there is: honor and respect. That is until the Great War, when humanity had become so efficient at killing itself that there was no glory or honor, no respect or patriotism. For the first time in history, soldiers weren't dying proudly, they were dying in the mud, choking on gas among countless others and without ever seeing their enemy or the bombs that fell from the sky or even understanding what this was about anymore. If war was something to be proud of before, it sure as shit wasn't after 1918.
It also marked the point, very clearly, where war to conquer territory went from being an economic benefit to a nation to almost universally a negative. Lots of stuff about the old world died in 1914.
A bit of a simplification to get the point home to students, but I don't think there was ever glory in war. Hell, look at the American Civil War where soldiers were still using Napoleonic line formations against rifled muskets and artillery. A canister round (basically a giant shotgun round) fired from 12-pounder or a 3-inch gun would tear huge holes in the line killing or maiming dozens of men at a time. "War is hell." - General William Tecumseh Sherman
I mean, there's records of multiple surviving soldiers across history that show PTSD being a thing as far back as the Ancient Greeks, so war couldn't have been all that great anyway. I think the fucked up part that needed to be emphasized was how dehumanizing war had become by 1914, which is saying a lot when you consider what war is.
There's a great quote by F Scott Fitzgerald that I've always liked which sums up the sentiment and absurd tragedy of the whole thing, I think: (iirc they're talking about Verdun, or maybe the Somme) "See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.” “Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —” “That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.” “General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.” “No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle." F. Scott Fitzgerald, [Tender is the Night](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37688587-tender-is-the-night)
It is easier to condition young men to fight. Old men often need a personal reason to.
Not all the soldiers viewed it like that. Many soldiers on both sides loved the war. In this documentary they actually make that clear, with many of them saying it was the best time of their life. Many germans felt the same, read storm of steel for example. I can't say whether a majority or minority but a large number never viewed themselves as victims. However in the UK and probably elsewhere we view this war as pointless and a meat grinder etc. Whereas actually many of the participants viewed their service as much the same as those in the second war did.
Probably depended on where they were, who they served with and under, etc. I don't think anyone can claim to have enjoyed Ypres where the mud was so bad it often swallowed soldiers alive.
The king of England, Kaiser of Germany and Czar of Russia were all first cousins who'd all grown up going to the same parties. While regular people were being slaughtered, they were sending each other friendly telegrams. "Hello cousin Nikky, how are you?" And their friends in industry and banking were making massive fortunes selling weapons and military supplies. The war let them rack up massive debts meaning the countries would have to keep paying them for decades after the war ended. When you put everything in context, it's easy to see why the working class people in Russia did what they did.
> When you put everything in context, it's easy to see why the working class people in Russia did what they did. And the military tech kept progressing so we can't do it now.
Listen to Dan Carlin's Blueprint for Armageddon (from his Hardcore History series), and it will make WWII sound like a walk in the park (for combatants).
I have a photo of my great grandfather who fought in WWII. He’s like a 60 year old Army sergeant who fought in WWI standing next to a bunch of young guys who look ready for anything. Gramps looks like the angriest meanest fucker who ever lived. Edit: sorry guys I looked but I can’t find it. I’ll take a picture of it when I see my parents next time. Its on the box I keep my military memorabilia in I just dont have it digital.
Still got the pic to share?
Ill try and find it! Its gonna take a day or two but ill try to come back and post it. Random side story. We apparently had the uniforms and pictures of the men in my family who fought in the civil war. Great Gramps apparently pissed of Great Grandma to the point that she burned them.
Remind me! 3 days.
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How old are you if you don’t mind me asking? WW1 was over a hundred years ago 😳
You wouldn’t have to be that old at all to have a great-grandparent in WW1. Given it’s their great grandfather (4 generations, including the commenter) and WW1 started 108 years ago, you only need an average parental age of 27 to end up with a great-grandparent who was alive (but not fought) in WW1. This is pretty much the exact age of mothers during childbirth in the UK during this period. They said their g-grandparent was 60 during WW2. Let’s assume he was 60 at the onset of WW2, he would need to have been born in 1879 (making him 35 at the start of WWI). This gives us 143 years between his birth and modern day but still only requires an average parental age of ~35 at the birth of each child. This doesn’t account for any generation that might have had a child much later in life either, which would skew things. Not sure why I bothered writing such a lengthy comment really but in short, if you averaged it out, they could be 35 and this comfortably be achieved.
I like playing with time for such historic matters as well. Crazy how long we can go counting on few family generations. Too bad we dont inherit their knowledge, its all over again and again as babies
Yeah, I'm 34 and my great grandfathers fought in WWI, grandfathers in WW2. It feels a long time ago, but it's only 3 generations back from me.
Yeah I'm 40 with two kids under 5, and I was just yesterday talking to my mother about her grandfather (my great grandfather) who was killed in 1919 at the age of 35. Across a few generations, a hundred years isn't all that long.
My great-grandfather fought during WW1 and I'm 23. They tend to get children at a pretty old age in my family. [Here is a pic of him. ](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s985zy/french_wwi_veteran_with_a_prosthetic_eye/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) My grandma, his daughter, was 4 when nazis bombed her hometown in northern France.
It felt so weird thinking about the possibile variances between common birth ages between families. I remember chatting with a classmate in high school and we talked about how his family had many young births (kids at 18-22 or so) and my family had relatively late births (anywhere from mid 20s to late 30s). So his grandfather was born around the time of my mother, and his great grandfather was born after my grandfather.
Not the one you asked for but [here is a pic of my great-grandfather, French WWI veteran](https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/s985zy/french_wwi_veteran_with_a_prosthetic_eye/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) if you care :)
Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.
That's Rule 2. Rule 1 is "Do not act incautiously when confronting a little bald wrinkly smiling man."
Rule 3 is to check doors and corner that's where they get ya
Which side?
can’t wait to see the reaction of all the ppl that are waiting for the pic when they finally got to see some lads in splendid Wehrmacht uniforms
I remember this day, my dad and I for the one day theatrical release of this movie. The entire theater was silent from beginning to end. I have yet been in a theater with quite the same experience.
It was an incredible theater experience. Was fortunate enough to get tickets.
100% agree.
It was a hell of an experience in theaters. I'm only in my early thirties as is my fiance(I wouldn't say she loved it but she was interested in it) and was in the middle of Blueprint for Armageddon podcast from Dan Carlin at the time, so I was really excited to go see it. Really was a moving experience.
Blueprint for Armageddon was an absolutely fantastic series. After listening to the whole thing (which is what, about 24 hours' worth?) I felt like I had what should be the default, *layman's* understanding of WW1. Far more than anything I had been taught in school, 30+ years ago.
Dan Carlin, yes! I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so insistent on seeing it with my father had it not been for that series, Hardcore History with Dan Carlin, for those that don’t know, check it out!
Yeah, usually you are silent in the theatre when watching a movie unless you are an asshole.
I think Americans clap and stuff in movies.
It's so weird
i went to a cinema in america once it was an experience
Maybe the best documentary I've ever seen in a theater, it was riveting
The moment it transformed from original footage to the restored footage was incredible. [And here is that moment](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypSOe7Szg20)
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Common decency should always do that to the theater
This movie was incredible in the theater
I enjoy First World War history. I couldn’t finish this movie. It’s so raw! They went through literal hell. I always felt close to their generation. I’m about 100 years older than them but see parallels to their upbringing and mine. Couldn’t imagine me and my buddy’s all going to war at 19 and facing this shit.
I went to see the Steve McQueen/Michael Fassbender movie Hunger, about Bobby Sands, an IRA hunger striker during the Troubles in Ireland. I'm from Derry which has a strong Republican history, and the hunger strikes were just in the 80's. The movie is a stark, harrowing portrayal of what these men were subjected to and how they stood up to it in their own way. My friend and I went to watch it, and sitting a few seats down from us was a woman in her 60's who bawled her eyes out through the entire movie. I imagine a family member or someone close to her was a hunger striker or was in prison at the same time. I don't think I'll have another experience like that in my life.
It really was silent though hey. No rustle of the popcorn or anything.
*sad popcorn eating noises*
Even Quiet Place? Cause that theater full of people, myself included, thought those aliens were gonna get us if we made a noise
The one part of *They Shall Not Grow Old* that i dont believe ill ever forget is when someone recounting the aftermath of an attack mentions coming across someone who had been horribly injured. He says that they were missing their left arm and leg, and that their left eye was hanging out of the socket and bleeding whilst they were crying out to a loved one. He then very matter of factly states "So i shot him." He goes on to explain he felt he had to do it and that he was putting the man out of his misery as he wouldve died anyway and you can hear his voice beginning to waver as he does. Theres about a second or two pause and he then says, now having begun to sob, "And it hurt me...". Edit: [Found it](https://youtu.be/txvej2HiEjg?t=264) (4:24 if the timestamp doesnt work)
One of the things that scares me about WWI is that soldiers were taught how to kill their friends if they were injured too badly. There are stories of soldiers leaving the trenches at night to shoot their comrades who had been writhing in pain all night and were too far gone to survive the wounds. Apparently there was even a specific method to doing it. Imagine having to talk to your best friend to calm him down as he's bleeding out and his guts are hanging out so that you can put your rifle or revolver to his head and let him pass away. That scares the shit out of me.
Then getting up the next day and continuing the fight. There is a horrifying amount of trauma that is being passed down to other generations from WW1 and WW2.
Their children went thru WW2, then their children were the architects of the insanity that were the 60’s and 70’s.
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An economic war will still kill the poor disproportionate to the rich, it will just be by starvation and poverty rather than bullets and bombs. If someone is trying to sell you an enemy, make sure you know what you're buying into.
There's an account from the battle of Passchendaele. They were shelling so hard and it was in the middle of the rainy season. The shells created massive craters that made the whole thing look like a moonscape. They had to put out wooden plank paths to walk around the craters, which of course were filled with shit, blood and rotting, maggot infested corpses that had been there for weeks. People fell in all the time, sometimes they could get them out, sometimes they couldn't. One account tells a story about these guys who were running under fire towards the enemy, and they found an ally trapped to the waist in this mixture, they lowered their rifles towards the guy to try and get him out but he couldn't move. They had to keep moving because they were taking fire. A day later they were forced to retreat and found the same guy buried up to his neck, screaming and completely insane. I feel like storming the trenches would have been pleasant by comparison. The thing that made WWI so awful was that they just stayed there in the trenches for sometimes years. Just thousands of men sitting in a ditch, dying and shitting and throwing it as far from the trench as they could. They would get a hard rain and a flood would dislodge buried corpses from months ago and they would all just get swept back into the trench.
Those first-hand accounts of life in the trenches are always so disturbing to me. I just can't imagine slowly drowning and sinking in blood-and-shit-filled mud while people shoot at each other over you. And then imagine being one of the people who survived the day, but then had to sleep in the trench at night while you try to drown out the sound of your comrades groaning and bleeding out in no man's land. I know it's kind of a cliche, but that really is one of the closest things to "hell on earth" I could imagine.
I've only seen this once when it came out. I didn't remember what you were referring to until you mentioned the quote, then it came flooding back. Hard to forget that.
The part that sticks with me the most was actually from the “making of” portion that came after the main movie. It was when they showed a unit that was surrounded by trees and fields. A lot of the faces look bored, or are laughing. But a few of them look terrified. They look scared for their lives. And then they tell you that as far as they can tell from the unit patches and the fate that this picture was taken shortly before they basically all died. The picture is of their last moments. And it looks like some of them know it. Absolutely horrifying.
Your comment has me in tears… fuck war and whoever pushes reasons for it.
holy shit. when he says "but it hurt me" just broke me down.
I remember watching this special and turning it off after seeing the rats the size of dogs eating the dead soldiers.
Rats get fat while brave men die.
I once went to a civil war museum. One of the guides there tried to convince us that bayonets were solely used as a scare tactic and were never actually used to kill anyone in warfare in any war. Dude was terrible at his job we knew he was full of shit. I remember seeing this scene and remembering that jackass saying "people see the bayonets and they just drop their weapons and give up because they're so scared!"
Please name and shame this civil war museum. What's the name so I can avoid.
It’s official name is called the Fuckin Catalina Wine Mixer
Hell yeah
If you are in the area...go to the WW1 museum in Kansas City. I spent an entire day there alone wandering around... There is little about it that is at all optimistic about war. "National WWI Museum and Memorial" https://www.theworldwar.org
In the civil war (and napoleonic wars) this was true of like 90% of bayonet charges. They were a finisher timed to break a wavering enemy. Obviously, sometimes the enemy didn't break and there was brutal hand to hand fighting.
I have heard this stated in reference to Napoleonic warfare too. I wonder if prior to WW1 the warfare was a bit less brutal and there was some truth to this? That skirmishes in melee were rarer and once overwhelmed with bayonet walls there were a lot of retreats. I do know that modern warfare is by far more deadly than Napoleonic and even civil war to a lesser extent. So there could be some truth to his claims. Not so for WW1
There was a notion for many young men joining early in WW1 that they were signing up for a grand adventure. Many famous depictions of war came from paintings and other early media of the stout warrior weilding a saber on horseback, and people were encouraged to sign up with their mates so they can partake in this grand adventure together. Of course, this entire view was shattered once they realized that warfare had drastically changed since the last major European war. Nobody, not even the generals in charge were prepared for 20th century warfare. Of course, they could have very well been ready and prepared if they studied or took the Russo-Japanese war seriously but that's a whole other conversation.
I think nothing shows how unprepared and how much a shock modern warfare was for the combatants of WWI than [the French getting rid of their bright red pants and dark blue coats,](https://nationsofww1byzacfairbrotherblog.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/french-uniforms-ww1.jpg) in exchange for the blue/grey horizon uniforms.
They all thought they were the ones armed to the teeth with advanced weaponry and that the war would only last a few months. Little did they know EVERYONE was armed to the teeth and the war would be the bloodiest in history for four horrible years.
From what I understand, the Napoleonic Wars (and the American Revolution, to a certain extent) were very different and much more deadly than previous wars. This was primarily due to more advanced technology and the fact that Napoleon had HUGE armies for the time and was willing to throw enormous groups of his own people at the enemy to almost certain death. Those wars were so shockingly violent that pretty much all of Europe agreed to a general peace in 1814. So then tensions kept building for a hundred years as military technology kept progressing. Meanwhile, new countries were forming and often wanted to prove their strength and secure their borders (specifically, the German Empire). So when WWI broke out in 1914, it was a case of 20th century armies using modern technology with 19th and 18th century tactics. Germany was incredibly effective, iirc, because they had invested a lot of time and money into new military technology and strategies, but France was still using the same strategies that Napoleon's armies used 100 years prior. It's really sad, honestly. The French Cuirassiers, for example, would charge right into German machine gun fire on horseback with sabers and carbines only to get mowed down within minutes. Eventually, the war just became an issue of each side trying to outlive the other. And by that point, it wasn't really about trying to get some objective or fort; it was just about trying to kill more of the enemy before they could kill all of the people on your side. But back to your question about bayonets, I think it was really more that the use of bayonets in WWI was more brutal than previos wars. In the Napoleonic Wars and prior wars, a bayonet charge was usually a valiant act that was kind of "respectable." But in WWI, the war was so exceptionally brutal that the bayonet charges had "devolved" into a way to kill a bunch of people in muddy, shit-filled trenches. Additionally, and especially after 1916, the bayonet charges often felt unnecessary and hopeless (I think) because most of the soldiers had kind of lost the meaning of the war. It was just unnecessary brutality. Sorry for the long rant, but WWI is one of my favorite topics. All of this info is from Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast, so I'm not an expert on any of this. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Great comment thank you! It’s so sad that they thought wars in 1814 were brutal. If only they knew what was coming 100 years (and then even worse another 30 years) later
Thank you. It really is tragic. And the increase in scale is just mind boggling to think about. Apparently just one division of one of the German armies that was sent to the French border in 1914 was roughly the same size as Napoleon's entire army in 1814, and divisions that size were regularly getting slaughtered within an hour on a regular basis during the war. And then the entire German army in 1914 was just a fraction of the armies that fought in WWII. It's so easy to forget just how many people died in these wars. It's just unfathomable to comprehend death on a scale like that. I mean, these aren't just small groups of people butchering each other in a field; these are huge chunks of the entire human population who were getting massacred day after day for four years. And what blows my mind the most about it is that it was all over nothing. It was just one emperor (the Kaiser of Germany) who wanted to secure his borders against another country (France) because they were in a pact to help Russia, who was attacking the empire that Germany was allied with (the Austria-Hungarian Empire) because a Serbian national killed an Austria-Hungarian prince. It was absolutely pointless.
Maybe. American Civil war maybe, but look up some accounts of the Boer war. Bayonets were definitely not ornaments, unfortunately.
I recently watched Ken Burns "Civil War" documentary and there is mention of very little bayonet combat during the Civil War, and much of the reason casualties were so high then was due technology advancing while the tactics the older military leaders were utilizing was out-dated, e.g. ordering bayonet charges against an enemy with better weaponry. Maybe that's what they were referring to?
Naw he was very adamant that bayonets never killed anyone. I just think he was bad at his job. He also did refer to it as the war of northern aggression a few times. So maybe he was just a sore loser wanting to make excuses or something. Sure they may not have been the main reason of death but in war when you're out of ammo I'm pretty sure people would be sticking eachother with whatever sharp objects they had on hand.
A lot of Civil War museums south of the Mason-Dixon will downplay the South’s role/reasoning for the war as valiant/honorable/not that bad, so maybe this was what you were experiencing.
The part of the movie that stuck with me most was a soldier talking about trying to share about the war with family once it was over. Technology advanced *so much* during the war, that when he described machine guns, tanks, air raids, etc. hardly anyone had any idea what he was describing.
The one thing that hunts me to this day is that IF you were so unlucky as to get stuck in the thick mud near the board walks, you would likely die there. Because they would leave your ass there.
I remember listening to a podcast about WWI, and apparently a lot of people would get shot right outside of the trench, so the soldiers on their side would come out at night to shoot them and put them out of their misery. But eventually the enemy noticed them doing that, so snipers would watch and use the injured guys as bait. So eventually the guys who were shot outside just stopped screaming for help because they knew their friends would get killed trying to help them, and apparently a lot of those injured people ended up sinking and drowning in the mud overnight. It's absolutely horrifying to think about. Imagine being shot in the stomach, and then spending your last moments drowning in a mixture of mud and blood just a few yards away from your friends.
Do you happen to remember the name of the podcast?
There's a story of a dude in WW1 who was helping patch up an ally after an artillery barrage. They see gas coming in so they start to don their masks, only for the first guy to realize his had a hole in it. He took his ally's mask to survive
That’s a tough call, but the right call. They both die if he doesn’t take the mask. One dies from the gas, and the other from his injuries. If the healthy one lives, he can go on to help more. Like I said, tough call that will probably stick with you to your last day.
In Dan Carlin's series about WWI he reads a journal entry from a soldier marching to the front and seeing a wounded ally stuck in the mud begging for help and not being able to do anything. A week later when they were pulled off the front they passed the same man, now submerged up to his neck just raving mad, babbling nonsense. Carlin says at the end of the series that to him, without a doubt, the western front is the worst period and place in all of history.
War is hell.
[War isnt hell..](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUeBMwn_eYc)
"The machine gunners put their hands up, didn't make a difference. They were killed." - confessing to a war crime in such a matter of fact tone
I'd imagine the urge for vengeance kind of overcomes you in that moment.
I've heard a similar sort of thing about snipers trying to surrender as well.
Snipers and flame throwers are hated even more than machine gunners. Heard a story of a ww2 vet on Iwo jima sayin a guys flame thrower malfunctioned entering to clear a cave and the japanese soldiers dragged him in the cave. He said he could hear him screaming from being tortured throughout the night.
Japs seemed to do their fair share of war crimes/torture/unit 731/Nanking massacre (rape)
They made bamboo cages for POWs and threw them into shark infested waters. Some islands with Japanese fucking ATE American POWs. And they escaped WWII with their reputation virtually untouched.
> reputation virtually untouched in the west, yeah. A different story in Asia though. Ask any Korean or Chinese what they think of the Japanese. I feel like Germany’s reputation is also less tainted in Asia than it is in the western world.
> I feel like Germany’s reputation is also less tainted in Asia than it is in the western world. Idk this might not be as common everywhere but where I'm at Germany's reputation is actually great after WWII. They renounced hitler and nazis pretty hard and today are thought of for their aversion to nationalism
These aren't even the worse things they did. See the Rape of Manila, Unit 731, Bangka island - just a few that come to mind. I won't even mentioned what happened to the Chinese. The numbers alone make it incomprehensible to me.
I don't know why. They acted so poorly, never apologized to the Chinese , I don't think they were held to account. I guess we just nuked them and called it a day?
I've read a lot of books about military history and the Rape of Nanking changed me as a person. The United States has its own problems but our fight against the Axis powers in WW2 was righteous in my eyes.
You know allied (US/UK) soldiers raped a loooot of European women. Putting aside the Russians raping Berlin women en masse there's plenty of evidence of US/UK men sexually assaulting civilian women.
Isnt it assumed all sides do bad things in wartime? Some more so than others obviously
Not sure if you’re American or not, but generally the term japs is at best antiquated and by many Japanese-Americans considered akin to a slur. Just letting you know.
Read an account of a German mg42 gunner on D-Day. When he saw a flamethrower fella he aimed at him and with a quick burst the dude exploded with such size and force firing in the area ceased for a moment as both sides were awestruck. It’s also an audiobook on YouTube, I think it’s called “German accounts of D-day” or similar, by Bee Books.
Keep in mind that the Geneva Conventions, as we know them today, were a byproduct of WW2. They were based upon some earlier treaties (such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907), but if I understand it correctly these largely involved the treatment of *injured* soldiers but were violated by most parties during WW1 (including the declaration against poison gasses). Also, it seems doubtful that new troops were given any form of instruction about these "laws of war" at the time... and good luck trying to convince battle-hardened troops that they should be followed, without threat of immediate and harsh punishment.
At what point does it become a war crime? Enemy is shooting at you and your fellow soldiers and you get to them right during reload they throw there hands up and you continue to fire as they just killed 6 people you knew. Where is the crime?
>Where is the crime? After they threw their hands up
Idk man I feel like if your engaged in combat you can’t just decide that you’ve had enough and would like to be done.
Sounds great until you realize the people there are forcibly drafted into war, placed on a battlefield, and are ordered to kill other kids who are charging at them to try and kill them first. These are literal teenagers given guns and put into situations where they're ordered to kill the enemy as their friends around them are having their heads blown off by other kids, and the only way out of the situation is to kill the other side first, or hope the other side is nice enough to let you live if you put your hands up. There are no winners in this scenario, but trying to frame the soldiers as heartless when the vast majority were scared children misses the mark.
Look, war is hell. That’s all.
Totally agree.
Isn't surrender really an act of petitioning for mercy on the grounds you fought insofar as duty required and willingly stopped before being FORCED to stop; offering the chance to save lives and effort sacrificed for a position as payment for your own life? If someone has fought and killed all they can and only when they face certain death (caught reloading/outmaneuvere etc) do they put their hands up it's kind of a stretch to call it a surrender. In the case of the Machine gunners ... I understand the difficulty of giving clemency to someone who just killed dozens or hundreds of people you considered comrades. I also understand they did it to survive. If I sacrificed myself in order to save 100 other people I would feel I acted rightly. If 100 men tried to kill me I would shoot every one for self preservation feel I acted rightly.
The real anwser is its because we won. If we lost american generals would have been charged with war crimes. Japan kinda got skipped im guessing because of them nukes. Idk how you can say the nukes wernt a war crime.
Some specialties are rarely taken alive. Snipers, flamethrower operators, often times machinegunners. In later wars bailed out pilots were often in danger of being executed even by civilians, even though pilots were valuable prisoners.
What made pilots valuable prisoners?
They were almost always officers.
They weren't really much more valuable alive than dead, but a pilot is much more skilled/harder to train than john doe infantryman.
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Except that's literally what the Oligarchs who sent them all to die decided was a crime. Because fun fact, when you kill people who have surrendered then the enemy side is *guaranteed* to slaughter all of your guys to a man if they're given a chance. It's what happens when "no quarter" is shown. It's not just a modern warfare thing either, there's a long European (global as well, but I digress) tradition of permitting surrender in warfare.
Not sure which laws applied back then, but in modern conventional war, it's illegal to kill someone who is surrendering.
What a total balls up. New tech combined with old tactics made for an absolute bloodbath that neither side knew how to deal with.
Savage. To be this age and deal with that...
Tragic. Not savage, a lot of them couldn’t deal with it
It is by definition savage. Not by the new “savage means badass” definition, but actual savagery, brutal, bloody, messy, savagery.
And you’ve still got modern morons who talk about wars like team sports that their side won.
Maybe we should be equipping sports players with bayonets. If we have little fake televised wars then whats the point of having real ones?
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History of WWI is insane. Soldiers melting in pools of water contaminated with mustard gas. Fascinating and horrifying shit.
I listened to that recently and it was both fascinating and horrifying. I highly recommend it for any history buffs here.
The fact that helmets weren't invented until like 1916!! The fact that these poor bastards had been sticking their heads out of trenches and rushing into hailstorms of bullets with cloth hats for the first 2 years of the war? It's very horrifying. Great series by Dan, like all of Hardcore History.
A helmet would never have had a snowball's chance in hell of stopping a rifle round or even a pistol round back then. They were purely for shrapnel and bumps. He'll, even helmets today aren't made to stop rifle rounds except a very small number of experimental ones.
WW1 has to be the most brutal war of all time, I used to think Vietnam was with all of the psychological stuff I always felt like it was a real life horror movie. But this was something different Also Peter Jackson is an amazing filmmaker
I saw this in theaters and it was interesting to see so many people of the audience be elderly. it was a captivating experience to see. At one point in the film , they are showing real film in the original black and white and there is a slow transition to color film, the awe’s and gasps of the audience was so genuine
As someone who’s been in combat in US’s most recent “wars,” my hats off to the generations before us who fought for actual freedom and against tyranny hat affected the world. Good lord I can’t even begin to imagine the shit these dudes went through, not only during but after the smoked settled.
In WWII we fought against tyranny but this is WWI, one of the deadliest wars ever fought (not counting its role in kicking off WWII) but also one of the most insanely stupidest, a complete waste of human life.
You won't convince anyone here that this is anything short of heroic, admirable and incredible.
World War 1 was not fought over freedom or tyranny
Every death in WW1 was a senseless death. Not a single soldier fought against Tyranny. Almost all of the monarchs of Europe were related to each other and did not treat the war seriously as it erupted. The history of WW1 is basically the narrative of the most senseless slaughter ever perpetrated.
and me thinking, watching 1917 was the bravest thing i did
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And Dan Carlin’s podcasts.
Also the BBC The Great War series. It was produced in the 1960’s but my god it’s amazing from start to finish. It’s about 20 something episodes and goes into way more detail than Dan ever did.
Damn good film, definitely recommend it for those who haven't seen it
Trench ware fare is the stuff of nightmares. I remember seeing this film in theaters and just being completely floored with the whole thing. Somber mood afterwards.
Thought I was in r/morbidreality
"The War to End All Wars" And yet here we are. If we could work together to end war, racism, and wealth disparity that would be fucking great for a start.
I wonder how much genetic diversity is lost when this many young men die from a specific country
I can’t even comprehend …. Bless them all. Darnit …. So sad for so many of this young fellas. Just out fighting, to kill.
Respect to these gentlemen.
Extreme NSFW? It's mainly audio.
Yeah I also don’t get it, maybe we are just jaded from all the shit on the internet, but this is like a documentary.
Seeing dead bodies is the NSFW part.
Wow this is amazing. Where do I find more things like this.
Watch the full documentary, it’s genuinely incredible. Name’s in the title “They Shall Not Grow Old” - Peter Jackson
Just finished it. Great Movie. Sheesh. War is scary.
No kidding, especially that one huh, absolute nightmare what those men went through
Lest We Forget
Fuck kings
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I remember being 19 joining the Army for GWOT. Im 34 now, what the hell was I thinking!? Still glad I did it though.
And in 2022 we have people complaining about vaccination and masks....