Ivor Biggun posted:

quote:

During the First World War, drafts created the armies that were drawn from remarkably similar societies for the first time in modern warfare. Along the Western Front, on both sides there were industrial workers and farm laborers. On both sides there were aristocratic senior officers and middle-class junior officers. For Catholics, Protestants and Jews fighting for separate armies, they sometimes identified more with their religious brethren on the opposing side than with their fellow soldiers.

The soldiers, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians were equally irreverent about what they were supposedly fighting for. Over the longer period of trench warfare, a kind of ‘live and let live’ attitude developed in certain relatively quiet sectors of the line; war was reduced to a series of rituals, as with the Greeks and Trojans. English pacifist Vera Brittain noted about a Scottish and a Saxon regiment that had agreed not to aim at each other when they fired. They made a lot of noise and an outsider would have thought the men were fighting hard, but in practice no one was hit. Robert Graves — in his pivotal memoir of the Great War, Goodbye to All That — recollected about letters arriving from the Germans, rolled up in old mortar shells: “Your little dog has run over to us, and we are keeping it safe here.” Newspapers were fired back and forth in the same fashion. Louis Barthas spent some time in a sector where the Germans and the French fired only six mortar rounds a day, ‘out of courtesy’.

Nothing symbolized this easygoing attitudes more than the informal Christmas truce of 1914, when opposing soldiers in many sectors joined together to sing carols, and exchange Christmas greetings and gifts. Soccer games were played in no man’s land with makeshift balls. Of course, there were some who refused to participate in the truce; among those was a German field messenger named Adolf Hitler, who grumbled, ““Such things should not happen in wartime. Have you Germans no sense of honor left at all?”

TEAYCHES posted:

i like the part where the surrender conditions for germany were so harsh that they elected nazis and tried again

mikerock posted:

Verdun is just nuts. The approaches to Fort Douaumont are a young forest growing over a moonscape of shell craters. The fort is devastated and kind of small and 3 quarters of a million men died fighting over it. The Verdun Ossuary has ONE HUNDRED AND THIRTY THOUSAND skeletons of dead French and Germans recovered from the battlefield in the foundation and you can see them through windows at the base of the Ossuary.

Edit: Fort Douaumont was taking 900-1600 shells PER DAY during the 9 months it was under occupation by the Germans.

Agag posted:

Thanks to Woodrow Wilson.

On the upside WW1 wiped out a lot of monarchies.


Verdun is the pivotal battle of the war, despite some Anglo-American claims to the contrary.

Its almost unique in history as an example of nationalistic mass-suicide rather than anything approximating warfare as we understand it.

Shadeoses posted:

Verdun owns bones

Agag posted:

Thanks to Woodrow Wilson.

On the upside WW1 wiped out a lot of monarchies.


Verdun is the pivotal battle of the war, despite some Anglo-American claims to the contrary.

Its almost unique in history as an example of nationalistic mass-suicide rather than anything approximating warfare as we understand it.

hemophilia posted:

We should be really glad for nukes because otherwise global conflicts would have probably kept happening. these remotely controlled conventional weapons platforms, drones cruise missiles aircraft carriers and all that poo poo would render the world into a terribly unstable hellscape where you never know if a gunship or drone is overhead and about to ruin your life. Not just Brown lives but poo poo happening in New York or Berlin or Montreal and beijing

hemophilia posted:

We should be really glad for nukes because otherwise global conflicts would have probably kept happening.

Rutibex posted:

if the bomb didn't exist, Stalin would have taken his 4-1 advantage in soldiers and equipment at the end of WW2 and just rolled over the rest of Europe, likely the rest of the world. there wouldn't be wars any more, we would be living under global communism

Tautologicus posted:

The wiki article is written like some kind of movie plot and is not how I heard it first but the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was actually kinda comical. Dude was in his motorcade going down the street and they throw a bomb at him and miss. Then they throw a grenade and miss. Theyre all bent out of shape about failing the assassination and Ferdinand goes on with his day and gives his speech. Theyre sitting at some cafe or another moping, when Ferdinand just happens to walk by that spot with his posse after the speech and Princip looks up sees him and shoots him. It was meant to be

McDowell posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDYb8msRSKc

texaholic posted:

mikerock posted:

The French part of WW1 gets downplayed somewhat in English language history, but I would say that all of 1916 was the same for everyone on the western front regardless of nationality - French, German, British/Commonwealth. It was the beginning of the end of 19th century battle doctrine. Innovation showed in battles like Vimy in 1917 and the opening stages of Operation Michael in 1918 but the grand campaigns continued on for the rest of the war with horrendous casualties, with some of the worst casualty rates by both sides suffered in the Kaiserschlacht and the Hundred Days in 1918.

If you want to look at it from the aspect of cultural suicide I would say that the battle of the frontiers in 1914 was the end of the the belle epoch, perfectly encapsulated in the kindermord.

naem posted:

It's scary to think how tiny and short lived the bubble of relative peace and prosperity we all live in itt giving us time to f around online

texaholic posted:

World War 1 is a funny name if you think about it was mostly fought in Europe with a little in Western Asia. The only reason it is called a World War is because the Europeans colonized the world.

Also The coming Resource Wars/Third World War will be truly global in conflict.

Agag posted:

If alive during WW1, many goons would be at home clandestinely printing communist leaflets and cucking their friends who were dying at The Front.

texaholic posted:

World War 1 is a funny name if you think about it was mostly fought in Europe with a little in Western Asia. The only reason it is called a World War is because the Europeans colonized the world.

Also The coming Resource Wars/Third World War will be truly global in conflict.

SirEvelynTremble posted:

Hitler got mustard gassed as a young soldier and ended up in an asylum

Goes to show, with the right meds, how far you can get in life

Commie NedFlanders posted:

FINALLY


WWI is seriously the cucked war because it really was the war to end all wars but WWII gets all the pizzaz. I'm P sure WWI might be the most culturally traumatic war ever fought.

It boggles my firkin mind thinking about it.

Young men stuck in trenches for weeks or months, non stop bombardment, a long field of death, the constant threat of total annihilation

The emergence of heavy weapons, artillery, machine guns on a massive scale, and DEADLY GAS

Looming back on history, I don't think any war did as munch damage to humanity as a collective spirit

Agag posted:

If alive during WW1, many goons would be at home clandestinely printing communist leaflets and cucking their friends who were dying at The Front.