WWI was WWII concentrate with some extra suck added for good measure.

"The Great War" is named that for a reason: Nothing was as stupid or deadly as being in the middle of a WWI battle...ever.

War of that nature are the result of a world without clearly superior forces, when you have monopolar or even bipolar worlds you don't tend to see this.  But when you have a world with numerous powers at a parity or close to parity level of military power eventually you will see war.

I am aware of both of circumstances, but, as I said, I still don't understand why they bothered to have that war.  Neither, or both, seems a reason to kill off five million men.

Jane

tag for post-coffee reading

It's that kind of thinking, that war is impossible in X situation, that makes these wars happen. Had things played out even a little differently in the cold war we wouldn't be posting shit on an inter-anything.



 

No tactics throughout the war, just brute force





 

At the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, Ferdinand Foch said: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for 20 years"

This.

True. They didn't understand that packing people shoulder to shoulder in tents/barracks was a bad thing. However, If I had to choose an easier death in WWI it would have been the flu. IMHO that is...



 

Yup, no world war one, no world war two or cold war. Hell, I'd be willing to bet that socialism wouldn't have even taken hold in Europe.

 

Yep. When the only two great powers in the Western world were Rome and Persia they never fought each other.....



 

Agree. I merely mentioned the F-P War as another example/reason of the stupidity of "civilized" society that fed the rivalries that caused millions to die needlessly.

they certainly knew how to bomb shit back to the stoneage back then

You may want to look at history, the Persian empire was destroyed by Alexander the Great who died  well before the Roman empire.  The cause of the Persian-Greco wars were the Persian perception that the Greek states were much weaker than them.

My concern with America's present position is that we will allow Asia to enter into the kind of multipolar arrangement that preceded the two World Wars.

If we cease to guarantee security and balance China then it is only a matter of time.

Two excellent books on WW1 are:







and







Keegan's book offers an excellent background on how the war happened.  So much of it was because of how the general staffs of the various armies depended on rail to bring up reserves.  They spent countless hours creating timetables that said "If country X begins to call up their reserves, we must move by d+2 to start bringing up our reserves or they could invade and we wouldn't be deployed".  So once Russia begain to call up their army due to Austria-Hungry's moves towards Serbia, a domino-like effect started to take place.



And Middlebrook's book shows just how bad the leadership was during the first years of the war.  How the British troops weren't allowed to run across no-man's land so they would maintain formation, etc.  For those 20,000 casualties, they barely took 2 miles of German line.  Most of which they didn't hold.

I agree. Thats one reason that we need this:

More accurately we need that because we will almost always fight over the ocean, while out enemies will fight at or near home.

Carriers being one of the most inefficient ways imaginable to drop bombs on an enemy country.  Of course, efficiency and efficacy are often at odds in war...  Some things aren't easy, or cheap.

1.5 Million men lost during the Battle of the Somme.  



I don't know how a man could witness that much death and not have a total psychological break.  I mean that's just living in blood and guts up to your knees and I can't imagine hell being a worse place.  



The trench living conditions, the constant artillery fire, the head long charges into machine gun fire across muddy fields covered in bodies and barbwire.



No thanks. Pure insanity.  Should have been the war to end all wars, but people have short memories.

One other thing that made battles like the Somme so horrific.  Men were grouped together by where they came from.  In some cases, they were encouraged to enlist with the promise they could serve with their friends.  In fact, some of the units were called "Friendlies".  This meant that if that unit got chopped up badly, a whole town would suddenly not have any males between 19-30.

Wow, double history fail, unless there's some hair-splitting going on here I'm missing.

ETA:

First Persian Empire, indeed destroyed by Alexander.

Parthian Empire and the Second Persian/Neo Persian/Sassanid Empire both of which were frequently at war with Rome.

ETA 2: I think I misread hellagrl's smiley, we're on the same page...

Numbers range from 60-100 Million + people worldwide








 

To really get the impact you can travel to front lines and see just how massive they were. There are several "regions" that still have remnants of the war. It is a very big deal and is honored daily in some cities to this day.


We went on a self guided tour and what we found was incredible. Bunkers, EO, bobwire by the mountain, mortar tubes so common they are used as fence posts and miles upon miles of what was the front. We were lucky and went right after the farmers plowed the fields so you could see what is called "ghost lines" or something like that were the tranches used to be, its a chalky substance  that the soldiers dug into and left a trace of the trench.  

Weipers, Verdun and Somme were the hots spots and there is a lot of stuff and a lot of very cool, but smaller museums jam packed with stuff. There are also a lot of B&B in the regions that cater to this.

If anyone would like more info let me know.

If you want to see something cool, go to Googleearth and type in Verdun france, there are lots of pictures of the hot spots but I am not seeing any trenches. The French have done a very good job of trying to preserve the relics of wars.

I believe as we see more and more nations become nuclear powers, which is inevitable at this point, we'll see increased missile defense shields and eventually the possibility will exist for large scale coventional wars to be carried out.  May not happen in our life times, but it will happen.  

As though God punished the world for slaughtering each other.



People really must have thought it was the end of days.

Nationalism had a great part in it.  Everyone thought they were better than anyone else.

War Plans fueled by paranoia.  No one wanted to give the other guy the initiative so everyone had war plans.  To sit on it was to give the other side the advantage.  Germany had the Schlieffen Plan, which called for over-running France by sweeping across Belgium and capturing Paris.  The French had Plan 17 which called for a thrust through the Rhineland, the recapture of the lost provinces (Alsace and Lorraine) and smashing into Germany to redeem the defeat of 1871.   Russia wanted the Balkans so as to have access to the Mediterranean Sea.  Additionally Russia saw itself as the big slavic brother to the lesser slavic states and figured it was only natural that only Slavs be united under the Tsar.  Austro-Hungaria wanted to keep what it had.  Germany backed Austria and had a fleet that was attempting to rival Great Britain's.  Great Britain supported France because it didn't want one power in Europe to dominate the others.  Besides, it resented the upstart German Navy and was engaged in a naval arms race for almost two decades.  Turkey was afraid of Russia and Germany also saw it as a natural counterbalance (at least a distraction) from the Russian steamroller.

God d*mn anarchist G. Princep killed Archduke Fedinand because he was a moderate and may have granted the Serbs partial independence, which was short of the full independence he wanted.  The anarchists are as naive today as they were back then.  They think the world would be a better place without .gov.  Well, the only way to have no .gov is if the Christ Spirit was within us all.  Since that's not likely at the present, the removal of .gov will result in Somalian style warlordism.  The guy with the most guns and most gun fighters win.  No thanks.

Looks like Hiroshima before and after the nuke. Crazy stuff.



 

Info Here

I have WW1 in Color, it's a great documentary. It's only a 2 1/2 hour film, so it's obviously condensed, considering how big WW1 was, but it really makes the Great War look and feel real as opposed to black and white film.

TaG

No, this looks worse. Much, much worse. Hiroshima still looked like a city after the A-bomb. A burned-out, leveled city, but a city nonetheless.

Verdun looks like the surface of the moon after getting shelled a million times.

The Great War was the death of one world and the birth of another, but it's history is largely forgotten.

Wait a bit, I'll dig up some of my western front tour pix

My favorite books on the war are long out of print.  I've been collecting anything I can find on the war for years, the wife is very understanding and the pile is pretty big.

There's a charming little memoir I've got a copy of that can be found for free on Project Gutenberg.. "Between the Lines" by Boyd Cable.    It's a pseudonym I'm guessing.

And hey... For the, "it's a small world" folks... Pick up Graves' "Goodbye to All That", and Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel".  

1918 Ludendorff Offensive.  German last ditch attack.  Graves and the Brits fall back under heavy attack.  Graves spins up a rude propaganda record on the phonograph and departs.  Some time later, Junger and his storm troops evidently find that very bunker.  Junger has a seat to rest, spins up a waiting phonograph, and is assaulted with a particularly offensive recorded insult.  He sweeps the phonograph to the floor.  

I've got a big pile of history books written during the war too, from big coffee table books to diplomatic editions.  The most telling thing when reading them is that they had really no idea what was going on.  The closer they were chronologically to the events being described, the thicker the haze.  

The "German Atrocities" sections are always vivid and dramatic.  Ooooh, the dastardly Hun and all.

The ground all down the Western Front, but particularly around Verdun and the Somme is still incredibly scarred almost a hundred years later, and one could almost walk from Belgium to Switzerland, stepping on nothing but gravestones and monuments.

There are a lot of both.  It's absolutely overwhelming.  Gettysburg every acre.

One of my favorite monuments is the Welsh Memorial in Mametz Wood on the Somme battlefield.  It's the Welsh dragon with tangles of barbed wire in his claws.  


Another favorite that I don't think I have my own picture of is the monument to the French 69th Infantry Division on Hill 304, Le Mort Homme ("The Dead Man", ie : "Dead Man's Hill"), at Verdun.

The hill actually had that name long before the war, but it was the site of incredible back-and-forth fighting throughout the Battle of Verdun.  It is said that twelve meters were shaved off the top.  

During the Battle of Verdun, the motto of the French general who "saved" it was, "Ils ne passeront pas!", "They will not pass!"

On the monument, the figure of Death is standing, holding and draped in the Tricolor, with the words, "Ils n’ont pas passe".  "They did not pass."  In that place, on that hill, it is one of the most powerful monuments I've ever seen.

"The Lost Generation",  I believe they've been called.

You are how old

"Pals Battalions".  Never heard 'em called Friendlies.

The experience of 1 July, 1916 really spoiled that whole idea, yea.

The lost generation is a term more accurately used to describe the young people of the 20s.

"The world breaks everyone. Those that it does not break it kills..."

What were the rotations like? I mean how much time would a soldier be placed on the front line for before being rotated out?  It just seems amazing that you wouldn't have men completely broken after some of that fighting.

DT.

You might want to look up the history of Persia.....by any other name, blah, blah, blah...its still Persia. That culture is pretty resilient.

I could have put Byzantium (meaningless academic phrase) vs the Sasanids its still really Rome vs Persia.





 

Actually, the real cause of the slaughter in World War I was France's total fear of a repeat of 1870.  After the near victory by the Germans averted by the quick action of relatively junior officers at First Marne in 1914, the French Goverment was afraid to engage in manuver warfare with Germany.

British officers tried repeatedly in 1915 to get the French to agree to deliberatly open gaps in the line and abandon obsolete fortresses to bring back manuver warfare. It cost Sir John French his job as BEF commander.

That was it.  No big mystery.

Trench warfare, apart from the occasional seige of a city or fortress, did not exist on the Russian front.  The war was still catistrophic for Russia because of Russias severe lack of modern weapons, resulting in frequent use of human wave attacks, and their repeated failure to compete with the German officers in regarding manuver warfare.  The Germans were only hobbled by the need to keep building railroads behind them and their insistance for two years in trying to knock France out of the war first rather than the less prepared Russians.

BTW, the famous expression we all know, "over the top", was phrase created from WW1. Coming from troops "going over the top", meaning leaving the trenches to attack the enemy across open ground.

Depended quite a bit.  General Petain was known for setting up a well run rotation system that essentially drew the entire army through the Battle of Verdun at one time or another for precisely that reason.  

Men were broken though.  Entire armies were broken.  The French quite famously had many units that refused to attack.  They weren't cowards or deserters, they would defend to the death, but they were damned if they'd be led into another meatgrinder by idiots for no results.  That's why you don't see many French offensives after say the middle of '17 or so.

This is the first war where large numbers of psychological casualties were recognized too, and it formed the basis for most of what we know today about PTSD, traumatic head injury (the metal helmet was scoffed at on all sides as medieval in 1914, by 1917 they were nearly universal), and heck... Plastic surgery and a thousand other subjects.

I've heard a pretty good argument that the First world war didn't actually end until the Soviet Union fell in 1989. That you couldn't distinguish World war 2 and the Cold war from the Great war because of how closely tied they were to World war 1.

You really would have to resign yourself to the fact that you were the walking dead.  If you had any hope for life you'd go nuts.  The problem is how do you avoid becoming suicidal or sadistic under such circumstances?  There is war and then there is the absolute slaughter of WWI.  I don't care how tough a guy is being faced with those kind of conditions would push any man right to the breaking point and probably past it.  



Be hard as an officer or nco to order men to their deaths like that.  Watching the youtube video on the Last Day of the War and seeing how an American General ordered men to take a town just a few hours before the war ended, when they knew it was going to end just to take a bath...well, I don't know if I could have followed that order as it lead to the deaths of 300 guys who didn't need to die.  I don't blame the French really at all.

Damn. 40 million arty rounds in one battle?

Yes, and you wouldn't believe how many liberal professors I had in college who thought America was foolish for trying to be a World Super Power and that we'd be so much better off if we were like small european nations.  I had a number of them ask "why does the United States of America feel it needs to be number one?"

We aint done yet either.  Iraq, the middle east, afghanistan...  How much of that can be blamed on issues related to the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after the war?

Something like 112,676 arty rounds a day.  Figure half of those are incoming. I can't even wrap my mind around that. Incredible.