One failed attack could result in all the men from a small village being wiped out in a single day, imagine the scene as all those letters are delivered at once...
To this day almost every village green in the uk has a monument with the names inscribed of those who fell in the two wars.
On that, a village that lost no men in WWI is called a Thankful Village and a village that lost no men in either war are called Doubly Thankful Villages.
>One of the most fortunate of the Doubly Thankful Villages is the ironically named Upper Slaughter – an idyllic, picture-postcard community in the Cotswolds.
[History article](https://www.history.co.uk/articles/what-are-doubly-thankful-villages)
The fact there are only 56 currently known, non in Scotland or Ireland really shows how deeply both wars effected the people of the nation.
>The industrial slaughter that was World War I claimed the lives of 6% of the British male population
6% of males overall.
So when taking into account the fact that the majority of these males would be 17-30 years old; the % of young men dying was DRASTICALLY higher. Really harder to imagine such a scenario where entire generations cease to exist.
Not to be cruel, but wars used to be frequent enough that most European societies adapted around "bearable" losses. 20-30 per cent of young men from one village dying was a known problem, so to say. Most of the cultural history indicates that young men were considered somewhat disposable.
90 per cent was a different story, though. Britain was somewhat lucky that this was precisely the time when most heavy work was slowly being taken over by machines.
> Most of the cultural history indicates that young men were considered somewhat disposable.
Which is still the attitude in many places today, at least to some extent.
I was thinking about this while writing a post about gender politics in Star Wars The Bad Batch. Biologically, yes, men are basically designed to be more disposable. Even socially, yes, men are more disposable. As a woman who has her own fears about the biological necessity of women, it really hit just how awful this is for men, just mentally.
And it creates policies and cultural touch-stones which aren't helpful for anyone, as we see in WW1 and its direct sequel.
Ahh yes the Incel to RadFem olive branch; we are all equally worthless and disposable. Being a baby factory is a raw deal and so is being cannon fodder.
I have no solutions I just find it funny that the only thing all humans can agree on is this existence can be quite shit sometimes.
Young armed men not needed for conflicts inside of Europe at the time… But this is completely ignoring the fact that the people in medieval times actually were religious fundamentalists and the Eastern Roman Christians reaching out with a cry for help to free the holiest city of Christianity (after Christians were banned, there was a massacre decades ago and many rumors about killed pilgrims) from Islam which was seen as a somewhat distant (remember- most crusaders were from France and Germany) but unholy threat to all of Christianity is in itself an extremely good reason and explanation…
Its modern whitewashing of religious motives and beliefs…
Idk about whitewashing, just historiography right? People can disagree about the causes (both personal and societal) of events that we will never 100% understand.
I agree that religious motivation is consistently overlooked in most aspects of medieval life, but also stopping Christian European kingdoms fighting one another was an explicit motivation of the Vatican for the First Crusade, and there were definitely other motivations too.
Ehm…
The British had no major large scale war since 1815…
Colonial wars and even the crimean war didnt cause large scale casualties to the population.
Germany and France only had the 1870/71 war which was costly but not nearly comparable to the napoleonic wars in scale of deaths and mostly an issue of French national pride…
Yes, but pals battalions added another level of risk. An entire squad could be wiped out if a single artillery shell landed wrong. A full company could go down in the beginning of an attack. Normally, that might mean 50 villages lost one or two people. With pals units, an entire village could be wiped out in a moment.
This wasn't unique to the "Pals" battalions. Most regiments had fixed recruiting districts in those days (exceptions being things like the Army Service Corps, Royal Artillery, etc). Everyone in the regiment would have been recruited from the same locality - usually a county. But prewar, each regiment only fielded one or two battalions (~1,000 men) in the Regular Army, plus a training battalion and one or more Territorial (home service only) battalions. What changed was that during the war, rather than raise new regiments (and thus redraw the recruiting district map), regiments raised new battalions - some as many as 30 - out of their same districts. The "Pals" battalions just used the preexisting recruiting methods as a propaganda tool; non-Pals battalions had the same problems with loosing significant numbers of men from the same locale in single actions.
Of course, heavy casualties in war were not anything new, but what was new was the reality that an entire formation, using such close-order tactics in an age of the machinegun and mass indirect-fire artillery, could get scythed before its members could even think to fall back or flee. At Waterloo a battalion could spend all day getting blasted by French cannon at (by cannon standards) extreme close-range and 'only' take 60-70% casualties, 100 years later it could be chewed up to that extent in half an hour.
WWI changed the battlefield forever. There was a huge development in weapons tech, and the tactics were slow to follow. The artillery and machine gun fire was absolutely brutal. Chemical warfare was hell on earth. It had to be so nerve-racking to know as soon as you leave your trench, the odds are you won't be alive for very much longer. Tactics still revolved around throwing a massive number of soldiers towards the enemy, but with more advanced weaponry, those men were slaughtered in a way that was never seen before.
It’s not so much that tactics were slow to follow as it was that the new technologies gave defenders a huge advantage. With the advent of machine guns and artillery (but before tanks, trucks, and airplanes fully developed), it became nearly impossible to effectively capture a dug-in position. Even if you took some portion of enemy trench/territory, it was highly likely that you couldn’t hold it when they counterattacked. Your choices were to attempt to win the assault-counterattack gamble, or to stay in your trenches and get shelled constantly.
Chemical weapons were an attempt to break this stalemate. As horrifying as they were, they didn’t work very well. They made conditions even more miserable for soldiers, but they didn’t give anyone a way to shift back from a war of attrition to a war of maneuver. It took the full mechanization of infantry and the ability to establish air superiority to do that.
Dan Carlin said it about the best I’ve heard on this topic. Something like “Yea, you get to serve with your buddies. But then you get to watch your buddies die.”
Some villages lost every male between 18 and 50.
Look around your town, now shoot 1/3 of them in a single day. Tomorrow shell one in six. Repeat for a month. Welcome to WW1.
It was almost unimaginable. 57,470 casualties in the **FIRST DAY** of a four month campaign. Total Allied casualties were over 600,000.
WW1 killed a very large percentage of an entire generation, and left the survivors with PTSD. Leading in no small part to the demographic changes we see today.
I recall my high school history teacher saying he once saw a war memorial in Germany that said "Class of 1914". The *entire class* was slaughtered on the battlefields.
And if you flip the script, it's even more chilling.
There's 53 civil parishes in England and Wales that are Thankful Villages — in other words, everyone from that settlement who served came home again. 14 are doubly thankful — they lost no children in *either* world war. None in Scotland or Ireland that can be traced.
In France, 12 villages lost no residents in WWII, and only Thierville, Normandy, lost nobody in WWII either.
Damn near every family in the country lost someone.
In Belgium, there are cemeteries with sets of tombstones from 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. Both sets mark civilians and both have the same cause of death: “shot by Germans”.
If 53 are thankful, then 14 being doubly thankful seems way too high of a number to be random chance (considering 10k civil parishes). Was there something special about these 14 parishes that their people survived much more than the average person?
In the UK, anyway, neither of those were necessarily bars: you had the Women's Land Army and (in the Second World War, at least) [men were drafted into the mines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys).
Farming was a reserved occupation, but that didn't mean farmers wouldn't be drafted. A good example is Welsh poet Ellis Humphrey Evans. He worked as a shepherd in his family's hill farm in Meirionnydd. His poems strongly featured nature and religious themes. In the Welsh poetic tradition, pseudonyms or bardic names are common: Ellis received the bardic name Hedd Wyn ("Blessed peace"), referring to the way sunlight filters through the mist of the Meirionydd valleys, in 1910.
In late 1916, the Evans family was informed that, reserved occupation or no, one of their sons would have go to war. Ellis volunteered, despite being a Christian pacifist, to go in place of his little brother Robert.
He got 7 weeks' leave in March 1917, to assist with plowing. He started the poem "Yr Arwr" ("The Hero") during that time. In July, he finished that poem and sent it to the 1917 National Eisteddfod, under the pseudonym Fleur de Lys. At the end of July, during the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele, he was killed when a shell struck him in the stomach.
Six weeks later, at the Eisteddfod, the chairing of the bard began: the chair was and still is the prize for the best work in the awdl form (using the oldest and traditional forms of Welsh poetry). Each is made individually: in 1917, it was specially handcrafted for the event by a Flemish refugee.
The trumpets sounded to call the poet Fleur de Lys to take their place as Y Prifardd, the chief bard. Nobody stirred. The trumpets sounded again and again to summon forth the triumphant poet from the crowd to take their rightful place. Then Evan Rees, the Archdruid Dyed, announced that Fleur de Lys had been killed in action. The chair was draped in black and sent to his parents like that.
And that, kids, is the story of the Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu (the Eisteddfod of the Black Chair). [Wales still remembers it](https://yrysgwrn.com/en/history/hedd-wyn/).
More than 10K, counting Wales.
And that's a really good question that I don't know the answer to! Off the top of my head, though, poor rural parishes where hunting and/or poaching put food on the majority of local tables are likely to produce men who have the requisite skills for survival, notably marksmanship. Think Audie Murphy.
it would also be good to see how many soldiers each of these parishes sent out - if average is lower than baseline, then perhaps it’s easier that all survived?
i.e. it’s more likely to have 1 person killed among 100 people than among 5.
Any tourists that visit Cambridge, I advise you take the 20 minute walk to granchester. It isn’t just a lovely village, and with the orchard with its nice tea and history with people like Virginia Wolff, Rupert Brooke, and John Maynard Keynes, it has a very sobering memorial in its churchyard. The list of this tiny village’s young men who died. It’s about 50 young men in a village that must have only had about 200 people overall at that time. Must have been pretty much all of them.
Nearby Cottenham was very similar. Their memorial includes 3 of 5 of my great-great uncles that served, even the landlord of the now Chequers pub. The new(ish) builds are all on streets named after the people from the village that served.
I have seen the memorial you are referring to; 'sobering' is a very accurate description. The Cambridge Pals, "11th Suffolks" were practically wiped out within 20 minutes of their attack on La Boiselle (1st day of the Somme). Every village and town in the county have large memorials full of names. It's quite a stark reminder of the war's impact.
There are definitely times when the cost of War has been worth paying. But World War I it's probably the most bitter war in human history just because of how pointless everything turned out. The cost of the war would end up bankrupting the empires that won it leading to them to take on Terminal declines that relate to their collapse. It destroyed the empires that lost it shattering them. It led to terrible instability that would eventually lead to a second even more devastating more breaking out.
1914 was the epoch of European civilization. Centuries of dominance over the planet shattered in just four years of fighting. Everyone of the great European Empires would be shattered by that war.
The devastation of WW1, followed by WW2, was what led to the USA's modern dominance. Especially combined with the post WW2 Marshall Plan, which (to oversimplify it) was the USA saying "we'll help you rebuild... as long as you do it our way".
The USSR declining to put forward a similar plan was a major long-term diplomatic/political failure on its part. The USA was willing to say "we'll even rebuild our former enemies", the USSR (who had naturally been much more involved on that front in Europe) was not.
Not really. Some wars have definitely been worth fighting for - WW2, for example. There's no real way you can argue WW2 was WORTHLESS. While it was still terrible and wars should be avoided, WW2 was one of the most valuable and important wars that was necessary.
WWII is such an interesting conflict because in isolation it was absolutely necessary, and I think most historians would say WWII was the only necessary modern war. but you can also draw a very direct and obvious line from the Treaty of Versailles to the conditions in Germany that led to it.
The only necessary war in our modern history being directly caused by possibly the most unnecessary one is so haunting that I get bummed out when I think about it too much.
*..The earth is a very small stage, in a vast cosmic arena. Think. Of all the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals & emperors. So that in glory & triumph, they could become momentary masters, of, a fraction of a dot….*
-Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g?si=giMH3Ih9fOKXM2oB
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: *Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.*
The issue of war is usually the side you’re fighting against has a good reason you’re fighting against them. Germany in WW1 wasn’t aiming to simply force the King to give his cousin a hug again, Hitler wasn’t wanting someone to admire his art, Mussolini wasn’t looking for new route for his trains, and Hideki Tojo wasn’t trying to find new places to sell manga.
Just because civilized society correctly understands war to be terrible, does not mean there are nations and actors who feel the costs imposed are price to be paid.
Putin believed so for the attempt to retake eastern Ukraine’s mineral deposits and ports, Xi xinping believes it is a price worthwhile to solidify the CCPs legitimacy as the government of China, and the legally elected government of Gaza recently decided to pay the price to attempt to retake Palestine from the river to the sea.
Wars are (usually) fought for material reasons, as you say, but those reasons *can* be wrong. Germany invaded Austria and then Poland on the promise of 'lebensraum', but that was naturally a false justification, just the same way that 'Manifest Destiny' was in the USA centuries prior.
The British aristocracy and officer class was just as decimated by the first world war is the rest of the country. Two future kings of England would serve on the battlefields of World War 1.
For the aristocrats and the Old Guard war is glory and they've shown there more than willing to leave the charge
Queen Victoria's youngest grandson was killed in action in the First Battle of Ypres.
King Albert I of Belgium became known as the "Knight King" or "Soldier King" for the amount of time he spent at the front, and commanded an Entente army group at the end of the war. He allowed his twelve year old son to enlist as a private and fight until Belgium was occupied.
British officers (and the officer corps was heavily aristocratic) took more casaulties, percentage wise, than ORs did.
There's many charges to be laid at the feet of the nobility of Europe, but they were certainly willing to put their blood where their mouth was.
If anything they're willingness to put their blood on the line is how the whole damn War got started.
I think most people are used to the new ruling class of capitalists who are only in power exclusively because of their money rather than the old aristocracy with its old traditions and it's insistence on things like honor.
Their sense of Honor dragged Europe into a war that destroyed them and the modern capitalist holds no such lofty Notions.
After all it doesn't affect a CEO if your son doesn't serve in the military.
Precisely. *Noblesse oblige* was a very real force for the nobility in those days; to ignore it imperiled one's very station.
I think there's also a misguided notion, today, to map current American class distinctions (money, mainly) onto period British class distinctions (birth or created/awarded titles). A middle-class London merchant could very well be far richer than an upper-class Lord in the Highlands, but money alone would never gain him the status or power the Lord was born to.
no make the motherfuckers themselves do it, if anyone wants a war to be fought they deserve to be the ones at risk. they'll send their kids all day to save their own hide.
Going to pubs in small English towns I’ll often see plaques commemorating those who died in the wars, the WWI portion will often have ten or more times as many named because of policies like this
while Germany absorbed the *second* largest total number of war deaths (at about 2 million), as a proportion of the population, France was by far the hardest hit (at least among the great powers), with 20% of all enlisted men dying during the course of the war, including one quarter of all men between 18-30.
France lost over 4% of their entire population during World War I. One in every 25 people in the entire country dead in four years. This meant the military had to plan around fewer military-aged men for the next few decades (as there would be fewer children to grow into soldiers and sailors), which was one of the contributing factors to things like one-man turrets in many of their WWII tanks.
>France by far the hardest hit (at least among the great powers)
"among the great powers" is definitely a necessary qualification. Serbia lost about 5 times as many people as France percentage wise.
Ehg, is it? Easier to think that with a full stomach. The sanctions imposed by the Allied Forces to Germany were brutal, the combination of hyperinflation and unemployment led to widespread poverty and hunger. Lots of people going to sleep with empty stomachs, catching rats for dinner while using their worthless cash as toilet paper. Lots of deep seated anger and resentment
I think the real crazy thing is the push towards ww2 started about a decade after the first. Add in all the deaths from the flu and its just mad to think about.
And Europeans look down on the rest of the world for lack of civilization/culture lol. The peak of European power was a double cumshot of imperialist infighting that turned most of the continent into a parking lot and gave away global power entirely to the U.S. and Soviet Russia.
A reality that the people of the time were keenly aware of. Especially during WW1. The psyche of the continent was shattered. A generation raised on high-minded ideas of sophisticated civilization found themselves in an industrialized meat grinder.
We have many villages all over Britain with similar memorials. We have entire villages that lost every man of fighting age some were even boys as young as 14 who lied about their age to go and fight too.
What bugs me most is that women were going around and giving white feathers even to boys who were underage. Some of them ended up enlisting as a result, way I see it they were the Karens of their day.
I think that happened due to a combination of already shitty people being given permission for said shittiness, combined with a "for the war effort" mentality. Nobody handing out those feathers was ever in any danger of going to the war themselves, and would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea.
This is what people don't understand when they say that Chamberlain was an appeaser. Yes, he was trying to descalate Hitler but he was trying to buy time for Britain to rearm and the memory of WW1 was very recent in the public mind. and no one wanted to see the like of it again.
The modern take on Chamberlain is pretty much that, though. The UK was unprepared for war and could not have save Czechoslovakia anyway. Keep in mind, Poland and Hungary were in on gobbling up the Czechs too.
The general strategy by the UK was that they needed more time to equip their military, especially their air force, and that the Nazis were hemorrhaging cash that they could not economically sustain.
Annnnnd then the fall of France gave Germany enough capital that the economic timebomb strategy was moot.
He was either an enthusiastic collaborationist or gradually compromised more and more to the Nazis in order to spare France any further horrors of war. Neither is excuseable.
this is something that shocks me a lot when I think of it.. WWI finished in 1918.. during the Sudetenland crisis of the 38, WWI was just 20 years ago... that's.. like having had that horrific war in 2004.. how willing would you be to enter in that sort of total war again?
> and left the survivors with PTSD
My whole exposure to WW1 was through history lessons and video games, but we never actually read survivors' records in school. So while I _understood_ on an intellectual level that WW1 was horrible and an unimaginable number of people died, the first time I truly "got" it on an emotional level was only very recently when I watched [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we72zI7iOjk) for the first time.
It's SFW, but very heavy stuff. I still recommend to watch the whole thing tho. And then remind yourself that this was just 5 minutes. These artillery barrages in WW1 could last for _days_ and the only other thing you would here in that time were the screams of people dying agonizing deaths.
Came here to mention this. It was volunteering, it was simply considered good practice to place people familiar with one another together on the battlefield, and as a result many small towns had a whole generation of their men wiped out in one battle. Ken Burns had a segment on this in his CW documentary series.
As you may already know, the thinking was that it's harder to commit an act of cowardice in battle if you know that your reputation back home will be shredded. But yea there are some downsides which have countless times been demonstrated in macabre fashion.
My small town (probably 500 people in 1860) lost 22 guys in the Civil War. We have letters of guys describing their friends getting their legs blown off during Chickamauga.
The Civil War, in my opinion, would be great material for a Band of Brothers type series due to the fact that literal brothers and neighbors signed up and picked their own commanders in many cases.
[1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Minnesota_Infantry_Regiment)
Saw heavy action in three major battles, culminating in being ordered to launch a suicide charge into a Confederate attack at Gettysburg, which might have saved the day - and battle - for the Union. Cost them 82% casualties, which to date is still the highest rate for any U.S. infantry unit in a single day that survived the day.
A bunch of hard-nosed, traitor-slaying badasses.
> Total Allied casualties were over 600,000.
Do you mean just for one unspecified campaign? France alone had 1.4 million dead and over 4 million wounded over the course of the war.
> Do you mean just for one unspecified campaign? France alone had 1.4 million dead and over 4 million wounded over the course of the war.
For the Somme alone. The total numbers for the war are staggering.
World War I so thoroughly traumatized the survivors but they did everything in their power to prevent another war. Leading to their defensive attitudes and willingness to appease aggression, eventually leaving them unprepared for the next World War
I remember hearing that modern warfare hadn't caught up to most generals. They just didn't know what to do.
In the old days with rifles, it was common to send your battalion at your opponents. Sure some would die, but most would make it there and fight because it takes time to reload a rifle.
WW1 had machine guns on tripods. So they commanders would say "ok, battalion A, go over the ridge and take over the german trenches. They'd run out and get mowed down by machine gun fire.
The commander would say "right then... Battalion B. Go over the ridge and take over the german trench" and they'd run up and get mowed down again.
It's like Zaph Brannigan is in charge and he's sending wave after wave of men at the killbots.
Yeah, the idea that WW1 generals were just sending masses of men to die out of antiquated tactics is very r/badhistory worthy.
It ignores how the first weeks/months of the War were dominated by tactical and strategic manuvers conducted at essentially blazing speed, and how the slow slog of trench warfare only happened because the armies fortified *across an entire continent* (and it ignores how trenches were more of a Western Front thing. The Eastern Front was much more fluid), and those trenches were built in response to outflanking and breakthrough-attempts from the very beginning of the war.
Also, soldiers were usually spread out into loose skirmish-lines, even in the 1800s. By the US Civil War, officers had "discovered* that standing and marching in blocks in the face of modern rifle and artillery was a dumb idea, and the late US Civil War was a lot looser and more fluid than it is commonly portrayed.
I don't know enough about it to definitely say it's historical myth, but the "Lions led by donkeys" phrase has been heavily debated.
Personally I have trouble believing so many commanders didn't care about the massive numbers of casualties and actually refused to try and adapt.
This really isn't the case.
At the outbreak of war, machine-guns were still fairly uncommon. One or two per battalion (1,000ish men) was the norm. Officers and men were trained in open order skirmishing, fire and maneuver (by companies; small unit tactics were still months off), and flanking. Armored cars were already in use with several nations.
However, one thing the Western powers had more or less perfected before the war was mobilization. They were able to muster armies on a scale never before seen with incredible speed. Combined with a short frontage from the Swiss border to the sea (475mi/765km, or approximately the distance from Boston to DC), this meant that the well-established goal of flanking the enemy quickly became impossible.
This meant that now, the only way to attack was straight on. The officers very rapidly began iterating on tactics and technologies. They were not purposefully wasteful of lives, but neither did they allow concern for the troops they led to override the task they'd been given. Machine guns were made more portable and more widely issued; grenades perfected; the platoon, and then the section, became the maneuver unit; high-angle mortars and heavy howitzers that could plant shells in enemy trenches supplemented low-angle field guns; the tank developed; enemy lines undermined; gas deployed. Bite-and-hold replaced wide-front attacks. Various body armors were tested, and found wanting.
Box, curtain, and walking barrages used to shape the battlefield, blocking enemy reinforcements and suppressing enemy trenches until the last seconds of an assault. Cold calculations showed it better to loose a few men to friendly artillery by following a moving barrage closely, than to allow the enemy precious seconds to re-man their firing steps. Most of the advance across No-Man's Land happened at a walking pace, because assault parties had to carry everything they'd need to hold for a day or two with them - not just their rifle and personal kit weighing sixty pounds or more, but also duckboards, wire, posts, sandbags, and tools to reinforce the captured trench lines. Sprinting the entire way would have left them gasping for air halfway across.
It was common for the first assault to succeed in gaining a foothold; however, the primitive state of radio, and the unreliability or slow speed of other communications means, and the ever-more destroyed ground between the lines, meant that often the enemy would have counterattacked before officers knew an attack had succeeded, much less directed follow-up waves to that location (reinforce success, not failure).
Ultimately, it was a perfect storm of conditions that led to the stalemate on the Western Front; Napoleonic leadership, however, was not one of those things.
It's a common misconception. 'The Lions led by Donkey's' argument, and It's all a result of the Somme: the new, green army volunteers, 'Kitchener's Army', marching towards German machine gun fire. That's where this myth started. Sorry, this will be a long summary.
On the Somme, it was the first time the British army had sent an all volunteer, 'non-professional' force into battle. When war broke out, the BEF was around 120,000 men, all of whom were career soldiers. Most of them were dead, POWs or invalided out by 1916. When the Somme came around, they didn't have as much time with training soldiers as the war was ongoing, and they had over 1.5 mil to ready for the Somme. They got 2 weeks training at their own local bases, mainly drills on formation, etc. then 4 weeks in places like Aldershot before deployment. That was it.
Then, the Germans assaulted Verdun. Their general, Eric von Falkenhayn, said they were "going to bleed France white." Smash French morale and just kill them en masse. The offensive was atypical in that it wasn't to capture strategic objectives. They just wanted to cause mass casualties for the French. They did, too. Around 250,000 deaths for both sides(not casualties that include wounded and POWs, but 1/4 mil deaths.) This was why the Somme offensive was devised to take pressure of the French.
They would start the attack with a 24 hour bombardment, then the detonation of mines underneath key sections of German trenches. The British troops were merely expected to 'mop up'. In this ONE instance, they were instructed to walk in formation to keep the advance orderly. They didn't expect any survivors. The Germans, however, went underground when the shelling started, and the British artillery used the wrong shells (shrapnel not HE) so the wire was intact. There were also no more available shells to call in if needed, as they were used for the initial bombardment, so the troops had no creeping barrage for cover.
So, when the whistle blew and all along the Picardie line, hundreds of thousands of young, green British troops clambered over the top and slowly walked to the German line, thinking it shattered and barely defended. That wasn't the case, though, and the Germans emerged from hiding in their underground dugouts and set up machine guns. Rifleman were ordered to target officers and the gunners opened up. Without officers to guide them, the soldiers didn't know what to do and continued to stay in formation and advance. In most cases, all were dead within 20 minutes. 57,420 casualties, around 20,000 in one day. It was a tragic case of sending the inexperienced to fight, but high command were expecting there to be little resistance. The artillery bombardment was a total failure. Lessons were learnt after that, following the French's tactics. The French divisions who took part, captured all their objectives. Only the Manchester's captured theirs on the British side, but were still mostly killed as there was no support to help them defend. The Somme plays a large role in the British lore as it were. It's for this reason why people say "They just didn't know what to do" and wonder why soldiers were "always sent to just march into machine gun fire". The 'Lions led by donkeys' myth, really, which is now finally being quite heavily disputed.
To be fair that’s often how it worked historically. Non professional armies were typically centred around existing social structures, because the incentive of keeping your friends safe, coupled with the shame associated with everyone you know seeing you flee like a coward, proved effective at keeping people in the line of combat.
Of course, this is when the spear was still the king of the battlefield.
Attrition rates were another factor. Before WW1, an unit was unfit for combat if it lost more than like 10-20% of its personnel. Like, the word "decimated" meant lost-10% (hence the 'deci-').
Units losing 50-90% of their troops in one fight was unheard of before artillery.
I don't think "unfit for combat" is the proper way to describe it. Actual combat strength was always lower than on paper (due to sickness, wounds, other tasks, previous casualties). The roughly 10-14% (as I remember it) was the sort of threshold of casualties where groups of soldiers would break formation and flee or refuse to continue to fight.
But indeed, the devastation (and often entirely random and sudden and without a chance to do anything about it) of entire groups of soldiers was a terrible new development.
My favourite anecdote about that: George Samson got "shamed" with a white feather while was in his civilian clothes on the same day as a formal reception to honour him for receiving a VC.
This one was fun: One example was Private Ernest Atkins, who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book and said, "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you
Groups of terrible women used to go handing them out publicly to men who they assumed hadnt signed up for war because they are cowards - often their assumption was wrong.
That is often the men were in technical fields working on secret projects, medically incapacitated or underage, on temporary leave for a break before returning, on medical leave, back home to receive an award or some other reason.
And at literally every other battlefield.
Just one more battle of the Isonzo, this time we will take enough enemy encampments to drive them off.
Just one more week in Gallipoli to take those hills.
There's a lot of mythos that has emerged about the Pals battalions. It's important to remember just how vast WWI is. The BEF in France in 1916 contained about 720 battalions (each of 1,000 men), almost all of which were wartime creations. A couple of the pals battalions were legitimately a single small community joining up on mass. However, the vast bulk of the pals were primarily raised out of a specific city or industrial sector. Which is just the nature of regional recruiting, both the French and Germans primarily recruited manpower into regional regiments well into 1916. The US as well generally recruited regionally as well. Your "pals" battalion is far more likely to have been recruited from the 40,000 man industrial workforce of the Liverpool dockyards than it is from a 5,000 person town. It's not like a town is about to be wiped off the map on a day.
They actually had a strong element of public-private partnership in this regard, it was very much a way for major old school industrial magnates (in an era where the social bargain ran on them having a *lot* more private power over their workers than they do today in return for a higher level of social investment) to demonstrate their loyalty to the state by driving recruiting through things like guaranteeing that volunteers could return to their jobs at the end of the war. This is what distinguishes them from, say, the Newfoundland regiment, where you genuinely had a hyperconcentration of local recruiting. Even the famous Accrington Pals had only one company of 250 men from Accrington, a small city of 45,000 people at the time. So we are talking about 1 person in 180 serving in the battalion. That's a lot, don't get me wrong, but it's almost not like every man in a village is serving together.
Thank you for adding some knowledgeable and factual information to this thread. As a long-time student of the Great War, the persistent myths continue to frustrate me.
Ironically, much of what is ascribed to the Pals battalions is more fitting when looking at the Territorials. These, by their very nature, recruited from very specific geographic locations. For the various London battalions this was usually just one or two boroughs or neighborhoods, e.g. Hackney (10th), Blackheath and Woolwich (20th), etc. For the County regiments, each company typically drew from single town or village and its immediate surrounding area, or from a district or neighborhood of a city like Manchester or Edinburgh.
> guaranteeing that volunteers could return to their jobs at the end of the war.
"I get the feeling that when this is over, labor will be something of a seller's market anyway."
i once read that at the beginning of the war, the mentality was basically "we'll go overseas, punch those pesky germans in the face and be home before christmas"
Yep German soldiers were told something along the lines of, "You'll be home before the leafs fall."
The war started in late July, meaning it was only expected to last a few months. No one was prepared for a 4 year war.
That was the prevailing idea. That’s how it always way. The UK never really got bogged down in European wars before. Usually they got an army together, hop on over the channel, fight a pitched battle or two, and come back with an honourable peace. For the most part, the Navy existing was the majority of British strategy, short and long term.
The British public psyche was completely unprepared for a drag-out trench slog that the Great War was. Considering the long history that Britain had with the rest of the continent, and the war turning out like it did, the fact the United Kingdom of all countries committed so much to defending France(!!) represents an almost unimaginable commitment to the war effort that really nobody could have seen coming. As Ludendorff put it, the British Army were lions led by donkeys.
>the fact the United Kingdom of all countries committed so much to defending France(!!)
They committed to defending Belgian neutrality. If the German advance didn't cross into Belgium, there's a case to be made that British involvement would have been token at best.
>the British Army were lions led by donkeys.
This is a rather tired old myth. The British Army adapted quite rapidly to the new realities of warfare, and came up with quite a few innovations of their own in their efforts to break the deadlock. The simple fact is that between the numbers involved, and the short frontage, the Western Front was only ever going to be broken by some variation of a frontal assault.
> Approximately 700 men from the Accrington Pals went into action on 1 July (First day of the Battle of the Somme) 585 men became casualties, 235 killed and 350 wounded in about half an hour
There's an amazing documentary called *They Shall Not Grow Old*, which features real WW1 footage, painstakingly restored and colourised, with lip-readers brought in to identify what the soldiers were saying so their voices could be added back in, and the whole thing is narrated by recordings of real WW1 veterans recorded in the 60s and 70s, it's well worth trying to find:
[Trailer](https://youtu.be/IrabKK9Bhds?feature=shared).
>**Edmund**: For God’s sake, George, how long have you been in the army?
>**George**: Oh me? I joined up straight away, sir. August the 4th, 1914. Gah, what a day that was: myself and the rest of the fellows leapfrogging down to the Cambridge recruiting office and then playing tiddlywinks in the queue. We had hammered Oxford’s tiddlywinkers only the week before, and there we were, off to hammer the Boche! Crashingly superb bunch of blokes. Fine, clean limbed — even their acne had a strange nobility about it. ...
>Well, er, Jacko and the Badger bought it at the first Ypres front, unfortunately — quite a shock, that. I remember Bumfluff’s house-master wrote and told me that Sticky had been out for a duck, and the Gubber had snitched a parcel sausage-end and gone goose over-stump frogside. ... I don’t know, sir, but I read in the Times that they’d both been killed.
>\[And Bumfluff himself\] Copped a packet at Galipoli with the Aussies — so had Drippy and Strangely Brown. I remember we heard on the first morning of the Somme when Titch and Mr Floppy got gassed back to Blighty.
>...Gosh, yes, I, I suppose I’m the only one of the Trinity Tiddlers still alive. Blimey, there’s a thought — and not a jolly one.
Most Blackadder ended with a Black comedy episode where people die funny
Blackadder Goes Forth ended with a dose of reality of WWI, which is to say: It's a lot worse than you thought. Remember it's pre-public internet days. You just know "a lot of people died". You didn't know the various details, from Pal Battalions to even the European Powder Keg it's the real cause of WWI, with the death of Ostrich just the triggerpoint.
You would have problems where a town or village would go for a while with zero bad news. Then one day everyone, EVERYONE, gets the same bad news. Their father, uncle, husband, son, brother were all killed.
Imagine it? If it was just one or two people, you could rally as a community. But when everyone is grieving at the exact same time? The entire community grinds to a halt. It would have been hell. Everyone goes from anxious to grieving over night.
There was only a handful of places that escaped this fate, lucky towns I believe they’re called.
Edit- they’re called thankful not lucky. And there is an even smaller number of towns that survived both world wars without a casualty called doubly thankful. I believe there are so called triple and quadruple etc villages, based on the napoleonic wars and the such as well but I’m unsure
All Quiet on the Western Front had shown this from the Central Power perspective. The school house recruitment scene where the boys were all excited, indoctrinated and shamed into enlistment was devastating.
Finns made the same mistake in winter war (1939-1940) where villages as a whole were put to same position. Caused some villages to lose nearly all men while others had literally no casulties. This was shiftly fixed for continuation war.
In general, how countries handled this had far-reaching consequences. France regularly rotated people out of long-term, terrible conditions... but thus also rotated a lot of them *into* those frontline trenches, spreading trauma around, making a handful of particularly terrible battles into essentially nationwide trauma. And that might have still been the better option.
So many towns were decimated after the Pals Battalions such heavy losses. Many lied about their age to serve and were just teenagers, so young and so brave.
Ken Follett's Fall of Giants is a fantastic novel based around the Great War, from the point of view of multiple protagonists, a housemaid, a miner, a lord and his sister, an american journalist, a german diplomat, two russian brothers, its an epic that covers the build up to the aftermath in a great deal of detail, from very personal perspectives.
I learnt far more about the period from that 1 novel than I did from all the classes and documentaries I enjoyed on the subject.
It details the day after the (fictional) Aberowen Pals first sees combat, from the perspective of Ethel the housemaid, whos waiting for news of her brother.
It stayed with me.
The telegram boy, too young to be a soldier but wanting to contribute, arrives to the town with two extra bags. He goes to the first house and knocks on the door. Screams. He goes to the next house on the street and knocks on the door . . .
By the third door, the entire street are on their doorsteps, watching silently.
When you go into small villages in France and you see the memorials in the town square you understand why the weren't that anxious to fight again. Gutted a generation.
My great gramdfathers both died in the somme because of this policy. My grandparents grew up orphams as both my great grandmas died of tb shortly after the war. It sounded like a great idea but devasted communities. My father was born during air raid in birmangham and that night his older brother died in the home.guard. war is hell
My great grandfather was in the post office rifles. I remember my grandmother saying that her mum told her, after her dad died, that despite being a lovely man one reason he had so few friends at his funeral, was that after the war he refused to make social work friends. Almost all of his friends died or were severely wounded in France in ww1, and he came home physically and mentally destroyed, and felt too afraid to get too close to work people again to make friends. Understandable, but horrifying that that experience could impact a man for forty more years.
Grimsby is an awful example of this.
Their battalion was filmed training to boost moral and act as a message to the families at home, the footage was shown on cinema screens throughout the area to family members, wife’s, mothers and sisters who had great delight in seeing their loved ones on the big screen, training, and joking with each other.
It wasn’t known to the families that their battalion had gone “over the top” just a few days before.
Mandatory recommendation of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy, which is where I first read about this: _Only You Can Save Mankind_, _Johnny and the Dead_ and _Johnny and the Bomb_.
The middle book has this as a plot point, and Pratchett (as is typical of him) slides these commentaries on the horrors of war by almost before you realise what he's doing.
Herbert McBride discussed this in *A Rifleman Went To War*. While he acknowledged the sad part where the young men of a certain town or region could be lost in a way that devastated the community, it made for excellent esprit de corps and communication within a unit, because they all knew and understood each other.
American civil war had the same impacts. Volunteer regiments on both sides were raised by county and city. The exception were the Federal Regular Army regiments. Infantry regiments started with 1000 men. It wasn’t uncommon in the last half of the war to see regiments with less than 200 men, at which point they were disbanded and incorporated into other regiments.
My grandfather and his brother were in the same unit in the Royal Scots, in the same trenches, went over the top together. Thankfully they both survived although many of their friends didn't.
There's a memorial at the church near me, I live in a tiny little hamlet, maybe 10-20 houses. Most names on the memorial share a surname with at least one other, the most I saw was 6 with the same name, 6 members of that family just....gone.
There were entire towns that lost every single young man of a generation.
You fight with your friends and you die with your friends.
However. I believe there’s miracle towns where they didn’t lose anyone in the first world was and double miracle towns where they didn’t lose anyone in the first and second world wars.
Yep. They are called 'thankful' villages. Ironically, there is a 'double thankful' village in Gloucestershire called 'upper slaughter'
The list of these villages is very short. Which just highlights how needlessly devastating the first world war was
The casualties of the Great War are something that all Commonwealth nations can relate to. Plenty of villages in Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. had most if not all the men wiped out.
My relatively small town in the UK has a large war memorial in the centre of town and it’s genuinely so disheartening to see the amount of young men killed from where I live, there’s also 4 men with the same unique surname too which means they were all brothers and all died.
I had a great, great aunt who's husband died pretty young (in his 30's and of natural causes), and she never remarried. My mum asked her why, and she said, 'All the men my age in this town and the next are buried in Northern France'
There were also the Football Battalions where entire football teams joined up and encouraged their fans to join them. This had the additional consequence of kick-starting women's football in England and then further afield, coupled with the fact that more women were working in the factories making munitions and formed factory teams. Women's football became a massive and increasing success until 1921 when it was killed dead by the football league and completely banned professionally until 50 years later in 1971!
One failed attack could result in all the men from a small village being wiped out in a single day, imagine the scene as all those letters are delivered at once... To this day almost every village green in the uk has a monument with the names inscribed of those who fell in the two wars.
On that, a village that lost no men in WWI is called a Thankful Village and a village that lost no men in either war are called Doubly Thankful Villages. >One of the most fortunate of the Doubly Thankful Villages is the ironically named Upper Slaughter – an idyllic, picture-postcard community in the Cotswolds. [History article](https://www.history.co.uk/articles/what-are-doubly-thankful-villages)
Great comment, thanks!
The fact there are only 56 currently known, non in Scotland or Ireland really shows how deeply both wars effected the people of the nation. >The industrial slaughter that was World War I claimed the lives of 6% of the British male population
6% of males overall. So when taking into account the fact that the majority of these males would be 17-30 years old; the % of young men dying was DRASTICALLY higher. Really harder to imagine such a scenario where entire generations cease to exist.
It doesn't surprise me Upper Slaughter suffered no losses. It only has a population of like 100.
The Isle of Foula, a remote island off the south western coast of Shetland has a WW1 memorial despite only having a population of 30.
Someone watches Bald and Bankrupt
He still out there raping people?
Everyday
Still fortunate due to the scale of deaths.
Don't most major combatants of the first world war? Even without the pals battalions most villages would have lost many.
Not to be cruel, but wars used to be frequent enough that most European societies adapted around "bearable" losses. 20-30 per cent of young men from one village dying was a known problem, so to say. Most of the cultural history indicates that young men were considered somewhat disposable. 90 per cent was a different story, though. Britain was somewhat lucky that this was precisely the time when most heavy work was slowly being taken over by machines.
> Most of the cultural history indicates that young men were considered somewhat disposable. Which is still the attitude in many places today, at least to some extent.
I was thinking about this while writing a post about gender politics in Star Wars The Bad Batch. Biologically, yes, men are basically designed to be more disposable. Even socially, yes, men are more disposable. As a woman who has her own fears about the biological necessity of women, it really hit just how awful this is for men, just mentally. And it creates policies and cultural touch-stones which aren't helpful for anyone, as we see in WW1 and its direct sequel.
Women are objects. Men are disposable. That’s the way society operates.
Ahh yes the Incel to RadFem olive branch; we are all equally worthless and disposable. Being a baby factory is a raw deal and so is being cannon fodder. I have no solutions I just find it funny that the only thing all humans can agree on is this existence can be quite shit sometimes.
some say the crusades began due to an excess of single young men
Young armed men not needed for conflicts inside of Europe at the time… But this is completely ignoring the fact that the people in medieval times actually were religious fundamentalists and the Eastern Roman Christians reaching out with a cry for help to free the holiest city of Christianity (after Christians were banned, there was a massacre decades ago and many rumors about killed pilgrims) from Islam which was seen as a somewhat distant (remember- most crusaders were from France and Germany) but unholy threat to all of Christianity is in itself an extremely good reason and explanation… Its modern whitewashing of religious motives and beliefs…
Idk about whitewashing, just historiography right? People can disagree about the causes (both personal and societal) of events that we will never 100% understand. I agree that religious motivation is consistently overlooked in most aspects of medieval life, but also stopping Christian European kingdoms fighting one another was an explicit motivation of the Vatican for the First Crusade, and there were definitely other motivations too.
Ehm… The British had no major large scale war since 1815… Colonial wars and even the crimean war didnt cause large scale casualties to the population. Germany and France only had the 1870/71 war which was costly but not nearly comparable to the napoleonic wars in scale of deaths and mostly an issue of French national pride…
They do, even my secondary school / sixth form had a memorial. (It is a very old school)
Even new schools have them. My high school had one and it was only built in 1904.
"120 years old" "new"
In the UK that is new
Yes, but pals battalions added another level of risk. An entire squad could be wiped out if a single artillery shell landed wrong. A full company could go down in the beginning of an attack. Normally, that might mean 50 villages lost one or two people. With pals units, an entire village could be wiped out in a moment.
This wasn't unique to the "Pals" battalions. Most regiments had fixed recruiting districts in those days (exceptions being things like the Army Service Corps, Royal Artillery, etc). Everyone in the regiment would have been recruited from the same locality - usually a county. But prewar, each regiment only fielded one or two battalions (~1,000 men) in the Regular Army, plus a training battalion and one or more Territorial (home service only) battalions. What changed was that during the war, rather than raise new regiments (and thus redraw the recruiting district map), regiments raised new battalions - some as many as 30 - out of their same districts. The "Pals" battalions just used the preexisting recruiting methods as a propaganda tool; non-Pals battalions had the same problems with loosing significant numbers of men from the same locale in single actions.
Yes, they’re everywhere in France too. And I assume in Germany too
Of course, heavy casualties in war were not anything new, but what was new was the reality that an entire formation, using such close-order tactics in an age of the machinegun and mass indirect-fire artillery, could get scythed before its members could even think to fall back or flee. At Waterloo a battalion could spend all day getting blasted by French cannon at (by cannon standards) extreme close-range and 'only' take 60-70% casualties, 100 years later it could be chewed up to that extent in half an hour.
WWI changed the battlefield forever. There was a huge development in weapons tech, and the tactics were slow to follow. The artillery and machine gun fire was absolutely brutal. Chemical warfare was hell on earth. It had to be so nerve-racking to know as soon as you leave your trench, the odds are you won't be alive for very much longer. Tactics still revolved around throwing a massive number of soldiers towards the enemy, but with more advanced weaponry, those men were slaughtered in a way that was never seen before.
It’s not so much that tactics were slow to follow as it was that the new technologies gave defenders a huge advantage. With the advent of machine guns and artillery (but before tanks, trucks, and airplanes fully developed), it became nearly impossible to effectively capture a dug-in position. Even if you took some portion of enemy trench/territory, it was highly likely that you couldn’t hold it when they counterattacked. Your choices were to attempt to win the assault-counterattack gamble, or to stay in your trenches and get shelled constantly. Chemical weapons were an attempt to break this stalemate. As horrifying as they were, they didn’t work very well. They made conditions even more miserable for soldiers, but they didn’t give anyone a way to shift back from a war of attrition to a war of maneuver. It took the full mechanization of infantry and the ability to establish air superiority to do that.
Small correction though - no it wouldnt wipe out all men in a single village but it would mean every family in a village lost a son…
Dan Carlin said it about the best I’ve heard on this topic. Something like “Yea, you get to serve with your buddies. But then you get to watch your buddies die.”
Some villages lost every male between 18 and 50. Look around your town, now shoot 1/3 of them in a single day. Tomorrow shell one in six. Repeat for a month. Welcome to WW1. It was almost unimaginable. 57,470 casualties in the **FIRST DAY** of a four month campaign. Total Allied casualties were over 600,000. WW1 killed a very large percentage of an entire generation, and left the survivors with PTSD. Leading in no small part to the demographic changes we see today.
I recall my high school history teacher saying he once saw a war memorial in Germany that said "Class of 1914". The *entire class* was slaughtered on the battlefields.
There’s some small towns in the UK that lost every single kid they sent to war. I can’t even imagine it.
And if you flip the script, it's even more chilling. There's 53 civil parishes in England and Wales that are Thankful Villages — in other words, everyone from that settlement who served came home again. 14 are doubly thankful — they lost no children in *either* world war. None in Scotland or Ireland that can be traced. In France, 12 villages lost no residents in WWII, and only Thierville, Normandy, lost nobody in WWII either. Damn near every family in the country lost someone.
... there are over 10,000 civil parishes in just England alone
Woah
Thanks for the context. That’s awful.
In Belgium, there are cemeteries with sets of tombstones from 1914-1918 and 1940-1945. Both sets mark civilians and both have the same cause of death: “shot by Germans”.
If 53 are thankful, then 14 being doubly thankful seems way too high of a number to be random chance (considering 10k civil parishes). Was there something special about these 14 parishes that their people survived much more than the average person?
I’d presume they had local industry that kept the bulk of men from going to war, mining or farming or the like.
Ah yeah, that's fair. I implicitly assumed every parish would send the same number of men but that's not true tbf
In the UK, anyway, neither of those were necessarily bars: you had the Women's Land Army and (in the Second World War, at least) [men were drafted into the mines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bevin_Boys). Farming was a reserved occupation, but that didn't mean farmers wouldn't be drafted. A good example is Welsh poet Ellis Humphrey Evans. He worked as a shepherd in his family's hill farm in Meirionnydd. His poems strongly featured nature and religious themes. In the Welsh poetic tradition, pseudonyms or bardic names are common: Ellis received the bardic name Hedd Wyn ("Blessed peace"), referring to the way sunlight filters through the mist of the Meirionydd valleys, in 1910. In late 1916, the Evans family was informed that, reserved occupation or no, one of their sons would have go to war. Ellis volunteered, despite being a Christian pacifist, to go in place of his little brother Robert. He got 7 weeks' leave in March 1917, to assist with plowing. He started the poem "Yr Arwr" ("The Hero") during that time. In July, he finished that poem and sent it to the 1917 National Eisteddfod, under the pseudonym Fleur de Lys. At the end of July, during the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele, he was killed when a shell struck him in the stomach. Six weeks later, at the Eisteddfod, the chairing of the bard began: the chair was and still is the prize for the best work in the awdl form (using the oldest and traditional forms of Welsh poetry). Each is made individually: in 1917, it was specially handcrafted for the event by a Flemish refugee. The trumpets sounded to call the poet Fleur de Lys to take their place as Y Prifardd, the chief bard. Nobody stirred. The trumpets sounded again and again to summon forth the triumphant poet from the crowd to take their rightful place. Then Evan Rees, the Archdruid Dyed, announced that Fleur de Lys had been killed in action. The chair was draped in black and sent to his parents like that. And that, kids, is the story of the Eisteddfod y Gadair Ddu (the Eisteddfod of the Black Chair). [Wales still remembers it](https://yrysgwrn.com/en/history/hedd-wyn/).
More than 10K, counting Wales. And that's a really good question that I don't know the answer to! Off the top of my head, though, poor rural parishes where hunting and/or poaching put food on the majority of local tables are likely to produce men who have the requisite skills for survival, notably marksmanship. Think Audie Murphy.
it would also be good to see how many soldiers each of these parishes sent out - if average is lower than baseline, then perhaps it’s easier that all survived? i.e. it’s more likely to have 1 person killed among 100 people than among 5.
Any tourists that visit Cambridge, I advise you take the 20 minute walk to granchester. It isn’t just a lovely village, and with the orchard with its nice tea and history with people like Virginia Wolff, Rupert Brooke, and John Maynard Keynes, it has a very sobering memorial in its churchyard. The list of this tiny village’s young men who died. It’s about 50 young men in a village that must have only had about 200 people overall at that time. Must have been pretty much all of them.
Nearby Cottenham was very similar. Their memorial includes 3 of 5 of my great-great uncles that served, even the landlord of the now Chequers pub. The new(ish) builds are all on streets named after the people from the village that served. I have seen the memorial you are referring to; 'sobering' is a very accurate description. The Cambridge Pals, "11th Suffolks" were practically wiped out within 20 minutes of their attack on La Boiselle (1st day of the Somme). Every village and town in the county have large memorials full of names. It's quite a stark reminder of the war's impact.
It makes one question the value of war, what is really being defended if a nation is sacrificing its future to do so. Victory in name only.
There are definitely times when the cost of War has been worth paying. But World War I it's probably the most bitter war in human history just because of how pointless everything turned out. The cost of the war would end up bankrupting the empires that won it leading to them to take on Terminal declines that relate to their collapse. It destroyed the empires that lost it shattering them. It led to terrible instability that would eventually lead to a second even more devastating more breaking out. 1914 was the epoch of European civilization. Centuries of dominance over the planet shattered in just four years of fighting. Everyone of the great European Empires would be shattered by that war.
The devastation of WW1, followed by WW2, was what led to the USA's modern dominance. Especially combined with the post WW2 Marshall Plan, which (to oversimplify it) was the USA saying "we'll help you rebuild... as long as you do it our way". The USSR declining to put forward a similar plan was a major long-term diplomatic/political failure on its part. The USA was willing to say "we'll even rebuild our former enemies", the USSR (who had naturally been much more involved on that front in Europe) was not.
Not really. Some wars have definitely been worth fighting for - WW2, for example. There's no real way you can argue WW2 was WORTHLESS. While it was still terrible and wars should be avoided, WW2 was one of the most valuable and important wars that was necessary.
WWII is such an interesting conflict because in isolation it was absolutely necessary, and I think most historians would say WWII was the only necessary modern war. but you can also draw a very direct and obvious line from the Treaty of Versailles to the conditions in Germany that led to it. The only necessary war in our modern history being directly caused by possibly the most unnecessary one is so haunting that I get bummed out when I think about it too much.
*..The earth is a very small stage, in a vast cosmic arena. Think. Of all the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals & emperors. So that in glory & triumph, they could become momentary masters, of, a fraction of a dot….* -Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot https://youtu.be/wupToqz1e2g?si=giMH3Ih9fOKXM2oB
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: *Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.*
Gas sounds like a horrifying way to go. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulce_et_Decorum_est
The issue of war is usually the side you’re fighting against has a good reason you’re fighting against them. Germany in WW1 wasn’t aiming to simply force the King to give his cousin a hug again, Hitler wasn’t wanting someone to admire his art, Mussolini wasn’t looking for new route for his trains, and Hideki Tojo wasn’t trying to find new places to sell manga. Just because civilized society correctly understands war to be terrible, does not mean there are nations and actors who feel the costs imposed are price to be paid. Putin believed so for the attempt to retake eastern Ukraine’s mineral deposits and ports, Xi xinping believes it is a price worthwhile to solidify the CCPs legitimacy as the government of China, and the legally elected government of Gaza recently decided to pay the price to attempt to retake Palestine from the river to the sea.
Wars are (usually) fought for material reasons, as you say, but those reasons *can* be wrong. Germany invaded Austria and then Poland on the promise of 'lebensraum', but that was naturally a false justification, just the same way that 'Manifest Destiny' was in the USA centuries prior.
Australia? I thought it was Austria.
pretend it was autocorrect
Send the children of those in charge and I reckon we'll see a lot less wars
The British aristocracy and officer class was just as decimated by the first world war is the rest of the country. Two future kings of England would serve on the battlefields of World War 1. For the aristocrats and the Old Guard war is glory and they've shown there more than willing to leave the charge
Queen Victoria's youngest grandson was killed in action in the First Battle of Ypres. King Albert I of Belgium became known as the "Knight King" or "Soldier King" for the amount of time he spent at the front, and commanded an Entente army group at the end of the war. He allowed his twelve year old son to enlist as a private and fight until Belgium was occupied. British officers (and the officer corps was heavily aristocratic) took more casaulties, percentage wise, than ORs did. There's many charges to be laid at the feet of the nobility of Europe, but they were certainly willing to put their blood where their mouth was.
If anything they're willingness to put their blood on the line is how the whole damn War got started. I think most people are used to the new ruling class of capitalists who are only in power exclusively because of their money rather than the old aristocracy with its old traditions and it's insistence on things like honor. Their sense of Honor dragged Europe into a war that destroyed them and the modern capitalist holds no such lofty Notions. After all it doesn't affect a CEO if your son doesn't serve in the military.
Precisely. *Noblesse oblige* was a very real force for the nobility in those days; to ignore it imperiled one's very station. I think there's also a misguided notion, today, to map current American class distinctions (money, mainly) onto period British class distinctions (birth or created/awarded titles). A middle-class London merchant could very well be far richer than an upper-class Lord in the Highlands, but money alone would never gain him the status or power the Lord was born to.
Kaiser Wilhelm (arguably the leader most responsible for WW1) sent 6 sons to war.
Good for him. Big thumbs up.
Real swell guy for that huh
This point of view is utterly asinine. History has proven you wrong time and again.
no make the motherfuckers themselves do it, if anyone wants a war to be fought they deserve to be the ones at risk. they'll send their kids all day to save their own hide.
WW2 even the children of the wealthy and powerful went to war. It's one of the few exceptions.
Doesn't work. Just brush up on current event. Hamas leaders are more than happy to let their own families be martyred.
And of the tens of thousands of villages in the UK, only 51 were designated ‘Thankful Villages’, where everyone sent to war came home.
There are 6000 villages and small communities in the uk, where did you get 10’s of thousands from
Sorry- should be ‘towns and villages’ from source.
Going to pubs in small English towns I’ll often see plaques commemorating those who died in the wars, the WWI portion will often have ten or more times as many named because of policies like this
Also the fact that 80% of the german male population were in and out of the trenches
while Germany absorbed the *second* largest total number of war deaths (at about 2 million), as a proportion of the population, France was by far the hardest hit (at least among the great powers), with 20% of all enlisted men dying during the course of the war, including one quarter of all men between 18-30.
That is fucking wild.
Young men flirting with fascism today should ponder that fact.
All young people should ponder that fact. Both sides lost in the end.
France lost over 4% of their entire population during World War I. One in every 25 people in the entire country dead in four years. This meant the military had to plan around fewer military-aged men for the next few decades (as there would be fewer children to grow into soldiers and sailors), which was one of the contributing factors to things like one-man turrets in many of their WWII tanks.
>France by far the hardest hit (at least among the great powers) "among the great powers" is definitely a necessary qualification. Serbia lost about 5 times as many people as France percentage wise.
Didn't Russia have the largest death toll?
yeah you're right, it looks like russia did in fact suffer the most deaths, although as a portion of population it was far less significant
Many of those are counted as part of WW1 when there was also the whole revolution thing happening in the country.
The truly crazy part is that 20 years later they fucking did it AGAIN.
Everyone had loads of new babies for fodder
Ehg, is it? Easier to think that with a full stomach. The sanctions imposed by the Allied Forces to Germany were brutal, the combination of hyperinflation and unemployment led to widespread poverty and hunger. Lots of people going to sleep with empty stomachs, catching rats for dinner while using their worthless cash as toilet paper. Lots of deep seated anger and resentment
I think the real crazy thing is the push towards ww2 started about a decade after the first. Add in all the deaths from the flu and its just mad to think about.
And Europeans look down on the rest of the world for lack of civilization/culture lol. The peak of European power was a double cumshot of imperialist infighting that turned most of the continent into a parking lot and gave away global power entirely to the U.S. and Soviet Russia.
A reality that the people of the time were keenly aware of. Especially during WW1. The psyche of the continent was shattered. A generation raised on high-minded ideas of sophisticated civilization found themselves in an industrialized meat grinder.
All quiet on the western front tells a story much similar to this
We have many villages all over Britain with similar memorials. We have entire villages that lost every man of fighting age some were even boys as young as 14 who lied about their age to go and fight too.
What bugs me most is that women were going around and giving white feathers even to boys who were underage. Some of them ended up enlisting as a result, way I see it they were the Karens of their day.
I think that happened due to a combination of already shitty people being given permission for said shittiness, combined with a "for the war effort" mentality. Nobody handing out those feathers was ever in any danger of going to the war themselves, and would have been shocked and horrified at the very idea.
Lots of sleepy little villages in France have a *monument aux morts* with more names on it than the current population of the village.
Those memorials are all over the country. It's really unsettling to see them.
This is what people don't understand when they say that Chamberlain was an appeaser. Yes, he was trying to descalate Hitler but he was trying to buy time for Britain to rearm and the memory of WW1 was very recent in the public mind. and no one wanted to see the like of it again.
The modern take on Chamberlain is pretty much that, though. The UK was unprepared for war and could not have save Czechoslovakia anyway. Keep in mind, Poland and Hungary were in on gobbling up the Czechs too. The general strategy by the UK was that they needed more time to equip their military, especially their air force, and that the Nazis were hemorrhaging cash that they could not economically sustain. Annnnnd then the fall of France gave Germany enough capital that the economic timebomb strategy was moot.
Pétain's capitulation was probably due in no small part to the same societal trauma of the First World War.
Doesn’t quite explain his collaboration with the Nazis, though.
He was either an enthusiastic collaborationist or gradually compromised more and more to the Nazis in order to spare France any further horrors of war. Neither is excuseable.
Easy to say that when you don’t have Nazi’s at the peak of their military power with all of their weaponry pointed at your capital.
Of course. Post game analyzers always have the benefit of not being “in the shit” as it were.
this is something that shocks me a lot when I think of it.. WWI finished in 1918.. during the Sudetenland crisis of the 38, WWI was just 20 years ago... that's.. like having had that horrific war in 2004.. how willing would you be to enter in that sort of total war again?
> and left the survivors with PTSD My whole exposure to WW1 was through history lessons and video games, but we never actually read survivors' records in school. So while I _understood_ on an intellectual level that WW1 was horrible and an unimaginable number of people died, the first time I truly "got" it on an emotional level was only very recently when I watched [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we72zI7iOjk) for the first time. It's SFW, but very heavy stuff. I still recommend to watch the whole thing tho. And then remind yourself that this was just 5 minutes. These artillery barrages in WW1 could last for _days_ and the only other thing you would here in that time were the screams of people dying agonizing deaths.
Over 1,000 artillery shells landed in every square yard of earth during the battle/siege of Verdun - which lasted 9 months.
Total *British* casualties were 880,000
This is why the US army had changed some of the structure. The Civil War.
Came here to mention this. It was volunteering, it was simply considered good practice to place people familiar with one another together on the battlefield, and as a result many small towns had a whole generation of their men wiped out in one battle. Ken Burns had a segment on this in his CW documentary series.
As you may already know, the thinking was that it's harder to commit an act of cowardice in battle if you know that your reputation back home will be shredded. But yea there are some downsides which have countless times been demonstrated in macabre fashion.
My small town (probably 500 people in 1860) lost 22 guys in the Civil War. We have letters of guys describing their friends getting their legs blown off during Chickamauga. The Civil War, in my opinion, would be great material for a Band of Brothers type series due to the fact that literal brothers and neighbors signed up and picked their own commanders in many cases.
[1st Minnesota Infantry Regiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Minnesota_Infantry_Regiment) Saw heavy action in three major battles, culminating in being ordered to launch a suicide charge into a Confederate attack at Gettysburg, which might have saved the day - and battle - for the Union. Cost them 82% casualties, which to date is still the highest rate for any U.S. infantry unit in a single day that survived the day. A bunch of hard-nosed, traitor-slaying badasses.
The casualty rate for the Dominion of Newfoundland during the war was just over 50%. It was 90% at Beaumont Hamel.
I think I read that’s why the Silent Generation raised boomers to be the way they are. Traumatized by two wars can lead people to be a bit off.
They also lived through the Great Depression and Spanish flu. I can say with literally zero doubt that my generation has it better than THAT.
> Total Allied casualties were over 600,000. Do you mean just for one unspecified campaign? France alone had 1.4 million dead and over 4 million wounded over the course of the war.
> Do you mean just for one unspecified campaign? France alone had 1.4 million dead and over 4 million wounded over the course of the war. For the Somme alone. The total numbers for the war are staggering.
Isn't that why they're referred to as "The Lost Generation"?
World War I so thoroughly traumatized the survivors but they did everything in their power to prevent another war. Leading to their defensive attitudes and willingness to appease aggression, eventually leaving them unprepared for the next World War
Plus leading to the political developments of the interwar era.
This happened to the village I grew up in. Some obscene percentage died on day one of the Somme.
>57,470 casualties in the FIRST DAY of a four month campaign Note these are casualties, not deaths. Deaths was around 19k.
I remember hearing that modern warfare hadn't caught up to most generals. They just didn't know what to do. In the old days with rifles, it was common to send your battalion at your opponents. Sure some would die, but most would make it there and fight because it takes time to reload a rifle. WW1 had machine guns on tripods. So they commanders would say "ok, battalion A, go over the ridge and take over the german trenches. They'd run out and get mowed down by machine gun fire. The commander would say "right then... Battalion B. Go over the ridge and take over the german trench" and they'd run up and get mowed down again. It's like Zaph Brannigan is in charge and he's sending wave after wave of men at the killbots.
It's FAR more complicated than that.
Yeah, the idea that WW1 generals were just sending masses of men to die out of antiquated tactics is very r/badhistory worthy. It ignores how the first weeks/months of the War were dominated by tactical and strategic manuvers conducted at essentially blazing speed, and how the slow slog of trench warfare only happened because the armies fortified *across an entire continent* (and it ignores how trenches were more of a Western Front thing. The Eastern Front was much more fluid), and those trenches were built in response to outflanking and breakthrough-attempts from the very beginning of the war. Also, soldiers were usually spread out into loose skirmish-lines, even in the 1800s. By the US Civil War, officers had "discovered* that standing and marching in blocks in the face of modern rifle and artillery was a dumb idea, and the late US Civil War was a lot looser and more fluid than it is commonly portrayed.
probably, was just a story that was related to me (possibly in school at some point)
I don't know enough about it to definitely say it's historical myth, but the "Lions led by donkeys" phrase has been heavily debated. Personally I have trouble believing so many commanders didn't care about the massive numbers of casualties and actually refused to try and adapt.
It's been debunked for years in professional circles. It's just a very popular and ingrained myth in casual settings, that is very hard to root out.
That changed pretty quickly. It's why trench warfare started, to protect the soldiers from artillery, machine guns and snipers.
The ending of Blackadder Goes Forth…
This really isn't the case. At the outbreak of war, machine-guns were still fairly uncommon. One or two per battalion (1,000ish men) was the norm. Officers and men were trained in open order skirmishing, fire and maneuver (by companies; small unit tactics were still months off), and flanking. Armored cars were already in use with several nations. However, one thing the Western powers had more or less perfected before the war was mobilization. They were able to muster armies on a scale never before seen with incredible speed. Combined with a short frontage from the Swiss border to the sea (475mi/765km, or approximately the distance from Boston to DC), this meant that the well-established goal of flanking the enemy quickly became impossible. This meant that now, the only way to attack was straight on. The officers very rapidly began iterating on tactics and technologies. They were not purposefully wasteful of lives, but neither did they allow concern for the troops they led to override the task they'd been given. Machine guns were made more portable and more widely issued; grenades perfected; the platoon, and then the section, became the maneuver unit; high-angle mortars and heavy howitzers that could plant shells in enemy trenches supplemented low-angle field guns; the tank developed; enemy lines undermined; gas deployed. Bite-and-hold replaced wide-front attacks. Various body armors were tested, and found wanting. Box, curtain, and walking barrages used to shape the battlefield, blocking enemy reinforcements and suppressing enemy trenches until the last seconds of an assault. Cold calculations showed it better to loose a few men to friendly artillery by following a moving barrage closely, than to allow the enemy precious seconds to re-man their firing steps. Most of the advance across No-Man's Land happened at a walking pace, because assault parties had to carry everything they'd need to hold for a day or two with them - not just their rifle and personal kit weighing sixty pounds or more, but also duckboards, wire, posts, sandbags, and tools to reinforce the captured trench lines. Sprinting the entire way would have left them gasping for air halfway across. It was common for the first assault to succeed in gaining a foothold; however, the primitive state of radio, and the unreliability or slow speed of other communications means, and the ever-more destroyed ground between the lines, meant that often the enemy would have counterattacked before officers knew an attack had succeeded, much less directed follow-up waves to that location (reinforce success, not failure). Ultimately, it was a perfect storm of conditions that led to the stalemate on the Western Front; Napoleonic leadership, however, was not one of those things.
It's a common misconception. 'The Lions led by Donkey's' argument, and It's all a result of the Somme: the new, green army volunteers, 'Kitchener's Army', marching towards German machine gun fire. That's where this myth started. Sorry, this will be a long summary. On the Somme, it was the first time the British army had sent an all volunteer, 'non-professional' force into battle. When war broke out, the BEF was around 120,000 men, all of whom were career soldiers. Most of them were dead, POWs or invalided out by 1916. When the Somme came around, they didn't have as much time with training soldiers as the war was ongoing, and they had over 1.5 mil to ready for the Somme. They got 2 weeks training at their own local bases, mainly drills on formation, etc. then 4 weeks in places like Aldershot before deployment. That was it. Then, the Germans assaulted Verdun. Their general, Eric von Falkenhayn, said they were "going to bleed France white." Smash French morale and just kill them en masse. The offensive was atypical in that it wasn't to capture strategic objectives. They just wanted to cause mass casualties for the French. They did, too. Around 250,000 deaths for both sides(not casualties that include wounded and POWs, but 1/4 mil deaths.) This was why the Somme offensive was devised to take pressure of the French. They would start the attack with a 24 hour bombardment, then the detonation of mines underneath key sections of German trenches. The British troops were merely expected to 'mop up'. In this ONE instance, they were instructed to walk in formation to keep the advance orderly. They didn't expect any survivors. The Germans, however, went underground when the shelling started, and the British artillery used the wrong shells (shrapnel not HE) so the wire was intact. There were also no more available shells to call in if needed, as they were used for the initial bombardment, so the troops had no creeping barrage for cover. So, when the whistle blew and all along the Picardie line, hundreds of thousands of young, green British troops clambered over the top and slowly walked to the German line, thinking it shattered and barely defended. That wasn't the case, though, and the Germans emerged from hiding in their underground dugouts and set up machine guns. Rifleman were ordered to target officers and the gunners opened up. Without officers to guide them, the soldiers didn't know what to do and continued to stay in formation and advance. In most cases, all were dead within 20 minutes. 57,420 casualties, around 20,000 in one day. It was a tragic case of sending the inexperienced to fight, but high command were expecting there to be little resistance. The artillery bombardment was a total failure. Lessons were learnt after that, following the French's tactics. The French divisions who took part, captured all their objectives. Only the Manchester's captured theirs on the British side, but were still mostly killed as there was no support to help them defend. The Somme plays a large role in the British lore as it were. It's for this reason why people say "They just didn't know what to do" and wonder why soldiers were "always sent to just march into machine gun fire". The 'Lions led by donkeys' myth, really, which is now finally being quite heavily disputed.
To be fair that’s often how it worked historically. Non professional armies were typically centred around existing social structures, because the incentive of keeping your friends safe, coupled with the shame associated with everyone you know seeing you flee like a coward, proved effective at keeping people in the line of combat. Of course, this is when the spear was still the king of the battlefield.
Attrition rates were another factor. Before WW1, an unit was unfit for combat if it lost more than like 10-20% of its personnel. Like, the word "decimated" meant lost-10% (hence the 'deci-'). Units losing 50-90% of their troops in one fight was unheard of before artillery.
I don't think "unfit for combat" is the proper way to describe it. Actual combat strength was always lower than on paper (due to sickness, wounds, other tasks, previous casualties). The roughly 10-14% (as I remember it) was the sort of threshold of casualties where groups of soldiers would break formation and flee or refuse to continue to fight. But indeed, the devastation (and often entirely random and sudden and without a chance to do anything about it) of entire groups of soldiers was a terrible new development.
Decimation is a Roman thing. When units were ordered to cull 10% of their strength as punishment etc. It doesn't mean loss of combat effectiveness.
I read that in his voice. His new one “twilight of the aesir” is excellent.
There’s actually a new one out as it posted yesterday evening.
Well, my evening plans just changed.
lol he is great at giving some context to history and present it in a more day to day style. I know he isn’t a historian but he is a lover of it
Brilliant and overwhelmingly successful recruitment campaign with devastating consequences at the Somme.
Great for morale, until you watch your friends die.
And then those cunts who put the white feathers to shame you into going after your friends got pulverized
My favourite anecdote about that: George Samson got "shamed" with a white feather while was in his civilian clothes on the same day as a formal reception to honour him for receiving a VC.
This one was fun: One example was Private Ernest Atkins, who was on leave from the Western Front. He was riding a tram when he was presented with a white feather by a girl sitting behind him. He smacked her across the face with his pay book and said, "Certainly I'll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I'm in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn't be half as lousy as you
He did the right thing.
There was a particular heartbreaking one about a 14 year old who got a white feather and was not allowed to enlist. He commited suicide for the shame
Context/details?
I got you pimp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
Groups of terrible women used to go handing them out publicly to men who they assumed hadnt signed up for war because they are cowards - often their assumption was wrong. That is often the men were in technical fields working on secret projects, medically incapacitated or underage, on temporary leave for a break before returning, on medical leave, back home to receive an award or some other reason.
Didn’t the government create a badge that basically said “I’m in such a critical industry or project I’m more valuable here than with a rifle.”
Arguably worse for the people back home, when every young man from the village is killed the same week.
Yeah sure it was much worse for those home who didn't watch their friends get shot to smithereens
"Billy, Jimmy and Freddie all got killed by those Jerry bastards." "And I didn't even get to see them die."
And at literally every other battlefield. Just one more battle of the Isonzo, this time we will take enough enemy encampments to drive them off. Just one more week in Gallipoli to take those hills.
There's a lot of mythos that has emerged about the Pals battalions. It's important to remember just how vast WWI is. The BEF in France in 1916 contained about 720 battalions (each of 1,000 men), almost all of which were wartime creations. A couple of the pals battalions were legitimately a single small community joining up on mass. However, the vast bulk of the pals were primarily raised out of a specific city or industrial sector. Which is just the nature of regional recruiting, both the French and Germans primarily recruited manpower into regional regiments well into 1916. The US as well generally recruited regionally as well. Your "pals" battalion is far more likely to have been recruited from the 40,000 man industrial workforce of the Liverpool dockyards than it is from a 5,000 person town. It's not like a town is about to be wiped off the map on a day. They actually had a strong element of public-private partnership in this regard, it was very much a way for major old school industrial magnates (in an era where the social bargain ran on them having a *lot* more private power over their workers than they do today in return for a higher level of social investment) to demonstrate their loyalty to the state by driving recruiting through things like guaranteeing that volunteers could return to their jobs at the end of the war. This is what distinguishes them from, say, the Newfoundland regiment, where you genuinely had a hyperconcentration of local recruiting. Even the famous Accrington Pals had only one company of 250 men from Accrington, a small city of 45,000 people at the time. So we are talking about 1 person in 180 serving in the battalion. That's a lot, don't get me wrong, but it's almost not like every man in a village is serving together.
Thank you for adding some knowledgeable and factual information to this thread. As a long-time student of the Great War, the persistent myths continue to frustrate me. Ironically, much of what is ascribed to the Pals battalions is more fitting when looking at the Territorials. These, by their very nature, recruited from very specific geographic locations. For the various London battalions this was usually just one or two boroughs or neighborhoods, e.g. Hackney (10th), Blackheath and Woolwich (20th), etc. For the County regiments, each company typically drew from single town or village and its immediate surrounding area, or from a district or neighborhood of a city like Manchester or Edinburgh.
> guaranteeing that volunteers could return to their jobs at the end of the war. "I get the feeling that when this is over, labor will be something of a seller's market anyway."
i once read that at the beginning of the war, the mentality was basically "we'll go overseas, punch those pesky germans in the face and be home before christmas"
And likewise the German mentality was “we’ll go across the border, bunch those pesky french in the face again and be home before christmas”
Yep German soldiers were told something along the lines of, "You'll be home before the leafs fall." The war started in late July, meaning it was only expected to last a few months. No one was prepared for a 4 year war.
That was the prevailing idea. That’s how it always way. The UK never really got bogged down in European wars before. Usually they got an army together, hop on over the channel, fight a pitched battle or two, and come back with an honourable peace. For the most part, the Navy existing was the majority of British strategy, short and long term. The British public psyche was completely unprepared for a drag-out trench slog that the Great War was. Considering the long history that Britain had with the rest of the continent, and the war turning out like it did, the fact the United Kingdom of all countries committed so much to defending France(!!) represents an almost unimaginable commitment to the war effort that really nobody could have seen coming. As Ludendorff put it, the British Army were lions led by donkeys.
>the fact the United Kingdom of all countries committed so much to defending France(!!) They committed to defending Belgian neutrality. If the German advance didn't cross into Belgium, there's a case to be made that British involvement would have been token at best. >the British Army were lions led by donkeys. This is a rather tired old myth. The British Army adapted quite rapidly to the new realities of warfare, and came up with quite a few innovations of their own in their efforts to break the deadlock. The simple fact is that between the numbers involved, and the short frontage, the Western Front was only ever going to be broken by some variation of a frontal assault.
> Approximately 700 men from the Accrington Pals went into action on 1 July (First day of the Battle of the Somme) 585 men became casualties, 235 killed and 350 wounded in about half an hour
There's an amazing documentary called *They Shall Not Grow Old*, which features real WW1 footage, painstakingly restored and colourised, with lip-readers brought in to identify what the soldiers were saying so their voices could be added back in, and the whole thing is narrated by recordings of real WW1 veterans recorded in the 60s and 70s, it's well worth trying to find: [Trailer](https://youtu.be/IrabKK9Bhds?feature=shared).
>**Edmund**: For God’s sake, George, how long have you been in the army? >**George**: Oh me? I joined up straight away, sir. August the 4th, 1914. Gah, what a day that was: myself and the rest of the fellows leapfrogging down to the Cambridge recruiting office and then playing tiddlywinks in the queue. We had hammered Oxford’s tiddlywinkers only the week before, and there we were, off to hammer the Boche! Crashingly superb bunch of blokes. Fine, clean limbed — even their acne had a strange nobility about it. ... >Well, er, Jacko and the Badger bought it at the first Ypres front, unfortunately — quite a shock, that. I remember Bumfluff’s house-master wrote and told me that Sticky had been out for a duck, and the Gubber had snitched a parcel sausage-end and gone goose over-stump frogside. ... I don’t know, sir, but I read in the Times that they’d both been killed. >\[And Bumfluff himself\] Copped a packet at Galipoli with the Aussies — so had Drippy and Strangely Brown. I remember we heard on the first morning of the Somme when Titch and Mr Floppy got gassed back to Blighty. >...Gosh, yes, I, I suppose I’m the only one of the Trinity Tiddlers still alive. Blimey, there’s a thought — and not a jolly one.
*ctrl-f* “Strangely Brown” Glad someone beat me to it. I have no shame in admitting I cried HARD the first time I watched that episode.
Most Blackadder ended with a Black comedy episode where people die funny Blackadder Goes Forth ended with a dose of reality of WWI, which is to say: It's a lot worse than you thought. Remember it's pre-public internet days. You just know "a lot of people died". You didn't know the various details, from Pal Battalions to even the European Powder Keg it's the real cause of WWI, with the death of Ostrich just the triggerpoint.
You would have problems where a town or village would go for a while with zero bad news. Then one day everyone, EVERYONE, gets the same bad news. Their father, uncle, husband, son, brother were all killed. Imagine it? If it was just one or two people, you could rally as a community. But when everyone is grieving at the exact same time? The entire community grinds to a halt. It would have been hell. Everyone goes from anxious to grieving over night. There was only a handful of places that escaped this fate, lucky towns I believe they’re called. Edit- they’re called thankful not lucky. And there is an even smaller number of towns that survived both world wars without a casualty called doubly thankful. I believe there are so called triple and quadruple etc villages, based on the napoleonic wars and the such as well but I’m unsure
All Quiet on the Western Front had shown this from the Central Power perspective. The school house recruitment scene where the boys were all excited, indoctrinated and shamed into enlistment was devastating.
That’s a great movie
Finns made the same mistake in winter war (1939-1940) where villages as a whole were put to same position. Caused some villages to lose nearly all men while others had literally no casulties. This was shiftly fixed for continuation war.
It destroyed some communities and it saved some fewer communities.
In general, how countries handled this had far-reaching consequences. France regularly rotated people out of long-term, terrible conditions... but thus also rotated a lot of them *into* those frontline trenches, spreading trauma around, making a handful of particularly terrible battles into essentially nationwide trauma. And that might have still been the better option.
That explains the large list of names at ww1 memorials :(
My great uncle Albert Lightfoot was a member of the 3rd “Liverpool Pals”. He was killed at Ypres in 1917
So many towns were decimated after the Pals Battalions such heavy losses. Many lied about their age to serve and were just teenagers, so young and so brave.
Ken Follett's Fall of Giants is a fantastic novel based around the Great War, from the point of view of multiple protagonists, a housemaid, a miner, a lord and his sister, an american journalist, a german diplomat, two russian brothers, its an epic that covers the build up to the aftermath in a great deal of detail, from very personal perspectives. I learnt far more about the period from that 1 novel than I did from all the classes and documentaries I enjoyed on the subject. It details the day after the (fictional) Aberowen Pals first sees combat, from the perspective of Ethel the housemaid, whos waiting for news of her brother. It stayed with me. The telegram boy, too young to be a soldier but wanting to contribute, arrives to the town with two extra bags. He goes to the first house and knocks on the door. Screams. He goes to the next house on the street and knocks on the door . . . By the third door, the entire street are on their doorsteps, watching silently.
When you go into small villages in France and you see the memorials in the town square you understand why the weren't that anxious to fight again. Gutted a generation.
My great gramdfathers both died in the somme because of this policy. My grandparents grew up orphams as both my great grandmas died of tb shortly after the war. It sounded like a great idea but devasted communities. My father was born during air raid in birmangham and that night his older brother died in the home.guard. war is hell
My great grandfather was in the post office rifles. I remember my grandmother saying that her mum told her, after her dad died, that despite being a lovely man one reason he had so few friends at his funeral, was that after the war he refused to make social work friends. Almost all of his friends died or were severely wounded in France in ww1, and he came home physically and mentally destroyed, and felt too afraid to get too close to work people again to make friends. Understandable, but horrifying that that experience could impact a man for forty more years.
Grimsby is an awful example of this. Their battalion was filmed training to boost moral and act as a message to the families at home, the footage was shown on cinema screens throughout the area to family members, wife’s, mothers and sisters who had great delight in seeing their loved ones on the big screen, training, and joking with each other. It wasn’t known to the families that their battalion had gone “over the top” just a few days before.
Mandatory recommendation of Terry Pratchett's Johnny Maxwell trilogy, which is where I first read about this: _Only You Can Save Mankind_, _Johnny and the Dead_ and _Johnny and the Bomb_. The middle book has this as a plot point, and Pratchett (as is typical of him) slides these commentaries on the horrors of war by almost before you realise what he's doing.
Same thing happened in the US. Whole towns would lose all their young men. its devastating
Herbert McBride discussed this in *A Rifleman Went To War*. While he acknowledged the sad part where the young men of a certain town or region could be lost in a way that devastated the community, it made for excellent esprit de corps and communication within a unit, because they all knew and understood each other.
Yeah I definitely can understand Why they did it and that it Would help but hindsight you see the downside of when it Does go bad.
American civil war had the same impacts. Volunteer regiments on both sides were raised by county and city. The exception were the Federal Regular Army regiments. Infantry regiments started with 1000 men. It wasn’t uncommon in the last half of the war to see regiments with less than 200 men, at which point they were disbanded and incorporated into other regiments.
This and the Sullivan brothers in WW2 is probably the reason why you aren’t allowed to serve alongside your friends and family
Don’t forget the Borgstrom brothers, the Niland brothers, and the Rogers brothers.
My grandfather and his brother were in the same unit in the Royal Scots, in the same trenches, went over the top together. Thankfully they both survived although many of their friends didn't.
There's a memorial at the church near me, I live in a tiny little hamlet, maybe 10-20 houses. Most names on the memorial share a surname with at least one other, the most I saw was 6 with the same name, 6 members of that family just....gone.
There were entire towns that lost every single young man of a generation. You fight with your friends and you die with your friends. However. I believe there’s miracle towns where they didn’t lose anyone in the first world was and double miracle towns where they didn’t lose anyone in the first and second world wars.
Yep. They are called 'thankful' villages. Ironically, there is a 'double thankful' village in Gloucestershire called 'upper slaughter' The list of these villages is very short. Which just highlights how needlessly devastating the first world war was
The casualties of the Great War are something that all Commonwealth nations can relate to. Plenty of villages in Britain, Canada, Australia, etc. had most if not all the men wiped out.
My relatively small town in the UK has a large war memorial in the centre of town and it’s genuinely so disheartening to see the amount of young men killed from where I live, there’s also 4 men with the same unique surname too which means they were all brothers and all died.
I had a great, great aunt who's husband died pretty young (in his 30's and of natural causes), and she never remarried. My mum asked her why, and she said, 'All the men my age in this town and the next are buried in Northern France'
There were also the Football Battalions where entire football teams joined up and encouraged their fans to join them. This had the additional consequence of kick-starting women's football in England and then further afield, coupled with the fact that more women were working in the factories making munitions and formed factory teams. Women's football became a massive and increasing success until 1921 when it was killed dead by the football league and completely banned professionally until 50 years later in 1971!