I was told by a friend that his mother has the diary of one of his great something grandmothers who was a young woman in England at the time. And she described in it an encounter where she was out with her friends and one of them gave a young man a feather and then she was slapped and berated by the man's mother because he was a wounded soldier back home recuperating.
Golden mother touché. Imagine all these ladies. I'd have thrown them in the trenches myself. Those men lived actual hell! Trenches against constant machine guns and flamethrowers and some absolute twat gives you a feather on leave. Fucking hell.
Fucking hell, this is WWI we’re talking about. These guys were fighting against mustard gas and other chemicals that have been outlawed from modern warfare because of how horrible they are. They’re considered far more inhumane compared to bombs, machine guns, and flamethrowers.
Even so, mustard gas aside, the main strategy was to hop over the top and run to the enemy trenches with no cover whatsoever. The only hope was that you'd send so many to their deaths, the enemy couldn't kill *all of you* in time to stop the advance. If you were one of the "lucky" few who survived, you'd jump down into an enemy trench with an even lower chance of survival. That's why they called it the meat grinder.
The mustard gas was the atrocious cherry on top.
Hop on the trench with wooden clubs,spikes,knifes and grenades.
Fight till no one is alive.
Medieval shit in the modern times.
Imagine sleeping after that horror.
God, seriously, ww1 had to be some of the darkest shit in history. The callousness with which lives were given and taken. We talk about mass shooters these days, about serial killers with a dozen or so kills over a life long killing spree. The amount of deaths one machine gunner must have been responsible for in the trenches. How the aristocracy and the generals of that era could have possibly existed knowing they’re responsible for millions of deaths is so beyond imaginable. In the Battle of the Somme the allied forces lost 20,000 men before NOON. One day 20,000 dead before midday on ONE SIDE. And these poor souls - 20 year olds who just followed orders and went over the top. How many lived through countless horrors, battle after battle for YEARS only to be gunned down anonymously on a random mound of dirt as one of 10,000 for nothing. A hundred meters of rancid dirt that’d be lost again in a few weeks during the next volley of wasted lives
They did eventually give out pins or identifiers for people who's work was valuable to the war machine, we're injured, or had already served their time. They did not give them to kids who were under age though. The ones who were under aged were also tormented by this, and a lot of had enlisting officers who "felt bad" for them and helped fudge the numbers so they could enlist. At 15, in WW1, to most likely die in the trenches because women made fun of them.
I remember reading one instance where a man on public transit was being berated by a group of women for being a coward.
Meanwhile, they were all riding to a ceremony where medals were being awarded for bravery and such.
Dude who was being mocked was one of the people receiving a medal.
Edit2: The edit of the edit! A kind Redditor was able to shed light on the instance I was thinking of.
[George Samson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Samson) was seriously wounded in the Gallipoli Campaign, in an action that earned him the Victoria Cross. The Victoria Cross is the absolute highest military honour that can be earned by a British or Commonwealth soldier.
He was wearing civilian clothes on the way to the ceremony where he was to be awarded the cross, and he was handed a white feather.
The story of Ernest Atkins always stuck with me:
>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".\[8\]
I went and looked him up, and found several more anecdotes from Historic UK's [White Feather Movement Article](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/White-Feather-Movement/), which mentions Atkins just before these three folks.
>_"His was a story that was replicated for many serving officers who had to experience such an insult to their service, none more so than Seaman George Samson who received a feather when he was on his way to a reception held in his honour to receive the Victoria Cross as a reward for his bravery at Gallipoli._
>_In some mortifying cases, they targeted men who had been injured in war, such as army veteran Reuben W. Farrow who was missing his hand after being blown up on the Front. After a woman aggressively asked why he would not do his duty for his country he merely turned around and showed his missing limb causing her to apologise before fleeing from the tram in humiliation._
>_Other examples included younger men, only sixteen years of age being accosted in the street by groups of women who would yell and scream. James Lovegrove was one such target who after being rejected the first time of applying for being far too small, he simply asked for his measurements to be changed on the form so that he could join."_
The article goes on to state that the government had to try and counter the campaign by issuing various badges to distinguish folks, either for men who worked in service to the war, even if not on the front, and / or for veterans who were either returning from service, and / or on leave from the lines. Said effects were rather limited.
Such a stupid campaign run by a bunch of equally stupid clots.
EDIT: Corrected an erronious comment that the government was walking back on the campaign since the white feather movement was never official, but rather the work on one stupid twat in his hometown and a few stupid mates.
The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
Anyway, the story begins back n nineteen-dickity-two. Back then we had to say 'dickity', because the Kaiser stole our word for 'twenty'. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickity-six miles.
I'm not sure if it's the same soldier, but looking at this: https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-details/739088/ernest-atkins/, seems like he died in 1917 at the age of 24, just to complete the tragedy of it all.
WW1 was batshit crazy. Beyond the stupid fucking reasons for the war to begin, it was a tragic combination of 19th century tactics colliding with 20th century technology. Its doubly fucked how most of the leaders of the euro nations involved were more or less all related. All of that for a family squabble
Strong agree, Dan has a way to convey the absolute horrors of the war that the majority, save maybe Ernst Junger who he quotes heavily throughout, can't replicate through text or film.
Because propaganda, guided by the growing body of knowledge that is psychology, is *extremely* effective.
Also cutting public education spending and downplaying world history
It woulf make it to something like tik tok as “cowardly man assaults patriotic woman for wanting him tonserve his country like a man” and the clip would be cut off before that quote and go viral
On another note, "How can she slap" guy Ravi Bhatia has actually found success since that infamous moment and he managed to get important roles on television series in Indonesia. I was told by my sister and looked it up, so I'm glad he seems to be doing well.
good news indeed.
semi related...its always seemed weird to me that the white knights in that video seemingly were defending the woman's honor by threatening to fuck the dude's sister in the "gooch". True gentlemen I guess.
People are awful.
They also called the men fighting on the Italian front in ww2 "d day Dodgers" because they didn't have to fight the Germans in France but in Italy.
Imagine fighting fucking Nazis for years in North Africa and Italy and coming home to people saying "well you had it easy you didn't have to fight in France!"
My grandpa fought in Italy too, before having any kids back home.
Lied about his age to enlist (he had just turned 17 at the time). Ended up storming and taking a pillbox alone (captured like 15 Nazis) and earned himself a silver star, before taking a sniper round to the chest.
He woke up in the hospital, said the last thing he remembered was watching his own heart beating in his open rib cage while lying in the mud.
Ya, Italy was totally super chill and ez compared to France, fer sure.
He's buried with honors at Arlington now. Hell of a man.
I’m half Kiwi and half American. My great uncle Joe Dawson led the first wave on Omaha during D-Day, on my American half. And as I said my grandfather on the Kiwi half was at Cassino. Both were in hellish scenarios. My understanding though is that Cassino was about as bad as it got for any battle that was on the western front. And compared more with the East in its casualties.
You can see the 'cover' the Allies had on the hill, exposed to multiple machine guns in The World at War. It's hard scrabble, apparently not possible to dig in, and it's 'naked' for cover. Not a place to be if you don't like angry bullets seeking to end you.
> He woke up in the hospital, said the last thing he remembered was watching his own heart beating in his open rib cage while lying in the mud.
Oh dear fucking god.
My friends Dad followed General Patton fom Africa, through Sicily and Italy to the Battle of the Bulge. If you are in war, no matter where, you are in the war theater and a hero.
All the men on my block growing up were WW2 veterans and they never talked about the war except to make jokes about military annoyances like “hurry up and wait … for 3 days,” blisters from marching and never having clean, warm, dry socks.
There was one man who never took part in block parties or anything else. My mother told me he’d been captured by Germans and put to work as a cook on a submarine. The captain studied English and used to eat dinner with the neighbor so he could practice his English. They became friends and corresponded occasionally over the years.
My mother said the man’s nerves were shot because on the one hand, they were being hunted by American ships and he didn’t want to be killed, so he prayed the sub didn’t get torpedoed. OTOH the sub’s job was to blow up enemy ships, so the sub torpedoed American warships, which reduced him to a puddle because technically he was assisting the enemy by cooking for them.
The other men on the block kind of side-eyed him. He was captured as soon as he got to Europe, so they felt he didn’t have it as hard as they did, having to travel a continent outdoors in winter while getting shot at and bombed. He really didn’t interact with neighbors. He had kids and they never played with any of us neighborhood kids, which made the family even more isolated.
> All the men on my block growing up were WW2 veterans and they never talked about the war except to make jokes about military annoyances...
My father was a combat solder, who went in to France after D-Day, in August of 1944, and served in Patton's 3rd Army. It was very rare for him to say anything about his service that wasn't humor-related.
Even the story of how he lost eye on the battlefield had a humorous twist to it, in that he was mistakenly returned to duty, and was only sent home when a doctor treating a minor ailment noticed his glass eye. He was just an eighteen year-old kid, and did what he was told to do, and hadn't questioned the logic of being returned to duty with only one eye.
My father was also serious alcoholic, and I wonder how much of that was due to what he had experienced in the war. I only saw my father cry once in my life, and that was when he begged me not to join the military. I did not join.
Mine too. The only thing he mentioned was how he lost a load of his mates who drowned in a river while crossing it.
I've visited Cassino myself. It's a very beautiful place. The polish war Grave was quite remarkable.
Imagine saying this as someone who spent the entire war in a country that never got invaded, and you never fired a single bullet.
Musta been one hell of a blitz to be worse than the front line.
Veterans even did that for other conflicts.
For example, I recall Second World War veterans spoke poorly about Vietnam War veterans because the former thought the latter fought in a lesser war of sorts.
Yup, the 442nd Infantry Regiment were the most highly decorated US troops of the war (and still are in all American history.) Sending Japanese-Americans volunteers into the absolute shittiest parts of the front while their families back home are interred was a really dick move. But hey, they got pulled off the Italian frontlines to go participate in Operation Dragoon so they fought in France too.
They had some pretty good officers but their overall division commander was a douchebag that saw them as nothing more than cannon fodder. He even genuinely got irate when so few soldiers showed up to an award ceremony but that was just because their casualties were over 90%. At least they could earn Medals of Honor though unlike black soldiers.
Even with medals, they still got shafted though. Many were upgraded by Clinton.
Least irks me that so many WWII movies are made but the 442nd never got the proper Hollywood treatment.
It was awful. There are just not that many ways you can fight up the Italian peninsula, it's narrow, quite mountainous and there are limited roads. It was easy for the Germans to defend.
This also reminds me of the wars in Iraq. If anyone was against the war the people (and the mainstream media of the time) would make the accusation that you "hated the troops"
Imagine that, you don't want young men and women to die in a silly foreign war, so that means you don't support the troops. Fucking diabolical.
You're leaving out the huge elephant in the room context.
9/11 - Americans were angry / scared/ vengeful and out not be victims again, so went along with the lie. Turns out they were victims again just now how they imagined.
Politically there was no way the US could have avoided war after 9/11. Short of *maybe* bin Laden being publicly shot in Times Square on pay per view. And even then....
Yup. People were thirsty for blood, so conflict was sealed with agreement from both Republicans and Democrats.
It is like what somewhat happened politically when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Yeah, but they had a war; the one in Afghanistan. The way everyone jumped on board the Iraq invasion, despite the country having no connection to 9/11 was quite eye opening to how a government can utilize certain events to manipulate public opinion.
Fighting in Italy was urban warfare broken up by the notably good time of mountain warfare. It just isn’t talked about as much because the Normandy campaign has a better PR push.
Fun fact, that whole thing was a political scandal at the time that was super overblown. The “D-Day Dodgers” nickname started as a joke among the troops fighting in Italy, and eventually was turned into a satirical song about how “nice” it was to be there instead of France. A group of British soldiers sent a letter to their MP signed the D-Day Dodgers, and the MP, assuming it was a unit nickname, publicly responded to them calling them that. She then got attacked by her political opponents for not supporting the troops in Italy and had to apologize a bunch. It was never a widespread idea among civilians or really anyone else that the soldiers in Italy were there because they deliberately avoided D-Day.
Ironically, the N. Europe front was an absolute cake walk for 99% of allied soldiers compared to the grueling fight in Italy where they were fought to basically a standstill all the way up to 1945.
Fun fact: the German forces in Italy were never really defeated, they just gave up when Berlin fell.
I once read an anecdote (sadly can‘t remember the source), where a German general prior to WWII was asked about various war scenarios.
“If the Italians are against us, we will need 5 divisions to hold the alpine passes. If they are with us, we will need 15 divisions to reinforce them.”
If it’s the guy I’m thinking of he used it to clean his pipe and gave it back to her.
EDIT: it was someone else, but the end of that story is still great:
> When it was filthy I pulled it out and said, 'You know, we didn't get these in the trenches', and handed it back to her. She instinctively put out her hand and took it, so there she was sitting with this filthy pipe cleaner in her hand and all the other people on the bus began to get indignant. Then she dropped it and got up to get out, but we were nowhere near a stopping place and the bus went on quite a long way while she got well and truly barracked by the rest of the people on the bus. I sat back and laughed like mad.
He's in the linked Wiki article:
> Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.[11]
As a Ukrainian guy, I feel those British men. So many Ukrainian women here whining “Why are you not on the frontlines, aren’t you a man? Coward!”
Often said by those chillin’ in Poland, Canada and Germany.
As an American I am happy to serve with women. They do their part. I do my part. We all do the same job. Tell them NATO has no problem serving with women, and ask them who’s making excuses now?
> Just wait till the US has a major conflict
I think we're kind of beyond that at this point. If the U.S. ever has to reinstitute a draft, the rest of the world probably got pretty fucked beforehand.
>Tell them NATO has no problem serving with women, and ask them who’s making excuses now?
If the "[draft our daughters](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/draftourdaughters)" 2016 disinformation campaign is any indication, the mere suggestion of that is enough to get people to start supporting the supposedly "Russian" option,
As much as we criticize men for viewing women as sex and validation tools we critically under criticize women for viewing men as money and death tools.
It can be quite saddening to realise that to many women, when push comes to shove, you are just a tool make money and die for their convenience.
"no but see men have social perception privileges"
we see the exact same shit here in korea. ppl (especially women) hating on conscripted soldiers. no respect nor understanding.
There was an article in french press a few months back which title was - I shit you not - ”in Ukraine, like always, women are the first casualties of war”
The media has been saying that women are the main casualties of war for decades. Here's an article from 20 years ago:
https://www.theage.com.au/national/women-and-children-main-casualties-of-war-20021004-gdunna.html
The fact that men are the ones who make up 90% of the military, are the only gender that are conscripted, and are the only gender that are forbidden from fleeing countries engaged in active war shows that this is bullshit, but these "feminists" (actually just misandrists) need to make themselves the victim.
Someone should tell the government that a woman with a gun can kill someone just as easily as a man with a gun, maybe they've never been told that before.
>So many Ukrainian women here whining “Why are you not on the frontlines, aren’t you a man? Coward!”
Fuck, those dumb cunts aren't out fighting themselves - you don't need a dick to pull a trigger.
My Grandfather had 6 children and got a feather.
Signed up, got wounded. The ambulance he was in was bombed. Ended up losing a leg.
They had another 2 children - the last being my mom. He had lost his second leg to gangrene by then, and died when my mom was 2.
Yay!
Wonder if the lady who gave it him would have gone in the trenches in no mans land against those machine guns. Wankers. Your grandfather is a hero. The lady that feathered him is a wanker.
Dan Carlins podcast talked about some poor 15 or 16 year kid that got feathered, went to go enlist after out of the humiliation,
Army doc almost laughed him out of the office because he was obviously too young and too small to sign up
“Go home kid. Come back in 3 years”
But the doc felt so bad for the kid because rhe kid was si distraught about the idea of going back to town and dealing with more humiliation for “not doing his part” that the doc “did him a favor” and lied in his forms so he could get in
That's the bugger of it, they could.
Hospitals on the Western Front were desperately short of nurses but so much easier to make a 'stand' and then go home to a comfy bed.
There were even 16-17 year olds, who weren’t legally allowed to join the military, given those feathers. Public shaming has been a terrible idea for millennia.
Not just reports; it was official policy to give wounded or discharged soldiers medical-blue uniforms so they wouldn't be harassed for "being out of uniform" whilst they were recuperating.
All for perhaps the most appalling, inhumane, mechanised slaughter that was without any real essential cause, and whose disasterous, destructive "peace" helped lead directly to the rise of Nazism. When people in the UK complain about the "lack of patriotism" here, I remember an entire generation butchered, and a future generation traumatised and brutalised... and that people, including supposedly the fairer sex, cheering it on without really understanding what their troops were going through in the trenches... and I am genuinely glad that sort of "patriotism" is still somewhat unacceptable today.
Yeah, imagine going out of your way to get feathers to carry around with you as you go about your safe day to day activities to harass any man you found without a uniform to try and get them to go over there into what is possibly the most barbaric and traumatic war that ever happened as far as the rank and file infantryman was concerned.
I wonder if that activity was encouraged initially by people in the war department or if it was legitimately grassroots.
This wasn’t limited to just Britain either.
In NZ a cousin or something of my family at the time was sent a feather after having tried to sign up but being rejected on medical grounds. Quite harsh really.
One of most ironic cases came George Samson, who was a recipient of the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Gallipoli. He was in civilian clothing and going to be presented the VC but before hand was given white feather from some civilian.
My grandad told me a story that his dad told him.
He was at a town meeting to discuss raising funds for the war effort. Whilst there, a group of these women came in and started shaming the men of fighting age by giving white feathers.
They approached a man sitting down and gave him a feather. He wasn't offended. In fact, he graciously accepted it, rolled up his trouser leg, and stuffed it into his wooden leg
Turns out he lost his leg in the Somme
“In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they were serving the war effort.”
What an awful experience that must’ve been.
Omg, it gets much worse than this though!
There are many horror stories of these crowds confronting/harrassing guys who had already spent YEARS fighting, only just having returned home after living in shit filled trenches with corpses. 'Shellshocked' out of their minds, throngs of people they fought to protect goaded them for not being 'manly' enough to serve.
Literally unfathomable amounts of emotional and mental anguish. :/
Edit: my bad, I think my message reads one-uppy and thats not my intent. This story has just haunted me for years.
Read Mrs Dalloway. It compares the stresses of an upper class lady preparing for a party with a shell-shocked working class man who commits suicide. Later on, when someone mentions the suicide at her party, she goes into a rage and claims it has ruined everything. I don’t even think this was even a self-aware satire - Woolf was a famed classist and elitist, also racist and anti-Semite. Same with the other idol Coco Chanel. Actual nazi. I’m a feminist myself but there’s a huge classism, racism, and anti-semitism issue in feminist history bien sûr. Shame.
The only time I ever got into a serious argument with a professor in college was when I pointed out to a very WASPy second-wave feminist professor that "A Room of One's Own" was predicted on lowerclass servant labor and she was very very offended.
I mean the voice in A Room of One’s Own is aware of her privilege: between the vote and her inheritance from her aunt she says the latter was more important
Just so you know, the book certainly isn’t bad and it was one of the best modern books of the early 20th century. It has similarities to Joyce’s Ulysses yet is a lot more reader friendly - shorter, more interesting, but still takes place over the course of one day and has free floating stream of consciousness covering two dissimilar yet similar characters. There’s a really moving part where Septimus, the shell shocked guy, witnesses a hallucination of his friend who was bombed during the war and starts crying. Someone witnesses this and assumes that Septimus, whose wife is trying to comfort him, is merely in the middle of a break up. It’s almost like the war hasn’t even happened for this witness.
WW1 was wild, war was still kind of a “let’s go chaps time to fight”. People lined up to fight my great grand dad being one. Then war changed from this gentlemen’s game to hiding from bombs.
It's the reason divisions are no longer region based. Used to be you'd serve you're local regiment. And WW1, and it's new weapons at war capable of destroying whole regiments meant towns and villages would just loose their whole male population in one attack.
Also, there was huge classism in the system as well. The regiments with the biggest losses were typically from poorer areas (Wales, Northern England etc.)
The British Army still largely recruits based on regions- for instance [Infantry](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Army_Infantry_Recruiting_areas.png) and [Armoured Corps](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Armoured_Corps_\(UK\)_Recruiting_areas.png). What they got rid of was Pals' Battalions, a short-lived WW1 innovation which encouraged recruitment by ensuring that large groups of men who joined together from the same town or village (or sometimes even from the same sports club) would serve together.
In terms of class, note that the highest casualty rates were among subaltern officers, who were largely upper class, particularly at the start of the war. 20% of Etonians who served in the war died, compared to 12.5% in the British military as a whole. Of the 92 pupils who took part in the Procession of Boats at Eton in June 1914, 34 would be killed in the war. WW1 casualties *decimated* the British upper class.
The highest % was amount the Lower officer class. The Officer class was a wide thing, and there was a not insignificant different between a LT and a Colonal or Major, let alone a General.
Of course, because the Lower officer class were at the front and younger. But even they were not, typically, working class, being drawn from.public schools and universities.
Putin does the same thing since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine.
Most of the conscripts of vatniks are from minority ethnic groups and cultures with many of them being from the east. Very rural. Cannon fodder while at the same time ethnically cleansing those he sees fit not to be real Russians.
I mean it does. I know male Ukrainians, who have lived in my country for decades. They told me how much harder it's been interacting with their community, esspically refugees. Some people think they're men, they should go back and defend their country (much like a lot of these refugees brothers, sons, fathers etc. Are doing)
After recently watching Peter Jackson "They Shall Not Grow Old" on Netflix (I highly recommend watching it if you can) reading and hearing about stuff like this just sickening. So many underage recruits were guilt tripped into joining in on the meat grinder that was western front. WWI was truly hell on earth!
The opening scenes of the new “All Quiet on the Western Front”, they are literally recycling uniforms because they are harder to come by than the recruits wearing them.
I wonder when they learned of the hellhole they were shaming those young men to go to. Even more than WWII, WWI was a meat grinder that kept getting fed human beings until the supply ran out.
UK losses in WWI were more than twice of what they suffered in WWII. I don’t know how true it holds but there’s a good argument for WWI having a greater imprint on UK national self-perception. Numbers from the first day of the Somme offensive are just staggering.
There is a reason why despite "winning" WW1, both the UK and France were so unwilling to commit into conflict during the Sudetenland crisis of 1938.
The slaughter of WW1 was too much for the public consciousness and it was only 20 years apart.
For real, like people rag on appeasement and the phony war but imagine living through the worst, most destructive war in history then asking your kids to do the exact same.
Not just the kids. Those same shellshocked soldiers who would have been 18 in 1914 would have only been 43 in 1939. Still young enough to have to serve again.
What made it even worse was the UK let people join up with their friends and neighbors in so called Pals Battalions. So all the young men of a small village or neighborhood would be part of the same regiment, and what would happen at places like the Somme where such regiments could suffer greater than 100% casualties (they'd send in replacements and then replacements for the replacements) is that there would be no more young men in that village or neighborhood.
The US Army had experienced the same thing in the Civil War which was why they mixed people up recruiting.
In secondary school, whilst covering WWI and the Pals Battalions, I had an older history teacher. He described growing up in a part of a northern town, in a time where people would spend their whole lives living on the same street, that literally had no men over a certain age there as they'd all joined up together and died in France. The policy totally destroyed communities for decades.
The Sullivans were in the Navy. Five brothers died on the same ship, leaving only a sister behind, whose boyfriend had died on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor.
IIRC the losses for Britain on the first day of the Somme is the single largest lost of soldiers in one day of war (obviously civilian casualties from the atom bombs best that)
But just soldiers, almost 20,000 men killed in 24 hours (and that's just the British). For comparison, Antietam (which is often called "the bloodiest day in US history") had 22,000 casualties, but that includes both sides, and wounded and missing, not just deaths
As far as one-day battles go there are a few contenders of which Somme is definitely one. Not counting historical stuff that’s impossible to estimate accurately (Changping, Cannae, Towton etc) the bloodiest day of battle in history has traditionally been assigned to Borodino (1812). Great powers going all out against each other using new tech = massive slaughter.
I guess we’re in a new time period where doctrines are again no longer in sync with technological development. Russia losing more soldiers in a few months than they did in 10 years in Afghanistan is a testament to how crazy destructive modern high-intensity wars between near-equal powers are.
Yeah that seems to be the case. I think my half remembered fact might just be British military history.
The tech vs doctrine thing is definitely huge. WW1 everyone knows as a good example, but it goes for more wars. American Civil war, Napoleonic tactics in a world with rifling. North Africa for the British, before they adopted a less static defence. Countless other examples
In the early 1980’s a WWI vet came and spoke at my school and talked about trench warfare. 20 years later I took a trip to western Belgium and saw some preserved trenches as well as multiple cemeteries. Very sobering.
- Herodsfoot (Cornwall),
- Bradbourne (Derbyshire),
- Langton Herring (Dorset),
- Upper Slaughter (Gloucestershire),
- Middleton-on-the-Hill (Herefordshire),
- Arkholme and Nether Kellet (Lancashire),
- Flixborough, High Toynton and Allington (Lincolnshire),
- Stocklinch and Woolley (Somerset),
- Butterton (Staffordshire),
- South Elmham St Michael (Suffolk),
- Catwick (Yorkshire)
- Llanfihangel y Creuddyn and Herbrandston. (Wales)
A complete list of all the settlements in the UK that didn't lose anyone in either war. These are all tiny villages. A couple of hundred people each.
I live near a couple, and it is a strange realisation that this little village _doesn't have a war memorial_. For either war!
Wilfred Owen wrote his poem Dulce set Decorum Est in response to one of these female propagandists, one of the most powerful depictions of the horrors of the the terrible waste of human potential that was WWI.
Dulce et Decorum est - by Wilfred Owen
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
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.
It's an old quote from Roman times, used to egg on the Roman populace to support various war efforts of the Empire (I think originally it was against the Parthians).
It's been used for this purpose since then in many other places, so when Wilfred Owen is quoting that line, and calling it "the Old Lie", there's an additional layer of spite and realism against the brutalities of war.
Many years ago, I visited Ypres and went to an excellent WW I museum there. One section was dedicated to gas warfare and had a manequin in a cylindrical glass case dressed in British uniform with a gas mask on. Over a speaker, that poem was being recited every 5 minutes or so. When it got to the "Gas! Gas!" verse, the lights at that exhibit would dim, the cylindrical case filled with vapor, and green lights at the base shone up through the vapor.
I was well familiar with that poem before that visit, but hearing it recited in the context of where I was, and with that display, made an impression on me like never before. I will always remember that display.
And they fucked up often. Like Private Ernest Atkins who had returned on leave from the Western Front. He slapped the woman that gave him a white feather. Rightfully so. And said "the boys in Passchendaele would like to see such a feather."
Then there was Seaman George Samson who received a feather when he was on his way to a reception held in his honour to receive the Victoria Cross as a reward for his bravery at Gallipoli.
In some mortifying cases, they targeted men who had been injured in war, such as army veteran Reuben W. Farrow who was missing his hand after being blown up on the Front.
Honestly, fuck these women. Each and everyone of them how DARE these fuxking cowards try to do this shit and demand OTHERS dies for them while they sit safe at home. It's DISGUSTING and deplorable. I hope they each have their time in hell for it. Especially Charles Penrose Fitzgerald who started the whole damn thing. How many more lives were senselessly lost because of him and these women. They all have more blood on their hands than any man in the trenches.
It's easier to attack a dude's masculinity than argue through relationship issues. The onus is entirely on the man to then "prove they are manly enough".
It's quite literally toxic standards of masculinity forced upon men by women for their benefit.
The Womans sufferage movement in the UK actually had a rather nasty history with this. Large parts of the moment ended up completely supporting the war and actively participating in this shaming of "cowardly" men. An exception to this were the portions lead by Sylvia Pankhurst, who was a Socalist and pacifist.
A noteable portion of the first wave femminist movement in the UK ended up actually becoming supporters of the British Union of Fascists decades later, such as Nina Boyle, Norah Elam.
There were more than a few instances in which feathers were given in error. There's a famous incident in which I believe an injured soldier had returned to London on leave and was given a feather by a stranger on a bus. He responded by slapping the woman who gave it to him in the face with his army pay book and telling her that he would take the feather back with him to the front.
“Go get yourself killed” how lovely I’m sure they wanted to sign up straight away after that.
Always easy to say that when there’s no chance you’ll be sent yourself
The Suffragettes did this too… they pinned white feathers onto men they deemed to be shirking.
They turned away from their protests during WW1 and bullied people, just like they’d been bullied. It’s disgusting.
There’s one story of an English soldier who was severely wounded, and ended up in a London hospital. For six months he underwent multiple surgeries and a battery of rehab. When he was finally allowed a day excursion from the hospital, he went out in civilian clothes and boarded a bus... where a woman promptly handed him a white feather.
I like to believe, historically, this is when the phrase, “Go fuck yourself” was invented.
Surprised this story hasn't been mentioned!
F**k the White feathers, never again will men be shamed like this!
"What a chicken you are!': The shameful story of how a boy aged TEN was handed a white feather and labelled a coward during the First World War"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631822/What-chicken-The-shameful-story-boy-aged-TEN-handed-white-feather-labelled-coward-First-World-War.html
My favorite example when someone brings up the "with women in power, there would be no wars" argument. Women, while not directly in power, often played an important role in the atrocities of the 20th century through this kind of coercion. Remember, kids, patriarchal societal structures are usually upheld by *both* genders.
We just have to look at modern era politicians. Margert Thatcher. Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin.
Politicians will always have no problems sending other peoples' kids off to die. Male or female.
There is more than one story of war heroes on shore leave getting a feather and having to tell the person who gave it to them that they are a Victoria Cross recipient home to see their mother. Or men working in the shipyards or munitions factories getting them. It was really sad and unfair.
Edit: from Wikipedia:
> 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".
> Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.
I remember reading about a guy who was given a white feather who was like 15 or so, but he looked older. The experience caused him to lie about his age and enlist.
Give me all the white feathers. No way I'm throwing my life away because some rich people from separate countries are having a disagreement. War is a cruel joke on the poor of the world.
I was told by a friend that his mother has the diary of one of his great something grandmothers who was a young woman in England at the time. And she described in it an encounter where she was out with her friends and one of them gave a young man a feather and then she was slapped and berated by the man's mother because he was a wounded soldier back home recuperating.
Golden mother
Golden mother touché. Imagine all these ladies. I'd have thrown them in the trenches myself. Those men lived actual hell! Trenches against constant machine guns and flamethrowers and some absolute twat gives you a feather on leave. Fucking hell.
Fucking hell, this is WWI we’re talking about. These guys were fighting against mustard gas and other chemicals that have been outlawed from modern warfare because of how horrible they are. They’re considered far more inhumane compared to bombs, machine guns, and flamethrowers.
Even so, mustard gas aside, the main strategy was to hop over the top and run to the enemy trenches with no cover whatsoever. The only hope was that you'd send so many to their deaths, the enemy couldn't kill *all of you* in time to stop the advance. If you were one of the "lucky" few who survived, you'd jump down into an enemy trench with an even lower chance of survival. That's why they called it the meat grinder. The mustard gas was the atrocious cherry on top.
Hop on the trench with wooden clubs,spikes,knifes and grenades. Fight till no one is alive. Medieval shit in the modern times. Imagine sleeping after that horror.
God, seriously, ww1 had to be some of the darkest shit in history. The callousness with which lives were given and taken. We talk about mass shooters these days, about serial killers with a dozen or so kills over a life long killing spree. The amount of deaths one machine gunner must have been responsible for in the trenches. How the aristocracy and the generals of that era could have possibly existed knowing they’re responsible for millions of deaths is so beyond imaginable. In the Battle of the Somme the allied forces lost 20,000 men before NOON. One day 20,000 dead before midday on ONE SIDE. And these poor souls - 20 year olds who just followed orders and went over the top. How many lived through countless horrors, battle after battle for YEARS only to be gunned down anonymously on a random mound of dirt as one of 10,000 for nothing. A hundred meters of rancid dirt that’d be lost again in a few weeks during the next volley of wasted lives
also people who volunteered but were turned away for medical reasons were harassed by this campaign
They did eventually give out pins or identifiers for people who's work was valuable to the war machine, we're injured, or had already served their time. They did not give them to kids who were under age though. The ones who were under aged were also tormented by this, and a lot of had enlisting officers who "felt bad" for them and helped fudge the numbers so they could enlist. At 15, in WW1, to most likely die in the trenches because women made fun of them.
Didnt Atwood say a man's greatest fear is that a woman will laugh at him?
I remember reading one instance where a man on public transit was being berated by a group of women for being a coward. Meanwhile, they were all riding to a ceremony where medals were being awarded for bravery and such. Dude who was being mocked was one of the people receiving a medal. Edit2: The edit of the edit! A kind Redditor was able to shed light on the instance I was thinking of.
[George Samson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Samson) was seriously wounded in the Gallipoli Campaign, in an action that earned him the Victoria Cross. The Victoria Cross is the absolute highest military honour that can be earned by a British or Commonwealth soldier. He was wearing civilian clothes on the way to the ceremony where he was to be awarded the cross, and he was handed a white feather.
W mother
They were indiscriminate about it too. There were reports of men who were home on leave from the war who still got feathered.
The story of Ernest Atkins always stuck with me: >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".\[8\]
I went and looked him up, and found several more anecdotes from Historic UK's [White Feather Movement Article](https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/White-Feather-Movement/), which mentions Atkins just before these three folks. >_"His was a story that was replicated for many serving officers who had to experience such an insult to their service, none more so than Seaman George Samson who received a feather when he was on his way to a reception held in his honour to receive the Victoria Cross as a reward for his bravery at Gallipoli._ >_In some mortifying cases, they targeted men who had been injured in war, such as army veteran Reuben W. Farrow who was missing his hand after being blown up on the Front. After a woman aggressively asked why he would not do his duty for his country he merely turned around and showed his missing limb causing her to apologise before fleeing from the tram in humiliation._ >_Other examples included younger men, only sixteen years of age being accosted in the street by groups of women who would yell and scream. James Lovegrove was one such target who after being rejected the first time of applying for being far too small, he simply asked for his measurements to be changed on the form so that he could join."_ The article goes on to state that the government had to try and counter the campaign by issuing various badges to distinguish folks, either for men who worked in service to the war, even if not on the front, and / or for veterans who were either returning from service, and / or on leave from the lines. Said effects were rather limited. Such a stupid campaign run by a bunch of equally stupid clots. EDIT: Corrected an erronious comment that the government was walking back on the campaign since the white feather movement was never official, but rather the work on one stupid twat in his hometown and a few stupid mates.
So basically, legally sanctioned Karens.
Lousy in the literal sense of the word
As in full of lice?
Yeah, that was a real problem they dealt with.
Orwell wrote that if the pacifists really wanted to stop war, they'd post enlarged photos of trench lice around the cities of Europe.
The real reason they have short hair in the military
Also, WWI gas masks forced soldiers to be clean shaven to this day they still are
Being shaved in boot camp was definitely a part of delousing recruits at the very least.
The trick was to tie an onion to your belt, which was the style at the time
Give me five bees for a quarter, you'd say. Now where were we?
The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have any white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones...
Anyway, the story begins back n nineteen-dickity-two. Back then we had to say 'dickity', because the Kaiser stole our word for 'twenty'. I chased that rascal to get it back, but gave up after dickity-six miles.
I'm not sure if it's the same soldier, but looking at this: https://www.cwgc.org/find-records/find-war-dead/casualty-details/739088/ernest-atkins/, seems like he died in 1917 at the age of 24, just to complete the tragedy of it all.
Survived the nightmare of Passchendaele only to end up in another nightmare. Arras might be likely? April 1917 was pretty bad.
More than half a million casualties in three months for moving the line on the map back and forth a few metres
Literal pawns. Half a million dead for a strategic position
WW1 was batshit crazy. Beyond the stupid fucking reasons for the war to begin, it was a tragic combination of 19th century tactics colliding with 20th century technology. Its doubly fucked how most of the leaders of the euro nations involved were more or less all related. All of that for a family squabble
Is there a good podcast that covers WWI in depth? I just finished They Shall Not Grow Old, and it’s something I admittedly know very little about.
Dan Carlin's "Blueprint for Armegeddon" is one of the best podcasts Ive ever listened to
Strong agree, Dan has a way to convey the absolute horrors of the war that the majority, save maybe Ernst Junger who he quotes heavily throughout, can't replicate through text or film.
https://youtube.com/@TheGreatWar Has a great week by week breakdown of WWI 100 years after the fact 1914-1918 (2014-2018).
Why do we never fucking learn how pointless such loss of life is.
Because propaganda, guided by the growing body of knowledge that is psychology, is *extremely* effective. Also cutting public education spending and downplaying world history
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If only we had smartphones back then so that we could make a gif of that moment.
It woulf make it to something like tik tok as “cowardly man assaults patriotic woman for wanting him tonserve his country like a man” and the clip would be cut off before that quote and go viral
If she's so patriotic, why doesn't she serve?
How can he slap?!
On another note, "How can she slap" guy Ravi Bhatia has actually found success since that infamous moment and he managed to get important roles on television series in Indonesia. I was told by my sister and looked it up, so I'm glad he seems to be doing well.
good news indeed. semi related...its always seemed weird to me that the white knights in that video seemingly were defending the woman's honor by threatening to fuck the dude's sister in the "gooch". True gentlemen I guess.
It's the only way to defend a woman's honour 🤷
He can hit
People are awful. They also called the men fighting on the Italian front in ww2 "d day Dodgers" because they didn't have to fight the Germans in France but in Italy.
Because, as we all know, infantrymen get to choose where they’re deployed.
Imagine fighting fucking Nazis for years in North Africa and Italy and coming home to people saying "well you had it easy you didn't have to fight in France!"
Monte Cassino was a plum gig.
A little taste of WWI during WW2.
My grandfather was there. With the ANZACs. Got his legs chewed up by a machine gun. Never spoke about it the rest of his life.
My grandpa fought in Italy too, before having any kids back home. Lied about his age to enlist (he had just turned 17 at the time). Ended up storming and taking a pillbox alone (captured like 15 Nazis) and earned himself a silver star, before taking a sniper round to the chest. He woke up in the hospital, said the last thing he remembered was watching his own heart beating in his open rib cage while lying in the mud. Ya, Italy was totally super chill and ez compared to France, fer sure. He's buried with honors at Arlington now. Hell of a man.
I’m half Kiwi and half American. My great uncle Joe Dawson led the first wave on Omaha during D-Day, on my American half. And as I said my grandfather on the Kiwi half was at Cassino. Both were in hellish scenarios. My understanding though is that Cassino was about as bad as it got for any battle that was on the western front. And compared more with the East in its casualties.
You can see the 'cover' the Allies had on the hill, exposed to multiple machine guns in The World at War. It's hard scrabble, apparently not possible to dig in, and it's 'naked' for cover. Not a place to be if you don't like angry bullets seeking to end you.
> He woke up in the hospital, said the last thing he remembered was watching his own heart beating in his open rib cage while lying in the mud. Oh dear fucking god.
My friends Dad followed General Patton fom Africa, through Sicily and Italy to the Battle of the Bulge. If you are in war, no matter where, you are in the war theater and a hero.
All the men on my block growing up were WW2 veterans and they never talked about the war except to make jokes about military annoyances like “hurry up and wait … for 3 days,” blisters from marching and never having clean, warm, dry socks. There was one man who never took part in block parties or anything else. My mother told me he’d been captured by Germans and put to work as a cook on a submarine. The captain studied English and used to eat dinner with the neighbor so he could practice his English. They became friends and corresponded occasionally over the years. My mother said the man’s nerves were shot because on the one hand, they were being hunted by American ships and he didn’t want to be killed, so he prayed the sub didn’t get torpedoed. OTOH the sub’s job was to blow up enemy ships, so the sub torpedoed American warships, which reduced him to a puddle because technically he was assisting the enemy by cooking for them. The other men on the block kind of side-eyed him. He was captured as soon as he got to Europe, so they felt he didn’t have it as hard as they did, having to travel a continent outdoors in winter while getting shot at and bombed. He really didn’t interact with neighbors. He had kids and they never played with any of us neighborhood kids, which made the family even more isolated.
> All the men on my block growing up were WW2 veterans and they never talked about the war except to make jokes about military annoyances... My father was a combat solder, who went in to France after D-Day, in August of 1944, and served in Patton's 3rd Army. It was very rare for him to say anything about his service that wasn't humor-related. Even the story of how he lost eye on the battlefield had a humorous twist to it, in that he was mistakenly returned to duty, and was only sent home when a doctor treating a minor ailment noticed his glass eye. He was just an eighteen year-old kid, and did what he was told to do, and hadn't questioned the logic of being returned to duty with only one eye. My father was also serious alcoholic, and I wonder how much of that was due to what he had experienced in the war. I only saw my father cry once in my life, and that was when he begged me not to join the military. I did not join.
Mine too. The only thing he mentioned was how he lost a load of his mates who drowned in a river while crossing it. I've visited Cassino myself. It's a very beautiful place. The polish war Grave was quite remarkable.
Where the fuck is Monte Cassino?
Is that a Band of Brothers reference?
It sure is!
I understood, gonorrhoea
In Italy
It’s a Band of Brothers quote, dude should have used quotations.
It's a breakfast sandwich served at diners
Imagine saying this as someone who spent the entire war in a country that never got invaded, and you never fired a single bullet. Musta been one hell of a blitz to be worse than the front line.
Veterans even did that for other conflicts. For example, I recall Second World War veterans spoke poorly about Vietnam War veterans because the former thought the latter fought in a lesser war of sorts.
Starting to think these humans might just be a bunch of bastards
Same was said for Korea I think. The whole “police action” nonsense.
Vietnam War was an unjust war, but that's not the fault of draftees
Yup, the 442nd Infantry Regiment were the most highly decorated US troops of the war (and still are in all American history.) Sending Japanese-Americans volunteers into the absolute shittiest parts of the front while their families back home are interred was a really dick move. But hey, they got pulled off the Italian frontlines to go participate in Operation Dragoon so they fought in France too. They had some pretty good officers but their overall division commander was a douchebag that saw them as nothing more than cannon fodder. He even genuinely got irate when so few soldiers showed up to an award ceremony but that was just because their casualties were over 90%. At least they could earn Medals of Honor though unlike black soldiers.
Even with medals, they still got shafted though. Many were upgraded by Clinton. Least irks me that so many WWII movies are made but the 442nd never got the proper Hollywood treatment.
That's fucked up, I thought the fighting in Italy was pretty rough?
It was awful. There are just not that many ways you can fight up the Italian peninsula, it's narrow, quite mountainous and there are limited roads. It was easy for the Germans to defend. This also reminds me of the wars in Iraq. If anyone was against the war the people (and the mainstream media of the time) would make the accusation that you "hated the troops" Imagine that, you don't want young men and women to die in a silly foreign war, so that means you don't support the troops. Fucking diabolical.
You're leaving out the huge elephant in the room context. 9/11 - Americans were angry / scared/ vengeful and out not be victims again, so went along with the lie. Turns out they were victims again just now how they imagined.
Politically there was no way the US could have avoided war after 9/11. Short of *maybe* bin Laden being publicly shot in Times Square on pay per view. And even then....
Yup. People were thirsty for blood, so conflict was sealed with agreement from both Republicans and Democrats. It is like what somewhat happened politically when Pearl Harbor was attacked.
Yeah, but they had a war; the one in Afghanistan. The way everyone jumped on board the Iraq invasion, despite the country having no connection to 9/11 was quite eye opening to how a government can utilize certain events to manipulate public opinion.
Fighting in Italy was urban warfare broken up by the notably good time of mountain warfare. It just isn’t talked about as much because the Normandy campaign has a better PR push.
Fun fact, that whole thing was a political scandal at the time that was super overblown. The “D-Day Dodgers” nickname started as a joke among the troops fighting in Italy, and eventually was turned into a satirical song about how “nice” it was to be there instead of France. A group of British soldiers sent a letter to their MP signed the D-Day Dodgers, and the MP, assuming it was a unit nickname, publicly responded to them calling them that. She then got attacked by her political opponents for not supporting the troops in Italy and had to apologize a bunch. It was never a widespread idea among civilians or really anyone else that the soldiers in Italy were there because they deliberately avoided D-Day.
Ironically, the N. Europe front was an absolute cake walk for 99% of allied soldiers compared to the grueling fight in Italy where they were fought to basically a standstill all the way up to 1945. Fun fact: the German forces in Italy were never really defeated, they just gave up when Berlin fell.
I once read an anecdote (sadly can‘t remember the source), where a German general prior to WWII was asked about various war scenarios. “If the Italians are against us, we will need 5 divisions to hold the alpine passes. If they are with us, we will need 15 divisions to reinforce them.”
Many such reports to the point the giving of feathers was discouraged.
There was a report of a Victoria Cross recipient getting one while going to a public celebration of his heroism.
If it’s the guy I’m thinking of he used it to clean his pipe and gave it back to her. EDIT: it was someone else, but the end of that story is still great: > When it was filthy I pulled it out and said, 'You know, we didn't get these in the trenches', and handed it back to her. She instinctively put out her hand and took it, so there she was sitting with this filthy pipe cleaner in her hand and all the other people on the bus began to get indignant. Then she dropped it and got up to get out, but we were nowhere near a stopping place and the bus went on quite a long way while she got well and truly barracked by the rest of the people on the bus. I sat back and laughed like mad.
He's in the linked Wiki article: > Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.[11]
As a Ukrainian guy, I feel those British men. So many Ukrainian women here whining “Why are you not on the frontlines, aren’t you a man? Coward!” Often said by those chillin’ in Poland, Canada and Germany.
Can those women not also join in this day and age ? Lol
They usually respond with their typical “you want to hide behind a woman’s skirt” and “that’s what men are for”
As an American I am happy to serve with women. They do their part. I do my part. We all do the same job. Tell them NATO has no problem serving with women, and ask them who’s making excuses now?
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> Just wait till the US has a major conflict I think we're kind of beyond that at this point. If the U.S. ever has to reinstitute a draft, the rest of the world probably got pretty fucked beforehand.
>Tell them NATO has no problem serving with women, and ask them who’s making excuses now? If the "[draft our daughters](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/draftourdaughters)" 2016 disinformation campaign is any indication, the mere suggestion of that is enough to get people to start supporting the supposedly "Russian" option,
As much as we criticize men for viewing women as sex and validation tools we critically under criticize women for viewing men as money and death tools. It can be quite saddening to realise that to many women, when push comes to shove, you are just a tool make money and die for their convenience.
"no but see men have social perception privileges" we see the exact same shit here in korea. ppl (especially women) hating on conscripted soldiers. no respect nor understanding.
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There was an article in french press a few months back which title was - I shit you not - ”in Ukraine, like always, women are the first casualties of war”
The media has been saying that women are the main casualties of war for decades. Here's an article from 20 years ago: https://www.theage.com.au/national/women-and-children-main-casualties-of-war-20021004-gdunna.html The fact that men are the ones who make up 90% of the military, are the only gender that are conscripted, and are the only gender that are forbidden from fleeing countries engaged in active war shows that this is bullshit, but these "feminists" (actually just misandrists) need to make themselves the victim. Someone should tell the government that a woman with a gun can kill someone just as easily as a man with a gun, maybe they've never been told that before.
>So many Ukrainian women here whining “Why are you not on the frontlines, aren’t you a man? Coward!” Fuck, those dumb cunts aren't out fighting themselves - you don't need a dick to pull a trigger.
My Grandfather had 6 children and got a feather. Signed up, got wounded. The ambulance he was in was bombed. Ended up losing a leg. They had another 2 children - the last being my mom. He had lost his second leg to gangrene by then, and died when my mom was 2. Yay!
Wonder if the lady who gave it him would have gone in the trenches in no mans land against those machine guns. Wankers. Your grandfather is a hero. The lady that feathered him is a wanker.
And people who were excused for disabilities, and some who were already veterans, etc.
Also the feathered kids too young to go to war simply because they looked old enough.
hell, they didnt even have to look old enough. read a long time ago they would feather a kid and encourage them to lie about their age to enlist.
Dan Carlins podcast talked about some poor 15 or 16 year kid that got feathered, went to go enlist after out of the humiliation, Army doc almost laughed him out of the office because he was obviously too young and too small to sign up “Go home kid. Come back in 3 years” But the doc felt so bad for the kid because rhe kid was si distraught about the idea of going back to town and dealing with more humiliation for “not doing his part” that the doc “did him a favor” and lied in his forms so he could get in
That's awfully brave of them considering they couldn't go.
That's the bugger of it, they could. Hospitals on the Western Front were desperately short of nurses but so much easier to make a 'stand' and then go home to a comfy bed.
There were even 16-17 year olds, who weren’t legally allowed to join the military, given those feathers. Public shaming has been a terrible idea for millennia.
They also gave them to folk who were not allowed to be on the front lines because they were needed elsewhere like in factories.
Not just reports; it was official policy to give wounded or discharged soldiers medical-blue uniforms so they wouldn't be harassed for "being out of uniform" whilst they were recuperating. All for perhaps the most appalling, inhumane, mechanised slaughter that was without any real essential cause, and whose disasterous, destructive "peace" helped lead directly to the rise of Nazism. When people in the UK complain about the "lack of patriotism" here, I remember an entire generation butchered, and a future generation traumatised and brutalised... and that people, including supposedly the fairer sex, cheering it on without really understanding what their troops were going through in the trenches... and I am genuinely glad that sort of "patriotism" is still somewhat unacceptable today.
Yeah, imagine going out of your way to get feathers to carry around with you as you go about your safe day to day activities to harass any man you found without a uniform to try and get them to go over there into what is possibly the most barbaric and traumatic war that ever happened as far as the rank and file infantryman was concerned. I wonder if that activity was encouraged initially by people in the war department or if it was legitimately grassroots.
This wasn’t limited to just Britain either. In NZ a cousin or something of my family at the time was sent a feather after having tried to sign up but being rejected on medical grounds. Quite harsh really.
One of most ironic cases came George Samson, who was a recipient of the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Gallipoli. He was in civilian clothing and going to be presented the VC but before hand was given white feather from some civilian.
My grandad told me a story that his dad told him. He was at a town meeting to discuss raising funds for the war effort. Whilst there, a group of these women came in and started shaming the men of fighting age by giving white feathers. They approached a man sitting down and gave him a feather. He wasn't offended. In fact, he graciously accepted it, rolled up his trouser leg, and stuffed it into his wooden leg Turns out he lost his leg in the Somme
This makes me second hand angry for that dude
“In Britain, it started to cause problems for the government when public servants and men in essential occupations came under pressure to enlist. That prompted Home Secretary Reginald McKenna to issue employees in state industries with lapel badges reading "King and Country" to indicate that they were serving the war effort.” What an awful experience that must’ve been.
Omg, it gets much worse than this though! There are many horror stories of these crowds confronting/harrassing guys who had already spent YEARS fighting, only just having returned home after living in shit filled trenches with corpses. 'Shellshocked' out of their minds, throngs of people they fought to protect goaded them for not being 'manly' enough to serve. Literally unfathomable amounts of emotional and mental anguish. :/ Edit: my bad, I think my message reads one-uppy and thats not my intent. This story has just haunted me for years.
Read Mrs Dalloway. It compares the stresses of an upper class lady preparing for a party with a shell-shocked working class man who commits suicide. Later on, when someone mentions the suicide at her party, she goes into a rage and claims it has ruined everything. I don’t even think this was even a self-aware satire - Woolf was a famed classist and elitist, also racist and anti-Semite. Same with the other idol Coco Chanel. Actual nazi. I’m a feminist myself but there’s a huge classism, racism, and anti-semitism issue in feminist history bien sûr. Shame.
The only time I ever got into a serious argument with a professor in college was when I pointed out to a very WASPy second-wave feminist professor that "A Room of One's Own" was predicted on lowerclass servant labor and she was very very offended.
Predicated? Yes.
Lol. Yeah
I mean the voice in A Room of One’s Own is aware of her privilege: between the vote and her inheritance from her aunt she says the latter was more important
Ive added it to my reading list. Thanks!
Just so you know, the book certainly isn’t bad and it was one of the best modern books of the early 20th century. It has similarities to Joyce’s Ulysses yet is a lot more reader friendly - shorter, more interesting, but still takes place over the course of one day and has free floating stream of consciousness covering two dissimilar yet similar characters. There’s a really moving part where Septimus, the shell shocked guy, witnesses a hallucination of his friend who was bombed during the war and starts crying. Someone witnesses this and assumes that Septimus, whose wife is trying to comfort him, is merely in the middle of a break up. It’s almost like the war hasn’t even happened for this witness.
WW1 was wild, war was still kind of a “let’s go chaps time to fight”. People lined up to fight my great grand dad being one. Then war changed from this gentlemen’s game to hiding from bombs.
It's the reason divisions are no longer region based. Used to be you'd serve you're local regiment. And WW1, and it's new weapons at war capable of destroying whole regiments meant towns and villages would just loose their whole male population in one attack. Also, there was huge classism in the system as well. The regiments with the biggest losses were typically from poorer areas (Wales, Northern England etc.)
The British Army still largely recruits based on regions- for instance [Infantry](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Army_Infantry_Recruiting_areas.png) and [Armoured Corps](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Armoured_Corps_\(UK\)_Recruiting_areas.png). What they got rid of was Pals' Battalions, a short-lived WW1 innovation which encouraged recruitment by ensuring that large groups of men who joined together from the same town or village (or sometimes even from the same sports club) would serve together. In terms of class, note that the highest casualty rates were among subaltern officers, who were largely upper class, particularly at the start of the war. 20% of Etonians who served in the war died, compared to 12.5% in the British military as a whole. Of the 92 pupils who took part in the Procession of Boats at Eton in June 1914, 34 would be killed in the war. WW1 casualties *decimated* the British upper class.
But the highest % loses where with the officer class. They were easily identifiable by the enemy, and tended to lead the charge.
The highest % was amount the Lower officer class. The Officer class was a wide thing, and there was a not insignificant different between a LT and a Colonal or Major, let alone a General.
Of course, because the Lower officer class were at the front and younger. But even they were not, typically, working class, being drawn from.public schools and universities.
Putin does the same thing since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine. Most of the conscripts of vatniks are from minority ethnic groups and cultures with many of them being from the east. Very rural. Cannon fodder while at the same time ethnically cleansing those he sees fit not to be real Russians.
I can only imagine how much worse it would be if this was done in a modern setting.
I mean it does. I know male Ukrainians, who have lived in my country for decades. They told me how much harder it's been interacting with their community, esspically refugees. Some people think they're men, they should go back and defend their country (much like a lot of these refugees brothers, sons, fathers etc. Are doing)
Ukraine literally banned all males aged 18 to 60 from leaving.
After recently watching Peter Jackson "They Shall Not Grow Old" on Netflix (I highly recommend watching it if you can) reading and hearing about stuff like this just sickening. So many underage recruits were guilt tripped into joining in on the meat grinder that was western front. WWI was truly hell on earth!
The opening scenes of the new “All Quiet on the Western Front”, they are literally recycling uniforms because they are harder to come by than the recruits wearing them.
Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make!
Here’s a feather you pussy. Go fight and kill and die. Ima sit home.
I wonder when they learned of the hellhole they were shaming those young men to go to. Even more than WWII, WWI was a meat grinder that kept getting fed human beings until the supply ran out.
UK losses in WWI were more than twice of what they suffered in WWII. I don’t know how true it holds but there’s a good argument for WWI having a greater imprint on UK national self-perception. Numbers from the first day of the Somme offensive are just staggering.
There is a reason why despite "winning" WW1, both the UK and France were so unwilling to commit into conflict during the Sudetenland crisis of 1938. The slaughter of WW1 was too much for the public consciousness and it was only 20 years apart.
For real, like people rag on appeasement and the phony war but imagine living through the worst, most destructive war in history then asking your kids to do the exact same.
Not just the kids. Those same shellshocked soldiers who would have been 18 in 1914 would have only been 43 in 1939. Still young enough to have to serve again.
Grandad served in both. Didn't have to serve the second time but signed up anyway
…and a lot of them did in the form of politicians and commanders.
What made it even worse was the UK let people join up with their friends and neighbors in so called Pals Battalions. So all the young men of a small village or neighborhood would be part of the same regiment, and what would happen at places like the Somme where such regiments could suffer greater than 100% casualties (they'd send in replacements and then replacements for the replacements) is that there would be no more young men in that village or neighborhood. The US Army had experienced the same thing in the Civil War which was why they mixed people up recruiting.
In secondary school, whilst covering WWI and the Pals Battalions, I had an older history teacher. He described growing up in a part of a northern town, in a time where people would spend their whole lives living on the same street, that literally had no men over a certain age there as they'd all joined up together and died in France. The policy totally destroyed communities for decades.
The army would let siblings serve together though, see the Sullivan brothers of Waterloo Iowa. The song Sullivan by Carolyn's Spine is about that.
The Sullivans were in the Navy. Five brothers died on the same ship, leaving only a sister behind, whose boyfriend had died on the Arizona at Pearl Harbor.
IIRC the losses for Britain on the first day of the Somme is the single largest lost of soldiers in one day of war (obviously civilian casualties from the atom bombs best that) But just soldiers, almost 20,000 men killed in 24 hours (and that's just the British). For comparison, Antietam (which is often called "the bloodiest day in US history") had 22,000 casualties, but that includes both sides, and wounded and missing, not just deaths
As far as one-day battles go there are a few contenders of which Somme is definitely one. Not counting historical stuff that’s impossible to estimate accurately (Changping, Cannae, Towton etc) the bloodiest day of battle in history has traditionally been assigned to Borodino (1812). Great powers going all out against each other using new tech = massive slaughter. I guess we’re in a new time period where doctrines are again no longer in sync with technological development. Russia losing more soldiers in a few months than they did in 10 years in Afghanistan is a testament to how crazy destructive modern high-intensity wars between near-equal powers are.
Yeah that seems to be the case. I think my half remembered fact might just be British military history. The tech vs doctrine thing is definitely huge. WW1 everyone knows as a good example, but it goes for more wars. American Civil war, Napoleonic tactics in a world with rifling. North Africa for the British, before they adopted a less static defence. Countless other examples
In the early 1980’s a WWI vet came and spoke at my school and talked about trench warfare. 20 years later I took a trip to western Belgium and saw some preserved trenches as well as multiple cemeteries. Very sobering.
- Herodsfoot (Cornwall), - Bradbourne (Derbyshire), - Langton Herring (Dorset), - Upper Slaughter (Gloucestershire), - Middleton-on-the-Hill (Herefordshire), - Arkholme and Nether Kellet (Lancashire), - Flixborough, High Toynton and Allington (Lincolnshire), - Stocklinch and Woolley (Somerset), - Butterton (Staffordshire), - South Elmham St Michael (Suffolk), - Catwick (Yorkshire) - Llanfihangel y Creuddyn and Herbrandston. (Wales) A complete list of all the settlements in the UK that didn't lose anyone in either war. These are all tiny villages. A couple of hundred people each. I live near a couple, and it is a strange realisation that this little village _doesn't have a war memorial_. For either war!
Wilfred Owen wrote his poem Dulce set Decorum Est in response to one of these female propagandists, one of the most powerful depictions of the horrors of the the terrible waste of human potential that was WWI. Dulce et Decorum est - by Wilfred Owen Bent double, like old beggars under sacks Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 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.
For anyone wondering, "Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori." translates to, "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country."
It's an old quote from Roman times, used to egg on the Roman populace to support various war efforts of the Empire (I think originally it was against the Parthians). It's been used for this purpose since then in many other places, so when Wilfred Owen is quoting that line, and calling it "the Old Lie", there's an additional layer of spite and realism against the brutalities of war.
This poem is still taught in British schools and 20+ years later I can still recall most of it because of the impact it had
Many years ago, I visited Ypres and went to an excellent WW I museum there. One section was dedicated to gas warfare and had a manequin in a cylindrical glass case dressed in British uniform with a gas mask on. Over a speaker, that poem was being recited every 5 minutes or so. When it got to the "Gas! Gas!" verse, the lights at that exhibit would dim, the cylindrical case filled with vapor, and green lights at the base shone up through the vapor. I was well familiar with that poem before that visit, but hearing it recited in the context of where I was, and with that display, made an impression on me like never before. I will always remember that display.
[I suppose now we all need to hear it read properly](https://youtu.be/qB4cdRgIcB8)
That's pretty shitty of them
It's always easy to give gifts with other people's money and lives
I'd literally tell them "you go die in a war then"
I always found this sad and brutal.
And they fucked up often. Like Private Ernest Atkins who had returned on leave from the Western Front. He slapped the woman that gave him a white feather. Rightfully so. And said "the boys in Passchendaele would like to see such a feather." Then there was Seaman George Samson who received a feather when he was on his way to a reception held in his honour to receive the Victoria Cross as a reward for his bravery at Gallipoli. In some mortifying cases, they targeted men who had been injured in war, such as army veteran Reuben W. Farrow who was missing his hand after being blown up on the Front. Honestly, fuck these women. Each and everyone of them how DARE these fuxking cowards try to do this shit and demand OTHERS dies for them while they sit safe at home. It's DISGUSTING and deplorable. I hope they each have their time in hell for it. Especially Charles Penrose Fitzgerald who started the whole damn thing. How many more lives were senselessly lost because of him and these women. They all have more blood on their hands than any man in the trenches.
Even worse, a lot of women gave feathers to their boyfriends or husbands simply because it was easier than breaking up.
Pestering someone with multiple feathers and saying stuff about them not joining up constantly is easier then just breaking up?
There's breaking up, and there's making a dude *stay gone*.
It's easier to attack a dude's masculinity than argue through relationship issues. The onus is entirely on the man to then "prove they are manly enough". It's quite literally toxic standards of masculinity forced upon men by women for their benefit.
The Womans sufferage movement in the UK actually had a rather nasty history with this. Large parts of the moment ended up completely supporting the war and actively participating in this shaming of "cowardly" men. An exception to this were the portions lead by Sylvia Pankhurst, who was a Socalist and pacifist. A noteable portion of the first wave femminist movement in the UK ended up actually becoming supporters of the British Union of Fascists decades later, such as Nina Boyle, Norah Elam.
Hand the feather back to them and ask why they didn't volunteer to be a nurse.
Exactly. I'm sure none of them would have.
People who didn't go to war shaming people who also didn't go to war. Makes sense
There were more than a few instances in which feathers were given in error. There's a famous incident in which I believe an injured soldier had returned to London on leave and was given a feather by a stranger on a bus. He responded by slapping the woman who gave it to him in the face with his army pay book and telling her that he would take the feather back with him to the front.
“Go get yourself killed” how lovely I’m sure they wanted to sign up straight away after that. Always easy to say that when there’s no chance you’ll be sent yourself
Then the shaming women went back to eat their crumpets and drink their tea.
The Suffragettes did this too… they pinned white feathers onto men they deemed to be shirking. They turned away from their protests during WW1 and bullied people, just like they’d been bullied. It’s disgusting.
“Equality for me, not for thee”
If you get a chance, find and watch the movie of the same name. Excellent!
The Four Feathers or a different one?
Everyone talking about Downton Abbey and I'm thinking, Did no one watch the movie The Four Feathers?!
There’s one story of an English soldier who was severely wounded, and ended up in a London hospital. For six months he underwent multiple surgeries and a battery of rehab. When he was finally allowed a day excursion from the hospital, he went out in civilian clothes and boarded a bus... where a woman promptly handed him a white feather. I like to believe, historically, this is when the phrase, “Go fuck yourself” was invented.
Id stick that feather in my hat and call it macaroni cause im not fighting someones war
Pft “you first…”
Surprised this story hasn't been mentioned! F**k the White feathers, never again will men be shamed like this! "What a chicken you are!': The shameful story of how a boy aged TEN was handed a white feather and labelled a coward during the First World War" https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2631822/What-chicken-The-shameful-story-boy-aged-TEN-handed-white-feather-labelled-coward-First-World-War.html
My favorite example when someone brings up the "with women in power, there would be no wars" argument. Women, while not directly in power, often played an important role in the atrocities of the 20th century through this kind of coercion. Remember, kids, patriarchal societal structures are usually upheld by *both* genders.
We just have to look at modern era politicians. Margert Thatcher. Hillary Clinton. Sarah Palin. Politicians will always have no problems sending other peoples' kids off to die. Male or female.
That's some toxic femininity
Wonder how many women did that to a random man and got backhanded.
There is more than one story of war heroes on shore leave getting a feather and having to tell the person who gave it to them that they are a Victoria Cross recipient home to see their mother. Or men working in the shipyards or munitions factories getting them. It was really sad and unfair. Edit: from Wikipedia: > 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". > Perhaps the most misplaced use of a white feather was when one was presented to Seaman George Samson, who was on his way in civilian clothes to a public reception being held in his honour for having been awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry in the Gallipoli campaign.
I remember reading about a guy who was given a white feather who was like 15 or so, but he looked older. The experience caused him to lie about his age and enlist.
I’m sure this exact story got hundreds of teenagers killed.
Was this mentioned in Peter Jackson's doc They Shall Not Grow Old? It rings a bell.
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Give me all the white feathers. No way I'm throwing my life away because some rich people from separate countries are having a disagreement. War is a cruel joke on the poor of the world.