61–70 of 119 posts
If this piques your interest at all I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History where he did 6 parts and about 18 hours on WWI from a mostly military history perspective. He also did a shorter one on the eastern front in WWII.
Funny how that shows every person online claiming to have PTSD from online bullying have nothing of the sort.
Snarky provocations aren't welcome here, and have little to do with serious discussion (of PTSD or anything else), regardless of how correct your opinion is.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032858 and marked it off-topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny to use the word "funny" in relation to other people's suffering.
Perhaps the world would be a less violent place if we laughed at soldiers for their failures instead of glorifying them. The article fittingly ends with "all that suffering .. for what?" It really was a lot of murderous people getting themselves killed and injured while trying to kill other people. Not something to have sympathy for. Sure, they might have been fooled by naive ideas of nationalism, but that's still a…
There is no more eerie account of what it was like to be a foot soldier caught up in trench warfare than Arthur Guy Empey's book "Over the Top" (1917). It is available free as a Kindle ebook: https://www.amazon.com/Over-Top-Arthur-Guy-Empey-ebook/dp/B0... (some reviews can be found here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1517707.Over_The_Top ) Empey was an American who managed to get in the mix with the British sold…
So many shells were fired that farmers are still digging up unexploded ones today. I saw a bunch of them at a corner of a farm field in Belgium pending pickup and it spooked me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/08/1...
Often referred to as the "iron harvest": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest
In the small farming towns of France and Belgium, undetonated World War I explosives that turn up during each year’s spring planting and autumn plowing are known as the “iron harvest."
If this piques your interest at all I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History where he did 6 parts and about 18 hours on WWI from a mostly military history perspective. He also did a shorter one on the eastern front in WWII.
Even the telling of the stories leaves one affected.
I just want to throw this in here for some more context: "During The Somme, the British bombardment consisted of 1,537 guns firing over 1,500,000 shells over a period of 168 hours averaging 8,929 shells fired per minute." That is just... staggering. I can't find a source for it, but I remember some factoid stating that on average it took several hundred shells to kill one soldier. That's not to say they had to take s…
It seems like the purpose of a bombardment like that isn't to kill the soldiers outright, but to crush their advance and keep them out of your territory.
"In late 1915 / early 1916, Commonwealth forces began developing a new form of barrage. Beginning close to their own lines, the 'creeping' barrage moved slowly forward, throwing up dirt clouds to obscure the infantry who advanced close behind. The barrage would reach the enemy lines and suppress as normal (by driving men into bunkers or more distant areas) but the attacking infantry would be close enough to storm these lines (once the barrage had crept further forward) before the enemy reacted. That was, at least, the theory."
From http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/worldwar1/p/prcreepingb....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't mean to draw any comparison between PTSD and sorrow. It's merely an example of how the same word can be used to describe very different things without implying any sort of equivalence.
That makes sense. I didn't think you were being dismissive. Hopefully I haven't just managed to be dismissive of you!
If this piques your interest at all I highly recommend Dan Carlin's Hardcore History where he did 6 parts and about 18 hours on WWI from a mostly military history perspective. He also did a shorter one on the eastern front in WWII.
Came here to say this. I learned so much that I didn't previously know about WWI from HH. Not only the military history aspect, but the political and cultural context for a lot of it.