Are wars actually less bad now? I've been listening to a book about the Crusades. During the First Crusade, the Crusaders ended up taking Antioch, but then getting trapped in it when a massive 40,000 man Turk army arrived.
They held up in the walls, but disease spread and they started starving. Then some priest claimed to have found the Spear of Destiny, the lance that pierced Christ's side, and they got all amped up and decided to attack.
The Turk army let them out because there is only like 20,000 Crusaders left and they're starving and ate their horses, so better to let them outside the wall.
Somehow they end up being hyped up enough to punch holes in the Seljuk line and end up encircling a large part and killing the vast majority of the Turk army in one day.
It's really hard to imagine a one day battle killing like 30,000 people these days.
So do guns and artillery actually slow down the pace of fatalities?
That sounds way better than walking around miles away from the frontline and then suddenly dying from a nade dropped on you by some fricking drone.
This or getting pushed around for hours barely being able to breathe from the dust, smell of shit, piss and dead bodies just to have a spear through the gut.
You used to have a chance for your own efforts and skills to see you through combat. Now though it's basically just a crapshoot.
Sure anon, there is absolutely zero difference in survivability between someone with no training and someone with 20 years of battlefield experience
Unironically yes.
Well done you uncovered the secret conspiracy, training and experience is actually useless
You're all actual idiots. Your odds of surviving are better the more training and experience you receive. This is an established fact.
Pure luck plays a huge role of course. But your odds are tremendously better.
Even seemingly irrelevant things like height can make a huge difference. Tall soldiers are more likely to survive battles because generally, they don't tire as quickly = more alert.
Look it up if you don't believe me.
thats not surprising honestly
experience is everything, no matter what you try to do. humans learn best from doing or experiencing something themselves, however we are quite unique that we can learn from other peoples failures and also simply from other people telling us about theoretical failures
now in war you dont have much room for mistakes. if your trench is dug wrong you are very likely to die, if you dont lower your heels while going prone they will get shot, etc. etc.
all of these things you cannot learn from own experience, because you only have 1 try, so if you can learn from other people teaching you or seeing other people die that naturally will immensely increase your chances of survival
yes, its still random if you die or not, but if you are untrained your risk to die is maybe 20% and if you are a tested veteran your risk is 3%
>Tall soldiers are more likely to survive battles because generally, they don't tire as quickly = more alert.
>Look it up if you don't believe me.
Aren't taller soldiers more likely to get hit?
He is wrong.
Taller soldiers require more food and energy to move a given distance, while manlets are very good at energy conserving and can last longer periods of time without food and water.
A bigger body requires more energy to move and effort.
big men can take the manlets food. the boss gets to eat while the midgets starve.
>the boss
Historically a lot of good military leaders were pretty short. Sure there's Napoleon as an obvious one (even though he was average for the time, the meme largely comes from the fact that he was measured as 5'2" in French units, in Imperial/British units he was actually 5'7" or so, but Brits took the meme and ran with it saying he was 5'2" in Imperial), but we could also look at Lord Horatio Nelson, a 5'4" manlet who was admittedly sort of temperamental and described as " having looked so small you could almost bend down and pick him up" (something like that, forget the exact quote) but he was truly a great admiral, often considered one of the greatest in history, and the best in English history. Alexander the Great was 5'0" and wasn't slowed at all by it, being beloved by his soldiers and a brilliant tactician, only failing when it was clear he was no longer interested in empire-building and wanted to keep conquering until there was no more world left to conquer, the man went as far as fricking India, a place he and much of the western world didn't know even existed at the time. A man for whom great men who came after him, including Julius Caesar, wept openly at his grave in Alexandria, proclaiming they could surely never be as great as Alexander.
The men were all well fed, the land was settled, honor was given and glory was shared. A man's height matters not, only his spirit. A man with enough spirit in him stands as tall as he allows himself to be, for nothing is impossible to he who dares try.
They also need more food right?
Unironically yes.
No. We are just engaged in fewer full scale wars than we used to be.
Bows, crossbow, musket, cannon, artillery, bomber.
Your training dictates how many enemies you can kill- but does nothing for your survivability.
You may fire 3 musket rounds in a minute, only to be killed by someone who can't even reload their musket.
Your fox hole could be better than anyone else's, good for rain but a 30 pound shell doesn't care.
You could be an admiral, if the bridge gets hit with a guided bomb shrapnel won't salute you as it passes.
That's why war sucks and isn't like a game, good and bad soldiers all die alike.
Mmm yes, all deaths in war are entirely luck-dependent and likelihood cannot be mitigated in any way, I agree completely
I'm glad we agree.
Today you sit in a FOB taking random mortar fire from a part time goat herder.
You have tens of thousands of dollars in kit, your rank isn't really relevant, who gets hit with a mortar, ied or RPG is basically dumb luck.
Historically you sit in a trench next to a baker conscripted last week and a veteran of the last war.
Three miles away the enemy fires a barrage of shells, two out of three three you will die. Dumb luck.
Your in a pike formation made up of your entire town, you've dragged this bloody heavy pole half way across France, you're forced to just stand there while arrows rain down on you, unable to advance or withdraw until the order is given.
It's 500 AD, you're a slinger, the guy next to you is a slinger, everyone is a slinger.
You yell and hurl hundreds upon hundreds of stones backwards and forwards between the masses of slingers.
Are you a good slinger? Yes.
Does the stone hitting you care? No.
You're probably getting hit with a dozen stones regardless of if you win or lose.
In fact there's probably not even a real winner or loser at all
yes, absolutely. do you think experience gets you more hit points? high rates of survival among western forces are contingent of institutional factors outside of the individuals control, such as cas, air superiority and medevac capability. doesn't matter if you're an office worker or delta force, if you take a hit and your support structure cant get you to a surgery in time; you're dead. thats not something that individual skill is remotely a factor in.
>le training doesnt matter
The best thing about the war in ukraine is its completely and totally obliterated the myth of "le training doesnt matter"
Watching russian "soldier" cope with almost pre ww2 understanding of the battlefield in a modern war is something to behold
its like because some of them have plate carriers things like "cover" dont matter.
The amount of dead russians who are dead because they exposed themselves out of cover is shocking
To be fair, most of those casualties are likely Donbabwe conscripts. Over half of their army of levies already got wiped out in spite of aggressive recruitment
Veterans are mortal just like a green recruit.
The IED, sniper or random machinegun burst or mortar strike really dosen't care.
>Both sides fight hard, having a similar amount of casualties
Nah. The rout produced most casualties but the rate of attrition in the "actual" battle itself was also important; winning sides often inflicted more casualties whether by skill of arms or manoeuvre or any other reason in the battle itself. That would be what actually breaks the enemy.
Trenches had to be arrow-proof still, even medieval ones. Romans considered a 2-foot trench with the spoil piled up shallow, suitable for a marching camp; in a siege like Alesia trenches would almost certainly have to be man height. Moreso in the medieval era when crossbows entered the fray.
I think you're getting trenches men sheltered in confused with sappers trenches that were dug up to and you undermine a wall.
My point is that in modern wars, excavators, metal shovels, metal buckets, canvas tents, wool blankets, great coats.
Imagine before these existed just how tough the front lines would have been.
The Romans recruited the poorest rural workers for the legion because these people could survive sleeping in the open.
>I think you're getting trenches men sheltered in confused with sappers trenches that were dug up to and you undermine a wall
no real difference; arrow and sling protection was necessary all the same. the Romans had elaborate siegeworks.
>What did the Romans ever do for us?
yeah I couldn't think of a proper riff of that
>starving attackers over run starving defenders and start eating them man to man
no I get the concept but was this an actual battle being referenced?
forgot to write: the noticeably higher rate of casualties amongst green recruits rather than amongst veterans disagrees with this theory
This board is filled with tourists now. Not sure what you expected with this post.
What would happen to me if you dropped a mortar shell from a silent drone 100' above me while I took a shit in a ditch 5 miles from the frontline?
What would happen to Jocko Willink if you dropped a mortar shell from a silent drone 100' above him while he took a shit in a ditch 5 miles from the frontline?
This is the epic World War 3 you fricking homosexuals hyped me up about.
There is a difference between someone with no experience and someone with a few weeks experience. There is basically no difference between a few weeks and several decades in terms of survivability
Not really. End of the day if your unit got encircled you'd be fricked.
Seems like encirclements getting broken through is more of a modern thing. Battle of Rorke's Drift's is what happens when you try and encircle a machine gun position.
Not really, wars in pre-industrial times were determined entirely by how wealthy you were, same as today.
Other way around
Modern warfare is 1000 times deadlier than any type of warfare before
You had far more chance to survive on a medieval battlefield than on a modern one
I mean in ancient warfare, you saw death coming but in modern, everything can kill you at any moment its too random
not true. just look at napoleonic era battles where 50k men died in less than a day
>The fighting involved around 250,000 troops and left at least 68,000 killed and wounded, making Borodino the deadliest day of the Napoleonic Wars and the bloodiest single day in the history of warfare until the First Battle of the Marne in 1914.
Using the top estimate of one battle doesn't mean all battles were similar.
Only about 5 out of 150 million people in Europe died in the Napoleonic Wars and it took 13 years. That's 3.3% of the population of 1800.
In WW2 ~20 million out of 575 million europeans died, which is a similar number, but not worse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Wars_casualties
Overall - WW2 wasn't thousand times worse but Napoleonic wars were not that bad either.
Wasn't the total amount of deaths in WW2 closer to 50 or 60 million people? I'm aware not all of those were in Europe, but still.
Yes, overall it was much higher.
But for the reasons of comparison to Napoleonic wars, the casualties in Europe are mentioned.
I guess it depends on the definition of Europe though. In western Europe, which is the civilized part of Europe, comparatively few people died.
In eastern Europe, and particularly in Russia, a shitload of people died. I mean, if you count all the Russian/Soviet deaths as European deaths, it's way beyond 20 million in total.
Of course, the deaths in WW2 can't really just be attributed to warfare, but also ideological stuff, not only from the happy fun time nazis killing nose people, but the Soviet homosexuals slaughtering literally everything, including their own people and their own allies.
Indeed, 20 million was military deaths mostly, if you count in civilian deaths from all causes, the number grows significantly.
Well, hopefully we will see similar death tolls in the near future. In Russia, I mean.
>I mean in ancient warfare, you saw death coming but in modern, everything can kill you at any moment its too random
How the frick would you know were you there?
Death has always been arbitrary and random in war. That's true of a missile hitting you or being crushed to death and stabbed in the neck from behind in melee of 500 people. It does not matter who you are.
I think getting stabbed in the middle of a stab fight is a lot less surprising than snoozing and waking up to half your platoon dead from one single 155 round
>accidently gets a cut from a random tree branch and dies from infection
yeah
You don't have to go back that far, just look at the Somme.
Anyway, the answer is that war has become more of a constant battle stretched over several days instead of one single decisive battle on one day, at most two. Also armies have arguably become smaller as they have become more expensive to build and maintain. A country may give up fighting if 3,000 of its troops die in one campaign, instead of 30,000 in one day.
But if you are looking at it in terms of absolute numbers, war has become more deadly because the human population is larger. Instead of 1 billion we are 7 billion. Look at Ukraine for example - the casualty count on each side has probably outnumbered the entire First Crusade. From that point of view, modern warfare kills more.
>A country may give up fighting if 3,000 of its troops die in one campaign, instead of 30,000 in one day.
Do Africa and middle eastern insurgent groups really count?
Does the USA count?
>do guns and artillery actually slow down the pace of fatalities?
lol
lmao even
Most of the casualties back then were people who would have survived if they had accessed to modern weapons (whether or not they'd ever fight again is another matter entirely). You also only tend to see casualties like this in Christian v Muslim slapfights. It's usually quite rare for battles in the Medieval period to exceed 10-20% for both sides. Butchery of kind that happened at battles like Agincourt was typically the exception rather than the rule.
>accessed to modern weapons
Meant medicine.
Lit here.
Some of the main differences I would note would be modern supply chains being so strong.
Historically whole armies of hundreds of thousands of men could starve because they were over extended and suffered a failure like roads being covered in mud.
They used to carry whole parties of hunters and herd thousands of cattle with an army to feed them.
There was no mre, no iron ration, no air drop, no artillery shell full of hard tack.
You matched with a pouch of perishable food, anyone present at day break got a bowl of slop, and anyone left behind starved to death in the middle of nowhere
>Historically whole armies of hundreds of thousands of men could starve because they were over extended and suffered a failure like roads being covered in mud.
"Historically"
The same could happen today
Actually it couldn't
Armies are a fraction of their historical size, China might have 2 million soldiers, 6 million auxiliaries and be able to levy the same again.
But that's the whole continent of China.
Historically you had battles between only two states of China where a million men were present.
Xerxes hordes, the khanate, even with the world's population being a fraction of what it is today staggeringly large armies were raised by conscription of children, the elderly, and essential workers (farmers).
We have shelf stable food, even our flour lasts years in storage.
Industrial agriculture gives us a massive global surplus, in peace time money limits production- in war time you produce at full capacity and stockpile.
Look at how the might of the usaf couldn't even break vc lines using chemical weapons and carpet bombing, and cluster bombing.
No, small armies , mechanized logistics, shelf stable food, many reasons
It is often unwise to take ancient sources on numbers at face value. No ancient battle ever had a million men present or even half that.
I'm not basing that on the typical exaggerated head count, I'm taking about mass mobilization.
Not just the army, but the "baggage train" of peasants which followed it carrying supplies.
Historical accounts don't consider the baggage train to be part of the army as a general rule, nor would the enemy even really know how many peasants were displaced in the enemies state.
However I fully appreciate how famine effected the belligerent state, having diverted massive food stockpiles and also lost the farmers in carrying said stockpiles.
The Romans in particular keep frequent and detailed notes on the harvests, the grain levies, and the supply of troops (see: why Romans actually won)
The Chinese in particular absolutely had engagements with a million men present, because that's only 300,000 soldiers a side, plus 300,000 auxiliaries/ baggage train, and 300,000 internally displaced peasants supplying the expeditionary force.
After the battle, the losing force would have their camp looted, most of the fleeing soldiers would starve as the baggage train broke up, and having lost the man power and resources the peasants at home would likely starve as well.
It's hard to fathom just how big the Chinese kingdoms were, how large their armies were, and how many starved after each of 2000 years of feudal pike wars
>It's hard to fathom just how big the Chinese kingdoms were
Is it really though? Less than 100mil easily
All I'm saying is that a far higher percentage of citizens were drafted.
The whole "peasant army" thing was 2000 years of Chinese history.
There was a looming famine, the only response was to send half the men armed with farm tools turned into pikes to invade the neighboring kingdom simply so there were less mouths to feed at home.
Whether the men died or not both sides would suffer famine, thus the "decisive tang victory" was not a meme.
I'm talking casualty ratios that must be measured not by the army; but by the kingdom.
A kingdom could lose a third of its population in one campaign season and the several years famine following.
Even the Maoist campaigns were like this
To be fair, those numbers included provisionaries and logistics officials who in a modern army would be outsourced to civilian contractors. The the actual combatant counts were lower.
NTA but food is lots more abundant, storable, and portable than before.
As late as WW1 (and WW2 Pacific) food basically went from farm to barn to front line with minimal processing. WW2 saw the mass adoption of tinned rations, a group effort by the Western Allies, but not in armies like USSR's and Japan's. They could and did starve in a matter of weeks if this supply was interrupted.
Now? There are massive supplies of tinned and packaged food kept in most cities, and ample transportation; should an army be in such a pickle it can commandeer such resources and rush it to the front.
Ever witnessed a gang fight? It's two hours of shit talking and two minutes of fisticuffs. Same deal.
The second major difference I'd note is the proportion of front line infantry, this stems from the previously mentioned logistics.
One truck carries 50 men's food, but historically you'd need 50 men to carry the supplies for 50 men.
This means 100 men are exposed to attrition, 100 men must retreat, 100 men can be wiped out if encircled.
A far higher rate of citizens were conscripted, simply to carry soldiers junk.
Today we conscript one truck driver, historically a Lord conscripted 50 porters.
In ww2 the French were using taxis and bicycles to supply supply front lines- well how bad would it be if the only wheels you had were made of wood.
>lit here
Yeah, it's obvious because you parrot bullshit tropes nobody with actual history knowledge takes seriously.
>armies of hundreds of thousands
Practically did not exist before the Napoleonic wars, and even then they marched in corps of 15-30k and only came together occasionally. Much like any of the ancient empires somewhat credibly purported to have fielded north of 100k men. But 90% of the time any 6 digit number can be automatically dismissed.
>parties of hunters
No. Not in the overwhelming majority of armies I am aware of. There would be "foragers", but these were just regular troops - typically light cavalry, if available - whose task it was to go around and basically steal anything that wasn't bolted down to feed the army.
>perishable foods
Hard bread, salted meats and fish, dried fruit and fricking basic ass bags of grain weren't invented in 1900, homosexual.
>lol everyone who didn't get the scraps just got left behind to starve
Rationing and marching discipline weren't invented in 1900 either
homosexual.
>There would be "foragers", but these were just regular troops - typically light cavalry, if available - whose task it was to go around
*who were tasked with going around
This wasn't some sort of dedicated formal post. Sure, some of them may have hunted, but generally looting is far more efficient.
That's just Europe. China absolutely did field armies hundreds of thousands strong. Even the tiny island country of Japan managed to field numbers approaching a hundred thousand on each side in major battles/sieges.
>China absolutely did field armies hundreds of thousands strong
In total, yes. In the field, debatable. Certainly not marching all together.
>Japan
Only towards the end of Sengoku Jidai, and again, only rarely concentrated all in one place.
Rome had an army up to 400-600k strong total, but it was only once in a blue moon that any given field army exceeded 40-50k. And again, for those large campaigns you'd typically have several forces that temporarily converged, typically in camps large enough to be considered temporary cities and resupplied through efforts that involved half the fricking empire.
You can squirm all you like, the facts speak for themselves. Napoleonic era my ass.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Osaka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Sekigahara
>automatically dismissed
weak
>Hard bread, salted meats and fish, dried fruit and fricking basic ass bags of grain weren't invented in 1900
the preparation of these items took more time, effort and resources, therefore they would still be in limited supply. evidenced by the fact that rulers had to give specific instructions to have them prepared before setting out on campaign. depending on time period many armies functioned on very perishable foods e.g. even the Romans, who usually ate puls (pottage).
nonetheless, they should not be "automatically dismissed"
go back to Madinah
>americans think medieval gigantic battles are fake news
newsflash:
the gigantic end-battle in the lord of the rings was pretty much a tiny border scuffle between two provinces in real medieval times.
then why didnt you post a medieval battle moron? Americans think of stuff, like crecy and agincourt, which were absolutely just skirmishes when compared to classical battles, like during the Punic wars. Or later period battles from early modern like what you posted.
>wanted a huge-ass fricking melee battle
>got posted one
>no no no no, not like this one
>1651
>medieval
>source: Wikipedia
have a nice day.
How long did a battle last?
how the frick does a giant mass of people not get tired and not just lay the frick down after 5 minutes of swanging 10 pound weapons at each other
People like conspiracies but i dont actually believe these battles happened as depicted
There is no way a bunch of people line up to go get shot with arrows. No way dudes would not freak out about being in the first row and be basically 100% going to die due to averages
are there any well written first hand (meaning a soldier) accounts of these battles? or is it all ye olde illiterates talking with no way to describe things in a detailed manner?
Actually it was very common in ancient times to fight "To a standstill".
Both sides reach the field of battle exhausted from matching, fight an indecisive engagement, are forced to withdraw to make camp, then just go back home.
It was hundreds of years before anyone even had enough food to fight in winter, before a "war" there were simply punitive campaigns of rape, looting and crop burning.
After a week fricking the other city up while they cowered in their walls your army just came home.
Many battles never reached close quarters, skirmish parties fought over supply lines (a road, a track, a river crossing) while the main army made camp (Because they simply had to) and whoever lost the skirmishes couldn't supply their camp and went home.
What made the Roman legion was how many stakes they carried (see fasces), how quickly they set up shitty little forts, and how after three days they were fine while the other army deserted after a week without food or shelter.
Sources: the aenied, homer, livy, various other histories.
So yes you're right, historically infantry fighting was rarely decisive.
This changes with the hoplites, who conserved their energy by fighting in formation, it changes with cavalry who can kill a disproportionate number of retreating enemies, and it changes with artillery.
>What made the Roman legion was
their huge emphasis on logistics, which enabled them to bring more reserves into action, march further and faster thus concentrating a stronger force, supply the troops with more ammo and more reliable standardised weapons, thus inflicting more casualties
Chinese accounts of campaigns involving half a million combatants are within the realm of possibility*. Consider that Leipzig involved half a million men altogether, and the technology of logistics isn't that different.
>*that's not to say it is definitely true, just possible
Yes, basically.
Their strength logistically translated to more decisive victories, where their neibours were only logistically supplied for seasonal punitive raiding.
The food, the fasces, the tents, the pilums.
The Roman fort that let them build, the supply chain they could protect, the road, the empire.
Before this, you had a pouch of oats, you spent a week trashing your neibours wheat field, gang raping whoever you caught, stole whatever you could carry then went home after a few weeks.
It was rare to get a lasting victory
>How long did a battle last?
how the frick does a giant mass of people not get tired and not just lay the frick down after 5 minutes of swanging 10 pound weapons at each other
Regular exercise.
A human being can literally do this for half a day as long as they are well fed and well exercised.
>he thinks regular exercise makes somebody inhuman
listen im not exactly PrepHole but you cant actually say that any human being is capable of hand to hand combat for more than 5-10 minutes
there is a reason boxing has timed rounds. If they dont , they drop from exhaustion
10 pounds is nothing. Its the crazy draw weight of bows that really gets me
Most soldiers were killed in retreats (see battle of Towton). Both sides fight hard, having a similar amount of casualties until one side finds itself in a mass rout. In those cases it is much easier to kill massive amounts of people. You tackle or smash the head of anyone too slow, tired or injured to run, and it's easier since their buddies are not going to punish you for it. Mass routes are dangerous. It's always wiser to withdraw in order before that happens.
Guys fighting on medieval battlefields had less to worry about than soldiers fighting with muskets, and they would still match shoulder to shoulder in range of enemy small arms.
WW1 troops would go over the top and get shelled and machine gunned and they still did it.
Because this battle didn’t actually happen as described. There’s no accurate contemporary description of it and most of what we do have is propaganda.
The numbers are almost certainly exaggerated.
>No way dudes would not freak out about being in the first row and be basically 100% going to die due to averages
This happened all the time and historians did mention it.
This is how the greeks won their first battles against persians.
>10 pound weapons
They weren't swinging 10 pound weapons. Swords are 2-3lbs, same for all other typical forms of one-handed weapon. Shields are heavier, with spears it depends on length.
>how the frick does a giant mass of people not get tired and not just lay the frick down after 5 minutes of swanging 10 pound weapons at each other
They did. Battles happened in waves of 10-15 minutes spread out over a day or so for the most part, unless an encirclement or breakthrough happened. Casualties were very low until the rout.
When big encirclements happened it probably looked more like a crowd disaster than you'd imagine a battle looking like, Cannae would have been like a giant version of Hillsborough.
>crowd disaster
>Hillsborough
Hillsborough wasn't a crowd disaster, it was a policing disaster.
>Hillsborough wasn't a crowd disaster, it was a policing disaster.
It was a fan disaster.
can't speak widely, but a practice in the roman army was to hot swap the battle line periodically for this reason, so the enemy would be fighting fresh troops.
Also, I can't think of any first hand accounts, because it depends entirely on the civilization/era (depending on who you're talking about, literacy was generally not something soldiers were skilled in, even Romans who we do have a few letters from vindolanda). We do have accounts from contemporary authors like Josephus who wrote on the military based on personal experience
>a practice in the roman army was to hot swap the battle line periodically
which is one interpretation of the described manoeuvre. how practicable it was in combat, we're not sure. more likely the described manoeuvre is pulling out a sub-unit of the line - perhaps one century - and substituting a fresher/more intact century in its place. because it would be quite difficult to replace the entire battle line all at once.
>There is no way a bunch of people line up to go get shot with arrows. No way dudes would not freak out about being in the first row and be basically 100% going to die due to averages
You have 2022 documented videotaped evidence of people doing SVBIED suicide missions, why wouldn't these people exist in the past ?
>No way dudes would not freak out about being in the first row and be basically 100% going to die due to averages
The samartians would put their oldest men in the front row.
>No way dudes would not freak out about being in the first row and be basically 100% going to die due to averages
It did happen. To my understanding however, in later years being in the front ranks was an honour/paid more and was thus largely professionals/volunteers.
I think WWI takes the cake for awful war conditions. Those ancient battles were pretty awful too. And I imagine cutting someone up with a sword multiple times a day might do something to your brain that shooting them doesn't.
Modern wars are brief.
Historically wars would last an entire lifetime, I've been to cities that have been razed 200 or more times, to villages where four generations of men killed and raped the same neighboring village over and over.
You know what's worse than being shot?
Being pelted to death by 500 slingers.
That's 1000 years of history right there, until the bronze age it was just masses and masses of slingers with wooden or wicker shields.
Think the trenches were bad?
They at least HAD trenches. Before the metal spade you slept in the open, your fort was a two meter high berm covered in spiky sticks.
The trenches had toilets, they had dugouts, they had duck boards.
Historically you had a roll of fur, or a straw mat. not even a tent because of the extraordinary cost of cloth.
The continuous nature of ww1 was awful, the lack of reprieve during fighting season.
The longest campaign in ww2 was in Manipur, many people fail to appreciate just what that meant.
Mustard gas was bad- but a wienertail of choleric disease, malaria, that kills more men.
Frankly starvation kills more men than anything, and that's systematically under reported because starvation of deserters, of the wounded, or in the aftermath of war is never adequately factored in.
>They at least HAD trenches. Before the metal spade you slept in the open, your fort was a two meter high berm covered in spiky sticks.
Trench warfare is ancient as frick and happened always in sieges.
Sieges didn't happen nearly as often as is imagined.
For much of history the belligerent force couldn't both seige and harvest their grain, you could attack the same city every summer after your harvest but that's not a seige.
What constitutes a "trench" historically may only have been half a meter deep, not for men to take cover in but simply to stop enemies crossing in formation.
Anyone could yeet overa trench but were simply outnumbered on the other side.
You had "trenches" that were a foot deep, with a foot of berm and pallisades.
My point is that historically armies often slept in the open, had weak supply chains, couldn't fortify areas well, and for these reasons suffered massive attrition.
WWI had all the sufferance of ancient warfare and medical treatment and all the death and destruction of modern equipment.
And one need look no further than the east to see the starvation and rape you speak of.
When the very air you breath becomes poison and the trees burst in 1,000,000 round rolling cannonades. Yes. WWI was truly horrifying. Horrifying in a way that ancient wars just simply could not achieve.
Ww1 was also horrible in a way that most modern wars cant achieve, in particulaf because of the limited mobility of troops due to lack of engines and vulnerability of horses to machine guns meant you could pound some dudes with endless number of shells all day. Nowadays, wars in Iraq and Ukraine and Afghanistan are all about trying to accurately hit a fast moving target with one round while its also firing back at you
We really just weren’t ready for modern warfare at that point were we, Christ. Or I guess it woke us up to just how fricking powerful the weapons we were producing.
World war one was bad, it certainly rates.
The famines in the ussr in ww2 rate.
The sino-japanese war trumps both in both morons, truly westerners were fortunate in both world wars.
But historically there are horrors beyond comprehension, of which historians only heard rumor.
There's degrees of cannibalism.
Eating the dead, eating parts of living people, butchering people.
And then there's a decisive tang victory, where starving attackers over run starving defenders and start eating them man to man.
There was the "dark age" after the collapse of Rome, Roman agriculture, Roman irritation.
I think nobody wanted to write about this period, and the writings were destroyed because nobody wanted to read them.
In ww1 the front lines weren't full of civilians.
Getting shelled isn't so bad, shells can't eat you
>decisive tang victory, where starving attackers over run starving defenders and start eating them man to man
tell me moar
>Roman irritation
yeah, the loss of that technology was quite an embuggerance
What did the Romans ever do for us?
No in China monoculture farming rice and the use of rice as money led to massive famines, the wars were often triggered by famine to begin with.
You conscript half the male population (starving farmers) promising them whatever rice you have left if they march into enemy territory.
4/5 outcomes involve starvation.
Indecisive outcome, neither side brings in harvest, both starve.
Victory over equally starving neibours, they die, you starve.
Defeat at hands of starving neibours, you die they starve.
The only option where you survive is if you decisively beat a rich neighbour without destroying their food in Inge process.
The fifth outcome is a decisive tang victory where the starving winner eats the starving loser.
This famine- pike army- famine cycle just kept repeating itself for thousands of years uninterrupted in mainland China because of their reliance on rice, the high labor cost driving rural over population, more people, more rice, more people until a famine and a pike army
>tell me moar
Think of this next time you eat chinese food. It is said that experienced cannibals of New Guina, who had eaten european, japanese and local New Guinean, preferred the latter two, since they tasted like sweet pork, while the european had a bitter aftertaste that ruined the meal. BTW, several thousands of chinese emigrants were eaten by australian aborginials in the late 1800s during the australian gold rush. Marauding bands of cannibal abbos made the wild lands unsafe, and an informal program of abbo extermination took place, apparently very extensive, since old accounts speak of abbos that had grown to well over 6 foot in height, while modern abbos are short runts.
>Think of this next time you eat chinese food
lmao so like, every day then
thanks anon
I thought the Tang ate their own city dwellers during a siege of their own city by outside forces, in order to survive said siege.
There were so many incidents of a related nature.
Like I said, this shit just repeats
True, but also like the Romans the imperial Chinese kept primary records.
Source: believe me bro, look it up
In recent wars most soldiers are killed by frag, ied, rpg, in the second world war artillery, in the first world war artillery.
Training may mean you win, winning doesn't mean you survive.
Bluepill homosexual
kinoest war
No war is worse now.
In the past in premodern periods battles were episodic and limited to a small area. Win or lose periods between battles are lengthy, and its months till the next battle or so. You got time to process things, prepare, and deal with whatever comes. Today? There are no battlefields/frontlines anymore in modern wars. The entire theatre is a battlefield. You can be miles from the actual frontline fighting and fricking die from a missile fired from some destroyer, bombed by a drone or warplane, or shelled by some long range howitzer. Armies advance rapidly thanks to mechanized & air transport that there are multiple battles within a single week.
There are no breaks in Modern Wars, hence PTSD is more widespread now than the time when people used swords.
>hence PTSD is more widespread now than the time when people used swords.
I don't believe it. Watching your friends scream of pain, and slashing human beings face to face while feeling and watching how their internal organs fall out must be fricking horrible. And also the smell must have been really, really bad.
They get over the PTSD with all the rape afterwards
Ptsd is caused by brain damage from being too close to explosions. Sword fighting is better in that regard.
>Ptsd is caused by
any kind of traumatic experience
PTSD is developed by prolonged exposure to traumatic shit.
Medieval Battles were usually over within a few hours. Now imagine getting shelled days on end.
That's not how PTSD works at all.
They definitely did. They just didn't describe it as such. Lots of soldiers were described as having difficulty getting through the night. A French knight of the hundred years war earned recruits that the exertion would cause great terrors in men even when safe from danger.
Sophocles wrote Ajax and very clearly expresses something we would likely call PTSD he experienced after 9 years of war.
>“When a man suffers without end in sight, and takes no pleasure in living his life, day by day wishing for death, he should not live out all his years,” Ajax moaned. Tears flowed down his cheeks—and the play was only a reading. Moments later, Cathey enacted Ajax’s suicide. “No more talk of tears,” Ajax said. “It’s time,” and he lunged onto his sharpened sword."
This after he went into a psychotic episode where he imagined the livestock around him were the enemy commanders and murdered the lot of them.
Soldiering has always been hard, the rapes and looting only do so much.
No wonder there have been so many alcoholic warriors thru history, like alexander the great
Decisive tang victory
Wikipedia, still bearing the number of people who were eaten.
It's not a joke.
>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Suiyang
> Yin Ziqi had besieged the city for a long time. The food in the city had run out. The dwellers traded their children to eat and cooked bodies of the dead. Fears were spread and worse situations were expected. At this time, Zhang Xun took his concubine out and killed her in front of his soldiers in order to feed them. He said, "You have been working hard at protecting this city for the country wholeheartedly. Your loyalty is uncompromised despite the long-lasting hunger. Since I can't cut out my own flesh to feed you, how can I keep this woman and just ignore the dangerous situation?" All the soldiers cried, and they did not want to eat. Zhang Xun ordered them to eat the flesh. Afterwards, they caught the women in the city. After the women were run out, they turned to old and young males. 20,000 to 30,000 people were eaten. People always remained loyal.
—Old Book of Tang, Chapter 137.
>eating the women first
unsure if based or gay
Chinese history and arachnology is a pack of communist bullshit and lies full of grotesque exaggerations and false claims. Academia failed itself the minute it accepted submissions from people who served a regime where truth is subjective to ultra nationalist pseudo marxism
>Chinese history
>communist
fail
>arachnology
kek good one
Here's an interesting read on late 16th century eastern asian warfare.
How anyone can watch the war in Ukraine and say experience doesn't matter is beyond me. Terrible spacing leading to multiple collateral casualties. Seeing platoon members drive into mines, panicking and driving into more mines, obvious lack of intel sharing between units at a tactical level, waving your weapons in the faces of comrades, backblasting comrades to bits, obvious lack of rudimentary maintenance skills, and experience some how doesn't matter for survival. What the actual frick?
If you guys who think this get drafted for WW3 then I hope you get kitchen duty.
No one ever said that some degree of basic military discipline and training is not necessary. The Russian blunders are beneath even that 'feral savages'
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/19/turned-feral-savages-says-ex-russian-soldier-time-ukraine/
Now you two Black folk have brought it up a comfy PrepHole-esque thread is going to be flooded by bots
Don't call me a Black person you c**t
Don't call me a c**t you gay
did the survivors say frick it and get piss drunk together afterwards?
Lol, Jesus. Really didn't like each other did they?
Aren't the MacDonalds the ancestors of former mma double champ Connor McGregor?
Yes, but it's only related to the insane advancements in medicine.
The Battle of the Somme saw 50,000 British casualties alone on the first day, and the whole thing lasted 4 months with over a million casualties across both sides. And the whole operation was meant to relieve pressure on Verdun, which was an equally large and bloody Battle happening at the same time. WW1 saw some shit that WW2 barely came close to touching outside a couple on battles on the Eastern Front.
>So do guns and artillery actually slow down the pace of fatalities?
no, you have to take into consideration strategy and tactics. guns are are almost immeasureably more lethal than swords and spears. in a fight between spears and guns, the side with melee oriented soldiers will obviously get slaughtered. in a near-peer firefight between 2 sides using guns, spread out formations and cover/concealment reduce the lethality of guns while still remaining highly lethal to melee weapon weilders.
there's also the fact that modern conventional militaries run pretty lean compared to medieval militaries and deploy a fraction of the manpower but also have force multipliers assets. so even if they get wreckt the overall casualties will be even lower than medieval battles, not to mention medical advancements and training will significantly reduce casualties.
Read about the battle of marathon. The beach was painted red.
Any modern soldier wpuld get ptsd after hand to hand combat, these people only fought this way.
The flip side is actually moving and exerting yourself in periods of traumatic stress actually reduces the likelihood if long term symptoms
I think a large difference is also that such things were experienced collectively. In modern warfare, if you have to stab someone to death, you'll probably be the only one in your platoon whith that experience. You may even be the only one who was physically present to see it. Contrast that to going in with your mates, your entire city state, allied citistates even, where physically gorging your enemies is what you went in for, what everyone partakes in, and what you'll be glorified for, by comrades and citizens on return.
>So do guns and artillery actually slow down the pace of fatalities?
It's actually the other way around with WWI being an absolute clusterfrick of madness due to being the first massive deployment of reliable artillery. In later wars that kinda got offset due to advances in modern medicine like antibiotics for instances, better surgical practices decreasing the chances of amputation from shrapnel damage and stuff like that.
Did men have more testosterone back then? Maybe that helped to cope about how shitty war was.
>Posts a picture showing men enduring grave difficulties because they are fueled by religious beliefs they share with the entire society and their ancestors, giving them the strength to keep going despite everything.
>Asks about testosterone.
1527
>"if you live a righteous life, you shall be saved and raised up again on the last day, my brother in Christ"
>dies to the last man protecting what he loves from the nonbelieving scum and armies of sinners and traitors
2022
>"um actually nothing happens when you die sweaty, just like live for yourself or something idk lol"
>desertion, drug abuse, faithlessness in any cause, cowardice, maladjusted and angry at the world for no reason
I can see a few differences in one's mindset over the ages
Ukraine is proof that you are wrong, they are fighting to protect their land.
Because Ukraine is a Christian country. A culture without Christ is meaningless.
I was actually referring to the Russians in particular with the modern soldier one. There are some causes that the Ukrainians have to fight for, but I know that they'd have less people trying to flee the country and being forced to stay and fight if religion still had a higher role in our society today (I realize that Ukraine probably never had a significant Catholic influence back when the Pope was still a political position, most of them being Orthodox and therefore cellular rather than one body, but I can call upon the absolute fervor that western Europeans had when fighting under the banner of the Cross). And while there are people standing and fighting, there were plenty of men trying to leave before the government banned all military age males from leaving, females got the free pass and so there's only a token few women that have actually remained to fight for something, their gal pals are off eating gourmet foods and getting railed in Italy while their men have to suffer the burdens they refuse to, but that's just women in general as they've all become baseless and disloyal prostitutes without the societal and familial structure of the past to orient them towards being good and loyal wives for good and pious men.
I get my point has morphed more into a general "frick women" stance here, but I was recalling that the Russians have no will to fight for anything, to the point that they commonly shoot their own COs and bounce rather than stay and get blasted with a HIMAR or something. Call me unfair, but I attribute the course of the war in Ukraine's favor as less of a testament to the nation itself but rather that Russia is a weak b***hmade state with delusions of grandeur based on krokodil-induced trances. They certainly don't have any sort of faith or zeal for the most part, let alone a moral compass.
i have a hypothesis that all men obsessed with T are gay
Sounds like projection from you, anon
in terms of raw casualties, yes absolutely
worst was ww1 and ww2 where whole regiments would simply charge right into machine gun fire and get mowed down
i would take the numbers you have for these ancient battles with a grain of salt, they are usually passed down by very unreliable sources and the whole population, logistics and infrastucture usually would not allow armies of these sizes. also they had no reliable data so everything was guesswork, usually second or third hand...
a lot of these numbers should probably be divided by 10 or even 100 in some cases
even the ww2 battles/blitz in the western theatre were already comparatively light in casualties
nowadays commanders are fully aware that sending in infantry charges against fortified positions is not something that gets you any results, plus each individual soldier today is a lot more expensive than in the past
the increased precision is also why the equipment numbers are so much lower today
in ww1 you were essentially using artillery to play "battleship" with a huge playfield and the guns being not very precise. so to compensate you used loads of guns to cover a huge area in hopes of a few shells actually hitting the few targets in the area
that is no longer necessary today, because once you identify your enemies' location you have little trouble in eliminating him
so assigning 10 or 100 or 1000 guns to a certain front area adds no value, except giving your enemy more easy targets
Horrors of war peaked in WW1.
Verdun, Somme, artillery bombardment so constant that the explosions were a single long noise, gas, drowning in craters of mud and rotting blood.
This guy gets it:
Do you think those numbers were real though? Imagine how much authors lie about the Holocaust, death counts by Russia, 9/11 etc.
No modern warfare is way worse. An estimated 105,000 men died in the war of the roses an estimated 40,000,000 died in ww1 no fricking context. Even the hundred years war that lasted over 100 years and had the literal black death happen in the middle of it had around 2,300,000 casualties
You also had a way lower population back then, dumbass.
but you have to see things in perspective
the 30 years war for example eliminated up to 30% of the population in central/western europe
in absolute numbers its less than the first days of ww1 but if something of similar scale happened today it would mean 150 million dead people for europe
The crusaders invaded innocent islamic nations with the goal to genocide them so of course it was bloodier.
>The crusaders invaded
No they did not, moron.
>innocent islamic nations
no such thing, Muslims since Muhammad conquered Christians and other non-Muslims. There is no Islamic nation that had existential legitimacy.
>Invaded
No they didn't
>Innocent
No such thing
>Nations
Not even invented
>goal to genocide
No it wasn't
>it was bloodier
Modern wars can still equal old wars. Congo lost 6 million people and they are barely even trying.
Numbers in those accounts are all poo poo Anon, if a medieval scholar is writing that 100000 arabs fought a battle against 80000 crusaders he is just saying that the numbers were big, that it was a 'big' battle, not that there were exactly thousands of people.
Steven Runciman got it right in his book when he said that at times, when no major crusade was happening, only a few hundred knights were in the holy land, spread all over the country (of course with maybe a few thousand non-noble infantry).
There are battles in the holy land were you have the king and fifty knights plus some 300 infantry and archers and those were considered epic stuff.
The romans perfected the logistics for their legions, but in the medieval times there was no way to support such large armies.
muh "dark" ages bullshit
>Spear of Destiny
You mean the Lance of Longinus or was it called something else back then?
Anyways, I dunno if you can really take the Crusades as an example of what all ancient warfare was like, at least as far as Europe goes. A lot of European wars were much different and had far fewer casualties. England in particular had more than a few civil wars but it usually didn't result in many casualties somehow.
The Crusades were the result of European states who'd been feuding for a long ass time trying to coordinate under the rule of the Pope. While I often liken the Papacy's power to unite Europe as a sort of proto-NATO alliance, medieval coordination was kinda shit back then. Maarat happened because the French were autistic and refused to bring more food or set up supply chains, and also refused to break off the siege despite their army starving to death. And that's just the cannibalism part, afterward you had the two armies fighting each other over whether they should remain and fortify the place or move on to their main objective, a dispute that was only solved when some of the men went AWOL and began destroying the walls themselves, forcing them to keep moving as there was absolutely nothing to defend anymore.
In general the Crusades have a habit of being clusterfricks where nobody really knows what the hell is going on and the results are unexpected. For example, the objective of the Fourth Crusade was to retake Egypt for Christendom, starting by invading Cairo (or Alexandria, I've heard both said). The army never arrived there, got co-opted by a Venetian hand-rubber, the commander abandoned them before they left port because he knew it was gonna hit the fan, and then they single-handedly destroyed the Byzantine Empire on the say-so of a Greek who said he'd totally cover the money they needed to get to Egypt (guess what he really did).
Relevant pic
Frick, wrong image
Really makes you think.
Anon what is this?
Nah, we gonna have 100k deaths in a day again.
WW2 wasn't that long a go The gap between the First and Second crusade is about the same as the gap between WW2 and today.
think about that, you think conflicts are less deadly cuz you've enjoyed a literal blep of peace in human history A BLEEP.
we were killing millions a few decades a go homie get perspective.
I'd rather get chopped in half in chaotic combat, than shelled for weeks and then die agonizing on the ground full of shrapnel from a drone.
Guns.
>So do guns and artillery actually slow down the pace of fatalities?
No, they do make it harder to rout the enemy without also taking horrific losses though
Early modern wars were horrific because of how it was fought (pike and shot) and the religious fervour of the combatants (30 years war)
"war" died after Vietnam. Now it's a corporate joke. Schwartzkopf was a shadow of the former glory of the military. He wouldn't be allowed to be a General today.
Something people don't understand about modern PTSD is that it'd be different from ancient warfare PTSD by necessity. PTSD as an evolutionary response developed to natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, and forest fires, where you have zero control over your ability to control your fate outside of GTFOing. You can't punch an earthquake to death the same way you can punch a lion to death. Modern warfare is very much like a natural disater where you'll die instantly at any time and there's very little you can do about it. Ancient warfare, on the other hand, is just you vs the dude in front of you with a sword, so it'd be more like the kind of mental trauma you get from being in a fistfight or other melee-based combat. Of course this isn't to say nobody in the ancient world got modern-style PTSD since there are different types of battles where you wouldn't have any control (like an ambush), but it was doubtlessly much rarer.
Everybody talking about how "oh you can just get killed by a drone while taking a shit" doesn't realize that actually shows how training and experience affects survival. It's understanding how seemingly trivial bullshit- shitting in the open, lighting your cigarette in the dark, having something too shiny - can get you killed that separates veterans and FNGs. Does experience make you invincible? No. Does it give you better odds? Yes.
High respect to OP for knowing about the Siege/Battle of Antioch. Studied it for years. It's an amazing story.