For me it's the shock. Pre-WW1 wars at least had the illusion of a warrior's pride, martial spirit and all. Imagine going in what seems a honest limited war against other like-minded people (i.e. we'll bump heads for a while, then figure something out) and you get thrown into a meat grinder with machine guns, poison gas, massed artillery, and hitherto unheard-of disregard for human life.
My great grand father was thrown into the meat grinder in France. He stopped corresponding half into it, and there weren’t any more news of him. The war ended and he did not return. After sometime the family had to accept his death and mourn him.The wife dressing in black as a widow until one late night he enters the house. This was a small village behind the hills with no electricity. The wife collapsed They thought he was a ghost. He had been a POW of the Germans and had now found his way back home in very frail health. >t. Portuguese
>micropenis: >barely feel it >feels degrading >left unsatisfied >13 inch wiener >rubs prostate even before insertion >blows out your ass, blows out your mind >feels so hard you can't move >feel it in your ass for a week after
give me the 13
>micropenis: >barely feel it >feels degrading >left unsatisfied >13 inch wiener >rubs prostate even before insertion >blows out your ass, blows out your mind >feels so hard you can't move >feel it in your ass for a week after
give me the 13
>can’t shit right ever again
well if you’re going to be dead and blown to bits half way through the next week then it doesn’t really matter
>can’t shit right ever again
This has been debunked.
Not at all. If you randomly select anyone who served in either the Wermacht or Red Army, both have significantly better than 50% odds of surviving the war, although obviously this varies drastically based on when, where, and how they served. Some wars have way higher fatality rates for combatants.
WWII is the deadliest war in history because the human population was vastly larger than it was at any earlier point. A major war in Africa or civil war in India or China this century could exceed the total number killed in WWII while also leaving much of the world untouched and killing a much lower %.
The Thirty Years War killed 2.5 times the percentage of the German population as both World Wars combined. The Huguenot Wars in France killed 11-14 times the share of the French population as the First World War. The death rate in the conflict would be akin to Syria having 5.75 million deaths in their war, i.e. ten times as deadly.
In general, earlier wars tended to kill a larger share of the population. Part of this is that militaries used to supply themselves by forage and plunder, part of it is that sacks that involved indiscriminate violence, looting, and the taking of slaves was permitted, and part of it was that the mass execution of civilians was tolerated to a higher degree. However, the biggest factor was that much of the population worked as near subsistence farmers, meaning that wars could collapse the food supply, leading to starvation and increasing susceptibility to disease. Armies also brought diseases with them, and an episode of small pox, etc. could cause mass fatalities, whereas without the huge movement of men and animals diseases didn't tend to engulf a region entirely (as often, obviously it still happened).
The First Crusade is a classic example of high combatant fatalities. The Latin army was huge for the time and ended up taking 66-75+% fatalities by the end despite being victorious.
There are a few ancient wars where the conquered people essentially get wiped out of existence, can't really get worse than that. The Assyrians were quite brutal.
Their historical accounts sound like shit you'd hear from a knockoff Conan the Barbarian villain. It's almost hilarious how over-the-top evil the boasts are until you consider that they probably weren't just making it up and they actually did that shit to people.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Can you make some examples?
12 months ago
Anonymous
Pic is the assyrians flaying people alive, that is removing skin
I have made a pillar facing the city gate, and have flayed all the rebel leaders; I have clad the pillar in the flayed skins. I let the leaders of the conquered cities be flayed, and clad the city walls with their skins. The captives I have killed by the sword and flung on the dung heap.
The Rassam cylinder in the British Museum describes :
Their corpses they hung on stakes, they took off their skins and covered the city wall with them.Dermatologist Ernst G. Jung notes that the typical causes of death due to flaying are shock, critical loss of blood or other body fluids, hypothermia, or infections, and that the actual death is estimated to occur from a few hours up to a few days after the flaying. Hypothermia is possible, as skin provides natural insulation and is essential for maintaining body temperature.
“I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile
[of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile … I
flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.”
“I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, [and]
defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops. … With their blood I dyed the mountain red
like red wool, [and] the rest of them the ravines [and] torrents of the mountain
swallowed. I carried off captives [and] possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their
fighters built a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys
[and] girls.” “In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting
men with the sword … I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms [and]
hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of
many troops. I made one pile of the living one of heads. I hung their heads on trees
around the city.”
12 months ago
Anonymous
Can you make some examples?
samegay
“I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives (as one cuts) a string. Like the
many waters of a storm, I made (the contents of) their gullets and entrails run down upon
the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of
their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked
and the evil, were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I
filled the plain, like grass. (Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the
seeds of cucumbers.” †
“Their dismembered bodies I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves, and eagles, to the birds of
heaven and the fish in the deep…. What was left of the feast of the dogs and swine, of
their members which blocked the streets and filled the squares, I ordered them to remove
from Babylon, Kutha and Sippar, and to cast them upon heaps.” †
“The sepulchers of their earlier and later kings, who did not fear Assur and Ishtar, my
lords, (and who) had plagued the kings, my fathers, I destroyed, I devastated, I exposed to
the sun. Their bones (members) I carried off to Assyria. I laid restlessness upon their
shades. I deprived them of food-offerings and libations of water.”
Was this type of stuff common?
Btw where is this from?
11 months ago
Anonymous
He's quoting Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631 BC. He wrote that (or rather, had it inscribed on a stone tablet that was placed out in public) of his conquests of Elam and what essentially amounts to his genocide upon the Elamites for aiding his brother in a civil war against him (or rather, his brother trying to break away from Ashurbanipal's empire).
This was all occurring around 646 BC in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and what you know now as the Middle East.
The Neo-Assyrians also had a proclivity for forced resettlement of conquered peoples, the Exile of the Bible was such a program of resettlement after they were conquered by them, moving large portions of the Israelites out of Israel and Judah (Israel split in two for a while, read the Book of Kings for more on that) and moving other conquered peoples into that land. This was done to try and stop the conquered from rising against them by placing them in lands they didn't know and among other peoples they either didn't know well or fricking hated so they wouldn't collude against the empire. None of this bullshit stopped the Persians (now Iran) from steamrolling them and absorbing all the land they'd taken though.
If you've ever wondered why the Middle East is the way it is, this is why.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>(Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.” †
Ngl thats a weird flex homie
Ya Mongols or Assyrians. Those cold ass motherfrickers killed your gods. And the Mongols treated you like traitors as All under Tengri was part of the Khans realm and ignorance was no excuse for disobedience.
A lot of the wars of the 18th century were a horrible combination of >larger populations that can muster a greater percentage for war due to improved agriculture >disease still claims most of the lives of soldiers >ungenerous treatment of adversaries >the beginnings of industrialised warfare and machines of mass slaughter >wide ranging campaigns
The taiping rebellion was a bad time of all involved, the civil war was not at all fun, the napoleonic wars could be pretty brutal, the Indian wars were certainly not fun for the native Americans lmao. The early wars of the start of the 20th century were also pretty awful, like the Russo Japanese and the Philippine American wars. King Philips war isn’t in that time frame but it was also a really awful time for all involved. I think unless you’re going back to antiquity or the classical period (where records are imperfect) a lot of the worst wars were fought mainly in the 19th century.
despite the mountains of corpses and electrified swamps there was barely any movement with the stalemate. Pleps like big movement and clay captures, hence WW2 homosexualry vs forgotten WW1. Despite the vets of the latter prepping and unleashing the former expecting a similar smack down
Because incompetent sandBlack folk from both sides pointlessly threw bodies on each other. It's a decade long stalemate. And worst part is that even if it wasn't and one side could clearly win over the other it would change absolutely nothing globally. Also despite abundant use of human waves it took them 7 years to rack up all those casualties, russians already got comparable in just over a year, which should tell you a thing or two about intensity of combat.
Even if one of them achieved a total victory all it would mean is that instead of two thirdie brown shitholes in that part of the world there would be one big one. It wasn't important. Stakes were very low in a global sense.
This.
The Americans gave Saddam nerve gas to use against the Iranians, then later accused Saddam of having nerve gas, while the US was the largest global manufacturer of nerve gas
There are like 4 wars with more death and destruction than WW1, it still takes the number 5 spot so it is worth mentioning but you should understand that 4 other conflicts eclipse it.
There is an argument for % of population but it's faulty and based on looking at people as statistics rather than living breathing organisms which matter. It is much more useful to measure devastation in total number of deaths rather than deaths per % of population. Sure it sucks to lose so many of your people but from each individual persons perspective who participated or lived in the region of the conflict, the conflicts with higher total death total had more human suffering.
I sympathize with the perspective, the death of an individual is a statistic but the death of a nation is a tragedy. Looking into the details, my argument hinges on the idea that the worst outcomes for everyone involved- civilian, soldier or whoever would also determine just "how bad" a war is to fight in.
Many anons in this thread are arguing that its worse to lose a higher % of your deployed forces or its worse to lose a high % of your population in war. Many would argue that the much larger nation can much more easily deal with the consequences of war by virtue of simply having more people and the consequences would be incredibly dire for the smaller nation.
The higher your losses the more likely that babushka has to pick up the AK. Quite grim.
However I'd rather be more fair and measure peoples lives equally and not value soldiers lives less than the lives of say your civilians or measure their lives and experiences as less than those of nations with a smaller population and a smaller military. It seems fair to just go ahead and conclude that human suffering is human suffering across the board and whether you're a hyper confident commander of a force that appears as though as if it's winning the day- but you get pink misted by a cruise missile all of a sudden or whether you're an insurgent partisan launching attacks on an occupying military that's genocidal towards your people and you get found out and gunned down by several occupiers at once, well the end result is still that you suffered a grim and terrible end either way.
Like I said if we want to take other things into account like starvation, not having a city to come home to, modern medicine, then sure. But that's the conversation we should be having. Not "oh well these guys got completely wiped out so their suffering automatically matters more than the people who died while they thought they were winning"
The continuous chimpout that happened in China between 1911 and 1949. It’s every war rolled into one war, and if you managed to survive your reward was living under Mao.
actually not really. Most warlords didn't give a frick about discipline in the army. If you wanted to you could run away and be a bandit, just like the rest
The average soldier is probably Chinese, so there's merit in this view.
Personally I think the worst Chinese wars were the imperial era wars where one state suffering fammine invaded the neibour to steal rice, causing the harvest to fail, starving either way
Given how fast shit is hitting the fan in China currently there’s a good chance we’ll end up with another gigantic meltdown like that I’m the coming decades.
A period of near-anarchy across the country with no force to establish order in sight. Where landlords requisition grain until their peasants starve half to death. Where roaming armies, bandits, and brigands cross a continent-sized country, raping, killing, and stealing at will.
All the while, the Western powers wring their hands and twiddle their thumbs. They continue to hold on to their colonial possessions, extorting the country of its wealth, refusing to help the government do anything to unify its country. No wonder why the Nationalist government turned to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany for help. Nobody else was willing to lift a finger to help them end the anarchy. The arms embargo, in fact, just made things worse.
When a truly organised force comes, it's not better at all. An army enters under the banner of Asian co-prosperity - steals, rapes, mutilates, murders; builds slave labour concentration camps that put Auschwitz to shame. An army enters for the sake of the Chinese nation - and it kidnaps all of the men in a town, leaving those left behind condemned to near-death and endless years of uncertainty, stealing all of the possessions to make things worse. An army enters in the name of global socialism - and destroys the fabric of society, condemning people to hardship.
Decades of unimaginably cruel pain and suffering. It's no wonder why old Chinese people appreciate Mao - despite killing tens of millions by incompetence and malice, his government still managed to improve life for the average person in a way unknown for many, many years.
I second this. Shit was brutal in a way hardly imaginable to most people during this period in China. Russo-ukraiBlack folk can frick of.
A period of near-anarchy across the country with no force to establish order in sight. Where landlords requisition grain until their peasants starve half to death. Where roaming armies, bandits, and brigands cross a continent-sized country, raping, killing, and stealing at will.
All the while, the Western powers wring their hands and twiddle their thumbs. They continue to hold on to their colonial possessions, extorting the country of its wealth, refusing to help the government do anything to unify its country. No wonder why the Nationalist government turned to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany for help. Nobody else was willing to lift a finger to help them end the anarchy. The arms embargo, in fact, just made things worse.
When a truly organised force comes, it's not better at all. An army enters under the banner of Asian co-prosperity - steals, rapes, mutilates, murders; builds slave labour concentration camps that put Auschwitz to shame. An army enters for the sake of the Chinese nation - and it kidnaps all of the men in a town, leaving those left behind condemned to near-death and endless years of uncertainty, stealing all of the possessions to make things worse. An army enters in the name of global socialism - and destroys the fabric of society, condemning people to hardship.
Decades of unimaginably cruel pain and suffering. It's no wonder why old Chinese people appreciate Mao - despite killing tens of millions by incompetence and malice, his government still managed to improve life for the average person in a way unknown for many, many years.
It’s worse because it was basically a century of chaos. The first opium war, taping rebellion and second opium war had annihilated China and the boxer rebellion was just the cherry on top. The Chinese really are right to call the period from the first opium war to 1949 the century of humiliation.
And then you have the Korean war immediately after… and then the Great Leap Forward… and the cultural Revolution… I can see why people accepted Dengism tbqh. 150 years of near unending chaos and bloodshed
>The continuous chimpout that happened in China between 1911 and 1949. It’s every war rolled into one war, and if you managed to survive your reward was living under Mao.
Once I discovered Chinese war movies they were more gory than I expected. I don't know why I expected otherwise, maybe assuming because China likes to censor things, but not these films. The propaganda part is more, like, Mao sitting around giving out wisdom, but the battle scenes are exceptionally brutal. It's like watching Dawn of the Dead or something. Here we go:
?t=4752
It could be almost medieval too at times because of shortage of ammunition, melee weapons were used a lot. Sometimes they go a little overboard and make it look like Warhammer but I imagine mass charges with melee weapons did happen:
They did and they were not uncommon on both sides and they featured pretty commonly even in mao-era film and theatre. The Luger+Dao with a ribbon combo is pretty common on both sides. Very 40k imo and quite frankly, kino
This movie is obviously cultural revolution era propaganda but there’s some kino there. Skip to about 1:25:00 or so for a dude dual wielding Lugers leading a detachment of these c**ts
?t=4752 [Embed] >look at fight scene >oh i recognize some of those sound effects from old bond movies >looks like one as well >check title >"Chinese movie 2021"
ultra kek
It's from 1999. Still kind of looks like it was shot in the 1980s, but it's not 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_Nanjing,_Shanghai_and_Hangzhou
At risk of being attacked daily, rather than a few weeks a year. Thanks to insertion by helicopter:
“For a combat soldier in World War II who served for four years, the average time spent in actual combat was approximately 40 days. By comparison, Grunts in Vietnam spent an average of about two-thirds of their 12- or 13-month tours – over 250 days – in combat”
Not really, this is an idea perpetuated by movies and a lack of real world experience with conventional war. Dispersion and range are significantly greater in real life, a bird's eye view of Kursk would look like a mostly empty field with the occasionally visible tank or explosion
Soviet movies are particularly bad with this - they'll show tanks, infantry, assault guns moving forward with centimetres of space between them, as if it was a cavalry charge of Kutuzov's army. It makes for very impressive imagery, though.
Obviously not a war but an SMO but the worst scenario I could imagine would be being a mobik/wagnerite in Bakhmut. >no food >no ammo >no orders >not even an entrenching tool >no training >zero trust and unit cohesion >get bombed by your own artillery >gun is a rusty AK >personal equipment is from the 1940's and full of bullet holes and dried blood from the last mobik >any second a grenade might be dropped on you with no warning >raped left, right and center by everyone from chechens to officers >best case scenario if you get wounded you wind up in pic related >if you live you get sent straight back
Excuse me, I’m a little slow. But isn't it the Ukrainians who are barley holding on to their only supply road into the town? Thats sounds worse, but not anywhere close to being the worst situation.
Excuse me, I’m a little slow. But isn't it the Ukrainians who are barley holding on to their only supply road into the town? Thats sounds worse, but not anywhere close to being the worst situation.
A Russian state officials I see. Its the same level as MSN or CNN or some tv evangelist. Its the same on the other side telling you Russians are loosing. Also Ukrainian 3 day anti terror operation in Donbas lasting 9 years.
Expenditure of tens of thousands of penal forces, VDV, Wagner regulars, and mobniks, concentrated with the best logistics and ammunition supplies the RU MoD can muster against predominantly territorial defense forces (some miscellaneous special forces present in low volumes as well) given tertiary priority in terms of resource allocation. Or are you forgetting how often Zaluzhny apologizes to Bakhmut defenders for keeping them at low priority?
Anyway the fact that's all they've accomplished so little while spending so much in roughly a year shows just how degraded Russia has become as a military force.
hol up, is this from yesterday? russians must know that the world is watching, how are they not making sure everything that goes on parade is 100% working, pristine condition?
Someone who helps organize and ensure safety at parades every 4th of July and Veterans' Day, this webm is still absolutely infuriating to watch even years later.
Embarrassing that the strategically useless town forced Russia to expend most of its resources for a pointless victory. I doubt that they can even keep the fricking place
If I zoom in on my spilled drink it'll seem big too. Do Russians not realize just how fricking irrelevant this town is? It doesn't even show up on most full maps of Ukraine
That's the funny thing. They haven't. That is only what they claim on Telegram. Ukraine doesn't reveal their positions, so there is no counterpoint. Do you think those maps show the recent Azov counter attacks 3km deep gain? Nope. Of course not. Because the "conquest of Bakhmut" is a fricking Russian fantasy sold to shit eating Zatniks as a life raft to cling to as they drown in shame and the anal rape of their peers.
Ukraine posting has literally been the worst thing to happen to /k/ in years.
He's not really that far off though. Do you realize how fricking gut wrenching it is thinking about how dystopian modern warfare has become. It used to be maybe Vietnam as the worst conflict in the fact that you're about 5 to 10 meters away in the middle of the night. But Ukraine is pretty fricking brutal, 24 hours ops meaning no time for rest and recovery, constant artillery strikes, and fire missions because there's drones and aircraft always flying by. The idea there's fricking toys flying around you dropping grenades on you is already hellish enough.
There are several dozen conflicts historically that the Russo-Ukrainian war cannot even touch in terms of total death and suffering. He's very far off, you're simply bias because you have been exposed the most to the Russo-Ukrainian war because it is a recent and ongoing conflict and is far easier to observe than pretty much any preceding war. It is the war that is most visible to you, but compared to say the Mongol conquests that lasted for 199 years and involved twice as much death as World War 1 is so distant and intangible that the suffering that occurred is alien and foreign to you. Nonetheless the historical record stands and the archaeological evidence backs it up and it dwarfs the Russo-Ukrainian conflict many times over.
By definition the worst war for a soldier is the war with the most people dying. It doesn't get any simpler than that you fricking mook.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>by definition
Post the definition.
12 months ago
Anonymous
How does one come to such a moronic conclusion? There have been tiny wars that have been way fricking worse for the average soldier than wars with a lot of total deaths were the average soldier had it reasonably good.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Because every soldier who dies or is permanently maimed has it the worst you fricking moron. I've already been through explaining this. Just because some nothing little tiny insignificant country got wiped out does not mean that the horrible deaths that a larger country faces on the battlefield suddenly become meaningless. Each man who dies in war suffers his own personal hell at the end, this is a fact.
Okay let's do a mental exercise to help you understand, using fake countries. The Gorgundian Confederation loses 5,000,000 men on the battlefield but has a population of 128,000,000 million and a standing military of 14,000,000. However, their ally, The Kingdom of Terrogon was completely wiped out, their total population was 5,000,000.
Of course for the people of that kingdom they lost everything. But those soldiers in the Gorgundian Confederation lost the exact same number of people in an equally horrible way. Obviously the Gorgundian's get to continue to exist and the Terrogonian's are completely gone but the amount of human suffering and death is exactly the same, measured individual to individual. One could argue those 5 million Gorgundian's also lost their nation because they don't know if they won or if they lost, they died horribly and will never know. They are gone, so are the Terrogonian's.
We can get more detailed and try to argue that women children and elderly matter more than male soldiers but that's pretty dumb because the individual suffering is the same. Would the 5 million Terrogonian's that died only matter if they were the only 5 million people in their country? Do small countries matter more than big countries? Again, are you moronic? Do you know what it means to die?
12 months ago
Anonymous
>doubling down this hard instead of just taking the L
12 months ago
Anonymous
This just in: Covid was worse than the Holocaust.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Question: Given the choice, would you rather hav been your average Gorgundian or Terrrogonian soldier?
>Do you know what it means to die?
12 months ago
Anonymous
Neither, both would have sucked. Either way you still die a horrible death being executed, blown to bits or shot up. If you get captured then you can be tortured, any number of things can happen to a soldier and not a peep of it gets out. Modern communications technology + the internet exposed us for what we are. We're fricking savages and that's the truth, in a real war no one gives a shit about the Geneva Convention or whatever treaties. Anything can happen. Whether you are the last man defending your nation or the first man over the trench you'll die horribly so my answer is neither.
This just in: Covid was worse than the Holocaust.
In both cases:
Maybe it happened, but it wasn't 6 million.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>Neither, both would have sucked
I don't recall neither being an option. Also >There is literally no difference between joining a military with 0 survivors and joining a military with 9 million survivors.
Damn, human lives are worthless to you, including your own, huh?
12 months ago
Anonymous
Sure, there's a difference but even "winning" forces still have to go through the shit and can die any time. Even if you're on the "bigger" and "better" winning team you can still get erased and die horribly on the battlefield. It's the same as if you were the last man standing in some situations. You could just be in a shit part of the war. How many Germans started out thinking they were hot shit in France and then found out just how much it sucked to fight in Stalingrad. The tide can always turn, dying while being fresh on the battlefield- dying after surviving utter hell. One way or another you're still dead and your fate is the same and just because you're on the larger side doesn't mean you're gonna die knowing that you're going to win. It's not going to make it any less painful.
Oh okay the fresh guys just sent to the front line all got slaughtered in scores while being ordered to hop over the trench.
Oh NO how horrible the survivors from the start of the war finally met their end in the last German charge over the trenches.
Both experiences sucked for both people and were utterly fricking terrifying. Sounds more like life and suffering don't matter to you, otherwise you'd see it on equal terms.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>By definition the worst war for a soldier is the war with the most people dying.
Incorrect. Soldier!=people.
The worst war for a soldier would be the war with the most soldiers dying as a % of total combatants.
Basically, which war did you absolutely not fricking want to fight in, since if you did you were practically guaranteed to be fricked? I don't think this thread has answered that. It's inflated with non-combatant deaths or includes situations where one side had shittons of survivors because of army size.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Okay so soldiers aren't people or does losing your civilians in war not factor in to how horrible it was? Who is and isn't a soldier or civilian in a civil war? How much does it suck to starve to death vs getting shot in the head? Like seriously bro if you lived in the region and you had to suffer through it, do you count in the assessment of how much it sucked? Well what if you picked up a hunting rifle and took a few potshots at the Red Army or the Nazi's in WW2? Are you a soldier now? Does your experience matter now because now you're a soldier?
I have many questions for you.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>Okay so soldiers aren't people
No. Not all people are soldiers. >does losing your civilians in war not factor in to how horrible it was
Pretty sure dying sucks more.
>Who is and isn't a soldier or civilian in a civil war?
A soldier would be someone that takes up arms as part of a regular force or as an irregular engaged in the war/
>How much does it suck to starve to death vs getting shot in the head?
Starving to death would suck more, I would imagine. So if we needed to do tiebreaks you could factor in cause of death I suppose.
>Like seriously bro if you lived in the region and you had to suffer through it, do you count in the assessment of how much it sucked?
No. The topic of the thread is for the average soldier.
>Well what if you picked up a hunting rifle and took a few potshots at the Red Army or the Nazi's in WW2? Are you a soldier now?
Yes. You're an irregular.
>Does your experience matter now because now you're a soldier?
Yes. Literally the subject of the fricking thread.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Glad you could clarify, so by the agreed upon definitions and agreements:
https://i.imgur.com/6A1fPdg.jpg
I've compiled a curated list of the top ten wars in human history in terms of total estimated losses. If you were alive in the periods of time and regions which participated, civilian or soldier your life was a nightmarish apocalyptic hellscape. These wars especially were apocalyptic, if you were in them or lived during the fighting it would appear world ending due to the size and scale.
This includes deaths of both soldiers, civilians, etc. from causes both directly and indirectly caused by the war, which includes combat, disease, famine, massacres, suicide, and genocide.
1.) World War 2: anywhere between 70,000,000 and 118,357,000 deaths. Lasted merely 6 years and 1 day.
2.) Mongol Invasions and Conquests: anywhere between 30,000,000 and 57,000,000 deaths. Lasted 199 years.
3.) Taiping Revolution: anywhere between 20,000,000 and 40,000,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
4.) Manchu Conquest of China: only estimate is 25,000,000 deaths. Lasted 65 years.
5.) Second Sino-Japanese war: anywhere between 18,000,000 to 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
6.) World War 1: anywhere between 15,000,000 and 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 4 years and 3 months.
7.) An-Shi rebellion: only estimate is 13,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
8.) Chinese Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists: anywhere between 8,000,0000 and 11,692,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
9.) Hui Muslim Minority War: only estimate is 10,000,000 deaths. Lasted 15 years.
10.) Russian Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the White Army: anywhere between 5,000,000 and 9,000,000 deaths. Lasted 5 years.
Notice that the Russo-Ukrainian war that we pay so much attention to today is utterly dwarfed both in size and scale by every single conflict on this list. Any single one of these wars was absolutely devastating and would have felt world ending to everyone involved. Pick any single one of them and it was the worst for those soldiers involved.
is still the defacto list of worst wars to participate in and if you don't think so I suggest you at least open up their wikipedia page and learn about them to understand that by the agreed upon answers- they are indeed the worst wars for soldiers, as defined by your answers, to participate in.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>is still the defacto list of worst wars to participate in
Spanish conquest of the Aztecs killed a greater % of mobilized participants than WWII. We're talking like 2 in 3 vs 1 in 5.
So...no?
12 months ago
Anonymous
There weren't even that many native americans alive you tard.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>%
% of mobilized participants doesn't mean shit. I don't know why I have to explain it to you. Total numbers are the only thing that matters, it doesn't matter if a large % of mobilized participants got wasted when the total death during Spanish conquest that occurred happened every fricking week on the eastern front many times over. That's why you're moronic. Measure suffering treating each individual with respect. Your little war that you think is so bad is nothing compared even to the pacific or the eastern front or even the western front.
>Total numbers are the only thing that matters
The average soldier doesn't give a shit about the total numbers.
I get it. You don't know what an average is. You're a brainlet. It's okay.
12 months ago
Anonymous
% of mobilized participants doesn't mean shit. I don't know why I have to explain it to you. Total numbers are the only thing that matters, it doesn't matter if a large % of mobilized participants got wasted when the total death during Spanish conquest that occurred happened every fricking week on the eastern front many times over. That's why you're moronic. Measure suffering treating each individual with respect. Your little war that you think is so bad is nothing compared even to the pacific or the eastern front or even the western front.
Total deaths doesn't mean whichever suck more, there's a reason there's an increase of PTSD and not becuase it's studied more intensely these days. Conflicts are sustained bouts of continuous stress now vs what they were 80+ years ago (obviously with some exceptions like in major battles like Iwo Jima, Stalingrad, Leningrad, etc...) war was a campaign structure. Now it's total constant battling. If you're a soldier in Bakhmut or Avdiivka or east of Kharkiv. Everyday you hear shells going over your head around your position, and you're on alert looking for drones or personnel doing reconnaisance. The mental fatigue of every minute could be your last is what the original dude meant in that it fricking sucks more than any other conflict.
Vietnam, both sides were getting the shit end of the stick >randomly get headshotted by a tree speaking VC >step on shit covered spikes and die of infections
>gunned down by the droves >burned alive by napalm and WP, and if you somehow survive you wish you hadn't
>Iran-Iraq electrified swamps. Iraq filled the Hawizeh marshes with land mines, barbed wire and live power lines. Iran lost 20k men in that assault >WW1 western front (Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele) >WW2 Eastern Front or Japanese invasion of China
Theyre top 3. After that probably US civil war due to super high deaths as a % of the population
In human history it's easily one of the countless chinese civil wars where like a million chinks die of starvation and cannibalism and entire armies resort to banditry to avoid dying a slow and painful death or getting castrated by whatever psychopath became emperor
Ancient warfare, where you died of some fricked up disease before ever saw the enemy sounds rough.
WW1 where nobody really understood modern war yet
Going into tunnels or getting captured in vietnam also sounds nightmarish
The Thirty Years War had a lot of torture for captives. The Swedish Drink was funneling soldiers cholera diarrhea down men's throats, there was breaking on the wheel, impalement, etc.
Also very long, very bloody, and pike/shot warfare is as brutal as any.
The push of the pike, actually engaging another pike formation with pikes, was bad enough that professional soldiers generally refused to do it and it wasn't common. More often a side would win based on maneuvering, getting the other line to break, or inflicting damage on them with firearms and cannons until they withdrew. When it did occur, which it certainly did at times during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, it normally resulted in atrocious losses on both sides. That seems like a pretty shit way to go out; even if your side wins you're fricked.
The lack of frequency of battles before the modern era is sort of offset by how brutal and dangerous marches were. You might be eating flour gruel for most meals while lugging your kit and supplies across hundreds of miles, and starvation and disease often hit armies.
The other thing is that poor transportation meant that getting caught up in raids could happen quite unexpectedly, although that's more a problem for civilians.
Battles were much quicker, but also sometimes much more deadly. The deadliest day in British history is either the first day of the Somme or Townton, but with Townton the population was 40 times smaller. Scaled up to the WWI population it was like losing 400,000 men in a day, over a full % of the male population in one go.
There are a number of battles with fatalities higher than the combined leaked total for the current war in Ukraine occuring over several hours. I imagine that sticks with you.
Pike and shot and line warfare also has the special unpleasantness of being unable to run because then calvary will ride you down, and so you have to stand in formation while artillery/cannons tee off on you.
Townton is considered to be an exaggeration, but either way neither. It's Watling street. And it's Watling street even if you divide it by ten. And I have never seen a historian say it's numbers are that exaggerated.
The push of the pike, actually engaging another pike formation with pikes, was bad enough that professional soldiers generally refused to do it and it wasn't common. More often a side would win based on maneuvering, getting the other line to break, or inflicting damage on them with firearms and cannons until they withdrew. When it did occur, which it certainly did at times during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, it normally resulted in atrocious losses on both sides. That seems like a pretty shit way to go out; even if your side wins you're fricked.
The lack of frequency of battles before the modern era is sort of offset by how brutal and dangerous marches were. You might be eating flour gruel for most meals while lugging your kit and supplies across hundreds of miles, and starvation and disease often hit armies.
The other thing is that poor transportation meant that getting caught up in raids could happen quite unexpectedly, although that's more a problem for civilians.
Battles were much quicker, but also sometimes much more deadly. The deadliest day in British history is either the first day of the Somme or Townton, but with Townton the population was 40 times smaller. Scaled up to the WWI population it was like losing 400,000 men in a day, over a full % of the male population in one go.
There are a number of battles with fatalities higher than the combined leaked total for the current war in Ukraine occuring over several hours. I imagine that sticks with you.
Pike and shot and line warfare also has the special unpleasantness of being unable to run because then calvary will ride you down, and so you have to stand in formation while artillery/cannons tee off on you.
>funneling soldiers cholera diarrhea down men's throats
Jesus Christ in Heaven, what sick frick came up with that one? At least during the Crusades, instances of cannibalism and other such shit was purely because logistics were shit and they happened to have a bunch of freshly surrendered brown people to eat. Feeding fecal matter to POWs is just vile.
Russian-Ukrainian war, for the prisoners captured by the Russians. You may starve, be beheaded, or be castrated before being executed. I can't imagine any worse fate for the soldier.
WW1. It wasn't as bloody as WW2 eastern front, but it was just pure agony that provided a near-unparalleled ratio of shellshocked veterans compared to other war.
Because all it was was sitting in a trench all day, as artillery rained down on you day and night, and a single bad roll of the dice would see you buried alive in your trench, to the point the dutch word for a trench in military context is literally "traversable grave".
And if you got to do anything else than getting shelled all day long, or gassed all day long, or listening to the moanings of the poor night assault of hte opposing side that got mowed down en masse the night prior but most of which didn't actually die and are now just slowly dying from infection and internal bleeding, you were getting send over the top where you pretty much were doomed to either die or be send back with a crippling injury.
There was just something so grim and profoundly unromantic about WW1 that makes it desirable to literally nobody. There was not one role that didn't translate to unfiltered fricking misery.
IIRC troops in ww1 were on 2 week rotations. You would spend 2 weeks in the hellish nightmare of the front trenches, then 2 weeks behind that in the secondary trench lines where it was significantly less dangerous, then 2 weeks in the rear where it was quite comfy and you could do what you want and play soccer and visit shops and take leave ect. Keep in mind there is also a bias towards the big meat grinders of the war like verdun ect, there were also thousands of kilometers of trenchline where soliders sat around basically doing nothing and seeing no combat the entire war
Yeah the war of the triple alliance was a localised mass extinction. I genuinely can’t think of a similar event in history where an aggressor is wiped out so completely and so unnecessarily. The Brazilian/Argentine/Uruguayan tardfecta wasn’t even trying to genocide them, they just wanted a surrender
Still, you have to admit, the aggressor was wiped out completely and unnecessarily from the perspective of the Muslims who literally didn't even have to do anything, lmao.
>I genuinely can’t think of a similar event in history where an aggressor is wiped out so completely and so unnecessarily
Yellow Turban Rebellion? That was kind of a shitshow.
Get off my fricking board moron, every thread does not need to be about ukraine.
Opie, I'm going to say it's probably an ancient war. I would say Belisarius' campaign in Italy is up there, absolutely devastated the peninsula to the point people and livestock got smaller from malnutrition. The sieges were fricking brutal as well.
The final Byzantine-Sassanian war is another good candidate. Huge swathes of territory changed hands, tons of cities sacked, the Persians got israelites in Palestine to start lynching random Christians in the street. Constantinople almost fell to a combined Persian-Avar force. Heraclius managed to turn it around by turning a Persian general, sneaking past their forces and sacking major cities in Iraq. The war was something like the USA and the USSR fighting if they didnt have nukes, superpower knock down drag out fight for survival. The reason the Islamic conquests were even able to happen was because the war left both empires so depopulated, impoverished and demoralized that a sudden attack caused the Persians to implode and the Byzantines lost the entire middle east except for Anatolia. Honestly this was one of the most important wars in human history in terms of long range consequences.
Being Japanese in ww2 sucked >basically told up front you're not going to survive, your life matters less to your commanders than most soldiers in all of human history >see the empire you follow religiously(literally) torn apart in front of you and experience a massive existential breakdown >main killers are starvation and disease >americans fricking despise you because of booby traps (dont accidentally step on one yourself, not like anyone is keeping decent track of where they are!) and your general treatment of them >convinced that americans are demons >you're a 4'10 starving conscript with a bolt action rifle and your enemies are marines who stand a full head taller than you and have air support, artillery support, a superior navy, better small arms, better equipment, better medicine, better organization and communication >nightmarish heat >flesh eating humidity >flesh eating diseases >flesh eating animals >cannibalism >massive lack of supplies, support, or even communication >your diet is mostly rat meat, dead comrades, and whatever you can forage or fish for (assuming the commanders don't take it from you) while the enemy is having bbqs and is being followed by floating ice cream factories, if you do manage to get a ration its a tiny portion of cold rice >expected to commit violent suicide as soon as anything goes wrong >head is stuck on a pike to decorate some americans tent, gear is taken home for him to show off to his drinking buddies while they make fun of you
Do you think they actually believe this shit or they're just being disingenuous?
Ukrainians get tons of training, especially compared to Russia, this is HEAVILY documented and incredibly easy to obtain information.
And I suppose this one is (sort of) a matter of opinion but I just don't see how anyone can claim America is responsible for this
The fact that the US bothered to set up reservations sort of disproves the genocide aspect. Why give up portions of land for your enemies to live in if you're just going to kill them all?
Many of the tribes got off easier at the hands of the US compared to what they would've gotten at the hands of other Indian tribes. The Comanche in particular come to mind.
Ethnic Cleansing is considered genocide. Yes, displacing populations of specific ethnicity through force of their homes is considered ethnic cleansing. No systematic murder doesn't need to be involved, and it's not like it wasn't.
The fact that the US bothered to set up reservations sort of disproves the genocide aspect. Why give up portions of land for your enemies to live in if you're just going to kill them all?
Many of the tribes got off easier at the hands of the US compared to what they would've gotten at the hands of other Indian tribes. The Comanche in particular come to mind.
we killed the vast majority of them and forced them to relocate to some shitty plots of land. this passes the bar for genocide >Many of the tribes got off easier at the hands of the US compared to what they would've gotten at the hands of other Indian tribes.
maybe a small fraction of them, but not in general. native americans didn't survive for dozens of millenia by nearly wiping each other out on the regular.
I'm not even a mutt but that's just ridiculous. Indians were complete primitives, there wasn't much to genocide and they didn't had much concept of "land" either to take it from them. It's not even like with middle and south american indians, where they had stable civilizations and societies, average north american indian had about as much connection to the land it was "driven off" as an Irishman born half a globe away that build his farm there.
>Indians were complete primitives
Native americans east of the great plains lived in city like settlements, the group of cultures known as the mound builders (pic related)
Granted they were not as advanced as the europeans but did have copper working
They lived in city states and kingdoms.
The civilisations collapsed due to disease spreading up the trade routes from central america and from the spanish explorers that did meet them
the civilisations collapsed before European colonies in the north
Im not saying what the Americans did was right by forcing people out of their lands
but native americans had brutal approaches to war like targeting women and children as it showed how you made it in to the heart of enemy territory
Look up descriptions of inuit warfare and you will be disgusted by what humans can do
I used to be one of those 'muh natives didnt do nothing, americans genocided those good boys', then i read more about it and they were brutal the torture and execution of captives, the simultaneous gang rape and torture of settler women including children, the total destruction of settlements. Im not saying the americans were saints either with their massacres either.
tl'dr
As I said i'm not saying what the americans did was right but the native americans shouldnt have acted like savages but neither should the americans, like begets like
>like begets like
Plenty of tribes were murdered just for being natives with zero fricking involvement with actions of other tribes. What like begets like nonsense. The California Genocide was basically all just unprompted genocides for natural resources. Sorta shit you see to this day in the Amazon.
One fricking tribe fought back against encroachment from settlers and after that it was just a protracted campaign to enslave, hunt, or sterilize Native Americans out of the entire fricking state.
12 months ago
Anonymous
i wanst saying their weren't innocent tribes
i was trying to say its not black and white
12 months ago
Anonymous
>i was trying to say its not black and white
But it often literally was. It was just granular.
12 months ago
Anonymous
i understand
tens of thousands of innocents died on both sides
tribes were forced of their lands and there were numerous massacres of the natives
the american view of natives as a whole was probably tainted by the barbaric ones that commited the attrocities
for comparison at school we were told their was a tribe in africa,
when a warrior died they cut out the gall bladder and drunk the contents so he could go to warrior heaven,
when the british army were fighting them, the tribesman did the same to the british dead as they respected them as fellow warriors
now the british saw this and thought they were barbaric cannibals desecrating their dead and this lead to a brutal campaign
now i dont know how true it was because i can find no reference to it on the internet
the romans even thought christians were a cannibal cult, they talk of a bizzare group of people who ritually eat their god and hide in tunnels and caves, they misunderstood the Eucharist, the eating of bread and drinking of wine representing the body and blood of christ
what i mean these two is early missunderstandings can taint how two peoples treat one another
the native american tribes that scalped women and children believing it to show great courage that you entered the heart of enemy territory and made it out alive, along with the massacre of settlers probably tainted the american's view of all natives they encountered from that point onwards
to this day not just americans but people around the world view native americans as a singular culture despite the fact they were many different cultural groups with differences within the groups
im saying neither side was right neither was wrong, attrocities were commited by both, this is an unfortunate fact of life that has repeated itself time and time again throughout human history and it will sadly contiue to repeat itself
12 months ago
Anonymous
>im saying neither side was right neither was wrong, attrocities were commited by both
And I'm saying this is complete bullshit, there was no "both". Portraying it as a "both" is a fundamentally biased world view. There were hundreds if not thousands of Native American tribes in the USA alone. Some were morally black, some gray, and some white, vs a definitively morally black USA.
There were absolutely some dumbfricks that viewed all Native Americans as a monolith, but the USA as a political and cultural body did not. It was aware of tribal differences to the point of actively exploiting intertribal politics for its own benefit. It made treaties with individual tribes which it continuously violated. It engaged in a protracted genocidal campaign without regard for fault for individual acts or human dignity on the side of the Native Americans.
And to say otherwise is to *lie*.
12 months ago
Anonymous
If USA was so morally black, why does every native american left today speak in ideas they got from the USA? Like people's right to self-determination, freedom from slavery, universal suffrage, right to divorce, bodily autonomy, etc. these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian or african.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian or african.
1. Indians were fighting for self-determination for the entire fricking Indian Wars, you fricking idiot
2. Black Haitians gave us freedom from slavery
3. Universal suffrage was from Finland
4. Native Americans had right to divorce
5. We don't even have bodily autonomy today. If anything that shit's been rolled back for them cause of the fricking government.
What an embarrassingly dumbass post.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>Black Haitians gave us freedom from slavery
nani?
12 months ago
Anonymous
Haiti was founded in a giant ass slave revolt. The "idea" of ending chattel slavery en masse was Haitian, in a way.
Actually that shit inspired John Brown, whose actions lead to a rapid deterioration in relations between the North and the South, which in turn accelerated if not helped to cause the Civil War, which in turn directly lead to the abolition of slavery, so in a roundabout way it also gave us freedom from slavery.
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
His soul is marching on!
12 months ago
Anonymous
The idea of ending slavery was haitian? Are you mental?
12 months ago
Anonymous
No. I feel like I made my case. Who would you say had the idea first? And please don't say Abraham Lincoln.
12 months ago
Anonymous
No. I feel like I made my case. Who would you say had the idea first? And please don't say Abraham Lincoln.
not any of these anons but i just wanted to say
inb4 spartacus
their is a myth spartacus wanted to end slavery, he didnt
during thier slave revolt, they only freed agricultural slaves as they were seen as strong and could fight
domestic slaves were left enslaved as they were considered weak
12 months ago
Anonymous
....you fricking idiot that doesn't mean he didn't want to end slavery, it means he didn't want the horrifying logistics drain of leading weak, untrained soft bodies into combat.
>Huuuurrrrrrrr he could have used them as meat shields huurrrrrrr
That's not how war works. In between battles he would have been fricking up his logistics by dragging around a shit load of people that couldn't help in the war effort. Remember Spartacus was effectively in hostile territory and fleeing from the "popular" enemy meaning he couldn't rely on the goodwill of the populace to feed and aid his army. He did want to free all slaves, he simply couldn't at the time.
12 months ago
Anonymous
it was never one of his goals, his goals was to get home
12 months ago
Anonymous
Mutts have an amazing ability to know nothing about world history. The first bill to end the slave trade was introduced to British Parliament in 1783 (passed 1807) and ending slavery had been a position held by quakers for a lot longer than that. That wasn't even the first banning of slavery the anglo world which happened in England circa. 1086. Haiti inspired loads of slave revolts (that all failed except the few where slave ships just sailed to British ports) but it had a limited effect on actually changing laws on slavery worldwide.
So the psychotic franchophone despot you should be sucking off is William I of England not Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Stop lying. Slavery in the UK wasn't banned until the 1960's.
12 months ago
Anonymous
1. The Haitian revolution started in 1791 and concluded in 1804.
2. Britain didn't end slavery until 1838. Slave trade and slavery aren't the same thing.
3. If you still had fricking legalized chattel slavery past 1086, slavery wasn't fricking ended, now fricking was it?
4. >but it had a limited effect on actually changing laws on slavery worldwide.
And? Nobody said anything about worldwide. It had a sizeable impact on the course of American political history vis a vis emancipation.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Hell, slavery was abolished in the Northern U.S. states as soon as the t were independent. a couple of decades before Haiti.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>Black Haitians INVENTED freedon from Slavery
Et Tu, Spartacus?
12 months ago
Anonymous
Spartacus lost. And more importantly didn't set about direct policy change resulting in the freedom of the slaves. There's been a bajillion failed and successful slave revolts and escapes through history both before and after his bullshit.
If the notion is he's good enough to represent a torchbearer for the idea of freedom from slavery then that idea was already rampant in Native American society and indeed every society on Earth through history.
FFS, Spartacus was a leader in the "Third" Servile War.
12 months ago
Anonymous
Modern liberalism came from Revolutionary France.
Modern fascism came from the United States.
12 months ago
Anonymous
>right to divorce, >these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian
Tell me you know nothing about native culture without telling me you know anything about native culture.
12 months ago
Anonymous
i say 'both' for simpicities sake
i think we both agree on the majority of points i feel we are arguing semantics
the american conquest of america was akin to ceasers conquest of gaul where their were 100s of gualish tribes many of which did no harm to rome
ceaser still burnt their cities
1/3 of gaulish population enslaved, 1/3 genociede, 1/3 left to live under roman rule
12 months ago
Anonymous
Good. Imagine this country with even a million more indians in it.
>native americans didn't survive for dozens of millenia by nearly wiping each other out on the regular
On the contrary, that's exactly how many of the powerful tribes survived. The Comanche, who originated in Wyoming, didn't build an empire in the Southern US and Mexico by politely asking the Apache, the Tonkawa, the Nadaco, the Shawnee, and everyone else in their path, to please leave. Indian tribes had been massacring and genociding each other for thousands of years, just as people have done everywhere else on the planet.
there’s not one single thing stopping any one of them from getting off their ass today and rejoining what’s left of civilization. they can quite b***hing about the past.
I think everyone agrees the only tribes we actually tried to genocide were the Comanche and we weren’t the only ones trying, not even the first to start.
First Punic War. You want guaranteed death, imagine sailing out in the largest premodern fleet ever assembled and getting shitcanned and drowned by Neptune along with 100k other dudes.
Twice.
Literally the most egregious use of human wave tactics in history. Emphasis on wave.
thirty years war
all the fun of disease, messed up supplies, wanton killing, and actual engagements of lining up in pike and shot blocks is probably the worst form of combat
or alternatively the ottomans wars which include all that plus slavery if you lose
Rape, pillaging, murder are statistical certainties in war. But the situation in the era of the 30 Years War is difficult for our present day minds to conceive.
The Treaty of Westphalia stated that only states could field armies, because during the 30 years war there was an abundance of non-state militaries. I imagine this was extremely bloody and hellish, basically dudes who had arms that took the opportunity to loot and destroy at whim because chaos reigned and they could site sectarianism as a justification for their actions. Entire regions were depopulated and had to be reclaimed from nature.
When the was was over, many of these people were rounded up and hung, much to the glee of the citizenry.
I'd say the 30 Years War has WW1 beat when it comes to human suffering, especially because in WW1 they at least had something akin to modern medicine.
And that's just Europe, I think the myriad of Chinese Civil Wars manage to be worse. And who knows what native Americans and Africans did in their history, but was just never properly recorded (or records destroyed during colonialism because said records were embedded in looted and destroyed artworks).
I don't really think pre-modern wars were that much bad on themselves, it's just that general quality of life was terrible already and war only made it worse.
In comparison modern war would be akin to forcing a man to jump from luxuries of heaven straight into pits of hell, while pre-modern war would be like moving from a pool of mud into a pile of shit.
Lord Anson's special military operation against the Spanish pacific was pretty grim
>Royal Navy sends a flotilla of 8 ships to harass and take prizes against the spanish. >they can't find enough marines for the detachment so they rock up to a military hospital and explain to the marines the plan >any of the wounded capable of running off go AWOL and the ones who can't are loaded aboard ship (including several very old marines who served at the Battle of the Boyne 50 years prior) >they fill the rest of the marine compliment with fresh recruits with no training >they get chased across the atlantic by the spanish >the ships all get lost and 2 return to britain >by the time they reached Chile 2/3 of the men were dead >HMS Wager crashes into a reef because only 12 men out of 105 and 50ish marines were fit to change sail >36 men from Wager survive by sailing round cape horn in jolly-boats >the meet up point on Juan Fernandez was plotted 300 miles away from its actual position >the flagship Centurion spends almost a month looking for the island while the crew dies of scurvy (only 8 were not suffering from scurvy out of 400 when they arrived) >3 more ships arrive there while they recover in Juan Fernandez but the Anna is too damaged and gets scuttled >they scuttle another ship but capture 2 spanish ships to use >fail to capture a manilla galleon >they realize they don't have enough crew and scuttle the spanish ships leaving all the men in just Centurion and Gloucester >they decide to circumnavigate to get home >Gloucester sinks halfway through the pacific >they reach Tinian and find a spanish supply depot with only 1 guard >while most of the crew are ashore Centurion is taken out to sea by a storm >Anson was planning to journey to China in another fricking jolly-boat >before that can happen the typhus addled sick men left on Centurion sailed back into port >they reach Macau and refit their ship
>they sail back to Samar to look for another manilla galleon >in the stupidest luck of all time they manage to find and capture the Nuestra Senora de Covadonga loaded with $54 million modern USD in silver >sail back to china and load all the silver onto the Centurion >return home as extremely rich heroes but with only 188 men out of 1,854
Honestly? Imagine being some warrior having to fight of the sea peoples? Your entire world is falling apart, these psychos on ships are just steamrolling your technologically advanced society and burning your cities to the ground and no matter where you run you find more of the same, the entire known world has been burned to the ground and you have no where to go. Also, warfare in the dawn of human civilization was always wars of annihilation, must’ve been apocalyptic
Reminder that the wars during the collapse went so hard multiple civilizations lost the ability to read and write for centuries. They quite literally got pushed back to the stone age.
I've compiled a curated list of the top ten wars in human history in terms of total estimated losses. If you were alive in the periods of time and regions which participated, civilian or soldier your life was a nightmarish apocalyptic hellscape. These wars especially were apocalyptic, if you were in them or lived during the fighting it would appear world ending due to the size and scale.
This includes deaths of both soldiers, civilians, etc. from causes both directly and indirectly caused by the war, which includes combat, disease, famine, massacres, suicide, and genocide.
1.) World War 2: anywhere between 70,000,000 and 118,357,000 deaths. Lasted merely 6 years and 1 day.
2.) Mongol Invasions and Conquests: anywhere between 30,000,000 and 57,000,000 deaths. Lasted 199 years.
3.) Taiping Revolution: anywhere between 20,000,000 and 40,000,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
4.) Manchu Conquest of China: only estimate is 25,000,000 deaths. Lasted 65 years.
5.) Second Sino-Japanese war: anywhere between 18,000,000 to 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
6.) World War 1: anywhere between 15,000,000 and 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 4 years and 3 months.
7.) An-Shi rebellion: only estimate is 13,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
8.) Chinese Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists: anywhere between 8,000,0000 and 11,692,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
9.) Hui Muslim Minority War: only estimate is 10,000,000 deaths. Lasted 15 years.
10.) Russian Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the White Army: anywhere between 5,000,000 and 9,000,000 deaths. Lasted 5 years.
Notice that the Russo-Ukrainian war that we pay so much attention to today is utterly dwarfed both in size and scale by every single conflict on this list. Any single one of these wars was absolutely devastating and would have felt world ending to everyone involved. Pick any single one of them and it was the worst for those soldiers involved.
I considered adding the European colonization of the america's, but actually knowing for sure how many native american's were alive in the Americas at that time is very difficult and estimates vary wildly between 8 million and 80 million and that variance is ridiculous. It seems mostly political just so they can say 80 million and I refuse to propagate such lies. The main agricultural civilizations in the americas were not particularly numerous, there may have been 3 or 4 of them over the period in question and none of them were able to support anywhere near 80 million people combined. Most of the population would be based on what the native flora and fauna of the americas would be able to support so the 8 million estimate is more than likely more accurate than 80 million and the vast majority of the dead in this particular instance were due to disease and not direct confrontation necessarily. Said disease death was not inflicted on the native on purpose even and occurred before germ theory in europe. So to count the colonization of the americas on this list would be disingenuous and unfair to other conflicts.
Making the claim that devastation should be measured by % of population is like saying "the more people who are alive, the less an individual persons experience matters" which is a completely moronic take. Just because a larger nations military was bigger than a lot of countries at that time does not mean that the individual suffering of their soldiers did not matter as much and the horrors they faced were not as important or devastating. Do you think that smaller countries just matter more than bigger countries? Are you moronic?
The number of individual deaths and individual suffering is larger. % of population would only matter to the citizens of that nation and nobody else. People are not statistics and each persons suffering matters so is definitive.
Add covid to the list then. 6 million dead over a period of two years. Truly a nightmarish hellscape we've been living in for the past two years (reminder: size of affected population, in this case the entire world, doesn't change things)
Well you can't add COVID to the list because it's difficult to figure out if doctors were lying about who died from COVID or not, especially when the government would give them good reason to mark everything down as a COVID death in order to get more government payouts. Many nations operated with similar governmental policies and that will in fact skew the numbers, add in the number of people who happened to die of something else while suffering from COVID- COVID then scores an extra kill because technically we wouldn't know if the person would have survived if they did have COVID or if they didn't. You see the problem here? Also you're going way off topic, why would you equate a pandemic to a war when a war didn't start the pandemic.
Unless you have absolute proof and evidence that the CCP designed COVID as a soft-kill biological weapon to destabilize the global economy and give themselves the edge while simultaneously eradicating their problematic elderly population which they were going to be unable to care for en masse. Maybe at that point you could make the case that COVID was a "war" of sorts. But first you'd need to prove without a shadow of a doubt that that's what China was doing.
By the way, yes we have been living in quite shitty times recently. I don't know why you would think otherwise.
Nah, it would be true if it was some siege but most often it was just >conscript all farmers >not enough people to work on fields >less food >population is the same >excess population just straight up dies
having population on the peak of your food capacity just means that any slightest drought or flood or blight or locust or dog shitting in wrong place would always kill millions.
>>no but actually they didn't fight at all
No, they didn't most often. They mostly manned yet another shitty fortification in bumfrick nowhere and and were slaved the frick out on manual labor and constructions.
There were wars that ended with the bulk of the population dead - that includes the soldiers. Many mongol invasions basically killed as many combatants out as possible. I have no doubt that there was plenty of wars where 95% of one side got wiped out.
I fricking hate communists but the morons running the show during WW1 would have made me consider communism as a lesser evil. That on top of battles like Passchendaele would have made it that much worse.
I can understand hating communists as they actually exist but always thought communism as a belief system has more hits than misses. Obviously the labour theory of value is horseshit and that's what makes most of the rest of communism fall apart but the parts about class dynamics for example are mostly correct.
The working class provide a clear majority of the value of economies and are overall the most necessary class, yet receive the lowest share of political influence and only a fraction of the wealth their work justifies. The capitalist class, what we normally call the upper class nowadays, hardly works at all, at best gambling with investments but frequently just sitting on hoarded wealth - in either case their income is mostly passive and earned off the backs of the working class, yet they receive the most political influence and benefit from many legal opportunities that simply are not available to other classes (for example, the right to purchase newspapers or own vast swathes of land despite the fact that nobody ever invented or created said land).
Then there's the middle class who the particularly moronic communists spend all their time alienating when they are clearly the only thing preventing elite dictatorship.
Never read anything more moronic. I'd rather die quickly from a shell or explosion or getting sprayed with a rifle rather than bleed to death slowly after being stabbed 6 times by a foreign man who looked me in the eye as he stabbed me over and over.
Every cop I've ever talked to much prefer getting shot to getting stabbed. There is an incredibly psychological component to piercing another human being with an edged weapon. War yes use to be based much more so on skill and technique but it was also more personal and there was no modern medicine, technology was worse and you had to put in a lot more effort and you had many more chronic health issues through compounding injuries which medicine could not fix at that time. Covered in filth and refuse and run through with spears or having your skull caved in by a club or warhammer was much more traumatizing than getting (usually) instantly erased by mortars and artillery and small arms fire.
American Revolutionary War 1775-1783
Cherokee-American Wars 1776-1795
Northwest Indian War 1785-1793
First Barbary War 1801-1805
Tecumseh's War 1810-1813
Creek War 1813-1814
Second Barbary War 1815
First Seminole War 1817-1818
Winnebago War 1827
Black Hawk War 1832
Second Seminole War 1835-1842
Texas Comanche Wars 1836-1875
Mexican-American War 1846-1848
Cayuse War 1847-1855
Apache Wars 1849-1924
Navajo Wars 1849-1866
Bleeding Kansas 1854-1861
Puget Sound War 1855-1856
Rogue River Wars 1855-1856
Third Seminole War 1855-1858
Second Opium War 1856-1859
Reform Wars 1858-1866
First and Second Cortina Wars 1859-1861
Paiute War 1860
American Civil War 1861-1865
Yavapai Wars 1861-1875
Dakota War of 1862
Snake War 1864-1868
Comanche Campaign 1867-1875
Modoc War 1872-1873
Red River War 1874-1875
Great Sioux War of 1876
Buffalo Hunters War 1876-1877
Nez Perce War 1877
Bannock War 1878
Cheyenne War 1878-1879
Sheepeater Indian War 1879
Victorio's War 1879-1880
White River War 1879
Egyptian Expedition 1882
Crow War 1887
Ghost Dance War 1890-1891
Garza War 1891-1893
Yaqui Wars 1896-1918
Spanish American War 1898
Philippine War 1899-1902
Moro Rebellion 1899-1913
Boxer Rebellion 1899-1901
Crazy Snakes War 1909
Mexican Border War 1910-1919
Little Race War 1912
U.S Occupation of Nicaragua 1912-1933
Bluff War 1914-1915
U.S Occupation of Veracruz 1914
U.S Occupation of Haiti 1915-1934
U.S Occupation of Dominican Republic 1916-1924
World War 1 1917-1918
Posey War 1923
World War 2 1941-1945
Korean War 1950-1953
Lebanon Crisis 1958
Dominican Civil War 1965-1966
Korean DMZ Conflict 1966-1969
U.S Invasion of Granada 1983
Bombing of Libya 1986
Tanker War 1987-1988
U.S Invasion of Panama 1989-1990
Gulf War 1990-1991
Iraqi No Fly-Zone 1991-2003
Intervention in Haiti 1994-1995
Kosovo War 1998-1999
Iraq War 2003-2011
Intervention in North-west Pakistan 2004-2018
Operation Ocean Shield 2009-2016
Intervention in Libya 2011
Operation Observant Compass 2011-2017
American Led Intervention in Iraq 2014-2021
American Intervention in Libya 2015-2019
So we are all mentioning Euro wars, and ya bad. But honestly like China probably had a dozen wars worse than anything in Europe. Like we all have seen that strategic tang victory meme, like I'll go over the trench vs being stuck in a Chinese siege.
A lot of the wars vs "non-state actors" you're talking about was when the U.S was relatively small fledgling nation with a small fraction of the resources and population that it currently commands. The Native American armed resistance technically lasted all the way up to 1923 with the Posey War.
Not to mention if you actually read the list, plenty of the victories were vs relatively functional nation states. It's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S has historically picked on countries weaker than itself- but that's not in and of itself exclusively true for all U.S victories.
By the way, no the U.S was not the deciding factor in WW1 but it can't be ignored that it sacrificed 117,466 men; in ancient times that would be an insane number of men to lose in just 4 years- there were still 12 participating nations which lost less men. You can't say that the U.S didn't contribute to the victory and by virtue of being on the winning side, the U.S gets the privilege of saying it won.
The Korean war started with the South Koreans basically defeated, North Korea had taken just about all of Korea, the U.S singlehandedly marched all the way up China's ass and then it spit out an extreme response without warning- 1 to 2 million Chinese soldiers sent in human waves to overrun the U.S and South Korean positions. North Koreans would have been completely crushed without extreme Chinese intervention. Every following attempt of the North Koreans and Chinese to penetrate into South Korea failed.
The U.S didn't want to escalate with the Soviets so it ended there. From start point to end point it's still a victory, south Korea was liberated and all further attacks repelled. The Gulf war and GWOT were resounding defeats for the standing militaries of those nations, every single original government was crushed every single time. It was the following insurgency that could be considered a "defeat", more so we just got sick of police work and left.
Black person we bodied the empire of Japan by ourselves in WW2 which was one of the most powerful empires of all time. Let me repeat that.
Empire of Japan:
Ground Forces: 6,095,000
Navy: 550,000 tons of displacement.
At the beginning of the Pacific war the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed the most powerful carrier force in the world, through combination of excellent ships, well-designed aircraft, and unsurpassed aviators. The Navy Air Service consisted of five naval air fleets. The Japanese had a total of ten aircraft carriers: six fleet carriers, three smaller carriers, and one training carrier.
The IJNAS had over 3,089 aircraft in 1941 and 370 trainers.
1,830 first-line aircraft including:
660 fighters, including 350 Mitsubishi Zeros
330 carrier-based strike aircraft
240 land-based, twin-engined bombers
520 seaplanes (includes fighters and reconnaissance) and flying boats.
Pic related is Japanese Imperial territory at peak strength they controlled 1/5 of the planet damn near. We defeated them, single handedly. Give us some fricking credit.
The Americans barely limped to Japan. It was the British Navy and Australian soldiers who won the day. And Japan only surrendered when Russia declared war, not due to the atomic bombs.
But what should we expect from >american education
There was a lot of problems in WWI. Multilingual empires, dysfunctional officer corps often based on outdated class systems, truly revolutionary military technology, improvements to logistics and food production, uneven technological development between belligerents, the insufficient development of manoeuvre elements compared to firepower assets, severe political dysfunction in many of the powers, large populations, army units organized by geographical area coming up against doctrines and weapons capable of mass slaughter, etc
I frankly think that three things have fixed it in the minds of people >weapons that more effectively physically marred battlefields and cities >photography and a generally free press documenting the war >the general air of pointlessness to the war in both causes and in outcome
Notice how Vietnam was also affected by the sudden increase in media coverage and colour video footage, and a lack of clear purpose for Americans
>was there no better option?
Legitimately don't have the war. A lot of the countries that joined didn't have to or were brought in by being attacked.
Austria-Hungary was under no obligation to declare war in the first damn place.
Germany dragged France and Russia into the war out of paranoia, Belgium and the UK into the war out of wanting an easier time fighting France, the Ottoman Empire into the war through spycraft (this one was at least on their side), Portugal into the war out of buttmad, and Brazil into the war out of incompetence.
Italy and Romania literally joined the war against their own fricking allies.
And Japan, Bulgaria, the US, Siam, Liberia, and China all joined the war for more or less purely political reasons.
Also, Italy gets a lot of shit for stabbing Germany in the back, but I'm surprised they found any fricking room with all the German knives shoved up there. Absolute dumbfricks.
what's crazy is that the USA had a proto-WW1 style of trench warfare just less than 50 years before WW1. The whole entire world saw the massive casualties from the Civil War, and nobody learned a goddamn thing (except for Muricans who avoided trench warfare during WW1).
what i found interesting is no western country learnt from the troubles or rhodesian bush war >extensive use of ieds prompt british and rhodesians to adopt v shaped hulls on vehicles to better deal with the blast
afghanistan comes round >uk forgot its lessons from the troubles >coalition sends flat bottomed vehicles lose 100s to ieds with 100s more injured >coalition 'invent' v shaped hulls, hailed as a great success
think about how many lives may have been saved if the west adopted v shaped hulls earlier
as von bismark said >Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others
I don’t know about the “most brutal” but Cambodia was absolutely nightmarish. Any sort of genocide of unarmed civilians by the military, like the Holocaust or the Rape of Nanking.
I’m not saying they are each equivalent, just saying that being an unarmed civilian up against a serious military force bent on war crimes is a nightmare.
I haven't read the thread yet but I would say the Iran-Iraq war personally, think WW1 with gas and trenches but you're in the desert and everything sucks even more. >t. Uneducated anon who read this on a news site once
You should read about the iran iraq war more, because you’re not far off. It was fricking insane. Very few wars can claim to have used roads made of corpses and I don’t know of any others that electrified swamps as a method of mass slaughter of assaulting forces
I know quite a bit about military tactics (manuals) but don’t know much about military history and past wars, where can I learn more?
I learned a bit from a military logistics book “supplying war” and a German soldier memoir from Russia in ww2 “blood red snow”, but aside from that I know almost nothing
as always, start with the greeks. The Peloponnesian War is as good as anywhere to begin.
In all seriousness, when studying the history of wars, it is usually best to take a roundabout approach and very broadly gloss over important periods or wars and identify campaigns or individuals that interest you and then focus on those parts. Reading in great deal about an entire era within which only small parts are interesting is just gonna lead to you forgetting almost everything you read.
>Start with Peloponnesian
You need to start with the Greco-Persian Wars to even understand the Peloponnesian Wars. That aside, starting two weeks before the Battle of Marathon and ending at The King's Peace is the first tract any prospective student of strategy or military history should study. It will also teach him why everyone who knows history fricking hates Sparta as turbo-cucklords.
>A pointy stick and a few planks of wood against a horde of merciless horse archers who are going to kill you and impale your entire village on spikes along the road to the next one
Grim.
It's even worse if you think about it. 199 years. Imagine being some Slav or Hungarian and you have to face off against the Mongols for a hundred years. That's like your great grandfather fought them, your grandfather fought them, your father fought them and now you have to fight them. Multiple generations growing up living as a tributary state or a country during the invasions. + You got your pointy stick and some shitty shield just marching under your lord into the slaughtering fields as you get encircled and outmaneuvered by an obscenely large and well organized force just constantly fricking pelting you, so many horse archers it feels like machinegun fire. You look on in horror as even your lord is outnumbered and torn apart by the horde. Oh and on the way to the battlefield you pass village after village with a pile of dead bodies at the center of town, frickers on spikes and shit no modern medicine, no sanitation, your life already sucked and was hard as frick and then you get surrounded by the horde.
Plus the Mongols had absolutely no mercy to armies that fought them. Throw down your weapons and run away, they'll easily catch up to you on horseback and use you for target practice. Inflicting near 100% casualties on fleeing armies is one of the many things the Mongols did that made them utterly wreck every state that tried to fight them.
I can't if you are actually moronic or just farming (you)s
the Somerset case in 1772 set the precedent that slavery couldn't exist except via positive law and no laws allowing slavery existed meaning that slavery in Great Britain and Ireland ended de facto on that date and de jure in 1086 which was when slavery ceased to exist as a legal concept under Norman legal reforms. The rest of the British empire followed in 1833. The 20th century stuff was just adding a legal definition of slavery in laws against it since before that it was just false imprisonment like in the Creole case in 1841
In point of fact, the last British serfs weren't freed until the 1570s, but by that point Britain had begun trading in African slaves, so effectively you're wrong.
Unironically (and this is even from a Europoor perspective) - American Civil War. If you watched documentaries or read about it - wounded soldiers being left on the battlefield for days, new expanding bullets fricking up bones so badly only amputations could potentially save you, no sanitation in the hospitals making Crimean war look like it took place in a freshly mopped maternity ward, POW treatment from both sides and the insane rates of death by disease amassing to 50-60% of soldier casualties.
Oh and I forgot to mention - out fricking dated tactics used by both sides. Napoleonic formations engaging each other at what? 20-50 yards? When the firearm at that time could very well carry the bullet for 100-200 with decent accuracy. It was a meat grinder for both sides.
WW1 maybe. Imagine being told to run to certain death
walking into certain death is also possible
just like the napoleon wars?
Yeah but WW1 had chemical weapons.
For me it's the shock. Pre-WW1 wars at least had the illusion of a warrior's pride, martial spirit and all. Imagine going in what seems a honest limited war against other like-minded people (i.e. we'll bump heads for a while, then figure something out) and you get thrown into a meat grinder with machine guns, poison gas, massed artillery, and hitherto unheard-of disregard for human life.
My great grand father was thrown into the meat grinder in France. He stopped corresponding half into it, and there weren’t any more news of him. The war ended and he did not return. After sometime the family had to accept his death and mourn him.The wife dressing in black as a widow until one late night he enters the house. This was a small village behind the hills with no electricity. The wife collapsed They thought he was a ghost. He had been a POW of the Germans and had now found his way back home in very frail health.
>t. Portuguese
I wonder if you could get her to write a book. I don't think any have been written about that scenario but it has to happen.
Oh wait, the odyssey. Serious mate write that life down before it's gone from us forever.
WW1 and it's not even close
The one they participated in.
Yes because sitting in a FOB in Iraq doing jack shit was just as bad as sitting in the trenches in Verdun. lmao get real.
Getting killed in Iraq would suck all the same
Would getting buttfricked by a guy with a micropenis be just as bad as getting fricked by a guy with a 13 inch wiener?
>micropenis:
>barely feel it
>feels degrading
>left unsatisfied
>13 inch wiener
>rubs prostate even before insertion
>blows out your ass, blows out your mind
>feels so hard you can't move
>feel it in your ass for a week after
give me the 13
>can’t shit right ever again
well if you’re going to be dead and blown to bits half way through the next week then it doesn’t really matter
>can’t shit right ever again
This has been debunked.
WW2 is the bloodiest war in history, so statistically the average soldier stood more chance of being killed in WW2.
Not at all. If you randomly select anyone who served in either the Wermacht or Red Army, both have significantly better than 50% odds of surviving the war, although obviously this varies drastically based on when, where, and how they served. Some wars have way higher fatality rates for combatants.
WWII is the deadliest war in history because the human population was vastly larger than it was at any earlier point. A major war in Africa or civil war in India or China this century could exceed the total number killed in WWII while also leaving much of the world untouched and killing a much lower %.
The Thirty Years War killed 2.5 times the percentage of the German population as both World Wars combined. The Huguenot Wars in France killed 11-14 times the share of the French population as the First World War. The death rate in the conflict would be akin to Syria having 5.75 million deaths in their war, i.e. ten times as deadly.
In general, earlier wars tended to kill a larger share of the population. Part of this is that militaries used to supply themselves by forage and plunder, part of it is that sacks that involved indiscriminate violence, looting, and the taking of slaves was permitted, and part of it was that the mass execution of civilians was tolerated to a higher degree. However, the biggest factor was that much of the population worked as near subsistence farmers, meaning that wars could collapse the food supply, leading to starvation and increasing susceptibility to disease. Armies also brought diseases with them, and an episode of small pox, etc. could cause mass fatalities, whereas without the huge movement of men and animals diseases didn't tend to engulf a region entirely (as often, obviously it still happened).
The First Crusade is a classic example of high combatant fatalities. The Latin army was huge for the time and ended up taking 66-75+% fatalities by the end despite being victorious.
So what would be the worst war to experience by your measure then? Living in one of the many nations ass raped by Mongols?
There are a few ancient wars where the conquered people essentially get wiped out of existence, can't really get worse than that. The Assyrians were quite brutal.
the fact that the assyrians managed to be hated so much at a time when basically every warcrime was standard procedure is pretty impressive
Their historical accounts sound like shit you'd hear from a knockoff Conan the Barbarian villain. It's almost hilarious how over-the-top evil the boasts are until you consider that they probably weren't just making it up and they actually did that shit to people.
Can you make some examples?
Pic is the assyrians flaying people alive, that is removing skin
I have made a pillar facing the city gate, and have flayed all the rebel leaders; I have clad the pillar in the flayed skins. I let the leaders of the conquered cities be flayed, and clad the city walls with their skins. The captives I have killed by the sword and flung on the dung heap.
The Rassam cylinder in the British Museum describes :
Their corpses they hung on stakes, they took off their skins and covered the city wall with them.Dermatologist Ernst G. Jung notes that the typical causes of death due to flaying are shock, critical loss of blood or other body fluids, hypothermia, or infections, and that the actual death is estimated to occur from a few hours up to a few days after the flaying. Hypothermia is possible, as skin provides natural insulation and is essential for maintaining body temperature.
“I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me [and] draped their skins over the pile
[of corpses]; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile … I
flayed many right through my land [and] draped their skins over the walls.”
“I felled 50 of their fighting men with the sword, burnt 200 captives from them, [and]
defeated in a battle on the plain 332 troops. … With their blood I dyed the mountain red
like red wool, [and] the rest of them the ravines [and] torrents of the mountain
swallowed. I carried off captives [and] possessions from them. I cut off the heads of their
fighters built a tower before their city. I burnt their adolescent boys
[and] girls.” “In strife and conflict I besieged [and] conquered the city. I felled 3,000 of their fighting
men with the sword … I captured many troops alive: I cut off of some their arms [and]
hands; I cut off of others their noses, ears, [and] extremities. I gouged out the eyes of
many troops. I made one pile of the living one of heads. I hung their heads on trees
around the city.”
samegay
“I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives (as one cuts) a string. Like the
many waters of a storm, I made (the contents of) their gullets and entrails run down upon
the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of
their blood as (into) a river. The wheels of my war chariot, which brings low the wicked
and the evil, were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I
filled the plain, like grass. (Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the
seeds of cucumbers.” †
“Their dismembered bodies I fed to the dogs, swine, wolves, and eagles, to the birds of
heaven and the fish in the deep…. What was left of the feast of the dogs and swine, of
their members which blocked the streets and filled the squares, I ordered them to remove
from Babylon, Kutha and Sippar, and to cast them upon heaps.” †
“The sepulchers of their earlier and later kings, who did not fear Assur and Ishtar, my
lords, (and who) had plagued the kings, my fathers, I destroyed, I devastated, I exposed to
the sun. Their bones (members) I carried off to Assyria. I laid restlessness upon their
shades. I deprived them of food-offerings and libations of water.”
https://faculty.uml.edu/ethan_spanier/teaching/documents/cp6.0assyriantorture.pdf
Was this type of stuff common?
Btw where is this from?
He's quoting Ashurbanipal, king of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 669 BC to his death in 631 BC. He wrote that (or rather, had it inscribed on a stone tablet that was placed out in public) of his conquests of Elam and what essentially amounts to his genocide upon the Elamites for aiding his brother in a civil war against him (or rather, his brother trying to break away from Ashurbanipal's empire).
This was all occurring around 646 BC in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) and what you know now as the Middle East.
The Neo-Assyrians also had a proclivity for forced resettlement of conquered peoples, the Exile of the Bible was such a program of resettlement after they were conquered by them, moving large portions of the Israelites out of Israel and Judah (Israel split in two for a while, read the Book of Kings for more on that) and moving other conquered peoples into that land. This was done to try and stop the conquered from rising against them by placing them in lands they didn't know and among other peoples they either didn't know well or fricking hated so they wouldn't collude against the empire. None of this bullshit stopped the Persians (now Iran) from steamrolling them and absorbing all the land they'd taken though.
If you've ever wondered why the Middle East is the way it is, this is why.
>(Their) testicles I cut off, and tore out their privates like the seeds of cucumbers.” †
Ngl thats a weird flex homie
Ya Mongols or Assyrians. Those cold ass motherfrickers killed your gods. And the Mongols treated you like traitors as All under Tengri was part of the Khans realm and ignorance was no excuse for disobedience.
AYRT, you are right, proportion > absolute numbers.
Not even remotely true
A lot of the wars of the 18th century were a horrible combination of
>larger populations that can muster a greater percentage for war due to improved agriculture
>disease still claims most of the lives of soldiers
>ungenerous treatment of adversaries
>the beginnings of industrialised warfare and machines of mass slaughter
>wide ranging campaigns
The taiping rebellion was a bad time of all involved, the civil war was not at all fun, the napoleonic wars could be pretty brutal, the Indian wars were certainly not fun for the native Americans lmao. The early wars of the start of the 20th century were also pretty awful, like the Russo Japanese and the Philippine American wars. King Philips war isn’t in that time frame but it was also a really awful time for all involved. I think unless you’re going back to antiquity or the classical period (where records are imperfect) a lot of the worst wars were fought mainly in the 19th century.
WW1 or WW2 eastern front.
Or those crazy shithole wars like the Iraq-Iran war.
Iran-Iraq war had WW2 level casualties and yet its barely talked about
Because nobody fricking cares. Why is it so difficult for brownoids to understand?
despite the mountains of corpses and electrified swamps there was barely any movement with the stalemate. Pleps like big movement and clay captures, hence WW2 homosexualry vs forgotten WW1. Despite the vets of the latter prepping and unleashing the former expecting a similar smack down
mag seems a little short? is he rocking a 10 rounder or something?
Because incompetent sandBlack folk from both sides pointlessly threw bodies on each other. It's a decade long stalemate. And worst part is that even if it wasn't and one side could clearly win over the other it would change absolutely nothing globally. Also despite abundant use of human waves it took them 7 years to rack up all those casualties, russians already got comparable in just over a year, which should tell you a thing or two about intensity of combat.
Even if one of them achieved a total victory all it would mean is that instead of two thirdie brown shitholes in that part of the world there would be one big one. It wasn't important. Stakes were very low in a global sense.
This.
The Americans gave Saddam nerve gas to use against the Iranians, then later accused Saddam of having nerve gas, while the US was the largest global manufacturer of nerve gas
moron
500,000 people died in that war.
That's less than some battles on the Eastern front
Get over it moron
There are like 4 wars with more death and destruction than WW1, it still takes the number 5 spot so it is worth mentioning but you should understand that 4 other conflicts eclipse it.
There is an argument for % of population but it's faulty and based on looking at people as statistics rather than living breathing organisms which matter. It is much more useful to measure devastation in total number of deaths rather than deaths per % of population. Sure it sucks to lose so many of your people but from each individual persons perspective who participated or lived in the region of the conflict, the conflicts with higher total death total had more human suffering.
You only understand half of the picture by viewing things that way. It's too simplistic for something as ravaging as war.
I sympathize with the perspective, the death of an individual is a statistic but the death of a nation is a tragedy. Looking into the details, my argument hinges on the idea that the worst outcomes for everyone involved- civilian, soldier or whoever would also determine just "how bad" a war is to fight in.
Many anons in this thread are arguing that its worse to lose a higher % of your deployed forces or its worse to lose a high % of your population in war. Many would argue that the much larger nation can much more easily deal with the consequences of war by virtue of simply having more people and the consequences would be incredibly dire for the smaller nation.
The higher your losses the more likely that babushka has to pick up the AK. Quite grim.
However I'd rather be more fair and measure peoples lives equally and not value soldiers lives less than the lives of say your civilians or measure their lives and experiences as less than those of nations with a smaller population and a smaller military. It seems fair to just go ahead and conclude that human suffering is human suffering across the board and whether you're a hyper confident commander of a force that appears as though as if it's winning the day- but you get pink misted by a cruise missile all of a sudden or whether you're an insurgent partisan launching attacks on an occupying military that's genocidal towards your people and you get found out and gunned down by several occupiers at once, well the end result is still that you suffered a grim and terrible end either way.
Like I said if we want to take other things into account like starvation, not having a city to come home to, modern medicine, then sure. But that's the conversation we should be having. Not "oh well these guys got completely wiped out so their suffering automatically matters more than the people who died while they thought they were winning"
The continuous chimpout that happened in China between 1911 and 1949. It’s every war rolled into one war, and if you managed to survive your reward was living under Mao.
kek
this seems pretty fricked
but frick bugs anyway
actually not really. Most warlords didn't give a frick about discipline in the army. If you wanted to you could run away and be a bandit, just like the rest
>If you wanted to you could run away and be a bandit
The warlord armies were the bandits.
If you wanted to you could run away and starve.
The average soldier is probably Chinese, so there's merit in this view.
Personally I think the worst Chinese wars were the imperial era wars where one state suffering fammine invaded the neibour to steal rice, causing the harvest to fail, starving either way
Given how fast shit is hitting the fan in China currently there’s a good chance we’ll end up with another gigantic meltdown like that I’m the coming decades.
I second this. Shit was brutal in a way hardly imaginable to most people during this period in China. Russo-ukraiBlack folk can frick of.
A period of near-anarchy across the country with no force to establish order in sight. Where landlords requisition grain until their peasants starve half to death. Where roaming armies, bandits, and brigands cross a continent-sized country, raping, killing, and stealing at will.
All the while, the Western powers wring their hands and twiddle their thumbs. They continue to hold on to their colonial possessions, extorting the country of its wealth, refusing to help the government do anything to unify its country. No wonder why the Nationalist government turned to the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany for help. Nobody else was willing to lift a finger to help them end the anarchy. The arms embargo, in fact, just made things worse.
When a truly organised force comes, it's not better at all. An army enters under the banner of Asian co-prosperity - steals, rapes, mutilates, murders; builds slave labour concentration camps that put Auschwitz to shame. An army enters for the sake of the Chinese nation - and it kidnaps all of the men in a town, leaving those left behind condemned to near-death and endless years of uncertainty, stealing all of the possessions to make things worse. An army enters in the name of global socialism - and destroys the fabric of society, condemning people to hardship.
Decades of unimaginably cruel pain and suffering. It's no wonder why old Chinese people appreciate Mao - despite killing tens of millions by incompetence and malice, his government still managed to improve life for the average person in a way unknown for many, many years.
Vietnam is similar. I imagine some poor frick fought the French, Americans, Cambodians, and then Chinese.
It’s worse because it was basically a century of chaos. The first opium war, taping rebellion and second opium war had annihilated China and the boxer rebellion was just the cherry on top. The Chinese really are right to call the period from the first opium war to 1949 the century of humiliation.
And then you have the Korean war immediately after… and then the Great Leap Forward… and the cultural Revolution… I can see why people accepted Dengism tbqh. 150 years of near unending chaos and bloodshed
>if you managed to survive your reward was living under Mao
L-MAO
>The continuous chimpout that happened in China between 1911 and 1949. It’s every war rolled into one war, and if you managed to survive your reward was living under Mao.
Once I discovered Chinese war movies they were more gory than I expected. I don't know why I expected otherwise, maybe assuming because China likes to censor things, but not these films. The propaganda part is more, like, Mao sitting around giving out wisdom, but the battle scenes are exceptionally brutal. It's like watching Dawn of the Dead or something. Here we go:
?t=4752
It could be almost medieval too at times because of shortage of ammunition, melee weapons were used a lot. Sometimes they go a little overboard and make it look like Warhammer but I imagine mass charges with melee weapons did happen:
?t=4721
They did and they were not uncommon on both sides and they featured pretty commonly even in mao-era film and theatre. The Luger+Dao with a ribbon combo is pretty common on both sides. Very 40k imo and quite frankly, kino
This movie is obviously cultural revolution era propaganda but there’s some kino there. Skip to about 1:25:00 or so for a dude dual wielding Lugers leading a detachment of these c**ts
Good film.
Glad you like it, the arts were very well funded during this era in China funnily enough because of Jiang
?t=4752 [Embed]
>look at fight scene
>oh i recognize some of those sound effects from old bond movies
>looks like one as well
>check title
>"Chinese movie 2021"
ultra kek
It's from 1999. Still kind of looks like it was shot in the 1980s, but it's not 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_for_Nanjing,_Shanghai_and_Hangzhou
I wouldn't want to have to go on patrols through a booby-trapped jungle in Vietnam time and again
At risk of being attacked daily, rather than a few weeks a year. Thanks to insertion by helicopter:
“For a combat soldier in World War II who served for four years, the average time spent in actual combat was approximately 40 days. By comparison, Grunts in Vietnam spent an average of about two-thirds of their 12- or 13-month tours – over 250 days – in combat”
https://web.archive.org/web/20160209114052/http://www.military.com/NewContent/0,13190,Defensewatch_012104_Stress,00.html
WW1 and WW2 specifically the Eastern Front.
Kursk however must have been fricking incredible from a birds eye view though.
Not really, this is an idea perpetuated by movies and a lack of real world experience with conventional war. Dispersion and range are significantly greater in real life, a bird's eye view of Kursk would look like a mostly empty field with the occasionally visible tank or explosion
Soldiers accounts of Kursk are of fields littered with si mmay destroyed tanks the smoke obscured everything and you could barely breathe.
Soviet movies are particularly bad with this - they'll show tanks, infantry, assault guns moving forward with centimetres of space between them, as if it was a cavalry charge of Kutuzov's army. It makes for very impressive imagery, though.
Paraguayan War for the Paraguayans perhaps.
Wouldn't be too bad being a Paraguayan jody though
Obviously not a war but an SMO but the worst scenario I could imagine would be being a mobik/wagnerite in Bakhmut.
>no food
>no ammo
>no orders
>not even an entrenching tool
>no training
>zero trust and unit cohesion
>get bombed by your own artillery
>gun is a rusty AK
>personal equipment is from the 1940's and full of bullet holes and dried blood from the last mobik
>any second a grenade might be dropped on you with no warning
>raped left, right and center by everyone from chechens to officers
>best case scenario if you get wounded you wind up in pic related
>if you live you get sent straight back
>This is your brain on Reddit
Good Morning Sirs!
Excuse me, I’m a little slow. But isn't it the Ukrainians who are barley holding on to their only supply road into the town? Thats sounds worse, but not anywhere close to being the worst situation.
At least they get supplies.
I'd rather be one the side where none of the things listed is a problem. You would to even if you're too embarrassed to admit it.
>barley
ESLs are so fricking funny lmao
>he doesn't hodl his barley
Interesting, so how did these starving, unarmed, untrained and unled soldiers achieve picrel?
If you zoom in on individual apartments it'll look more impressive, Sanjay.
A Russian state officials I see. Its the same level as MSN or CNN or some tv evangelist. Its the same on the other side telling you Russians are loosing. Also Ukrainian 3 day anti terror operation in Donbas lasting 9 years.
One of those is the Belarusian dictator you fricking clown lmao.
>Also Ukrainian 3 day anti terror operation
...What? Are you seriously cargo culting even this? Kek.
Expenditure of tens of thousands of penal forces, VDV, Wagner regulars, and mobniks, concentrated with the best logistics and ammunition supplies the RU MoD can muster against predominantly territorial defense forces (some miscellaneous special forces present in low volumes as well) given tertiary priority in terms of resource allocation. Or are you forgetting how often Zaluzhny apologizes to Bakhmut defenders for keeping them at low priority?
Anyway the fact that's all they've accomplished so little while spending so much in roughly a year shows just how degraded Russia has become as a military force.
>"yes human wave tactics are great!"
>"it only took them MONTHS"
>"NATO troops put up one hell of a fight"
Good morning sir
>So I fought that one guy
>I came second, he ended up next to last
How did they after 14 months *almost* capture a town with a pre-war population of 70k? That's really impressive.
they tried to evade civilian causalities chud
hol up, is this from yesterday? russians must know that the world is watching, how are they not making sure everything that goes on parade is 100% working, pristine condition?
its older stuff
Someone who helps organize and ensure safety at parades every 4th of July and Veterans' Day, this webm is still absolutely infuriating to watch even years later.
They're Russians; that is pristine condition.
What is worse: Working a munitions-factory in China or working in munitions-factory in Russia?
Constant reinforcement, bodies get replaced by more bodies
By dying by tens of thousands.
Embarrassing that the strategically useless town forced Russia to expend most of its resources for a pointless victory. I doubt that they can even keep the fricking place
by standing on the corpses of ten thousand who went before them.
If I zoom in on my spilled drink it'll seem big too. Do Russians not realize just how fricking irrelevant this town is? It doesn't even show up on most full maps of Ukraine
That's the funny thing. They haven't. That is only what they claim on Telegram. Ukraine doesn't reveal their positions, so there is no counterpoint. Do you think those maps show the recent Azov counter attacks 3km deep gain? Nope. Of course not. Because the "conquest of Bakhmut" is a fricking Russian fantasy sold to shit eating Zatniks as a life raft to cling to as they drown in shame and the anal rape of their peers.
Thank you, Reddit war tourist.
He's not really that far off though. Do you realize how fricking gut wrenching it is thinking about how dystopian modern warfare has become. It used to be maybe Vietnam as the worst conflict in the fact that you're about 5 to 10 meters away in the middle of the night. But Ukraine is pretty fricking brutal, 24 hours ops meaning no time for rest and recovery, constant artillery strikes, and fire missions because there's drones and aircraft always flying by. The idea there's fricking toys flying around you dropping grenades on you is already hellish enough.
There are several dozen conflicts historically that the Russo-Ukrainian war cannot even touch in terms of total death and suffering. He's very far off, you're simply bias because you have been exposed the most to the Russo-Ukrainian war because it is a recent and ongoing conflict and is far easier to observe than pretty much any preceding war. It is the war that is most visible to you, but compared to say the Mongol conquests that lasted for 199 years and involved twice as much death as World War 1 is so distant and intangible that the suffering that occurred is alien and foreign to you. Nonetheless the historical record stands and the archaeological evidence backs it up and it dwarfs the Russo-Ukrainian conflict many times over.
This thread isn't about total deaths dumbo, read the OP.
By definition the worst war for a soldier is the war with the most people dying. It doesn't get any simpler than that you fricking mook.
>by definition
Post the definition.
How does one come to such a moronic conclusion? There have been tiny wars that have been way fricking worse for the average soldier than wars with a lot of total deaths were the average soldier had it reasonably good.
Because every soldier who dies or is permanently maimed has it the worst you fricking moron. I've already been through explaining this. Just because some nothing little tiny insignificant country got wiped out does not mean that the horrible deaths that a larger country faces on the battlefield suddenly become meaningless. Each man who dies in war suffers his own personal hell at the end, this is a fact.
Okay let's do a mental exercise to help you understand, using fake countries. The Gorgundian Confederation loses 5,000,000 men on the battlefield but has a population of 128,000,000 million and a standing military of 14,000,000. However, their ally, The Kingdom of Terrogon was completely wiped out, their total population was 5,000,000.
Of course for the people of that kingdom they lost everything. But those soldiers in the Gorgundian Confederation lost the exact same number of people in an equally horrible way. Obviously the Gorgundian's get to continue to exist and the Terrogonian's are completely gone but the amount of human suffering and death is exactly the same, measured individual to individual. One could argue those 5 million Gorgundian's also lost their nation because they don't know if they won or if they lost, they died horribly and will never know. They are gone, so are the Terrogonian's.
We can get more detailed and try to argue that women children and elderly matter more than male soldiers but that's pretty dumb because the individual suffering is the same. Would the 5 million Terrogonian's that died only matter if they were the only 5 million people in their country? Do small countries matter more than big countries? Again, are you moronic? Do you know what it means to die?
>doubling down this hard instead of just taking the L
This just in: Covid was worse than the Holocaust.
Question: Given the choice, would you rather hav been your average Gorgundian or Terrrogonian soldier?
>Do you know what it means to die?
Neither, both would have sucked. Either way you still die a horrible death being executed, blown to bits or shot up. If you get captured then you can be tortured, any number of things can happen to a soldier and not a peep of it gets out. Modern communications technology + the internet exposed us for what we are. We're fricking savages and that's the truth, in a real war no one gives a shit about the Geneva Convention or whatever treaties. Anything can happen. Whether you are the last man defending your nation or the first man over the trench you'll die horribly so my answer is neither.
In both cases:
Maybe it happened, but it wasn't 6 million.
>Neither, both would have sucked
I don't recall neither being an option. Also
>There is literally no difference between joining a military with 0 survivors and joining a military with 9 million survivors.
Damn, human lives are worthless to you, including your own, huh?
Sure, there's a difference but even "winning" forces still have to go through the shit and can die any time. Even if you're on the "bigger" and "better" winning team you can still get erased and die horribly on the battlefield. It's the same as if you were the last man standing in some situations. You could just be in a shit part of the war. How many Germans started out thinking they were hot shit in France and then found out just how much it sucked to fight in Stalingrad. The tide can always turn, dying while being fresh on the battlefield- dying after surviving utter hell. One way or another you're still dead and your fate is the same and just because you're on the larger side doesn't mean you're gonna die knowing that you're going to win. It's not going to make it any less painful.
Oh okay the fresh guys just sent to the front line all got slaughtered in scores while being ordered to hop over the trench.
Oh NO how horrible the survivors from the start of the war finally met their end in the last German charge over the trenches.
Both experiences sucked for both people and were utterly fricking terrifying. Sounds more like life and suffering don't matter to you, otherwise you'd see it on equal terms.
>By definition the worst war for a soldier is the war with the most people dying.
Incorrect. Soldier!=people.
The worst war for a soldier would be the war with the most soldiers dying as a % of total combatants.
Basically, which war did you absolutely not fricking want to fight in, since if you did you were practically guaranteed to be fricked? I don't think this thread has answered that. It's inflated with non-combatant deaths or includes situations where one side had shittons of survivors because of army size.
Okay so soldiers aren't people or does losing your civilians in war not factor in to how horrible it was? Who is and isn't a soldier or civilian in a civil war? How much does it suck to starve to death vs getting shot in the head? Like seriously bro if you lived in the region and you had to suffer through it, do you count in the assessment of how much it sucked? Well what if you picked up a hunting rifle and took a few potshots at the Red Army or the Nazi's in WW2? Are you a soldier now? Does your experience matter now because now you're a soldier?
I have many questions for you.
>Okay so soldiers aren't people
No. Not all people are soldiers.
>does losing your civilians in war not factor in to how horrible it was
Pretty sure dying sucks more.
>Who is and isn't a soldier or civilian in a civil war?
A soldier would be someone that takes up arms as part of a regular force or as an irregular engaged in the war/
>How much does it suck to starve to death vs getting shot in the head?
Starving to death would suck more, I would imagine. So if we needed to do tiebreaks you could factor in cause of death I suppose.
>Like seriously bro if you lived in the region and you had to suffer through it, do you count in the assessment of how much it sucked?
No. The topic of the thread is for the average soldier.
>Well what if you picked up a hunting rifle and took a few potshots at the Red Army or the Nazi's in WW2? Are you a soldier now?
Yes. You're an irregular.
>Does your experience matter now because now you're a soldier?
Yes. Literally the subject of the fricking thread.
Glad you could clarify, so by the agreed upon definitions and agreements:
is still the defacto list of worst wars to participate in and if you don't think so I suggest you at least open up their wikipedia page and learn about them to understand that by the agreed upon answers- they are indeed the worst wars for soldiers, as defined by your answers, to participate in.
>is still the defacto list of worst wars to participate in
Spanish conquest of the Aztecs killed a greater % of mobilized participants than WWII. We're talking like 2 in 3 vs 1 in 5.
So...no?
There weren't even that many native americans alive you tard.
>%
>Total numbers are the only thing that matters
The average soldier doesn't give a shit about the total numbers.
I get it. You don't know what an average is. You're a brainlet. It's okay.
% of mobilized participants doesn't mean shit. I don't know why I have to explain it to you. Total numbers are the only thing that matters, it doesn't matter if a large % of mobilized participants got wasted when the total death during Spanish conquest that occurred happened every fricking week on the eastern front many times over. That's why you're moronic. Measure suffering treating each individual with respect. Your little war that you think is so bad is nothing compared even to the pacific or the eastern front or even the western front.
Total deaths doesn't mean whichever suck more, there's a reason there's an increase of PTSD and not becuase it's studied more intensely these days. Conflicts are sustained bouts of continuous stress now vs what they were 80+ years ago (obviously with some exceptions like in major battles like Iwo Jima, Stalingrad, Leningrad, etc...) war was a campaign structure. Now it's total constant battling. If you're a soldier in Bakhmut or Avdiivka or east of Kharkiv. Everyday you hear shells going over your head around your position, and you're on alert looking for drones or personnel doing reconnaisance. The mental fatigue of every minute could be your last is what the original dude meant in that it fricking sucks more than any other conflict.
Ukraine posting has literally been the worst thing to happen to /k/ in years.
Yeah, if you're a vatnik/pajeet.
>I'm bored
>Go onto /k/
>psyop
Goddammit you fricks. Ukraine sucks, Russia sucks. All of you suck.
>mobik/wagnerite in Bakhmut.
You mean Lugandan/Donbabwean sacrificial meat.
Anyone have this but for DPR/LNR?
Black person
Wew, Reddit must be rough.
You should fricking go back.
Taiping Rebellion
>Chinese christian schizos revolt against the Qing Dynasty
>20-70 million people die
i would love to see the taiping rebellion winning,they would have been better at least.
the fact that the europeans considered them crazy should tell you they werent exactly following the bible very closely
Vietnam, both sides were getting the shit end of the stick
>randomly get headshotted by a tree speaking VC
>step on shit covered spikes and die of infections
>gunned down by the droves
>burned alive by napalm and WP, and if you somehow survive you wish you hadn't
>Iran-Iraq electrified swamps. Iraq filled the Hawizeh marshes with land mines, barbed wire and live power lines. Iran lost 20k men in that assault
>WW1 western front (Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele)
>WW2 Eastern Front or Japanese invasion of China
Theyre top 3. After that probably US civil war due to super high deaths as a % of the population
In human history it's easily one of the countless chinese civil wars where like a million chinks die of starvation and cannibalism and entire armies resort to banditry to avoid dying a slow and painful death or getting castrated by whatever psychopath became emperor
Ancient warfare, where you died of some fricked up disease before ever saw the enemy sounds rough.
WW1 where nobody really understood modern war yet
Going into tunnels or getting captured in vietnam also sounds nightmarish
Ethiopia Eritrea war had child soldiers forced to storm and defend WWI trenches.
Trench warfare of ww1. Gas attacks, mud, flamethrowers a hellscape of barbed wire and shells all over the place.
Vietnam. Exhausting depletion of your vitality in that nightmarish humidity. Traps out of a nightmare. Both of these seem the worse.
Desert terrain and arctic terrain are extreme and horrid but the two above seem much worse.
The Thirty Years War had a lot of torture for captives. The Swedish Drink was funneling soldiers cholera diarrhea down men's throats, there was breaking on the wheel, impalement, etc.
Also very long, very bloody, and pike/shot warfare is as brutal as any.
>tfw swedes buckbroke the germans so hard they continue to eat and drink shit to this day
The push of the pike, actually engaging another pike formation with pikes, was bad enough that professional soldiers generally refused to do it and it wasn't common. More often a side would win based on maneuvering, getting the other line to break, or inflicting damage on them with firearms and cannons until they withdrew. When it did occur, which it certainly did at times during the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War, it normally resulted in atrocious losses on both sides. That seems like a pretty shit way to go out; even if your side wins you're fricked.
The lack of frequency of battles before the modern era is sort of offset by how brutal and dangerous marches were. You might be eating flour gruel for most meals while lugging your kit and supplies across hundreds of miles, and starvation and disease often hit armies.
The other thing is that poor transportation meant that getting caught up in raids could happen quite unexpectedly, although that's more a problem for civilians.
Battles were much quicker, but also sometimes much more deadly. The deadliest day in British history is either the first day of the Somme or Townton, but with Townton the population was 40 times smaller. Scaled up to the WWI population it was like losing 400,000 men in a day, over a full % of the male population in one go.
There are a number of battles with fatalities higher than the combined leaked total for the current war in Ukraine occuring over several hours. I imagine that sticks with you.
Pike and shot and line warfare also has the special unpleasantness of being unable to run because then calvary will ride you down, and so you have to stand in formation while artillery/cannons tee off on you.
Townton is considered to be an exaggeration, but either way neither. It's Watling street. And it's Watling street even if you divide it by ten. And I have never seen a historian say it's numbers are that exaggerated.
>calvary
It's like you are trying to bait me on purpose.
>Time to get fashionable.
nice ass bro
Thirty Years War scaled up to Europe's WWII population would have been around 57.5 million dead, drastically eclipsing the European theater of WWII.
Yeah, but people bred like rabbits back then.
doesn't really matter if most people died during childbirth/early childhood
>funneling soldiers cholera diarrhea down men's throats
Jesus Christ in Heaven, what sick frick came up with that one? At least during the Crusades, instances of cannibalism and other such shit was purely because logistics were shit and they happened to have a bunch of freshly surrendered brown people to eat. Feeding fecal matter to POWs is just vile.
Pekka with the knife absolutely crowns this image.
literally the best depiction of swedish-finnish and german relations during the 30 years war I've ever seen.
Why are northerners like this? Is it the cold? In warmer climes warfare is just comedy.
payback for magdeburg. The swedes were the saviours of protestant germans.
Pike battles were fricking hardcore, I wouldn't want to be involved in that shit
>Crawling under the pikes with a small dagger to stab the enemy in the kidney
goblin shit right there
That one Chinese war where a city was besieged for years and the garrison only held because they resorted to cannibalism
> That one Chinese war where they resorted to cannibalism
You're gonna have to get way more specific
any war before modern medicine became thing
90% of causalities in war were from shitting themselves to death
Russian-Ukrainian war, for the prisoners captured by the Russians. You may starve, be beheaded, or be castrated before being executed. I can't imagine any worse fate for the soldier.
That's pretty much how the treat their own soldiers too.
sensible chuckle
WW1. It wasn't as bloody as WW2 eastern front, but it was just pure agony that provided a near-unparalleled ratio of shellshocked veterans compared to other war.
Because all it was was sitting in a trench all day, as artillery rained down on you day and night, and a single bad roll of the dice would see you buried alive in your trench, to the point the dutch word for a trench in military context is literally "traversable grave".
And if you got to do anything else than getting shelled all day long, or gassed all day long, or listening to the moanings of the poor night assault of hte opposing side that got mowed down en masse the night prior but most of which didn't actually die and are now just slowly dying from infection and internal bleeding, you were getting send over the top where you pretty much were doomed to either die or be send back with a crippling injury.
There was just something so grim and profoundly unromantic about WW1 that makes it desirable to literally nobody. There was not one role that didn't translate to unfiltered fricking misery.
IIRC troops in ww1 were on 2 week rotations. You would spend 2 weeks in the hellish nightmare of the front trenches, then 2 weeks behind that in the secondary trench lines where it was significantly less dangerous, then 2 weeks in the rear where it was quite comfy and you could do what you want and play soccer and visit shops and take leave ect. Keep in mind there is also a bias towards the big meat grinders of the war like verdun ect, there were also thousands of kilometers of trenchline where soliders sat around basically doing nothing and seeing no combat the entire war
The Korean War just seems like such a horribly depressing conflict.
In terms of survival? Probably the War of the Triple Alliance for the Paraguayans
This was just the survival rate for their leadership.
1) War of the Triple Alliance
2) Second Punic War
3) Gombe Chimpanzee War
4) WWI
>Gombe Chimpanzee War
Imagine getting jumped at a McDonalds 1 by 1 at an odd hour of the night when you're all alone.
Holy shit, those were the top 0.1% of the country.
Yeah the war of the triple alliance was a localised mass extinction. I genuinely can’t think of a similar event in history where an aggressor is wiped out so completely and so unnecessarily. The Brazilian/Argentine/Uruguayan tardfecta wasn’t even trying to genocide them, they just wanted a surrender
>I genuinely can’t think of a similar event in history where an aggressor is wiped out so completely and so unnecessarily
Fourth Crusade?
The fourth crusade and the war of the triple alliance are two very different breeds of moronic, pointless wars
Still, you have to admit, the aggressor was wiped out completely and unnecessarily from the perspective of the Muslims who literally didn't even have to do anything, lmao.
>I genuinely can’t think of a similar event in history where an aggressor is wiped out so completely and so unnecessarily
Yellow Turban Rebellion? That was kind of a shitshow.
The Taiping Rebellion comes close in wanton cruelty.
The second punic war would've been pretty bad.
>all while the US and the people that 'started-it"
Didn't know that the US invaded Ukraine on February 24 and struggles to capture Bakhmut. The more you know
Get off my fricking board moron, every thread does not need to be about ukraine.
Opie, I'm going to say it's probably an ancient war. I would say Belisarius' campaign in Italy is up there, absolutely devastated the peninsula to the point people and livestock got smaller from malnutrition. The sieges were fricking brutal as well.
The final Byzantine-Sassanian war is another good candidate. Huge swathes of territory changed hands, tons of cities sacked, the Persians got israelites in Palestine to start lynching random Christians in the street. Constantinople almost fell to a combined Persian-Avar force. Heraclius managed to turn it around by turning a Persian general, sneaking past their forces and sacking major cities in Iraq. The war was something like the USA and the USSR fighting if they didnt have nukes, superpower knock down drag out fight for survival. The reason the Islamic conquests were even able to happen was because the war left both empires so depopulated, impoverished and demoralized that a sudden attack caused the Persians to implode and the Byzantines lost the entire middle east except for Anatolia. Honestly this was one of the most important wars in human history in terms of long range consequences.
The final Byzantine Sassanian war is an underexplored conflict thanks to the lack of written sources on the Sassanid side.
Being Japanese in ww2 sucked
>basically told up front you're not going to survive, your life matters less to your commanders than most soldiers in all of human history
>see the empire you follow religiously(literally) torn apart in front of you and experience a massive existential breakdown
>main killers are starvation and disease
>americans fricking despise you because of booby traps (dont accidentally step on one yourself, not like anyone is keeping decent track of where they are!) and your general treatment of them
>convinced that americans are demons
>you're a 4'10 starving conscript with a bolt action rifle and your enemies are marines who stand a full head taller than you and have air support, artillery support, a superior navy, better small arms, better equipment, better medicine, better organization and communication
>nightmarish heat
>flesh eating humidity
>flesh eating diseases
>flesh eating animals
>cannibalism
>massive lack of supplies, support, or even communication
>your diet is mostly rat meat, dead comrades, and whatever you can forage or fish for (assuming the commanders don't take it from you) while the enemy is having bbqs and is being followed by floating ice cream factories, if you do manage to get a ration its a tiny portion of cold rice
>expected to commit violent suicide as soon as anything goes wrong
>head is stuck on a pike to decorate some americans tent, gear is taken home for him to show off to his drinking buddies while they make fun of you
>convinced Americans were demons
the Americans themselves weren’t, but the israelite bankers that controlled everything certainly were
Manchurian Japanese women were told to drown their babies and commit sudoku so they and their kids wouldn’t be raped to death by theRussians.
to commit violent suicide as soon as anything goes wrong
This will never make sense
Do you think they actually believe this shit or they're just being disingenuous?
Ukrainians get tons of training, especially compared to Russia, this is HEAVILY documented and incredibly easy to obtain information.
And I suppose this one is (sort of) a matter of opinion but I just don't see how anyone can claim America is responsible for this
The "Indian wars" in the 19th century US west. If that wasn't genocide, what was it?
The point wasn't to kill them per se, just drive them off their land. Plus it wasn't really a war, just a special military operation.
Ethnic Cleansing is considered genocide. Yes, displacing populations of specific ethnicity through force of their homes is considered ethnic cleansing. No systematic murder doesn't need to be involved, and it's not like it wasn't.
The fact that the US bothered to set up reservations sort of disproves the genocide aspect. Why give up portions of land for your enemies to live in if you're just going to kill them all?
Many of the tribes got off easier at the hands of the US compared to what they would've gotten at the hands of other Indian tribes. The Comanche in particular come to mind.
we killed the vast majority of them and forced them to relocate to some shitty plots of land. this passes the bar for genocide
>Many of the tribes got off easier at the hands of the US compared to what they would've gotten at the hands of other Indian tribes.
maybe a small fraction of them, but not in general. native americans didn't survive for dozens of millenia by nearly wiping each other out on the regular.
>we killed the vast majority of them
smallpox hands typed this post
I'm not even a mutt but that's just ridiculous. Indians were complete primitives, there wasn't much to genocide and they didn't had much concept of "land" either to take it from them. It's not even like with middle and south american indians, where they had stable civilizations and societies, average north american indian had about as much connection to the land it was "driven off" as an Irishman born half a globe away that build his farm there.
>Indians were complete primitives
Native americans east of the great plains lived in city like settlements, the group of cultures known as the mound builders (pic related)
Granted they were not as advanced as the europeans but did have copper working
They lived in city states and kingdoms.
The civilisations collapsed due to disease spreading up the trade routes from central america and from the spanish explorers that did meet them
the civilisations collapsed before European colonies in the north
Im not saying what the Americans did was right by forcing people out of their lands
but native americans had brutal approaches to war like targeting women and children as it showed how you made it in to the heart of enemy territory
Look up descriptions of inuit warfare and you will be disgusted by what humans can do
I used to be one of those 'muh natives didnt do nothing, americans genocided those good boys', then i read more about it and they were brutal the torture and execution of captives, the simultaneous gang rape and torture of settler women including children, the total destruction of settlements. Im not saying the americans were saints either with their massacres either.
tl'dr
As I said i'm not saying what the americans did was right but the native americans shouldnt have acted like savages but neither should the americans, like begets like
>like begets like
Plenty of tribes were murdered just for being natives with zero fricking involvement with actions of other tribes. What like begets like nonsense. The California Genocide was basically all just unprompted genocides for natural resources. Sorta shit you see to this day in the Amazon.
One fricking tribe fought back against encroachment from settlers and after that it was just a protracted campaign to enslave, hunt, or sterilize Native Americans out of the entire fricking state.
i wanst saying their weren't innocent tribes
i was trying to say its not black and white
>i was trying to say its not black and white
But it often literally was. It was just granular.
i understand
tens of thousands of innocents died on both sides
tribes were forced of their lands and there were numerous massacres of the natives
the american view of natives as a whole was probably tainted by the barbaric ones that commited the attrocities
for comparison at school we were told their was a tribe in africa,
when a warrior died they cut out the gall bladder and drunk the contents so he could go to warrior heaven,
when the british army were fighting them, the tribesman did the same to the british dead as they respected them as fellow warriors
now the british saw this and thought they were barbaric cannibals desecrating their dead and this lead to a brutal campaign
now i dont know how true it was because i can find no reference to it on the internet
the romans even thought christians were a cannibal cult, they talk of a bizzare group of people who ritually eat their god and hide in tunnels and caves, they misunderstood the Eucharist, the eating of bread and drinking of wine representing the body and blood of christ
what i mean these two is early missunderstandings can taint how two peoples treat one another
the native american tribes that scalped women and children believing it to show great courage that you entered the heart of enemy territory and made it out alive, along with the massacre of settlers probably tainted the american's view of all natives they encountered from that point onwards
to this day not just americans but people around the world view native americans as a singular culture despite the fact they were many different cultural groups with differences within the groups
im saying neither side was right neither was wrong, attrocities were commited by both, this is an unfortunate fact of life that has repeated itself time and time again throughout human history and it will sadly contiue to repeat itself
>im saying neither side was right neither was wrong, attrocities were commited by both
And I'm saying this is complete bullshit, there was no "both". Portraying it as a "both" is a fundamentally biased world view. There were hundreds if not thousands of Native American tribes in the USA alone. Some were morally black, some gray, and some white, vs a definitively morally black USA.
There were absolutely some dumbfricks that viewed all Native Americans as a monolith, but the USA as a political and cultural body did not. It was aware of tribal differences to the point of actively exploiting intertribal politics for its own benefit. It made treaties with individual tribes which it continuously violated. It engaged in a protracted genocidal campaign without regard for fault for individual acts or human dignity on the side of the Native Americans.
And to say otherwise is to *lie*.
If USA was so morally black, why does every native american left today speak in ideas they got from the USA? Like people's right to self-determination, freedom from slavery, universal suffrage, right to divorce, bodily autonomy, etc. these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian or african.
>these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian or african.
1. Indians were fighting for self-determination for the entire fricking Indian Wars, you fricking idiot
2. Black Haitians gave us freedom from slavery
3. Universal suffrage was from Finland
4. Native Americans had right to divorce
5. We don't even have bodily autonomy today. If anything that shit's been rolled back for them cause of the fricking government.
What an embarrassingly dumbass post.
>Black Haitians gave us freedom from slavery
nani?
Haiti was founded in a giant ass slave revolt. The "idea" of ending chattel slavery en masse was Haitian, in a way.
Actually that shit inspired John Brown, whose actions lead to a rapid deterioration in relations between the North and the South, which in turn accelerated if not helped to cause the Civil War, which in turn directly lead to the abolition of slavery, so in a roundabout way it also gave us freedom from slavery.
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
His soul is marching on!
The idea of ending slavery was haitian? Are you mental?
No. I feel like I made my case. Who would you say had the idea first? And please don't say Abraham Lincoln.
not any of these anons but i just wanted to say
inb4 spartacus
their is a myth spartacus wanted to end slavery, he didnt
during thier slave revolt, they only freed agricultural slaves as they were seen as strong and could fight
domestic slaves were left enslaved as they were considered weak
....you fricking idiot that doesn't mean he didn't want to end slavery, it means he didn't want the horrifying logistics drain of leading weak, untrained soft bodies into combat.
>Huuuurrrrrrrr he could have used them as meat shields huurrrrrrr
That's not how war works. In between battles he would have been fricking up his logistics by dragging around a shit load of people that couldn't help in the war effort. Remember Spartacus was effectively in hostile territory and fleeing from the "popular" enemy meaning he couldn't rely on the goodwill of the populace to feed and aid his army. He did want to free all slaves, he simply couldn't at the time.
it was never one of his goals, his goals was to get home
Mutts have an amazing ability to know nothing about world history. The first bill to end the slave trade was introduced to British Parliament in 1783 (passed 1807) and ending slavery had been a position held by quakers for a lot longer than that. That wasn't even the first banning of slavery the anglo world which happened in England circa. 1086. Haiti inspired loads of slave revolts (that all failed except the few where slave ships just sailed to British ports) but it had a limited effect on actually changing laws on slavery worldwide.
So the psychotic franchophone despot you should be sucking off is William I of England not Jean-Jacques Dessalines.
Stop lying. Slavery in the UK wasn't banned until the 1960's.
1. The Haitian revolution started in 1791 and concluded in 1804.
2. Britain didn't end slavery until 1838. Slave trade and slavery aren't the same thing.
3. If you still had fricking legalized chattel slavery past 1086, slavery wasn't fricking ended, now fricking was it?
4.
>but it had a limited effect on actually changing laws on slavery worldwide.
And? Nobody said anything about worldwide. It had a sizeable impact on the course of American political history vis a vis emancipation.
Hell, slavery was abolished in the Northern U.S. states as soon as the t were independent. a couple of decades before Haiti.
>Black Haitians INVENTED freedon from Slavery
Et Tu, Spartacus?
Spartacus lost. And more importantly didn't set about direct policy change resulting in the freedom of the slaves. There's been a bajillion failed and successful slave revolts and escapes through history both before and after his bullshit.
If the notion is he's good enough to represent a torchbearer for the idea of freedom from slavery then that idea was already rampant in Native American society and indeed every society on Earth through history.
FFS, Spartacus was a leader in the "Third" Servile War.
Modern liberalism came from Revolutionary France.
Modern fascism came from the United States.
>right to divorce,
>these concepts sure as shit werent invented by any indian
Tell me you know nothing about native culture without telling me you know anything about native culture.
i say 'both' for simpicities sake
i think we both agree on the majority of points i feel we are arguing semantics
the american conquest of america was akin to ceasers conquest of gaul where their were 100s of gualish tribes many of which did no harm to rome
ceaser still burnt their cities
1/3 of gaulish population enslaved, 1/3 genociede, 1/3 left to live under roman rule
Good. Imagine this country with even a million more indians in it.
Have you read about King Philips War in detail?
Like begets like indeed.
>Im not saying the americans were saints either with their massacres either
Isn't the way the American state genocided the natives a major inspiration for Hitler and the holocaust?
You’re getting your wires crossed I think, thinking of the Boer War inspiring the camps and Jim Crow laws inspiring similar laws in 3rd Reich
Now that's some mutt urban legend, why do you think anyone even cares about indians let alone knows? Africa tier Black folk just slightly less brown
>why do you think anyone even cares about indians let alone knows?
If there's one thing Nazis are, it's autistically obsessed with minorities.
IIRC before ww2 nazi germany did send ethnographers and linguists to study native americans
Yes. Hitler literally referred to Poland as a "reservation" at one point.
>Look up descriptions of inuit warfare and you will be disgusted by what humans can do
I can't find anything, tell me.
>native americans didn't survive for dozens of millenia by nearly wiping each other out on the regular
On the contrary, that's exactly how many of the powerful tribes survived. The Comanche, who originated in Wyoming, didn't build an empire in the Southern US and Mexico by politely asking the Apache, the Tonkawa, the Nadaco, the Shawnee, and everyone else in their path, to please leave. Indian tribes had been massacring and genociding each other for thousands of years, just as people have done everywhere else on the planet.
there’s not one single thing stopping any one of them from getting off their ass today and rejoining what’s left of civilization. they can quite b***hing about the past.
Survival. They were savages and we treated them accordingly.
Not just the men. But the women and the children too.
I think everyone agrees the only tribes we actually tried to genocide were the Comanche and we weren’t the only ones trying, not even the first to start.
First Punic War. You want guaranteed death, imagine sailing out in the largest premodern fleet ever assembled and getting shitcanned and drowned by Neptune along with 100k other dudes.
Twice.
Literally the most egregious use of human wave tactics in history. Emphasis on wave.
thirty years war
all the fun of disease, messed up supplies, wanton killing, and actual engagements of lining up in pike and shot blocks is probably the worst form of combat
or alternatively the ottomans wars which include all that plus slavery if you lose
Rape, pillaging, murder are statistical certainties in war. But the situation in the era of the 30 Years War is difficult for our present day minds to conceive.
The Treaty of Westphalia stated that only states could field armies, because during the 30 years war there was an abundance of non-state militaries. I imagine this was extremely bloody and hellish, basically dudes who had arms that took the opportunity to loot and destroy at whim because chaos reigned and they could site sectarianism as a justification for their actions. Entire regions were depopulated and had to be reclaimed from nature.
When the was was over, many of these people were rounded up and hung, much to the glee of the citizenry.
I'd say the 30 Years War has WW1 beat when it comes to human suffering, especially because in WW1 they at least had something akin to modern medicine.
And that's just Europe, I think the myriad of Chinese Civil Wars manage to be worse. And who knows what native Americans and Africans did in their history, but was just never properly recorded (or records destroyed during colonialism because said records were embedded in looted and destroyed artworks).
I don't really think pre-modern wars were that much bad on themselves, it's just that general quality of life was terrible already and war only made it worse.
In comparison modern war would be akin to forcing a man to jump from luxuries of heaven straight into pits of hell, while pre-modern war would be like moving from a pool of mud into a pile of shit.
Any naval campaign: all the risks of ground warfare, plus the likely possibility of drowning.
Lord Anson's special military operation against the Spanish pacific was pretty grim
>Royal Navy sends a flotilla of 8 ships to harass and take prizes against the spanish.
>they can't find enough marines for the detachment so they rock up to a military hospital and explain to the marines the plan
>any of the wounded capable of running off go AWOL and the ones who can't are loaded aboard ship (including several very old marines who served at the Battle of the Boyne 50 years prior)
>they fill the rest of the marine compliment with fresh recruits with no training
>they get chased across the atlantic by the spanish
>the ships all get lost and 2 return to britain
>by the time they reached Chile 2/3 of the men were dead
>HMS Wager crashes into a reef because only 12 men out of 105 and 50ish marines were fit to change sail
>36 men from Wager survive by sailing round cape horn in jolly-boats
>the meet up point on Juan Fernandez was plotted 300 miles away from its actual position
>the flagship Centurion spends almost a month looking for the island while the crew dies of scurvy (only 8 were not suffering from scurvy out of 400 when they arrived)
>3 more ships arrive there while they recover in Juan Fernandez but the Anna is too damaged and gets scuttled
>they scuttle another ship but capture 2 spanish ships to use
>fail to capture a manilla galleon
>they realize they don't have enough crew and scuttle the spanish ships leaving all the men in just Centurion and Gloucester
>they decide to circumnavigate to get home
>Gloucester sinks halfway through the pacific
>they reach Tinian and find a spanish supply depot with only 1 guard
>while most of the crew are ashore Centurion is taken out to sea by a storm
>Anson was planning to journey to China in another fricking jolly-boat
>before that can happen the typhus addled sick men left on Centurion sailed back into port
>they reach Macau and refit their ship
CONT
>they sail back to Samar to look for another manilla galleon
>in the stupidest luck of all time they manage to find and capture the Nuestra Senora de Covadonga loaded with $54 million modern USD in silver
>sail back to china and load all the silver onto the Centurion
>return home as extremely rich heroes but with only 188 men out of 1,854
Grim.
But please, continue
Honestly? Imagine being some warrior having to fight of the sea peoples? Your entire world is falling apart, these psychos on ships are just steamrolling your technologically advanced society and burning your cities to the ground and no matter where you run you find more of the same, the entire known world has been burned to the ground and you have no where to go. Also, warfare in the dawn of human civilization was always wars of annihilation, must’ve been apocalyptic
Reminder that the wars during the collapse went so hard multiple civilizations lost the ability to read and write for centuries. They quite literally got pushed back to the stone age.
I've compiled a curated list of the top ten wars in human history in terms of total estimated losses. If you were alive in the periods of time and regions which participated, civilian or soldier your life was a nightmarish apocalyptic hellscape. These wars especially were apocalyptic, if you were in them or lived during the fighting it would appear world ending due to the size and scale.
This includes deaths of both soldiers, civilians, etc. from causes both directly and indirectly caused by the war, which includes combat, disease, famine, massacres, suicide, and genocide.
1.) World War 2: anywhere between 70,000,000 and 118,357,000 deaths. Lasted merely 6 years and 1 day.
2.) Mongol Invasions and Conquests: anywhere between 30,000,000 and 57,000,000 deaths. Lasted 199 years.
3.) Taiping Revolution: anywhere between 20,000,000 and 40,000,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
4.) Manchu Conquest of China: only estimate is 25,000,000 deaths. Lasted 65 years.
5.) Second Sino-Japanese war: anywhere between 18,000,000 to 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
6.) World War 1: anywhere between 15,000,000 and 22,000,000 deaths. Lasted 4 years and 3 months.
7.) An-Shi rebellion: only estimate is 13,000,000 deaths. Lasted 8 years.
8.) Chinese Civil War between the Communists and Nationalists: anywhere between 8,000,0000 and 11,692,000 deaths. Lasted 14 years.
9.) Hui Muslim Minority War: only estimate is 10,000,000 deaths. Lasted 15 years.
10.) Russian Civil War between the Bolsheviks and the White Army: anywhere between 5,000,000 and 9,000,000 deaths. Lasted 5 years.
Notice that the Russo-Ukrainian war that we pay so much attention to today is utterly dwarfed both in size and scale by every single conflict on this list. Any single one of these wars was absolutely devastating and would have felt world ending to everyone involved. Pick any single one of them and it was the worst for those soldiers involved.
I considered adding the European colonization of the america's, but actually knowing for sure how many native american's were alive in the Americas at that time is very difficult and estimates vary wildly between 8 million and 80 million and that variance is ridiculous. It seems mostly political just so they can say 80 million and I refuse to propagate such lies. The main agricultural civilizations in the americas were not particularly numerous, there may have been 3 or 4 of them over the period in question and none of them were able to support anywhere near 80 million people combined. Most of the population would be based on what the native flora and fauna of the americas would be able to support so the 8 million estimate is more than likely more accurate than 80 million and the vast majority of the dead in this particular instance were due to disease and not direct confrontation necessarily. Said disease death was not inflicted on the native on purpose even and occurred before germ theory in europe. So to count the colonization of the americas on this list would be disingenuous and unfair to other conflicts.
Making the claim that devastation should be measured by % of population is like saying "the more people who are alive, the less an individual persons experience matters" which is a completely moronic take. Just because a larger nations military was bigger than a lot of countries at that time does not mean that the individual suffering of their soldiers did not matter as much and the horrors they faced were not as important or devastating. Do you think that smaller countries just matter more than bigger countries? Are you moronic?
The number of individual deaths and individual suffering is larger. % of population would only matter to the citizens of that nation and nobody else. People are not statistics and each persons suffering matters so is definitive.
Add covid to the list then. 6 million dead over a period of two years. Truly a nightmarish hellscape we've been living in for the past two years (reminder: size of affected population, in this case the entire world, doesn't change things)
Well you can't add COVID to the list because it's difficult to figure out if doctors were lying about who died from COVID or not, especially when the government would give them good reason to mark everything down as a COVID death in order to get more government payouts. Many nations operated with similar governmental policies and that will in fact skew the numbers, add in the number of people who happened to die of something else while suffering from COVID- COVID then scores an extra kill because technically we wouldn't know if the person would have survived if they did have COVID or if they didn't. You see the problem here? Also you're going way off topic, why would you equate a pandemic to a war when a war didn't start the pandemic.
Unless you have absolute proof and evidence that the CCP designed COVID as a soft-kill biological weapon to destabilize the global economy and give themselves the edge while simultaneously eradicating their problematic elderly population which they were going to be unable to care for en masse. Maybe at that point you could make the case that COVID was a "war" of sorts. But first you'd need to prove without a shadow of a doubt that that's what China was doing.
By the way, yes we have been living in quite shitty times recently. I don't know why you would think otherwise.
tbqh half of these are chinks so 80% just died to starvation, non related to combat in any way
That's where you're wrong bucko. The combat caused the starvation.
Nah, it would be true if it was some siege but most often it was just
>conscript all farmers
>not enough people to work on fields
>less food
>population is the same
>excess population just straight up dies
having population on the peak of your food capacity just means that any slightest drought or flood or blight or locust or dog shitting in wrong place would always kill millions.
>conscripting all farmers
>no but actually they didn't fight at all
>conscripting. all. farmers.
So you admit that the battles were actually fricking humongous and the actual fighting was probably nightmarish by the sheer magnitude of it?
>>no but actually they didn't fight at all
No, they didn't most often. They mostly manned yet another shitty fortification in bumfrick nowhere and and were slaved the frick out on manual labor and constructions.
where are you getting that upper death figure for WWII?
The worst war in human history was probably the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah they really highlight how incompetent third world armies are when compared to those of civilized countries.
Other way round, moron. Third world kicked the US's ass.
Cool, post some battles that you won.
New Guinea for the average Japanese soldier. They literally had a saying
>Heaven is Java. Hell is Burma. But no man comes back alive from New Guinea
The Congo War
There were wars that ended with the bulk of the population dead - that includes the soldiers. Many mongol invasions basically killed as many combatants out as possible. I have no doubt that there was plenty of wars where 95% of one side got wiped out.
I fricking hate communists but the morons running the show during WW1 would have made me consider communism as a lesser evil. That on top of battles like Passchendaele would have made it that much worse.
I can understand hating communists as they actually exist but always thought communism as a belief system has more hits than misses. Obviously the labour theory of value is horseshit and that's what makes most of the rest of communism fall apart but the parts about class dynamics for example are mostly correct.
What does it say about class dynamics?
The working class provide a clear majority of the value of economies and are overall the most necessary class, yet receive the lowest share of political influence and only a fraction of the wealth their work justifies. The capitalist class, what we normally call the upper class nowadays, hardly works at all, at best gambling with investments but frequently just sitting on hoarded wealth - in either case their income is mostly passive and earned off the backs of the working class, yet they receive the most political influence and benefit from many legal opportunities that simply are not available to other classes (for example, the right to purchase newspapers or own vast swathes of land despite the fact that nobody ever invented or created said land).
Then there's the middle class who the particularly moronic communists spend all their time alienating when they are clearly the only thing preventing elite dictatorship.
Never read anything more moronic. I'd rather die quickly from a shell or explosion or getting sprayed with a rifle rather than bleed to death slowly after being stabbed 6 times by a foreign man who looked me in the eye as he stabbed me over and over.
Every cop I've ever talked to much prefer getting shot to getting stabbed. There is an incredibly psychological component to piercing another human being with an edged weapon. War yes use to be based much more so on skill and technique but it was also more personal and there was no modern medicine, technology was worse and you had to put in a lot more effort and you had many more chronic health issues through compounding injuries which medicine could not fix at that time. Covered in filth and refuse and run through with spears or having your skull caved in by a club or warhammer was much more traumatizing than getting (usually) instantly erased by mortars and artillery and small arms fire.
these global south morons who make shit up and then expect everyone else to play along
American Revolutionary War 1775-1783
Cherokee-American Wars 1776-1795
Northwest Indian War 1785-1793
First Barbary War 1801-1805
Tecumseh's War 1810-1813
Creek War 1813-1814
Second Barbary War 1815
First Seminole War 1817-1818
Winnebago War 1827
Black Hawk War 1832
Second Seminole War 1835-1842
Texas Comanche Wars 1836-1875
Mexican-American War 1846-1848
Cayuse War 1847-1855
Apache Wars 1849-1924
Navajo Wars 1849-1866
Bleeding Kansas 1854-1861
Puget Sound War 1855-1856
Rogue River Wars 1855-1856
Third Seminole War 1855-1858
Second Opium War 1856-1859
Reform Wars 1858-1866
First and Second Cortina Wars 1859-1861
Paiute War 1860
American Civil War 1861-1865
Yavapai Wars 1861-1875
Dakota War of 1862
Snake War 1864-1868
Comanche Campaign 1867-1875
Modoc War 1872-1873
Red River War 1874-1875
Great Sioux War of 1876
Buffalo Hunters War 1876-1877
Nez Perce War 1877
Bannock War 1878
Cheyenne War 1878-1879
Sheepeater Indian War 1879
Victorio's War 1879-1880
Autism strikes and wins again
Honorable mention, The Ice Marches in Siberia during the Russian Civil War.
White River War 1879
Egyptian Expedition 1882
Crow War 1887
Ghost Dance War 1890-1891
Garza War 1891-1893
Yaqui Wars 1896-1918
Spanish American War 1898
Philippine War 1899-1902
Moro Rebellion 1899-1913
Boxer Rebellion 1899-1901
Crazy Snakes War 1909
Mexican Border War 1910-1919
Little Race War 1912
U.S Occupation of Nicaragua 1912-1933
Bluff War 1914-1915
U.S Occupation of Veracruz 1914
U.S Occupation of Haiti 1915-1934
U.S Occupation of Dominican Republic 1916-1924
World War 1 1917-1918
Posey War 1923
World War 2 1941-1945
Korean War 1950-1953
Lebanon Crisis 1958
Dominican Civil War 1965-1966
Korean DMZ Conflict 1966-1969
U.S Invasion of Granada 1983
Bombing of Libya 1986
Tanker War 1987-1988
U.S Invasion of Panama 1989-1990
Probably whichever one they died in.
What the absolute frick is wrong with her arm?
Gulf War 1990-1991
Iraqi No Fly-Zone 1991-2003
Intervention in Haiti 1994-1995
Kosovo War 1998-1999
Iraq War 2003-2011
Intervention in North-west Pakistan 2004-2018
Operation Ocean Shield 2009-2016
Intervention in Libya 2011
Operation Observant Compass 2011-2017
American Led Intervention in Iraq 2014-2021
American Intervention in Libya 2015-2019
So we are all mentioning Euro wars, and ya bad. But honestly like China probably had a dozen wars worse than anything in Europe. Like we all have seen that strategic tang victory meme, like I'll go over the trench vs being stuck in a Chinese siege.
>gulf war was a defeat
The coalition won it more convincingly than basically any other non-NATO has since ww2.
>Gulf War was a defeat
>Russia is winning
Is it opposite day already?
A lot of the wars vs "non-state actors" you're talking about was when the U.S was relatively small fledgling nation with a small fraction of the resources and population that it currently commands. The Native American armed resistance technically lasted all the way up to 1923 with the Posey War.
Not to mention if you actually read the list, plenty of the victories were vs relatively functional nation states. It's not an exaggeration to say that the U.S has historically picked on countries weaker than itself- but that's not in and of itself exclusively true for all U.S victories.
By the way, no the U.S was not the deciding factor in WW1 but it can't be ignored that it sacrificed 117,466 men; in ancient times that would be an insane number of men to lose in just 4 years- there were still 12 participating nations which lost less men. You can't say that the U.S didn't contribute to the victory and by virtue of being on the winning side, the U.S gets the privilege of saying it won.
The Korean war started with the South Koreans basically defeated, North Korea had taken just about all of Korea, the U.S singlehandedly marched all the way up China's ass and then it spit out an extreme response without warning- 1 to 2 million Chinese soldiers sent in human waves to overrun the U.S and South Korean positions. North Koreans would have been completely crushed without extreme Chinese intervention. Every following attempt of the North Koreans and Chinese to penetrate into South Korea failed.
The U.S didn't want to escalate with the Soviets so it ended there. From start point to end point it's still a victory, south Korea was liberated and all further attacks repelled. The Gulf war and GWOT were resounding defeats for the standing militaries of those nations, every single original government was crushed every single time. It was the following insurgency that could be considered a "defeat", more so we just got sick of police work and left.
>BUT WE WON THE BATTLES
Yeah, yeah. It's been the same story since 'Nam. "America has never lost a war, and if it didn't, it didn't count".
Black person we bodied the empire of Japan by ourselves in WW2 which was one of the most powerful empires of all time. Let me repeat that.
Empire of Japan:
Ground Forces: 6,095,000
Navy: 550,000 tons of displacement.
At the beginning of the Pacific war the Imperial Japanese Navy possessed the most powerful carrier force in the world, through combination of excellent ships, well-designed aircraft, and unsurpassed aviators. The Navy Air Service consisted of five naval air fleets. The Japanese had a total of ten aircraft carriers: six fleet carriers, three smaller carriers, and one training carrier.
The IJNAS had over 3,089 aircraft in 1941 and 370 trainers.
1,830 first-line aircraft including:
660 fighters, including 350 Mitsubishi Zeros
330 carrier-based strike aircraft
240 land-based, twin-engined bombers
520 seaplanes (includes fighters and reconnaissance) and flying boats.
Pic related is Japanese Imperial territory at peak strength they controlled 1/5 of the planet damn near. We defeated them, single handedly. Give us some fricking credit.
The Americans barely limped to Japan. It was the British Navy and Australian soldiers who won the day. And Japan only surrendered when Russia declared war, not due to the atomic bombs.
But what should we expect from >american education
this was pretty bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Suiyang
Decisive Tang victory.
I’ll just leave this here.
So much for the third world kicking the US ass then.
Emu Wars.
so in hindsight, was WW1 strategy/tactics really stupid, or was there no better option?
>or was there no better option?
they knew what war of movement was but theres nowhere to move into when everyone has millions of troops in arms
There was a lot of problems in WWI. Multilingual empires, dysfunctional officer corps often based on outdated class systems, truly revolutionary military technology, improvements to logistics and food production, uneven technological development between belligerents, the insufficient development of manoeuvre elements compared to firepower assets, severe political dysfunction in many of the powers, large populations, army units organized by geographical area coming up against doctrines and weapons capable of mass slaughter, etc
I frankly think that three things have fixed it in the minds of people
>weapons that more effectively physically marred battlefields and cities
>photography and a generally free press documenting the war
>the general air of pointlessness to the war in both causes and in outcome
Notice how Vietnam was also affected by the sudden increase in media coverage and colour video footage, and a lack of clear purpose for Americans
>was there no better option?
Legitimately don't have the war. A lot of the countries that joined didn't have to or were brought in by being attacked.
Austria-Hungary was under no obligation to declare war in the first damn place.
Germany dragged France and Russia into the war out of paranoia, Belgium and the UK into the war out of wanting an easier time fighting France, the Ottoman Empire into the war through spycraft (this one was at least on their side), Portugal into the war out of buttmad, and Brazil into the war out of incompetence.
Italy and Romania literally joined the war against their own fricking allies.
And Japan, Bulgaria, the US, Siam, Liberia, and China all joined the war for more or less purely political reasons.
Also, Italy gets a lot of shit for stabbing Germany in the back, but I'm surprised they found any fricking room with all the German knives shoved up there. Absolute dumbfricks.
what's crazy is that the USA had a proto-WW1 style of trench warfare just less than 50 years before WW1. The whole entire world saw the massive casualties from the Civil War, and nobody learned a goddamn thing (except for Muricans who avoided trench warfare during WW1).
World history is full of instances of the same damn lesson needing to be learned a few decades apart.
See: Vietnam and Afghanistan
what i found interesting is no western country learnt from the troubles or rhodesian bush war
>extensive use of ieds prompt british and rhodesians to adopt v shaped hulls on vehicles to better deal with the blast
afghanistan comes round
>uk forgot its lessons from the troubles
>coalition sends flat bottomed vehicles lose 100s to ieds with 100s more injured
>coalition 'invent' v shaped hulls, hailed as a great success
think about how many lives may have been saved if the west adopted v shaped hulls earlier
as von bismark said
>Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others
Thirty Years War, Magdeburg.
I don’t know about the “most brutal” but Cambodia was absolutely nightmarish. Any sort of genocide of unarmed civilians by the military, like the Holocaust or the Rape of Nanking.
I’m not saying they are each equivalent, just saying that being an unarmed civilian up against a serious military force bent on war crimes is a nightmare.
Any before modern medicine.
>get grazed by spear
>1 month later the local carpenter saws your leg off
>3 months later you are dead
I haven't read the thread yet but I would say the Iran-Iraq war personally, think WW1 with gas and trenches but you're in the desert and everything sucks even more.
>t. Uneducated anon who read this on a news site once
you know anon, there are some other maybe better choices in this thread, but Iran-Iraq is pretty underrated for how shitty it was
You should read about the iran iraq war more, because you’re not far off. It was fricking insane. Very few wars can claim to have used roads made of corpses and I don’t know of any others that electrified swamps as a method of mass slaughter of assaulting forces
I know quite a bit about military tactics (manuals) but don’t know much about military history and past wars, where can I learn more?
I learned a bit from a military logistics book “supplying war” and a German soldier memoir from Russia in ww2 “blood red snow”, but aside from that I know almost nothing
as always, start with the greeks. The Peloponnesian War is as good as anywhere to begin.
In all seriousness, when studying the history of wars, it is usually best to take a roundabout approach and very broadly gloss over important periods or wars and identify campaigns or individuals that interest you and then focus on those parts. Reading in great deal about an entire era within which only small parts are interesting is just gonna lead to you forgetting almost everything you read.
>Start with Peloponnesian
You need to start with the Greco-Persian Wars to even understand the Peloponnesian Wars. That aside, starting two weeks before the Battle of Marathon and ending at The King's Peace is the first tract any prospective student of strategy or military history should study. It will also teach him why everyone who knows history fricking hates Sparta as turbo-cucklords.
Without any shred of a doubt the second sino-japanese war
no matter what side you fought for, you were utterly fricked
Being a Slav peasant soldier during the mongol invasions must have been unimaginable hell.\
>A pointy stick and a few planks of wood against a horde of merciless horse archers who are going to kill you and impale your entire village on spikes along the road to the next one
Grim.
It's even worse if you think about it. 199 years. Imagine being some Slav or Hungarian and you have to face off against the Mongols for a hundred years. That's like your great grandfather fought them, your grandfather fought them, your father fought them and now you have to fight them. Multiple generations growing up living as a tributary state or a country during the invasions. + You got your pointy stick and some shitty shield just marching under your lord into the slaughtering fields as you get encircled and outmaneuvered by an obscenely large and well organized force just constantly fricking pelting you, so many horse archers it feels like machinegun fire. You look on in horror as even your lord is outnumbered and torn apart by the horde. Oh and on the way to the battlefield you pass village after village with a pile of dead bodies at the center of town, frickers on spikes and shit no modern medicine, no sanitation, your life already sucked and was hard as frick and then you get surrounded by the horde.
Plus the Mongols had absolutely no mercy to armies that fought them. Throw down your weapons and run away, they'll easily catch up to you on horseback and use you for target practice. Inflicting near 100% casualties on fleeing armies is one of the many things the Mongols did that made them utterly wreck every state that tried to fight them.
I can't if you are actually moronic or just farming (you)s
the Somerset case in 1772 set the precedent that slavery couldn't exist except via positive law and no laws allowing slavery existed meaning that slavery in Great Britain and Ireland ended de facto on that date and de jure in 1086 which was when slavery ceased to exist as a legal concept under Norman legal reforms. The rest of the British empire followed in 1833. The 20th century stuff was just adding a legal definition of slavery in laws against it since before that it was just false imprisonment like in the Creole case in 1841
Read a book Black person
In point of fact, the last British serfs weren't freed until the 1570s, but by that point Britain had begun trading in African slaves, so effectively you're wrong.
Unironically (and this is even from a Europoor perspective) - American Civil War. If you watched documentaries or read about it - wounded soldiers being left on the battlefield for days, new expanding bullets fricking up bones so badly only amputations could potentially save you, no sanitation in the hospitals making Crimean war look like it took place in a freshly mopped maternity ward, POW treatment from both sides and the insane rates of death by disease amassing to 50-60% of soldier casualties.
It fricking sucked man.
Oh and I forgot to mention - out fricking dated tactics used by both sides. Napoleonic formations engaging each other at what? 20-50 yards? When the firearm at that time could very well carry the bullet for 100-200 with decent accuracy. It was a meat grinder for both sides.
Ya mudda
Anything with spear/pike formations going up against each other, i would rather walk into machine gun fire in ww1 than imagine dealing with that shit.