A bit off topic, but I recommend that anyone interested in this watch They Shall Not Grow Old (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds) - it's an excellent documentary, a bit of a passion project by Peter Jackson to polish up a lot of old WW1 footage (normalized the frame rate, since it was hand cranked, colorize, and add sound - he hired lip readers and voice actors from the same regions as the filmed soldiers). It makes it seem much more relatable and real, in a way that comically-fast black and white footage really doesn't.
In the “War and Peace” there is a passage reading “having quickly finished off the injured, soldiers cleared out the gate so the [transport] could pass unimpeded”.
Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...
... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.
I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.
^ citing from memory
^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.
It's possible he was echoing the callousness by not expounding on it. I don't think word count is the best way to measure importance in literature. Understatement is a tool authors use.
In all probability the callousness in tone was the point. It’s also a common device in Russian literature of the time to gloss over such brutality and hardship. It’s a bit of a trope at how commonplace suffering was made to seem in stories and other writing by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other contemporaries. See also: God Sees the Truth, But Waits
At Agincourt the prisoners that were executed were all noblemen or landed knights. The custom was for these prisoners to be taken, because they could be ransomed back to their wealthy families. It was a shocking event because it broke the conventions of the times.
It would have been very unlikely that common men would have ever been taken prisoner. They'd have just been slaughtered on the battlefield, if they did not run away.
What an amazing world-changing battle! Brother versus brother, English longbows versus French heavy cavalry (again) . . . Try to imagine a world without a Henry the Navigator.
I was not aware the Castillan forces were commanded by the brother of Nuno Álvares Pereira. He's less known nationally than the mythic Brites fe Almeida.
Why don't the history teachers drop these snippets during classes?
Nope. The rest of the book showed plenty of the wounded being treated (however well, still not killed). And this was in Moscow just as it was conquered - plenty of places to treat and there were enough inhabitants in the city who would see to it.
But even if you’re right, don’t you think it deserved more than half-sentence?
As someone who also often engages in contrarian speculation and is often wrong about it, my advice to you is to thank the person with the correct perspective for sharing it. If they are sufficiently civilized, they will thank you for adding to the discussion even though it was wrong.
For your purposes, it would be more useful to recognize when you're doing this kind of probably-wrong analysis and make the relevant qualifying announcements in your post. It's useful to do, it's even more useful when done in a self-aware fashion.
Particularly, it makes it easier for the person with the correct understanding to share it without feeling like they're pissing into the wind. My new favorite phrase is, "correct me if I'm wrong here, but..."
In Goodbye Darkness, William Manchester tells similar stories of Southerners:
> The Marine Corps had always recruited a disproportionate number of men from the South, where the military traditions of the early 1860s had never died. Later I met many Raiders like that, and Coffey was typical: tall, lanky, and fair haired, with a mad grin and dancing, rain-colored eyes full of shattered light. They were born killers; in the Raider battalions, in violation of orders, they would penetrate deep behind Japanese lines at night, looking for two Nips sacked out together. Then they would cut the throat of one and leave the other to find the corpse in the morning. This was brilliant psychological warfare, but it was also, of course, extremely dangerous. In combat these Southerners would charge fearlessly with the shrill rebel yell of their great-grandfathers, and they loved the bayonet. How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
> How my father's side defeated my mother's side in the Civil War will always mystify me.
Strategy, logistics, own warriors who were not actually cowardly either and did actually fought and killed too. Also, military discipline is an advantage overall I heard. Soldiers eager to break it in order to get to few kills are oftentimes less of an advantage.
WW1 just boggles the mind. The sheer slaughter that came from armies trying to adapt to the new reality of mass warfare and new weaponry seems incomprehensible, maybe because of how coldly logical it was. You read these accounts of charges on fortified machine gun positions across flat fields, the only cover being the mounds of bodies that eventually piled up, and you wonder how anyone could go into that.
I've been wondering how the story of Sleeping Beauty would play out if she'd gone to sleep in, say, 1846 or so, waking up just after the end of WW2. Imagine a royal family held in a time capsule emerging to demand their kingdom back from people who've just gone through the absolute hell raised by the collapse of the old monarchies, twice. What would that fairy tale look like?
You know how people today generally can't wrap their head around data driven results and AI generated photography/AR lenses? They treat it like magic or as not relevant to them.
Now instead of a smartphone, it's an automatic belt fed gun being aimed at your collective imaginary ancestor - someone who's fired a bolt operated gun at best and who has only written accounts(if they can read) or verbal rumors of the effect of such weaponry. Even if they were firing it, all you would see is your gun spitting bullets out steadily and people charging at you dropping on their faces like puppets with their strings cut. It would be hard to process in the moment.
They Shall Not Grow Old sheds some visceral light on this — soldiers are very intentionally funneled through a process taking them from normal life to the front line in a way that makes the next step the natural, logical thing to do in that situation, and by the time the full gore of the front line fighting is realized, they are partially acclimated to it, and partially pushed from behind into the melee. It’s a calculated psychological trip.
> At the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, visitors can see a case filled with the fearsome homemade weapons that Canadians trench raiders plunged into the faces and chests of their enemy: Meat cleavers, push daggers and spiked clubs.
I saw similar items at the RCR museum in London, Ontario years ago. Definitely worth a visit.
Didn't learn about this in school. Pretty pissed at how sanitized war history was.
I think Canada was in a "littlest brother of the commonwealth with a lot to prove" position. Confederation was in 1867 but we weren't really
a country until much later. We couldn't even declare war on our own. Just went wherever England went.
Canada was actually the big brother of the Commonwealth. It was considered to be the "Eldest Daughter" of Britain. Remember, all the other dominions were in worse positions than Canada.
I've always been of the opinion that Canada didn't really become a country until the Suez canal crisis. That was the first time that we took a principled stand on the world stage in defiance of the highly immoral actions of our mother country. We didn't merely quietly disagree with Britain and abstain from public comment. We loudly and publicly lead the international effort against Britain and its allies, and helped peacefully resolve the situation.
Mentioning the Suez crisis is actually relevant to this discussion. The architect of the Suez peace, Canadian foreign affairs minister Lester Pearson, had spent his First World War career (and nearly the entire duration of that war) as a volunteer field medic. He spent his formative young-adult years seeing the immediate aftermath of modern battles that result when leaders fail to engage in good-faith diplomacy.
They did teach it, they just weren't callous enough to teach the moral judgement you've just made about the conduct of your anscestors while entire nations were trying to kill them.
Can you please not take HN threads further into flamewar? That's in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. So is "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Sorry Dan, I shouldn't have responded like that. I do think I was responding to the most plausible interpretation of what he said, but my tone was off.
The comment I responded to describes Canadian history extremely inaccurately ('littlest brother of the commonwealth'), that this is wildly incorrect should be obvious to anyone educated in Canada. I like many others was taught all about Canadian exploits in WW1 and WW2, including their excellence at trench raiding, improvised weapons and feared reputation as 'shock troops.' Could be that's just Ontario (or my school district) but I'm fairly certain it's a well known part of Canadian history (at least for Canadians).
Even the author of the article says we should not pass judgment given the circumstances. Have a good morning.
> Throughout the war, stretches of the Western Front observed an unofficial “live and let live” policy between Germans and their French or British enemies. By mutual agreement, both sides agreed not to attack the other unless ordered — and would even schedule truces for meals and bathroom breaks.
There are no simple situations in war. The soldiers on all sides of this one were, by and large, eager to be anywhere else. It was a stupid war that accomplished little besides the pointless bloodshed.
It’s likely your grandfather was a good man with no desire to kill Germans. It’s likely whoever shot him felt the same.
Back than that was normal thing. Just watch, or read, All Quite in the West. Especially the scene right before the boys graduate highschool. Also, the war was supposed to be over by Christmas. And once reality hit it was too late.
I am well aware of that, and have read Im Westen Nichts Neues a number of times.
This doesn't affect my point: Huge numbers volunteered for slaughtering and being slaughtered, many with gusto and in great haste.
My grandfather served in WW2, not WW1. In his case, he actually lied about his age to join, and also was made to temporarily change the German surname you might notice in my username. He was enlisted for the duration and stayed on for decades after. Only left when they made him (medical).
I don't think its quite fair to label this a personal attack, and I don't agree with it getting flagged.
Your link also states "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation"
Both their parent and GP were talking about reading conflicting things. Reading around to get a better sense of the truth of the matter would seem, reasonable.
Of course a less pithy comment, where the meaning was clear would be best of all.
Other downplayed and denied stuff happened in the Balkans during these times. I know of for instance Swedish officers having "telecommunications problems" when ordered by home command to stand down and let a hospital be taken. They "never received" that order and stood their ground.
For those who don't know what a mess it was in the Balkans in the 90s, this should give you some idea:
- at times non-American Generals were in charge of the UN forces. So what did they do? They moved their country forces to the rear, and sent "coalition" forces into battle. The reason was that any casualties (even 2 or 3 dead) would be a political crisis at home (true across most European nations.)
- the Albanian underground had to import a 50 cal AA gun from the US. What for? To shoot at UN helicopters attacking their citizens. And guess what ... it worked - the UN stopped flying helicopters after their ground search for it failed. (Think about it for a second - who else had helicopters to shoot down besides the UN?)
- the US did an airstrike on the Chinese Embassy ... because they were relaying radio signal traffic to local forces fighting the UN. This caused a major international incident, but nobody seriously denies ... that the Chinese were involved in radio signal intercepts for locals.
- The UN agreed to cease-fires with enemy forces and allowed them to enter refugee camps and hospitals. Guess what happened next. Good on the Swedes ... there wasn't much courage going around at the time.
Kosovar Albanian rebel representatives living in the US at the time legally purchased a small number of .50 BMG rifles on the civilian market. Those were bolt-action or semi-automatic, not actual anti-aircraft guns. Then they illegally smuggled those rifles to Kosovo.
TL;DR: The Swedish military doctrine created a military culture of highly autonomous units that were expected to make task completion and decisive action their top priority, even if it meant disobeying orders. Consequently, NORDBAT 2 was highly effective in achieving their objectives, some of which they themselves decided, but you have to wonder where you draw the line between taking appropriate action based on local knowledge and simply going rogue.
This especially in the context of a UN peacekeeping mission - such missions depend on consent from the belligerents, and if UN troops are seen to become participants in a war, it is likely to make future operations harder.
Do you have a source for this? The closest I got to was this book, "Mission Abroad" http://www.csms.se/upl/files/142648.pdf
where a standoff at a hospital in Bakovici was mentioned. Stewe Simson was quoted as Platoon Commander, but there was no mention of orders from higher ups nor ignoring orders.
I have to disagree. I was taught about the Balkans, but an elementary school version where Canadians were peace-keepers. Peace-keeping used to be a source of pride in Canada, but rarely hear of it now.
The Afrikaaners (Dutch-descended colonists) already had their own states (Transvaal, Orange Free state), so it wasn't quite an "uprising".
However there was a gold rush happening in the Transvaal in the late 1800s, and the problem was that it wasn't British-controlled, so that had to be fixed.
I'm not really sure colonialism and morality really go together full stop, but that may be me projecting my modern morality where it doesn't belong, its entirely possible the average Victorian thought they were doing good, by bringing 'civilisation' to the 'savages'.
But then this isnt classic colonialism either, the Dutch Boers weren't exactly there first. This is one set of colonisers fighting another, so on one level, singling it out as immoral betrays a certain kind of bias. Yes the British invented the concentration camp to lock up the Boers, but what were they doing to the Zulus when they were at war with them?
That's what the film Zulu is based on. They followed on from one another, and on the same day, they're generally considered to be 2 separate actions though.
Anyway I wasn't even thinking about what they did in battle, I was think about how they treated the civilians, how they treated them after the war, how they treated prisoners. The Boers got off lightly, they got some (all?) of their land back after a relatively short period, the Zulus didn't.
I also remember being taught the British sent Canadians into battles the British didn't want to do - the worst battles where casualties were expected to be high.
I wonder why this came to be. At first my theory was that they were upset at being dragged across the ocean to fight a war they had nothing to do with, leading to a kind of personal vendetta against Germany for starting it. But that doesn't make much sense, because evidently the Australians didn't have the same reaction, and as I understand it the average German soldier was not much invested in their cause.
I know that American soldiers only showed up at the end of the war, but did they have a similar reaction to the Canadians?
I think Canada implemented conscription much later than the European countries, so in a lot of cases it would be volunteers versus conscripts. I wonder if Canada also had a less visible/rigid class system than Europe back then, that could cause a lack of sympathy for enemy soldiers who realistically had little choice in what they were doing. And obviously Canada isn't going to be holding on to any European territory, so the accomplishment of moving borders around would mean even less to them than the others.
> One theory was that Canadians were perpetually avenging the “Crucified Canadian,” a battlefield rumour of a captured Canadian officer that Germans had supposedly crucified to a barn door near Ypres. The crucifixion was almost certainly fabricated.
From what I've read America went through a compressed repeat of all the mistakes and what the other allies had learnt 1914-1916. Were it not for the brief excursion into Mexico in the years preceding, they'd have opened with cavalry. Even so they still formed a cavalry division in 1917. Learning to deal with the arrival of machine guns, gas and the stagnancy of trench warfare before proper mechanisation was challenging to the generals and tactics of the day.
I imagine their soldiers had just as tough a time of it as others. Life was cheap, WW1 was brutal in the extreme.
Cavalry actually was used very effectively in WWI, for example the Battle of Mons. It was still quite devastating outside of trench warfare, which was why there where still some cavalry units at the start of WWII.
Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear would have loved to have a horse. That can apply to just about any heavy but still man portable weapon.
PS: Horses where still useful outside of battle in WWII. Hell, America was occasionally using donkey’s in Afghanistan.
Yeah but Mons was the opening weeks of the war before the entrenchment and stagnancy on both sides. In some respects it was one of the last battles of the old tactics, still fighting the last war. A cavalry action in 1917 would have been pointless slaughter. Mind, so were most of the infantry advances.
Horses were used as transport, and lugging around field guns throughout the war - they were more capable than vehicles in the conditions. Those were supplemented with the narrow gauge trench railways. Internal combustion wasn't yet up to replacing all those uses.
> Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear would have loved to have a horse.
man + 30 kg of gear (standard for US) is already approaching the upper limit of what a horse can carry. Horses are easy to spook and hurt. Donkeys are total badasses in comparison.
> Horses where still useful outside of battle in WWII.
They were still useful in battle in WW2. My regiment fought on horseback during WW2. And the US still trains soldiers to fight on horseback to this day.
> Consider a man lugging around a 35lb anti tank rifle, ammunition, and gear would have loved to have a horse.
Yes but that’s not cavalry is it - that’s just an infanteer on a horse.
I think one cannot overlook that a great many Canadians were farmers, foresters, and miners at a time when workplace safety wasn't a thing. My grandfather recalled men being ripped in half by the snapped lines from the log pulls, of being squished by errant logs. Similar horrors were commonplace in Canadian life of that era, along with starvation, disease and winter.
New Zealand troops were certainly involved in atrocities but I have been under the impression they behaved better than the Canadians - I am a New Zealander though so have a bias.
This is perhaps a better explanation than the Crucified Canadian: Another (theory) was that Canadians had never forgiven the Germans’ first use of poison gas in 1915, of which Canadian units had been some of the hardest hit.
According to the book Vimy Ridge by Pierre Berton the Canadians were taught from the start of their training (in Canada), by Currie, not to take prisoners unless specifically instructed to do so, say to obtain information under interrogation later. It was official policy not an emotional reaction. Currie was very self-made as a military man and may have come up with that policy on his own. Or not.
I’m not sure how much it counts for, but the federation of Australia was barely 13 years old at that time. Furthermore it’s flag was also the Union Jack.
When WW2 rolled around, the point was moot, with offensive forces literally on the doorstep - Darwin was bombed, and there were submarines inside Sydney’s harbour.
Canada had its own flag in addition to the Union Jack between
1868 and 1965. A fairly typical British colonial flag - similar to British Hong Kong [1, 2], Australia, New Zealand, Cape Colony, etc. - with the Union Jack in the canton (upper-left quadrant) against a red background with a coat of arms in the bottom-right varying based on who was part of Canada at any given time. [3]
It's a little odd to characterize these volunteers as 'Canadians,' and Cook should know it. The majority of the recruits were first-generation immigrants from the British Isles. Few native-born Canadians volunteered. So whatever was going on over there was the product of that recent immigrant experience. That's interesting in itself, but puts a different gloss on this than we might get from those who would like to say something about Canadians, the Canadian mentality, and Canadian nationality from this.
Most Canadians stayed home during WWI. Most recently-arrived Brits went to Europe to fight for their country.
I wonder where that comes from: outside Canada, a perception I'm aware of is a country big on marketing itself but ironic in its realities: clubbing seals for fur, biggest exporter of asbestos to third world countries, shamelessly, sponsor of trophy hunts on Canadian soil, and so on. Very confusing set of seemingly contradictory facts? I don't know how to think of it.
Canada is a country of contradictions found by two different very different groups of people. Canada is a compromise and only exists because of will and tolerance and compromise.
Everything makes logical sense with details. Native populations through treaties have the right to hunt. Canada wanting to manage populations sets limits. This creates a lotto system. Winners sell them to big game US hunters and the tribe gets the profit.
The asbesto mines are in the French part of Canada which makes shutting them down politically difficult.
Canada is a collectiom of different people who figured out how to get along.
As an aside - shooting bears,elk and deer is hardly an issue, now is it? animal lovers aside, shooting deer is hardly the same as shooting big cats/elephants.
I do not see the harm in controlling the population via hunting instead of letting the populations teether wildly between the carnivores and herbivores as one of them gain dominance in the biosphere...
Also banning something outright just drives the people who want to do it underground where they can't be controlled.
Everyone is polite, and "bloodthirsty" at different times.
The Swiss, the French, the Kenyans, the Mauritians, the Indonesians, the Chileans, literally everyone on earth. Every nation and every human is faced with that dichotomous state of being.
British are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Americans. Japanese are no more polite, or bloodthirsty than Canadians or Koreans. What you allude to is a very human failure, and is present in every society on earth.
It's a response to not provoking an assault in my experience. Most Commonwealth countries are like this in the anecdotes I've witnessed, where brawling is common and laws lax on manslaughter. If you don't say anything you will find yourself getting beat up in broad daylight whereas other countries you can be as rude as you want without physical repercussions. Try walking into some guy in Winnipeg and brush his response off it's a provocation you want to fight where in other cultures this would be absurd.
I think the "sorry" thing comes from the the fact that many Canadians pronounce the first vowel of "sorry" differently from the rest of North America. So it becomes a default "quaint Canadianism" joke.
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