Nine million soldiers died in World War One – about one every 15 seconds for four years.
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How many climate refugees?
depends on how many islands have tipped over…
9 million deaths. No time for humor
Unfortunately governments killing their own people beat the numbers killed in wars: 262,000,000. Murdered in the 20th Century.
DEMOCIDE: Death by Government
Unfortunately I am very much afraid that the idiots who run this world and refer to us as The Great Unwashed have a lot more killing planned.
I’m sorry to say you’re right and there’s no end in sight.
262,000,000 souls, 262,000,000 people, men, women and children, with feelings and hopes and lives — and almost all of them disarmed by their own rulers before being murdered. I have never met a so-called “gun control” advocate who would admit that the number 262,000,000 is large enough to make them reconsider their desire to disarm civilians.
Simply divide the total official US casualty figures of killed and wounded by the number of days duration of the war and one will find that in both killed and wounded WW I is well above all other major foreign wars the US has fought. By that criteria there is no comparison. Though I have never done it I would bet the conclusion would remain the same if one figured the ratio of those killed and wounded that were deployed in the combat theater. WW I was the deadliest major foreign war US troops have ever been involved in despite the fact our forces were late comers. Though I have never done it I would bet the result would remain the same if one figured the ratio of those killed and wounded that were deployed in the combat theater.
For the belligerent nations that were in it from beginning to end……….
You can’t visualise just horrific the killing was until you visit the Western Front. About 35 years ago we drove from the North Sea to Alsace. Every two or three kilometres a war cemetery, then the major cemeteries/memorials The Menin Gate, Verdun and Vimy Ridge, after that you don’t want to see anymore, it’s too distressing.
We always try and pay our respects at the War Memorials in small villages we visit, tiny places with tens of names and usually at least one surname appearing 5 or more times, that’s just France and the UK.
There are still some places on those old battlefields, and especially Verdun, where your taking a risk to tread. I was up in Belgium in 1986 when Chernobyl melted down. At that same time read where two Belgium workmen had dug into a pile of WW I mustard gas artillery shells near Flanders. Both died but the article failed to say if they died from the explosion or the gas. Somehow I expect it was the explosion since such gas does degrade pretty quickly over time.
My time in the Army gave me the chance to tour the great battlefields of WW I and WW II and some of the Napoleonic wars. During that trip to Belgium I had an Opal Cadet rental car and my team was in support of a joint Special Ops exercise code named ‘Osprey’. After the initial work as part of the advanced team my job was to put symbols on the sides of RR train cars. The symbols were a code that corresponded to photographs of Soviet equipment on a train. Some tarped and some not. The teams in the field doing “Special Recon” would have to identify that equipment. You see there are key pieces of equipment or adaptations of equipment that are generally only found at Army, Army Group, and Front levels.
Anyway for a couple weeks my mornings were spent in train stations at places like Bastogne, Wiltz, Neufchateau, and Diekirch. Then I had the afternoon to do what ever I wanted. Having a Official Passport and plenty of time helped.
Namur. My train stopped there briefly. The view was captivating. Did you go there?
Never made it to Namur.
I’m sorry. In the first sentence I meant duration from when the US declared war until the end of hostilities.
Human history is a total abomination. All so pointless and needless.
It is a record of Sociopaths rising to the top and causing misery and death, much of that completely needless.
Does the zebra need the lion?
The Great War (aka WWI) was the at the hight of the Great Game where the world’s great imperial empires were battling for a greater share of the territory of the world. This war started just as The Great Rapprochement between the US/Britain and Russia was about to happen and the related royal dinasties of Germany, Britain, and Russia came into confict.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Rapprochement
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I
Although a resurgence of imperialism was an underlying cause, the immediate trigger for war was the 28 June 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo. This set off a diplomatic crisis when Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to the Kingdom of Serbia,[10][11] and international alliances formed over the previous decades were invoked. Within weeks, the major powers were at war and the conflict soon spread around the world.
Power, avarice, and influence started and sustained this war, thankfully we have learned so much more since then. In these modern times such a thing could not happen again, could it?
Oops another typo
royal dynasties, not ‘royal dinasties’
tom0mason says:”……..In these modern times such a thing could not happen again, could it?”
===============================================================
In the words of that great historian Dick Martin “You bet your sweet Bippy!”. How can people learn something when most of them don’t know or seem to care to know the history? But of course I think that was exactly what you were getting at.
That is what I was thinking, with the rise in pseudo-imperial powers, Russia, China, the EU and the US (with Nato champing at the bit), the great mess of the Middle East, and the Islamic problem; it is all too possible. Once again the stakes are high and cool heads are needed.
A small spark of an incident in ?? Africa? Asia? or the Baltics?, and a regional conflict becomes a general confligration too quickly for the diplomats to stifle.
This little bit of news should scare you silly:
The background: Lessons of history: China’s century of humiliation
Do not forget China is hacking into the computers of Americans Universities, businesses and even Oak Ridge to grab nuclear secrets.
Hackers Linked to China’s Army Seen From EU to D.C.
Clinton’s Contribution to arming China- link and the idiotic reason why
Dale C. Copeland, “Economic Interdependence and War: A Theory of Trade Expectations,” International Security, Vol. 20, no.4 (Spring 1996)
The first I heard of China’s Century of Humiliation was in David Achibald’s book “Twilight of Abundance” David writes of The Century of Humiliation and that Xi Jinping, shortly after assuming the presidency, took all the members of his politburo with him to the museum the Party has built in Tiananmen Square, – the Museum of National Humiliation and Revival.
Though most people seem to think Taiwan would be the target I suspect it will be smaller. Probably the oil rich and contested Spratly Islands. Only by demonstrating significant naval power can China really take it’s place as a dominating Super Power. Still today the ability to project one’s power outside your own sphere of influence relies to a great extent on ones Naval/Amphibious/Logistical capabilities. And China still has a good ways to go before they have the capability to do that. They still don’t have a really functioning top class aircraft carrier and are still well behind in submarine technology. But they are trying very hard to change all that.
The independence war against Britain in 1700s could be considered as WW1 because of the countries involved… I can’t recall where I read the article about it but it was pretty interesting although not the numbers of death but how involved those countries were involved.
The date on the newspaper was interesting, because on August 12, 1914 Big Bertha destroyed one of those Liege forts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Li%C3%A8ge
These cannon were one reason that the First World War was so bloody. Only a few years before the guns had to be in sight of their target to fire upon it. Fire direction centers, relying on forward observers and the new airplane-carried camera, exploiting the sciences of ballistics and meteorology, permitted placing a series of artillery shells on targets miles behind the front lines even during darkness and in weather so foul that birds roosted–or walked.
Today, the conventional image of World War One combat is waves of infantry throwing themselves in futile frontal assault upon fortified enemy positions, hanging up in barbed wire while machine guns mowed the infantry down. That oversimplified view obscures the reason for the trench network in the first place–the need to get below ground level in order to survive the deadly cannon shells. Artillery was credited with causing the first epidemic of what is now labeled PTSD. Artillery caused more casualties than any other weapon–and for a change, only a third of military deaths were due to diseases and malnutrition and simple exhaustion of the poor bloody infantry: two-thirds of the soldier deaths in the Great War were inflicted by weapons.
Depending upon source, from 59% to 85% of casualties inflicted by weapons was due to artillery fire. I cannot get a good breakdown on gas (sometimes delivered by artillery), and if artillery spotting was done from the air, was it an ‘aviation kill’ or an “artillery kill?” In addition to deadly artillery, the synergetic weapons (more than one branch working in concert) turned No Man’s Land into a death machine: barbed wire, entrenched defenders, land mines and booby traps, aircraft (very few casualties), bayonets, machine gun fire, artillery, poison gas, flame throwers, sniper fire, even home-made clubs and the humble trench knife killed. Artillery killed more soldiers in World War One than any other single weapon–though artillery had help. Other weapons and terrain restrictions aided artillery butchery. Had it been only cannon fire…well, part of the butcher’s bill was due to machines developed to counter the cannon fire–the pedestrian infantry spade permitted soldiers to mole down below the bursting shells and made them proof against anything other than a direct hit–or drowning when their holes flooded.
http://facts.randomhistory.com/world-war-i-facts.html
http://www.capebretonpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/2014-08-01/article-3821227/First-World-War%26rsquo%3Bs-casualties-changed-everything/1
Agreed. Artillery was the big killer in WWII as well.
On the battlefields of WW II artillery was responsible for more killed and wounded than any other weapon types also. There is a reason why Artillery is called “The King of Battles”. And though I saw little combat I did have my own experiences with tubed and rocket artillery in Lebanon in 1984. For my money tubed is far worse than the rockets. Had a Syrian fired shell land on the opposite side of a short stone wall from me and knock me down and ring my bell a little. Probably a 122mm from a Soviet made D30 which the Syrians had a lot of. Based on that experience I decided the old adage that “you don’t hear the one that gets you” is correct. I didn’t hear it coming at all.
Though WW I is well known for it’s trench warfare it was actually in the later stages of the American Civil War during the various sieges, the most well known being that of Richmond and Petersburg, when the great trenches became common practice. Even before the advent of fully automatic firearms and the general use of semiautomatic rifles/carbines, the efficacy of small arms and artillery had advanced so much due to increases in range, accuracy, rate of fire, and the general lethality of munitions that the great formations of infantry meeting on open terrain and cavalry charges against prepared positions was becoming a thing of the past.
Trench warfare is old. Roman soldiers dug field fortifications. Countering the field fortifications and fixed fortifications (castles and permanent forts) were sappers (surface trenches) and miners (underground tunnels), and siege engines.
The tank was developed as a siege engine that could move machine gun and light field guns across the battlefield obstacles of World War One: barb wire farms, ditches, moats, and trenches, mines and booby traps, while under direct fire from small arms (rifle and machine gun) and indirect artillery fire. Tank development is a different subject from the evolution of field fortifications–but tanks developed to fight field fortification that were protected by artillery fire and that protected artillery batteries. In a way, history was a reason tank development stalled during the Twenties and Thirties–why build siege towers when they weren’t needed?
Crude cannon firing stone balls ended the day of the castle because if there was a wall to pound, the wall could be breached. Forts went below ground in complex patterns, with Vauban’s star forts being the most famous: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vauban_fortification
These live today in field fortifications such as the Depuy Foxhole–sort of. American military leaders have “short memories” because they didn’t learn from the past. There are a few advantages to ignorance of the past, such as the tank changing from a siege engine into the modern concept of cavalry. The Jeep was first visualized as a machine gun carrier–with the machine gun mounted to fire on the move or at a momentary halt. http://olive-drab.com/od_mvg_www_jeeps_origin.php
Britain’s Special Air Service used gun jeeps on deep penetration raids against German and Italian airfields–which were not fortified deep in the Axis rear areas. When SAS jeeps moved to Europe, they acquired armor plate to survive…and had to avoid field fortifications.
The United States military first encountered trench warfare during Colonial times–and during the Revolutionary War. Fast forward to 1898 and the Spanish American War and Theodore Roosevelt’s famous charge during the Battle of San Juan Hill: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_San_Juan_Hill
And, of course, there was the Boxer Rebellion, the 1904/1905 war between Imperial Russia and Imperial Japan…
Yes trench warfare and fortifications are old. They are really the same thing. But in the Civil war in the instances mentioned earlier what you had was trench on trench. And that trench on trench is not the same as trench on Castle or other permanent fixed fortification. The ideas of key terrain, cover and concealment are as old as warfare it’s self. But the absolute requirement for trenches did not come about until efficiency of the weapons being used required it. There was a no mans land between the trenches of the Confederacy and Union forces during the Richmond Petersburg siege and since there was no such thing as a machine gun then and Gatling’s invention was not yet in general use, it was the deadly small arms and artillery that made that deadly space.
It should be noted that in the end the Confederate line was never broken at Richmond. Lee lost at Richmond simply because his depleted forces did not allow him to have a mobile reserve to prevent the Sheridan’s flanking the line.
And yes the tank was developed to break the stalemate of the trenches but the problem was the technology and learning how to use them. Before the tank the standard method for breaching the line was infantry advancing behind creeping barrages of artillery. It was effective to some extent but hard to coordinate and often resulted in fratricide.
The tanks of WW I, once developed so they had at least a modicum of reliability, managed to be able to breach the front lines but developing the coordination and tactics to continue an advance to make a real breakthrough was another matter all together. Coordination is tough to do when your only means of communications is either some guy banging on the outside of your tank to get you to stop and talk to him or hand signals. Other than that it’s just a matter of follow the leader. And never did they even come close to being able to efficiently refuel and resupply an armor spearhead during WW I.
The ability of infantry,armor, and their supporting artillery to truly coordinate did not happen until they had mobile real time wireless communications and they simply did not have that in WW I for mobile ground combat units. In addition to communications and coordination one needs POL (Petroleum, Oil, Lubricants) and resupply and the concept and refinement of a logistical tail for combined arms mobile warfare was not developed until the Germans did it for their blitzkrieg in WW II. And THAT is the key element that so many miss when they berate the achievement of putting together the blitzkrieg. Communications in a combined arms attack with the lead elements having a logistical tail to sustain their operations as they moved fast and far was what the Germans demonstrated for the first time in mechanized warfare.
‘Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics and communications.’ Is a phrase I have often heard said. I do not fully agree. But I most certainly believe that the majority of the arm chair generals often fail to understand the import of those two key elements.