Unpopular opinions.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

22 hours ago, D.A.F.C said:

You would have thought after WW1 that letting upper class muppets rule the armed forces was a bad idea.

Tally ho you boys walk slowly at the machine guns. It’s utterly unthinkable that it was assumed to be a good idea. Only after they actually listened to non career officers from Canada they made progress. The Germans actually copied this for blitzkreig it was so effective. 

Blackadder wasn’t far away from the truth.

 

4. The upper class got off lightly

Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.

Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an uncle was captured.    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836

 

Quote

John Ellis wrote in his 1989 book Eye-Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I that among subalterns “estimates for the mortality rates range from 65 to 81%. This was, at its lowest estimate, double the rate for enlisted men.”

Bloodshed on this scale prompted the British historian A.J.P. Taylor to write “The slaughter of the subalterns in World War I destroyed the flower of the English gentry.”  https://owlcation.com/humanities/Junior-Officers-in-World-War-One

 

[D.A.F.C]

I’m pretty sure the plebs didn’t decide to walk into machine gunfire themselves though.

 

[Silvio Tattiescone]

1 minute ago, D.A.F.C said:

I’m pretty sure the plebs didn’t decide to walk into machine gunfire themselves though.

 

Nope. The junior officers said "follow me", just before they died.

 

There's an argument that WWI played a large part in breaking down the class barriers because the upper class junior officers lived and died beside the common soldiers.

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, D.A.F.C said:

I’m pretty sure the plebs didn’t decide to walk into machine gunfire themselves though.

 

2 1/2 million volunteered, tiny bit less than the conscripts.

[D.A.F.C]

My argument was that the upper class career types made the plans and they were a tad out of date and foolish. It wasn’t until they ran out of ideas that they listened to alternatives. Then they watched their own tactics fail again at the start of WW2.

No doubting many of them were brave also. I watched warhorse at the weekend again, I believe that was based on some facts and they really did charge machine guns with horses. 

[Stellaboz]

Slightly off topic but at the start of the war, the French were still wearing bright colored, ridiculous outfits on horseback!

[Shotgun]

48 minutes ago, NewBornBairn said:

Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.

Right, but who was it gave the orders to send the troops over the top and into the slaughter? Again and again and again. It sure as hell wasn't the working classes.

[Shotgun]

4 minutes ago, Stellaboz said:

Slightly off topic but at the start of the war, the French were still wearing bright colored, ridiculous outfits on horseback!

One of the reasons WWI was referred to as "The War to End Wars" is that many believed the machine gun had effectively made war obsolete.

I've often wondered what life would be like if humans took all the brainpower, effort and money that they invest in coming up with new and more efficient ways of killing, and put it towards finding ways to help each other. What a world we could have if so many people weren't c***s.

[welshbairn]

 

2 minutes ago, Shotgun said:

Right, but who was it gave the orders to send the troops over the top and into the slaughter? Again and again and again. It sure as hell wasn't the working classes.

They happily volunteered for the madness and their womenfolk handed out white feathers to conscientious objectors. The "Elite" get the blame for everything, they couldn't do f**k all without lots of ordinary people exactly thinking the same. 

[Shotgun]

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

They happily volunteered for the madness

I was thinking more of the General Haig's of the war. Sending millions to their deaths with nary a second thought while they sat safe and sound back at HQ, or in Whitehall.

But...

1 minute ago, welshbairn said:

and their womenfolk handed out white feathers to conscientious objectors.  The "Elite" get the blame for everything, they couldn't do f**k all without lots of ordinary people exactly thinking the same. 

Absolutely right and thereby hangs a major problem of the human condition. From Trump to Brexit, trickle down economics to austerity. A huge number of people of people seem to take a perverse pleasure in giving others permission to treat them like shit.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

It was a different era when people accepted that war meant dying in large numbers. It was felt it didn't matter if huge numbers of men died so long as the enemy lost more - a war of attrition.  The junior officers who survived WWI became the senior officers of WWII and weren't averse to seeing large casualty lists so long as they won. Montgomery is held up as a hero but he lost over 500 tanks at El Alamein when he ordered them to advance against anti tank guns and minefields again and again and again.

 

As for class - look at the Soviets in WWII where monumental casualty rates built up as they launched human wave attacks. 

[supermik]

2 hours ago, Shotgun said:

Right, but who was it gave the orders to send the troops over the top and into the slaughter? Again and again and again. It sure as hell wasn't the working classes.

 

[Stellaboz]

It was a different era when people accepted that war meant dying in large numbers. It was felt it didn't matter if huge numbers of men died so long as the enemy lost more - a war of attrition. 

I disagree with that. Nobody until WW1 had seen anything like the scale of death that the trench battles brought. Absolutely nothing comes close on the scale but by the time the war was in full swing, yes the officers and chiefs were already used to it.

I guess they needed to be at that moment. If they let the scale of what was happening blanket them, they'd have frozen in fear or worse no doubt.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

2 minutes ago, Stellaboz said:

 

 

I disagree with that. Nobody until WW1 had seen anything like the scale of death that the trench battles brought. Absolutely nothing comes close on the scale but by the time the war was in full swing, yes the officers and chiefs were already used to it.

I guess they needed to be at that moment. If they let the scale of what was happening blanket them, they'd have frozen in fear or worse no doubt.
 

 

Quote

Fifty years before WW1 broke out, southern China was torn apart by an even bloodier conflict. Conservative estimates of the dead in the 14-year Taiping rebellion start at between 20 million and 30 million. Around 17 million soldiers and civilians were killed during WW1.

Although more Britons died in WW1 than any other conflict, the bloodiest war in our history relative to population size is the Civil War, which raged in the mid-17th Century. A far higher proportion of the population of the British Isles were killed than the less than 2% who died in WW1. By contrast, around 4% of the population of England and Wales, and considerably more than that in Scotland and Ireland, are thought to have been killed in the Civil War.

In the UK around six million men were mobilised, and of those just over 700,000 were killed. That's around 11.5%.

In fact, as a British soldier you were more likely to die during the Crimean War (1853-56) than in WW1.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25776836

[Stellaboz]

Well that's me told. I'm certainly no expert, but did those wars have battles where hundreds of thousands die in a day or two?

[Silvio Tattiescone]

No, that's what industrialisation brings you. At the Somme there were approx 1.2m casualties in a 5 month battle. In Operation Bagration in WWII there were 1.2m casualties in 3 weeks.

[Benjamin_Nevis]

36 minutes ago, Stellaboz said:

Well that's me told. I'm certainly no expert, but did those wars have battles where hundreds of thousands die in a day or two?

Not quite. The Somme saw around 60,000 British casualties (dead and wounded) on the first day, which still stands as the Army's worst single day in terms of casualties. The belief was that several days on constant shelling of the german lines had destroyed their barbed wire and fortifications and they would meet little or not opposition. Legends has it the first man "over the top" kicked a football across no man's land. Much of the barbed wire was intact as the wrong type of explosive shell had been used, the germans were pretty well fortified and there was a long enough delay between the shelling stopping and the attack commencing for the germans to get out and set up their machine guns, resulting in an absolute massacre.

The Battle of Verdun further south saw around 750,000 men die over a several month period in a series of pointless attacks on a largely symbolic French fort. 

The Allied Generals did eventually learn to adopt less ludicrous tactics than walking into machine gun fire, such as the use of creeping barrages etc, but tactical clusterfucks permeated the entire war, which when mixed with awful weather, eg Passchendaele, still resulted in dreadful casualty figures. 

[D.A.F.C]

Not quite. The Somme saw around 60,000 British casualties (dead and wounded) on the first day, which still stands as the Army's worst single day in terms of casualties. The belief was that several days on constant shelling of the german lines had destroyed their barbed wire and fortifications and they would meet little or not opposition. Legends has it the first man "over the top" kicked a football across no man's land. Much of the barbed wire was intact as the wrong type of explosive shell had been used, the germans were pretty well fortified and there was a long enough delay between the shelling stopping and the attack commencing for the germans to get out and set up their machine guns, resulting in an absolute massacre.
The Battle of Verdun further south saw around 750,000 men die over a several month period in a series of pointless attacks on a largely symbolic French fort. 
The Allied Generals did eventually learn to adopt less ludicrous tactics than walking into machine gun fire, such as the use of creeping barrages etc, but tactical clusterfucks permeated the entire war, which when mixed with awful weather, eg Passchendaele, still resulted in dreadful casualty figures. 

So the toffs fucked it again then basically.

[DiegoDiego]

So the toffs fucked it again then basically.

I'm sure that putting working class folk in charge would have resulted in a swift boot to the pie for the Kaiser and we'd all have been back for dinner.

[Silvio Tattiescone]

That BBC link is worth reading