Was there any war or theater of war as hellish, destructive,

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Bumping with pics

>>1875094
The Russo-Japanese front during WWII.

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>>1875094
Western front of WW1

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>>1875094
Western WW1.
>muh SS
They were gassing each other on the western front, they were shelling them constantly, the only "respite" was when they went over the top and either got gunned down in machine gun fire or sniped. You put your head over the trench for a second and it was blown clean off. The leadership was abhorrent, they even had buddy brogades where you got to see uour childhood friend die in your arms.

No event in human history will ever compare to the western front of WW1. Pic related, what happened if you didn't get your gas mask on quick enough.

>>1875114
all five seconds of it

>>1875126
There were other periods of respite when troops were rotated away from the front.

Germans pillaging, raping, murdering, and sacking their way across Eastern Europe nto the USSR only for the USSR to counterattack and pillage, rape, murder, and sack their way across Eastern Europe into Germany.

The Western Front of WW1 is a close competitor.

The Western Front of WWI is arguably comparable in terms of misery, though I'd say WWII's eastern front's lowest points were worse. Stalingrad was just a horrorshow.

>>1875126
>They were gassing each other on the western front,
gas was not a big killer
> they were shelling them constantly
no
>and either got gunned down in machine gun fire or sniped
or achieved their objectives
or retreated

>>1875126
>You put your head over the trench for a second and it was blown clean off.
>der wuz snoypers watching litchurly evry inch of evry trench and shiiiiieeeeeeeettttt

>>1875335
You didn't get your head blown off every single time you put it above the trench, but you certainly behaved as if you would.

>>1875331
>gas was not a big killer
Yes it was, and the injuries it caused were horrific.

>no
Are you pretending to be retarded? What are howitzers?

>or achieved their objectives
And what was the objective? Give me a single fucking purpose for WW1.

>>1875126
This reads a little bit like what they would tell fresh troops just arriving at the front to scare them into taking it seriously.

The reality was a little less severe, by all accounts. Still a hellish nightmare of the highest order, but not quite not this cartoonish.

>>1875353
And your post reads like someone who still thinks war is like his cawaladooty games.

>>1875331
>>1875335
>>1875353
Verdun was fucking awful
Now is true that some other places like the Somme and Passchendaele were pretty shill in comparison

>>1875352
>Yes it was
why do you like on the internet? only about 7 percent of troops hit by gas were killed, as in about eighty thousand

>Are you pretending to be retarded? What are howitzers?
howitzers are weapons, what does that have to do with the fact that your claim of "constant shelling" is a logical, logistical and who else knows what kind of impossibility

>And what was the objective?
to inflict casualties on the enemy
to capture ground
to win the battle
to win the war

>Give me a single fucking purpose for WW1.
to establish regional/continental dominance
to prevent a rival from doing the above
to support an ally
to defend from an invasion
there you go, there's four

>>1875094
World War one is a big contender, for obvious reasons
I do have a special place in my heart for the Eastern Front however

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>>1875347
>You didn't get your head blown off every single time you put it above the trench

it only happened once, then you were done

>>1875360
>shows pic of mustard gas facial burns
>SEE THIS PIC? THIS WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU ARE EVEN ONE SECOND TOO SLOW
>tons of chlorine gas was also used, leaving much more sightly corpses.

>YOU WILL GET YOUR HEAD BLOWN CLEAN OFF IF YOU EVEN PEAK OVER THERE FOR ONE SECOND
>Or any other time due to airburst rounds

I'm sorry if my WWI readings and actual military experience have allowed to see through the hyperbole of the trench conditions you have painted. Good day.

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What was this soldier affected with? One guess each.

No google image cheating.

>>1875391
that feel when no teenaged wife

>>1875391
Chlorine?

>>1875352
>>1875370
rekt

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more pics please..

>>1875396
>>1875416
mustard gas

The Western Front of WW1

>>1875094
Verdun

>>1875094
Yes. The Western Front in WWI. They just had a different mentality and less civilians were purposefully killed.

Verdun, beyond any doubt.

"They must be crazy to do what they are doing now: what a bloodbath, what horrid images, what a slaughter. I just cannot find the words to express my feelings; Hell cannot be this dreadful. Humans are insane."

>>1875126

On the western front, troops would rotate to and from the front every two weeks. Not really as harsh as people like to think.

The eastern front during ww2 was just pure hell. Partisans, neverending lice, trench foot, cannibalism, sub-zero temperatures, snipers, constant shelling, death squads...

I read an account of an ss machine gunner at Narva. He and his asst. Gunner laid down in a hole at the front for two whole weeks. They could not sit up or snipers would get them, they could only go get food or piss at night and sometimes he food wouldnt get there, so they wouldnt eat for days.

And on top of that, the usual... Lice covering you, freezing and numb fingers, constant shelling...

>>1876681

That was the plan anyhow. For the Germans especially, lack of reserves meant soldiers were often on the front much longer.

The German forces were also surviving off very meager rations by the end.

Two facts have stuck with me.

1. In order to get British soldiers to go over the top, they had to resort to forcing rum on them before offensives. They'd get them drunk, then threaten to shoot them. That's what it took to get people to take the odds of attacking.

2. Before offensives French soldiers used to baah like sheep; the only protest left to them.

Still, WW1 on the east was in some ways also more shit than WW2. The lack of supplies for Russian and Austrian forces was even more acute. You have literally thousands freezing to death overnight because Austria decided to launch an offensive in the winter with no boots and no coats.

The western front during WW2

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>>1876747

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Western Front

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>>1876747
>The western front during WW2

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>>1876747
>The western front
>during WW2

>>1876747
>written from my Red Cross-administered prison camp on stationary paid for through prison labor and delivered to my parent's home in Connecticut, all as stipulated by the Geneva Convention

>>1876752
Thats Stalingrad

Chinese front during WW2?

>>1876727
March to the sea + verdun /= four years of trench warfare

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>>1876752

Results of an Italian push to dislodge Austrian and German forces.

Fuck getting sent out like that. You know ahead of time that there is no chance of success and that your sacrifice is meaningless.

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>>1876681
>cannibalism
That did really happen? Any stories of it?

>>1875094
the thirty years war

>>1876770
This is a viable answer.

If you're Japanese or a Japanese sympathizer, you're deep in the countryside full of guerillas and people who absolutely detest you. If you stop to piss away from your company too long some gommie partisan is going to slit your throat. All the good equipment gets sent to the Pacific, and eventually your commander is going to expect you to kill yourself destroying an American-made tank better than anything you have, in order to protect a land full of people who would like nothing more than to lynch you in the streets.

If you're Chinese you're even less equipped, and you're repeatedly thrown into stalling campaigns where most of your side dies, or you're sent off to the fucking rainforest to build the Burma Road by hand for a bunch of white folk who just want to save their colonies. If you surrender the Japanese will just get offended and kill you. Things look better near the end when lend-lease equipment starts getting to you, until you start fighting a civil war right after.

>>1876681
Care to give sauce on that account, sounds like an interesting read.

>>1876792
Epic meme
The 30 Years War was awful for civilians but for soldiers it was average

>>1875094

Not theater, but Cannae would be pretty much the worst combat experience.

> Ok, we're going to fuck Hannibal up, the Legions kick ass and we outnumber him by a lot

> We are raping the Carthaginian center!

>Fuck, we're surrounded....

>Let me wait around neck to neck with 75,000 other guys until after hours of this we are all crushed or stabbed to death.

It was like 1.5 Vietnam wars worth of dead soldiers for the Romans in one day, at BC population levels. It's amazing they won that war.

>>1876792
There weren't even fronts yet so non combatants could be mostly safe, every one just got raped and looted by random death stacks like some kind of shitty paradox game

>>1876802

A World Undone by G.J. Meyer

Really good book on WWI. Read it right after the Guns of August.

>>1876727
>They'd get them drunk

A tot of rum won't get you drunk, it was a standard part of the mens daily ration it kept the men relatively happy. If you're looking for drunk men look to the Royal Navy in Nelsons day where they were issued eight pints of beer in their daily ration.

>>1876837

They'd pass out extra before sending them over the top.

They'd also threaten to open fire if they wouldn't move forward.

Although, to be fair, getting killed by your own side if you broke and ran was an implicit part of the set up of the phalanx and legion for a long long time. It's just a bit shocking in a more modern context.

>>1876847
>It's just a bit shocking in a more modern context.
Desertion has always been a capital crime.

>>1876847
A bit extra yes but not enough to inhibit their ability to fight. Desertion in the face of the enemy was a heinous crime no matter what army you fought in, in hindsight it's pretty fucked up but it was par for the course then.

>>1876786
Just 1 min to Google it.
Canibalism happend both on ussr ( siege of leningrad for example) and german side ( battle for stalingrad).

>>1877120
>>1876786
Here is quote from Wikipedia about canibalism in leningrad

"Dimitri Lazarev, a diarist during the worst moments in the Leningrad siege, recalls his daughter and niece reciting a terrifying nursery rhyme adapted from a pre-war song:

A dystrophic walked along
With a dull look
In a basket he carried a corpse's arse.
I'm having human flesh for lunch,
This piece will do!
Ugh, hungry sorrow!
And for supper, clearly
I'll need a little baby.
I'll take the neighbours',
Steal him out of his cradle.[66]"
Shit was brutal

>>1875205
the USSR began at the Polish border shit for brains

I personally think the only reason the eastern front is worse than ww1 western front is the ideological differences. In ww1 you were just fighting some poor bastard in a trench just like you, if you or he got captured you would be a POW. On the eastern front the enemy was not human and capture meant a slow death hence much more bitter fighting on both side.

Both are horrible beyond imagination

>>1875126
That picture is from a burn victim who got a large skin graft from skin taken from his chest.

>>1875391
Mustard gas

>>1876681
I remember reading of a story about a couple of German tankers who got partially doused in acid. A panzer IV got shot and apperantly the shot damaged suitcase sized batteries which sat at the bottom of the tank. The driver and radio operator major burns on their lower bodies. Something about modern warfare always seems more gruesome because of stuff like that.

Speaking of WW2, anyone have the pic that compiled various leader's quotes about the Greeks in WW2, and had Mussolini's horrified face?

>>1876829
The account of the ss soldiers is that book?

>>1876797
WINRAR.

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>>1875094

The Pacific theater of WW2 (especially on the Asian mainland)
>Chinese Civil War is already in full swing when the Japs staged Mukden
>Japs behave without any kind of restraint (openly too)

World War I altogether (it was pretty miserable to be a soldier no matter what corner of the world you were fighting in).

Russian Civil War

The Overland Campaign in the American Civil War

>Fighting back and forth over the same corpse-strewn trenches for hours on end, using single shot muskets, the contending troops were periodically reduced to hand-to-hand combat reminiscent of battles fought during ancient times.

>>1876727
>1. In order to get British soldiers to go over the top, they had to resort to forcing rum on them before offensives. They'd get them drunk, then threaten to shoot them. That's what it took to get people to take the odds of attacking.
>2. Before offensives French soldiers used to baah like sheep; the only protest left to them.
this is 2meme4me

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>>1875094

I'd argue that Peleliu, Iwo, Okinawa were unique hells that rival anything in the East in terms of horror and the hellishness of condensed fighting. Peleliu especially.

>>1877596
American Civil War gets overlooked but damn was it brutal

>one of the first (THE first?) mechanized wars
>tactics have yet to catch up with new tech
>high casualties because "ok let's just bumrush the enemy position cause that's what we know" and the enemy has Gatling guns
>Bushwhackers and other such guerrillas fucking shit up in the boonies
>Try to draft Irish immigrants: they chimp out and start slaughtering blacks AND rich Manhattanites

>>1876802

It is a norweigian memoire written by an SS Voulenteer named Ivar Skarlo. I dont think there is an english translation of it yet, it got published like 1-2 years ago.

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>>1877138

>>1877618
It sounds true to me
I can recognize the British cowardice and the French use of dark humor when facing death very well

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>>1875094
The American Civil war is really fucking brutal if you do research.

>Be southerner
>be innaGettysburg day 3
>100 cannons bombard enemy position with little to no effect
>start a mile long walk to enemy position
>as you are walking in closely packed squares enemy artillery take potshots at you as you hear the scream and cries of the wounded being ripped to shreds by explosive rounds and once you get close enough, canister shot
>in range of enemy muskets you speed up as the enemy takes potshots at you with minne balls which fragment in multiple direction once it hits your body
>finaly IF you reach Union lines you realize most of your forces are gone as a desperate and extremely bloody melee takes off as brothers kill brothers
>retreat the mile past crying boys who have no arms
>your boys died for nothing.

Not to mention the other 2 days are just as bloody.

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>>1877800
>Peleliu especially.

13,031 deaths on an island with an area of 5 square miles, or 2,606 fatalities/sq mile. For comparison, Stalingrad's much larger body count averages out to ~20 military deaths/sq mile.

Peleliu was coral rock, preventing even the temporary burial of the dead in the rare occasion they could be collected, as the confined nature of the battlefield meant bodies of friend and foe often remained in the open to decompose where they fell in the heat.

>Except along the beach areas and in the swamps, digging into the coral rock was nearly impossible. Consequently, thousands of men -- many suffering with severe diarrhea, fighting for weeks on an island two miles by six miles -- couldn’t practice basic field sanitation. This fundamental neglect caused an already putrid tropical atmosphere to become inconceivably vile.

>Added to this was the odor of thousands of rotting, discarded Japanese and American rations. At every breath, one inhaled hot, humid air heavy with countless odors. I felt as though my lungs would never be cleansed of all those foul vapors.

>In this garbage-filled environment the blowflies, always numerous in the tropics anyway, underwent a population explosion.

>With human corpses, human excrement, and rotting rations scattered across Peleliu's ridges, those nasty insects were so large, so glutted, and so lazy that some could scarcely fly. They could not be waved away or frightened off a can of rations or a chocolate bar. Frequently they tumbled off the side of my canteen cup into my coffee. We actually had to shake the food to dislodge the flies, and even then they sometimes refused to move. I usually had to balance my can of stew on my knee, spooning it up with my right hand while I picked the sluggish creatures off the stew with my left. They refused to move or to be intimidated. It was revolting, to say the least, to watch big fat blowflies leave a corpse and swarm into our C rations.

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>>1878421

"You know what's gonna happen? I'll tell you what's gonna happen. Troops are now forming behind the line of trees. When they come out, they'll be under enemy long-range artillery fire. Solid shot. Percussion. Every gun they have. Troops will come out under fire with more than a mile to walk. And still, within the open field, among the range of aimed muskets. They'll be slowed by that fence out there, and the formation - what's left of it - will begin to come apart. When they cross that road, they'll be under short-range artillery. Canister fire. Thousands of little bits of shrapnel wiping the holes in the lines. If they get to the wall without breaking up, there won't be many left. A mathematical equation...

But maybe, just maybe, our own artillery will break up their defenses. There's always that hope...

But that's Hancock out there, and he ain't gonna run. So it's mathematical after all. If they get to that road, or beyond it, we'll suffer over fifty percent casualties. But, Harrison, I don't believe my boys will reach that wall."

My ancestor, Thomas Michael Blackwell was the Chaplain and Doctor for the 11th Mississippi Volunteers. His son made the charge with A Company (University Greys). Didn't make it.

Every time I watch the movie Gettysburg, I'm always a bit haunted by the fact one of the poor sods being shot down in the final charge is supposed to my Uncle.

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>>1878434

Hard to believe Eugene Sledge went on to be a world-renowned expert in Helminthology. One would think he would wind up the drunken hobo sleeping in an abandoned rail yard or put a bullet through his own head to end the nightmares.

I can only imagine the agony he felt at knowing some of his former students serving in the same miserable conditions, or his revulsion at the general wave of violence that swept through the United States during the 1960s. Even for a man born and raised to see segregation of the races as natural and acceptable, Sledge must've found the fact neighbors were willing to kill each other over it revolting.

>>1875094
The Pacific Theater of WW2 was actually much proportionally deadlier for those who participated. Though much smaller scale obviously. Take Okinawa for example. This 450 square mile island saw some 200,000 deaths in 6 weeks. Including 35% of the civilian population and 90%+ of the Japanese soldiers.

>>1876824
no, for a large part of germany lost 70% of their population or more

>>1876824
>>1878600

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Years%27_War#Political_consequences

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>>1875094
war of the triple alliance, 70-90% of the male population died there

>>1878625
>you'll never survive and gain a harem

>>1875370
You're both right. The purposes of war were just that, gaining ground, winning the bloody thing. But in the grand scheme of things it was just a pointless waste of life

>>1876480
Who said that?

>>1878382
You are so clearly french it hurts

>>1878750
Not as much as you sound british doh

>>1878475
Yeah that's pretty horrific..

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>>1878750
>>1878757
Stop it, you two.

>>1878757
You completely have me there buddy

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>>1878421
>>1878063
>>1878475
The ACW was comparable to the Crimean War
Hardly any worse

>>1878382
He says sat in a country protected by English blood

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>>1878780
Are these two faggots unironically taking a selfie in the middle of a battle?

>>1875094

Pretty sure native american warfare was brutal. Ritual torture of pows and all

>>1878803
Yes

>>1878803
Two things:
Kek and nice 'shopping on that debres to make it look like they were holding it when in the original it was above.

>>1875391
4chan's make your own crystals

>>1878724
The last note from the diary of Alfred Joubaire

>>1879369
apologies for the trip
fucking auto-fill-in

>>1879369
Cheers bud

>>1878511

His was definitely the most cerebral war memoir I ever read.

>>1876821
this desu senpai

>>1877138
fuck

<Eastern front WW2 for combat,

<Burma WW2 for anticipation and paranoia of the enemy

<Western Front WW1 for just absolute hellish loving conditions

Couldn't think of one I would prefer to of been in. All horrendous really

>>1880775
Second Congo War for destroying your faith in humanity.

>>1875370
Why is constant shelling unbelievable and out of the question? Obviously it wasn't 24/7 for every single day of the war. I'm assuming the other guy who posted it meant it as in constant during times of attack and advance

>>1875094
Sino-Japanese war.

Is all this WW1 meming just because of that Battlefield game? It's not even comparable to eastern front WW2.