My first thought was that perhaps some of these last minute explosions were like celebratory gunfire[0]. But no, it seems that people were still desperately trying to kill each other knowing full well they only had hours, minutes or even seconds left to do so: "the cease-fire would not come into effect for a further six hours - at 11am ... the final day of WWI would produce nearly 11,000 casualties, more than those killed, wounded or missing on D-Day ... Just minutes before 11am, to the north around Mons, the 25-year-old Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was on the trail of retreating German soldiers ... But Pte Price's death at 10.58 was not the last. Further south in the Argonne region of France, US soldier Henry Gunther was involved in a final charge against astonished German troops who knew the Armistice was about to occur. What could they do? He too was shot ... It was 10.59."[0] Madness.
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I will post this at the risk of being downvoted because I am all but a pacifist and it is not a popular position. This is not surprising at all for two reasons.
Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not generally begrudgingly respect each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute. The grudging respect you see discussed in documentaries comes decades later. After the continual trauma and memories of dead friends have time to fade.
War beaurocracies transform people into rational psychopaths. They create an order in which a letter of the law is utmost and that letter is laid by your betters. If your betters find some purpose in ordering you to kill pointlessly, you will. We all like to think we could find the courage or clarity to disobey an unethical order. But history is much more full of compliant atrocities than righteous mutinies. Soldiers kept firing because that is the perogative that came out of the leadership black box.
>They hate each other in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute.
That really isn't true, which is largely why the First World War was characterised by immobile trench warfare. A group of experienced and highly motivated soldiers were perfectly capable of breaking the lines and holding territory, as demonstrated by Stoßtruppen and Arditi, but most soldiers weren't experienced and highly motivated - they were barely-trained civilians who just wanted to go home in one piece. They might have occasionally fired a few shots over the barricades to show willing, they might have chosen to risk death in a charge over the lines rather than face certain death by firing squad, but they really didn't want to be fighting and certainly didn't want to risk death or live with the consequences of having killed.
Snipers can achieve remarkable combat effectiveness, partly because of their marksmanship and fieldcraft skills but mainly because they're actually shooting to kill, due to an innate or acquired psychological difference from ordinary infantrymen. Most infantrymen weren't really trying to kill anyone, which is why the overwhelming majority of combat casualties were inflicted by artillery - it is psychologically far easier to fire an artillery piece at a grid coordinate than to fire a rifle at a human being.
The burden of sustained combat or psychologically-informed training can increase the propensity of people to kill, but it's not a natural psychological state. Ordinary men under prolonged stress sometimes become hardened killers, but they're more likely to become disaffected and depressed.
Modern military strategy is based on this reality - a small proportion of elite infantrymen at the tip of the spear, supported by vast numbers of men in support and indirect combat roles. Tanks, aircraft and drones provide firepower, but just as crucially they provide psychological distance from the act of killing. The significance of psychological distance is a crucial but often overlooked aspect of the Milgram experiments.
> The burden of sustained combat or psychologically-informed training can increase the propensity of people to kill, but it's not a natural psychological state.
I believe observational studies of pre-industrial people's contradict this notion. There was a somewhat recent book (10-12 years old) that aggregated many studies and favored a Hobbesian outlook on this subject. I cannot remember the author or book though. Written by a Dane or a German I think. The topic is still in some debate.
Regardless I specifically indicated that it is produced state not a natural one.
I think it would be very hard to deduce how much a lack of combat efectiveness is due to fear of killing vs. fear of being killed. As a sniper or artilleryman you may take your time to fire. As a frontline soldier the longer you aim the longer you expose yourself.
If you haven't seen it yet, this is the basis of the blackmirror episode "men against fire". [spoiler] in the very near future, the military uses neural implants so that soilders see grotesque mutants instead of humans on the battlefield. The episode presents itself as a zombie horror type thing until we find out the truth at the end. Most of the missions were actually against civilians and the dehumanization tech is being used to make genocide palpable.
The 1914 Christmas truce demonstrates otherwise as five months of fighting was insufficient to guarantee hate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce
It’s surprisingly difficult to train civilians to kill each other, but governments have discovered how. You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field.
December 1914 was a very different world upon the front lines of WWI from Movember 1918. People still thought that war would looks something like the Franco-Prussian War.
> You don’t do it on the front lines, you do it before they get to the battle field.
I think you do it by exposing people to years of misery and loss. But a boatload of propaganda doesn't hurt.
"You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees."
-Kaiser Wilhelm II, addressing German troops leaving for the front, August, 1914.
You still had truces breaking our on December 1915 which was 17 months or 1/3 of the length of the war, but officers where fighting them much more effectively.
What’s important from my perspective is they required large percentages of both sides willing to abide by a truce. You don’t get a truce if even 10% of each side keeps firing.
Simple. March them to the front lines and say "If you don't kill them, they'll try to kill you. Go get em!" And lo and behold! they were told the same thing, so everybody starts shooting.
It works mainly because the audience was 'educated', and part of this process lets the power instill its 'values' into youngsters' brains.
In most of the Western World and a not-so-distant past some Christian Church was in charge of this, and we had Crusades, clerics baptizing guns...
The main cause may be the will to 'enhance' the populace by using education in order to inoculate values. We may escape by only teaching fundamentals (either politically neutral or boosting a critical mindset). Letting a central power mix proper education with its messages leads to total war.
A group of men have to react instantly in order to survive. This is the point of your training. You learn to follow orders, instantly. There is no time to discuss the issue. It is a case of kill or be killed.
That’s often closer to propaganda than reality. Militaries want soldiers to put their own lives at risk if it’s a net gain in the war. A soldier maximizing their own odds of survival is rarely that effective.
For example a sniper firing from ambush may kill their target, but it also makes them a giant target. It’s a useful strategy specifically because people are willing to take that risk.
I’m not sure that’s true. Apparently very few shots are on target. People seem reluctant to just kill someone else.
This “problem” has been ameliorated In recent times via increasingly distant and abstract warfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology#The_problem_of_non-_...
And war is full of atrocities because people just cannot being themselves to do bad things to eachother?
I am not making a basic argument for the goodness or lack thereof in people. Only that war changes the rationale and emotional stability of people. It makes the illogical or unthinkable into the next logical step.
Wars are opportunistically encouraged and joined by psychopaths, of course, though armies often don't want those people because they aren't mission oriented. When they rise in the ranks it can be terrible.
My point is that the majority of people don't "join the dark side"
Yeah, I overemphasized that point which I didn't even mean to originally honestly. See below.
My dad fought in WW2 and I have overhead quite a few conversations about the war. Most soldiers just wanted to go home in one piece and did whatever it took to do so.
My father fought in Vietnam and that is how he began. By the time he left he wanted to kill as many VC as possible or leave or whatever but that is one man's experience.
Are you so sure that if you had been able to ask your father immediately after his return what he thought of the Germans or the Japanese he'd tell the same story?
My dad is German :). Did your dad have a desire to kill VC after going home?
I sometime forget the international nature of the folks on this site. Rephrase that question but about his feelings toward Americans, Englishs or Russians.
To answer your question, yes he did. He was racist amd embittered for many years. Sometime before I was born he began to soften that hate. He is different now but sometimes I still see it beneath the surface.
I have heard this hate only from people who fought the partisans in Yugoslavia. I can imagine Vietnam was a similar kind of war which is even more brutal and disturbing than regular warfare.
I have never heard any of them having ill will against the brits, French or Russians. They especially liked the Americans because they treated POWs and civilians by far the best.
I think I overgenerlized this specific point of my OP. Have a look at my response below. How much this is a factor probably depends a lot on the length and intensity of conflict, which is what you allude to here.
Desire to kill may be a bit strong but I distinctly remember sitting with my WWII veteran grandfather in November 1989 (US Thankgiving to be exact) and watching the stories of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the obvious prospect of a united Germany in the near future.
My grandfather and I watched CNN silently and after a while he got up, and as he left the room he remarked "We'll be fighting the bastards within 50 years."
He's got 20 years.
Being Norwegian (occupied by the Nazis during WW2) I'd like to chime in with my anecdata - my grandfather served as occupation police in Germany for a couple of years after the war; when the Berlin Wall came down, I was eleven years old and visiting my grandparents. I had been put to bed, but then my grandfather comes and tells me to come to the living room with this weird, strained look on his face; I duly followed him, expecting bad news - some death in the family or whatever.
He nods to the television and tells me that tonight, I'll stay up until the newscast is over - because tonight, the war finally comes to a close.
My grandfather didn't do feelings very well - but for most of that night, he wept with relief and joy. It is to this day the most powerful experience of my life - seeing the impact this event had on my otherwise stoic, accept-anything-in-its-stride grandfather.
And instead of the "bastards" starting another WW, they're treating French and Italian people sick with the coronavirus [1]. Wouldn't surprise me if in one month or so Germany were to lend a hand to the US too.
[1] https://www.euronews.com/2020/03/28/eight-covid-19-patients-...
To anyone having doubts about this: this has been an active field of research by the military for the last 70 years, when it was found that the efficiency of the average conscripted soldier was lacking due to non- or mis-firing soldiers.
Imagine being brainwashed to the point that you purposefully get yourself killed because you only have a minute left to kill the others.
Henry Gunther's story is particularly sad. He was a sergeant who got demoted due to private after writing a friend a letter containing some antiwar comments that were perceived as cowardice. He was obsessed with regaining what he perceived as his lost honor, which is why he led a futile charge in the final moments of the war. IIRC the Germans he was charging were reluctant to actually shoot at him
I think that the kind of brainwash that we typically think about evaporates very quickly at front lines. But the actual fighting -- trying not to get killed, seeing your comrades killed, killing in return -- is a 'brainwash' of its own.
It wasn't so much plain brainwashing as it was a total lack of modern communication on the battlefield. Especially in 1918.
Back then, communication happened via carrier pigeon, runners, telegram, telephone or telegraph. In extremely hostile conditions. Trench newspapers were the only alternate source soldiers and availability depended entirely on the situation on the ground.
In fact, fighting didn't necessarily seize at 11AM all over the world because communication was hard:
https://history.blog.gov.uk/2018/11/09/the-war-that-did-not-...
As for the Western front in particular, it didn't help that some generals disapproved of the ceasefire and armistice:
> General John Pershing, Commander of the American Expeditionary Force, did not approve of the armistice. Consequently he gave no instructions to his commanders to suspend any new offensive action during the remaining hours until 11am. This gave individual commanders latitude to determine their actions in the last few hours and in some quarters there was fierce fighting up to 11am which was difficult to stop. On 11 November alone were nearly 11,000 casualties, dead, missing and injured, exceeding those on D-Day in 1944. Over 3,500 of these were American. Pershing had to face a Congressional hearing to explain why there were so many deaths when the hour of the armistice was known in advance.
Officers at the front at that time pretty much were left to their own devices. With an absolute minimum of orders or context, the 'safe' approach was to assume that the enemy might have ignored the cease fire and overwhelmed those who would have let their guard down. Being partly blind, many of them doubled down on the fighting "just in case".
Let's not forget. 4 years of atrocious fighting had passed by. By then, soldiers new perfectly well that life on the front carried little value. They could only hope for a break as refusing to fight or dodging orders meant martial punishment. Plus, it wouldn't have done them any good anyway since there was little to no practical way out of that theater anyway.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/se...
There are many historical examples of generals and frontline troops continuing conflict after the fact for multiple reasons.
Some as innocuous as communication issues. Some as numbing as military bureaucratics. Some as terrible as hatred.
My point was never to attribute all such instances to hate or a desire to kill. But I see that all demonstrate well why war should be avoided at all costs.
>Despite what films will depict, people fighting on the front lines in a war do not have a begrudgingly respect for each other. They hate eachother in a way most people probably cannot understand. Many would not pass up the opportunity to rid the world of what they see as the most evil upon its face unto the very last minute.
So... either you're some kind of omniscient telepath, or you're making this insight of yours up because you believe it should be true.
No. I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways.
This is a product of putting people under the pressure of fear of death for hours, days or weeks at a time, propagandizing the enemy as less than human and trauma from the loss of loved ones at the hands of what in modern war is an unknown enemy.
This understanding escapes us in popular culture. It isn't often that HBO series or history books focus on the enmity that abides long after conflict has ceased. Those who return from war with hate still in them are our 'Taxi Driver' type villains or freaks. We don't reckon that to a certain extent everyone we send into combat has hate in them.
> I have read a lot of history books which delve into diaries and correspondence of individuals fighting in front line situations. The respectful weighing of the other side's reasons for fighting is overwhelmed by a desire to kill them in graphic and brutal ways.
Odd. I've read a lot of war correspondence and history as well, being kind of addicted to that stuff on Youtube, and I haven't encountered the sort of overwhelming pathological hatred and programming you describe be mentioned often enough to assume that it applies as a near-universal constant.
Are you sure you're not just taking one or two instances from, say, World War 2 and the Vietnam War and assuming all war is like Full Metal Jacket or something? It certainly seems like you're projecting.
I've never seen, "Full Metal Jacket" so I could not say.
To be very specific, I am talking only about combatants. I am not generally talking about the kind people that get interviewed for documentaries or whonwrite their own books. Leadership often has the luxury of cool detachment.
I think I did speak to generally in my OP and then bit down on the argument. I was answering the question of why some batteries continued to fire until amrasitice. It wasn't my intention to indicate this was primarily due to hate.
The truest answer is that they were ordered to. People follow those orders for a collection of reasons. The general obedience developed by being part of war machine is probably paramount.
I should reorder my points. Primarily that war machines like modern militaries and the conflicts they participate in create their own rationale. And you should never be surprised to find irrational violence in war because that rationale is not of your peacetime world.
Beyond those that are simply following orders there area many whom the propaganda and trauma of war has made enthusiastic about inflicting every last bit of punishment possible upon the enemy. You are correct that we cannot number these and it probably changes depending on the violence and desperation of the conflict. But I think they are more than we like to admit. And this is a further cause of seemingly irrational violence and particularly atrocities.
Nothing better reflects the insanity of WW1 than 11/11/18. The sheer ridiculousness of needless slaughter to allow a few old men the vanity of stopping a war at 11 is the most WW1 thing ever.
> Madness.
Outliers, therefore newsworthy. If these very few haters were able to get a final confrontation, there were also many who did want to stop the fight.
What happened during an unofficial seasonal ceasefire in WWI? Seasonal greetings were shared, between enemies. [1]
How certain where they that the cease-fire would be successful?
It wasn't celebratory. They had to haul home all the ammunition they didn't fire.
Fighting over nothing except marginally better terms in the peace treaty...