WW2 eastern Front was the the worst by massive margin with Stalingrad , Leningrad , Moscow , Kurust ?? ( spelling )
The scale of those battles was unimagineable. At Kursk there was 3 million soldiers, 60 thousand artillery, 10 thousand tanks and 5000 planes between the Soviets and the Nazis. All fighting in one battle. Rediculous. Not to belittle our Greatest Generation, but most of the war had been fought by the time we even got there.
Also the Western front in WW1 was utter hell !! Imagine being the 3rd wave and seeing the previous 2 become road kill in minutes . You know you will be dead in 5 min ..when you hear the whistle of death coming . You can’t not advanced or your own leaders would shoot you !! No sate space existed
WW1 wasn't much more than a mass sacrifice to the blood god... insanity! I don't think I would've been able to force my brain to let me charge an enemy trench after watching several previous waves get killed to the man without any progress. I think I would've tried to go the Francis Pegahmagabow route and tried my luck sneaking around behind enemy lines stealing intel.
And all that sacrifice just to achieve a ceasefire. As bad as modern warfare is tribal warfare was far more deadly.
Tribes do not like to take casualties, but over time tribal wars often inflict in 100% or near 100% casualties on the loser. "Mobilization was more complete in primitive warfare, Mr. Keeley contends. Battles went on more often. More people were killed and fewer prisoners were taken. Weapons were designed to inflict greater damage: the author cites arrowheads and spear points designed to break off in the wounds they caused, and the use of septic poisons intended to cause death long after contact. Territory was gained and held. Massacres occurred. And evidence of all this often predates contact with Western culture. "For example," Mr. Keeley writes, "at Crow Creek in South Dakota, archeologists found a mass grave containing the remains of more than 500 men, women and children who had been slaughtered, scalped and mutilated during an attack on their village a century and a half before Columbus's arrival (circa A.D. 1325)." Moreover, he argues, primitive cultures were rarely contaminated by contact with more civilized cultures. If anything, the influence occurred in reverse, as in the case described by a New Englander in 1677: "In our first war with the Indians, God pleased to show us the vanity of our military skill, in managing our arms, after the European mode. Now we are glad to learn the skulking way of war." NEW YORK TIMES, BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Even in Eden, It Seems, War Was Hell, By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, Reviewing WAR BEFORE CIVILIZATION, The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, JULY 18, 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/18/books/books-of-the-times-even-in-eden-it-seems-war-was-hell.html Sad to say but modern warfare by comparison represented progress.
Let me put it this way- I don't think I could force myself to sacrifice for nothing. If I knew my wave was a distractionary tactic for another force that had a shot, but only in conjunction with our suicide charge, or something like that, I'd like to think I could do it. But if I thought it was just because command wants a daily charge because they're out of ideas, I'd prolly take my chances with defection or battling the commisar. Which is why I prolly wouldn't make a very good soldier.
agreed, but spear throwers never did genocides like Germany. that is a warfare strategy of civilised countries
Tribal warfare was usually an attempt to completely wipe out the enemy. That strategy, usually after a lengthy period of total war, was often successful. For instance, the Hurons were erased from the Great Lakes after a long ethnic cleansing campaign pressed by the Iroquois. "Heraclitus made the curious observation that Nature loves to hide, History too, loves to hide. The closer you look at the land, the more it conceals, and so the past becomes an unlikely, semi-mythical, at times unintelligible place. Only shadows and erasures and faint prints remain of the life that this land's first inhabitants knew." Kevin Honold, A Brief History of the Huron, P. 241. The Hudson Review, VOLUME LXXII NUMBER 2 SUMMER 2019, 10/15/2019.
civilised countries have expensive military's to upkeep, so they cleanse their own civilians to save on costs. not saying spear throwers wouldn't do the same
WWI - here’s a good read https://www.archive.org/stream/guiltofwilliamho00kautiala/guiltofwilliamho00kautiala_djvu.txt
The ethnic cleansing of tribal cultures was far more comprehensive - nation states never come close. TG "One author has very liberally estimated that more than 100 million people have died from all war related causes including famine and disease on our planet during this century. These deaths could be regarded as the price modern humanity has paid for being divided into nation-states. Yet this appalling figure is twenty times smaller than the losses that might have resulted if the world population were still organized into bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. A typical tribal society Lost about .5% of its population in combat each year (figure 6.1). Applying this casualty rate to the earth 20th-century populations are predicts more than 2 billion war deaths since 1900." WAR BEFORE CIVILIZATION, The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1996, p. 93.
agreed, in the bigger picture we cannot allow spear throwers to possess nuclear weapons. Mel Gibson's - Apocalypto - 2006 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypto
And that Central American culture with its human sacrifice and cannibalism would still make the list of civilized states. Tribal warfare and atrocities were even more horrific. "Of course, many tribal societies took no prisoners and retained no prisoners of any sex or age. The Chemehuevi of the Southwest and several tribes in California spared no one. Perhaps the harshest treatment of captives was meted out in Polynesia. The Tahitians are described as leaving enemy children into their mothers with spears or "pierced through the head and strung on cords." The Maoris sometimes disabled captive women so that they could not escape, permitting the Warriors to rape, kill, and eat them when it was more convenient to do so. Even in societies where captives were taken, once general killing started it could be difficult to stop. For example, in an Asmat head-hunting raid in New Guinea, anyone interested in saving a woman or child as a captive (something rarely done) experienced considerable difficulty in preventing his overexcited comrades from dispatching his chosen prisoners." WAR BEFORE CIVILIZATION, The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence H. Keeley, Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, 1996, p 67.
that explains why the aussies are an elite fighting force, they had to defeat the maoris for the land down under.
I have to believe that the various Mongol hordes must have been the most efficient and ruthless killers in history.
Most in this discussion have defaulted to measure in terms of casualties. But there measures, might be in terms of % casualties of the antagonists involved, % the population of the political entities involved in conflict or in terms of the % world’s population. Each provides a different perspective. Along with, defining weather casualties were the result of military arms, disease or the after effects (I.e, starvation).
I always thought that as well, but you have to take into account that there’s just no way of knowing, since you can’t compare since there was really no census of the populations that the Mongols put to the sword. Historians estimate like something 20 to 50 million people might have perished. But then again, the world’s population was not as much , compared to modern times. But, you are right, they were some brutal savages.