Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History episodes on WW1 (called Blueprint for Armageddon) has been fascinating to listen to. It’s been eye-opening to me how much WW2 has overshadowed this first conflict between several world powers.
It’s also been eye-opening how oblivious I have been to most of history. The whole reason for the conflict of WW1 was basically a Serbian dude assassinated the Archduke of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Within a week, basically all of Europe was at war with each other.
Throughout the podcast (and the war) it’s amazing to see how many times the same problems were run into over and over yet dealt with the same way. Constantly, generals were doing the exact same thing they or previous generals were doing before them, and were causing absolute slaughter to happen to the men beneath them in rank.
The podcast just spent a good while talking on the battle of Verdun – for good reason seeing as how the battle was basically a war in itself being 10-months long.
This battle basically crippled the French army. They had nothing left after this battle. Because of a rotation system to keep fresh men there, almost every man in the French army had experienced this place.
Again and again throughout the war these generals do the same things expecting different results or saying if they can just get one extra thing they’ll be able to accomplish what they want. And again and again, they sacrifice literally millions of human lives because of this.
Let’s learn from history for once instead of repeating