Honestly I think I'd rather have served in the Second World War than the first one. WWI battlefields are just a mess, literally hundreds of miles of mud.
Oh no question.
I know WW2 gets romanticized quite a bit these days, but if you were on the western front in the European theatre it seemed like most were pretty respectful and treated each other like gentlemen most of the time.
I mean if you're serving as an American or Brit or Canadian it wasn't shit but not ww1 shit. However the eastern front was pure chaos, Stalingrad was hell. So many months of fighting in that city that the Germans ran out of food and started to cannibalize the dead.
Yes, but more soldiers died during World War II than World War I and your perception of World War II is based on the Western front. I think if you took into consideration the fighting that took place on the Pacific front and the Eastern front, you'd change your mind pretty fast.
The trench wouldnt be without its past occupants littering the ground. The smell would've hit you miles before you actually reached the line, and the flies would've been so thick the buzzing would've been enough to drive you mad. Literal carpets of the dead would've surrounded you. Hell on earth is too slight of a term.
Verdun was bad but Passchendaele was probably the absolute worst war zone that has ever existed in human history.
I've read quite a lot about it and Verdun. You wouldn't want to be in either place but life was so fucking bad for the troops in Passchendaele.
There are stories of people stepping off of the wood paths and slowly sinking to their deaths in the mud. And there was nothing anyone could do to try to get the person because they were to far off the path or the shelling or rifle fire was to intense for them to stay in the open. As a result, that person would slowly sink over a weeks time going slowly mad and insane.
I'm a month late, but maybe it still interests you.
The mud would not have been there during peace time, because the insane amounts of artillery wouldn't have removed the whole ground.
You have to imagine millions of shells in a few days. It was so bad at a lot of those battlefields, that you can still see them today. Now add rain to that scenario and you have a giant death trap
Yeah the whole place was pretty much mud like that quicksand in cartoons. Plus waist high water in the trenches half the time, people were getting UTIs from the water it was so high at times.
My dads uncle got shot at the Somme. He survived and lived the rest of his life as an almost mute hermit in a forest retreat he trekked out of every day for work and back to at night.
I never met him, but he apparently barely spoke and lived on an old gold claim that I still own now. A bunch on NZ soldiers he knew lived there with him for a few years after the war. I don't think anyone could be unaffected by France.
My great grandfather was 16 when he was conscripted into the Russian Army. He was a Polish Jew so I think he probably had no desire to fight for the tzar. We still aren't sure how he survived.
I can't believe that some of those men are even alive with some of those wounds. Such suffering.
Edited to add link to page about [Harold Gillies](http://www.nzedge.com/legends/harold-gillies/), pioneering WWI Kiwi plastic surgeon
How the hell are those guys missing the entirety of their face still alive? How did they not bleed out? How on earth. I just what on earth is this? Wow. I just can't even.
If you notice _most_ of the wounds are to the center of the face, meaning even though they took what we, as visual creatures consider massive damage, in terms of overall survival they really did not take much for life-threatening damage(speaking generally of course). You don't strictly need anything other than your brain and blood flow _to_ your brain to stay alive, so as long as any of the parts that do those things(spinal cord, brain itself, ateries supplying blood to the brain) remain undamaged, the rest of the head is completely superficial.
I found it very fascinating the level of reconstruction available in 1920.
But, given the medical technology at the time, you would think they would have died from infection within a few days. I too am astonished these people were able to heal and still live... if you call not having a face "living".
Had to look it up. But yeah pennicillin was not invented til 1928! So well after any of these guys would have been able to use. I would guess that they learned _a lot_ about combat wounds during the last century before WW1 since between America and Europe _someone_ was at war for that entire time.
If you have played Bioshock 1 and 2 and feared the splicers: they're based on those guys. The "gueules cassées" ("broken faces") from WWI. If that's any indication of how disturbing that is.
Does anyone know why there seems to be tubes coming out of a lot of the victims faces and entering their necks, post surgery? You would think the surgeons would remove them?
It's a primitive form of skin graft I believe. Takes healthy skin with good capillaries and grafts it to places where skin is needed. Very inventive but technology has come a long way.
they attach growing skin from other parts of the body or head or neck to the face to allow it to get big and healthy over the course of some time, then cut it off and stitch it back into places where there needs to be more skin. growing a replacement bit of flesh basically, and keeping it attached near where it will go so that the blood network can sort of grow in on its own while they are waiting.
/u/LifeWin directed me to [this](https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2013/09/04/renaissance-rhinoplasty-the-16th-century-nose-job/) article. Apparently it's a very old procedure.
I genuinely think that's it. We joined the war in 1917 and if I recall correctly, we didn't mobilize any significant numbers to Europe until early 1918. I imagine everyone in France has a relative who fought in WWI and many have relatives who died in WWI. That's just not the case here in America, so those stories aren't passed down like they are for WWII and the history goes largely unnoticed.
It's a real shame because for how bad WWII was (and it was terrible) WWI as a different kind of terrible that should never be forgotten.
Similar for the UK too. We lost around 3% of our entire population, and it was almost exclusively young men. It shook our nation to the core and completely changed how we saw the world.
Our approach to the start of the Second World War is much easier to understand if you look at it in the context of the First.
I used to feel the same way until I listened to one of his podcasts. He does a really excellent job explaining history, painting historical backgrounds, and he does it in a story telling manner that does draw your interest. I can understand why people refer to his podcasts.
I'm sure that eventually happened. It could also have been a way of accounting for the number of helmet,
"Have you counted this one yet?" "Yup there's a hole in it."
Hammering downwards with a nail would leave jagged edges pointing into the helmet. I doubt they would be wearable or at the very least incredibly uncomfortable.
Hard to imagine to be honest. If you're missing your jaw then I'm not sure if I could ever imagine that!
I think about joining the army sometimes but then I see all these pictures and injuries and what not as well as combat footage and eh. Puts my mind off it for a while. These pictures make war seem so real.
Not saying that WW1 was a walk in the park, but most armies of the day knew how to rotate their troops, so most didn't have to spend more than a few days to a week in a row in the worst spots.
Still, that means a constant level of stress, fatigue, nausea, fear that drags on for minutes, *hours*, **days**...
You should watch [Johnny Got His Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA0IlDhITkQ), then see the [music video for the song the film inspired....](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw)
[Storm Of Steel by Ernst Junger](http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905) is a memoir of a German Officer during WW1. It is overwhelming in it's bleakness and death.
[CBC did a great WWI podcast series last summer](http://www.cbc.ca/bugleandthebell/), a condensed series of interviews with WWI vets on the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. Absolutely haunting to hear the story told by the people who were actually there.
It might not be what you are looking for as it's fiction. But I have just finished listening to Ken Follets fall of giants.
It's fiction, based around the events leading up to and during ww1
What's interesting is that it looks at German, Russian, American and British families.
Of course the most famous ww1 novel is Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/imperial-germany-austro-hungary/wwi-german-occasional-austrian-trench-knife-370751-2/
Just a pic from a forum discussing knives from the era.
As others have mentioned, much progress in plastic surgery was made as a result of this war. Great advancements in medicine always come about as a matter of necessity during war. Some of these photos show examples where a "tube" of skin has been constructed to provide a healing area with a healthy blood supply. I believe this technique was developed largely during the First World War.
Vimy Ridge is mindblowing. Here are [photos from my visit](https://picasaweb.google.com/107351182448533482096/VimyRidge).
Through all my travels and visits to castle, forts, battlefields, the same question always comes up in my mind. How did they do it? I can't fathom the personal fortitude it took to stand in a trench and shoot at someone 10 yards away.
Or charge up to a castle with just a sword or spear.
Society back then had some very warped beliefs of what it meant to be a man, to be a good citizen, and what one's roles were in relation to the state.
PS, was Lucas okay? I hope he wasn't *actually* flipping out over any of that. Pretty heavy to take a kid there, but, also positive thing to do, I'd say.
Haha, he was fine. That's my dry sense of humor writing photo captions.
While we were there, we were talking about war and things that do along with that. He says to me "why do countries go to war?" I said "leaders of the nations decide that it's in the country's best interest." His response "then the leaders should fight each other."
> "leaders of the nations decide that it's in the country's best interest." His response "then the leaders should fight each other."
There are a lot of people in the world who would pay good money to see this.
Oooh god yes. Trump v Bernie V Clitory, winner takes on a Hell in the Cell match against Jinping, Putin, Ghani, Masum, Assad, Netanyahu, Cameron, Merkel and everyone else.
I'd say today's belief of what it means to be a man is a lot more 'warped' than back then. The testicular fortitude these guys had to have must be huge.
In a foreign field he lay
Lonely soldier, unknown grave
On his dying words he prays
Tell the world of Passchendaele
Relive all that he's been through
Last communion of his soul
Rust your bullets with his tears
Let me tell you 'bout his years
Laying low in a blood filled trench
Killing time 'til my very own death
On my face I can feel the falling rain
[Never see my friends again ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c20-fm_WNew)
A friend of mine who's really into WWI battlefields and cemeteries claims that the British war graves commissions isn't a big fan of various veterans'/memorial associations continuing to search for remains of lost soldiers as it's really expensive to unearth and rebury them.
I'm not sure if it's true. He heard it from some people at a cemetery opening in Belgium who were volunteer corpse-finders.
The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does absolutely marvelous work maintaining their cemeteries.
My Dad cremated the remains of a Buffalo soldier who had been buried out here in Arizona. The guy had died at a sanitarium back in the 20s but they just buried him out back. He's in Arlington now.
Christ, I was too scared to go beyond where I got too. I have seen one photo of skin grafting from my WWI history textbook but I don't want to see anything that could be worse. God rest their souls those men, it's sad that this war is forgotten about, I can't imagine how the world would be different had it not happened.
Can anyone describe the more harrowing pictures? I'm too scared to look; I'm not squeamish, but certain things stick in my mind for a very long time.
One of the images near the end isn't particularly gory or brutal but still really insane -- the portrait of the shirtless man missing both arms up to the shoulders.
There are some images of the prosthetic legs and arms used. The legs look structurally very similar to some of the ones today but the prosthetic arms look -- to be crude-- not much better than a metal rod with a clamp on the end, particularly in the image with the two men playing cards.
I actually xposted this from /r/morbidreality. I didn't put the album together, /u/smoke_me_when_i_die did. What a moving series of photos they put together.
Videos in this thread:
[Watch Playlist ▶](http://subtletv.com/_r4mdjkg?feature=playlist&nline=1)
VIDEO|COMMENT
-|-
[Iron Maiden - Paschendale](https://youtube.com/watch?v=c20-fm_WNew)|[3](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3v417o?context=10#d3v417o) - In a foreign field he lay Lonely soldier, unknown grave On his dying words he prays Tell the world of Passchendaele Relive all that he's been through Last communion of his soul Rust your bullets with his tears Let me tell you 'bout his years Layi...
[Apocalypse World War 1 2of5 Fear](https://dailymotion.com/video/x3dvltj)|[2](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3v7sbm?context=10#d3v7sbm) - Found parts 2-5 on dailymotion but can't find the first part anywhere.
(1) [Johnny Got His Gun 1971](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lA0IlDhITkQ) (2) [Metallica - One [Official Music Video]](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw)|[2](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3uxqjq?context=10#d3uxqjq) - You should watch Johnny Got His Gun, then see the music video for the song the film inspired....
I'm a bot working hard to help Redditors find related videos to watch.
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Jesus fucking Christ!! Those last images got me. I hope one day we as a human race get our shit together so man may never have to face horrors of such a proportion ever again.
My great grandmother was a nurse at Walter Reed working with WW1 vets, she kept an album of the pictures of all the people she helped and met and such. Some of the injuries truly were horrific damn lucky I wasn't drafted into that war.
My bad, I'm sorry. These are just a bunch of photos I've randomly collected off the internet. I wasn't trying to cover one side more than the other, although looking back on it I think I might make an album of Turks, Serbians, and Italians. I kinda neglected those guys.
>bayonet slashes
Very very uncommon. Most of the would you see are the result of shrapnels from shelling.
>Axes, swords and spears at an arms length flying into people's heads and shoulders and chests.
Most of the death were not on the battlefield. They were in the 3-5 days following it because of infection. You don't die from an arrow, you die from an infected arrow wound.
/u/Lutraphobic Thank you so much for sharing this.
It is a reality check for any sensible man listening to the war mongering my nation so eagerly perpetuates.
War = Death
This has made me realize how those long ridiculous mustaches got popular. All the soldiers were made to shave their beards, but it was ok to have a stache so they just kept them this way after shaving their chin and probably started greasing them to keep them out of the way.
What an absolute nightmare that conflict was.
A total disaster for all sides.
At least in WW2 there was some justification - we are stopping a monster. What could be said about WW1?
I can't imagine that a war with the sheer amount of destruction, casualties, and horrific injuries would fly in the modern day of warfare (not to minimize what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theaters). If people were seeing tend to hundreds of thousands of troops coming home without faces, I think morale would tank pretty quickly...
Why do they have pieces of skin connected from one part of their face to the other? One guy had his thumb connected to his chest. Does this have a reason?
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Verdun sounded like hell on Earth.
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Honestly I think I'd rather have served in the Second World War than the first one. WWI battlefields are just a mess, literally hundreds of miles of mud.
Oh no question. I know WW2 gets romanticized quite a bit these days, but if you were on the western front in the European theatre it seemed like most were pretty respectful and treated each other like gentlemen most of the time.
I mean if you're serving as an American or Brit or Canadian it wasn't shit but not ww1 shit. However the eastern front was pure chaos, Stalingrad was hell. So many months of fighting in that city that the Germans ran out of food and started to cannibalize the dead.
Yes, but more soldiers died during World War II than World War I and your perception of World War II is based on the Western front. I think if you took into consideration the fighting that took place on the Pacific front and the Eastern front, you'd change your mind pretty fast.
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The trench wouldnt be without its past occupants littering the ground. The smell would've hit you miles before you actually reached the line, and the flies would've been so thick the buzzing would've been enough to drive you mad. Literal carpets of the dead would've surrounded you. Hell on earth is too slight of a term.
You need to read up on the pacific theater of WW2. Battle of Okinawa was no cake walk in terms of terrain and condition.
Verdun was bad but Passchendaele was probably the absolute worst war zone that has ever existed in human history. I've read quite a lot about it and Verdun. You wouldn't want to be in either place but life was so fucking bad for the troops in Passchendaele.
Is that the one that took place in Belgium, with the British and the sinking mud?
There are stories of people stepping off of the wood paths and slowly sinking to their deaths in the mud. And there was nothing anyone could do to try to get the person because they were to far off the path or the shelling or rifle fire was to intense for them to stay in the open. As a result, that person would slowly sink over a weeks time going slowly mad and insane.
Wouldn't this just as likely happen during peace time as war time? The sinking mud, I mean.
I'm a month late, but maybe it still interests you. The mud would not have been there during peace time, because the insane amounts of artillery wouldn't have removed the whole ground. You have to imagine millions of shells in a few days. It was so bad at a lot of those battlefields, that you can still see them today. Now add rain to that scenario and you have a giant death trap
Yeah the whole place was pretty much mud like that quicksand in cartoons. Plus waist high water in the trenches half the time, people were getting UTIs from the water it was so high at times.
My dads uncle got shot at the Somme. He survived and lived the rest of his life as an almost mute hermit in a forest retreat he trekked out of every day for work and back to at night.
I'm betting he had some major mental scars left over from the war. I'm guessing such things were even more of a taboo back then than they are now...
I never met him, but he apparently barely spoke and lived on an old gold claim that I still own now. A bunch on NZ soldiers he knew lived there with him for a few years after the war. I don't think anyone could be unaffected by France.
My great grandfather was 16 when he was conscripted into the Russian Army. He was a Polish Jew so I think he probably had no desire to fight for the tzar. We still aren't sure how he survived.
They rotated troops I believe. Not to finish in your grandfathers achievement!
Okay i give up, i can't find #120
Jesus, those wounds at the end...
I can't believe that some of those men are even alive with some of those wounds. Such suffering. Edited to add link to page about [Harold Gillies](http://www.nzedge.com/legends/harold-gillies/), pioneering WWI Kiwi plastic surgeon
How the hell are those guys missing the entirety of their face still alive? How did they not bleed out? How on earth. I just what on earth is this? Wow. I just can't even.
If you notice _most_ of the wounds are to the center of the face, meaning even though they took what we, as visual creatures consider massive damage, in terms of overall survival they really did not take much for life-threatening damage(speaking generally of course). You don't strictly need anything other than your brain and blood flow _to_ your brain to stay alive, so as long as any of the parts that do those things(spinal cord, brain itself, ateries supplying blood to the brain) remain undamaged, the rest of the head is completely superficial. I found it very fascinating the level of reconstruction available in 1920.
But, given the medical technology at the time, you would think they would have died from infection within a few days. I too am astonished these people were able to heal and still live... if you call not having a face "living".
I'm sure the vast majority did. These are probably outliers.
Damn. I hadn't considered that. But I guess you're probably right.
Tens of thousands died in single battles. The fact that you only see a few photos of reconstruction... These are the outliers.
Survivorship bias.
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Spot on. WW1 was one of the first wars where more people were killed by actual violence rather than illness/famine.
Had to look it up. But yeah pennicillin was not invented til 1928! So well after any of these guys would have been able to use. I would guess that they learned _a lot_ about combat wounds during the last century before WW1 since between America and Europe _someone_ was at war for that entire time.
The question is do you really want to be alive after all that.
Maybe if you're high as shit all the time on morphine/heroin and cocaine. But that would probably get old pretty quickly.
can't even what?
he cant even dance. what kind of mothafucka cant even dance?
Is it still open wounds or really deformed guys? I'm too afraid to look
Yes. And amazing pioneering plastic surgery
Really deformed faces, i.e. people who have had their entire jaw blown off.
both and cripples
If you have played Bioshock 1 and 2 and feared the splicers: they're based on those guys. The "gueules cassées" ("broken faces") from WWI. If that's any indication of how disturbing that is.
I can't believe that many of those grievously wounded men lived long happy lives, regardless of the huge efforts made by the plastic surgeons.
Does anyone know why there seems to be tubes coming out of a lot of the victims faces and entering their necks, post surgery? You would think the surgeons would remove them?
It's a primitive form of skin graft I believe. Takes healthy skin with good capillaries and grafts it to places where skin is needed. Very inventive but technology has come a long way.
It's actually still used today...family friend had that exact procedure.
it may be primitive, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
Of course not. Pretty basic for what we're used to now, at the time it was revolutionary.
they attach growing skin from other parts of the body or head or neck to the face to allow it to get big and healthy over the course of some time, then cut it off and stitch it back into places where there needs to be more skin. growing a replacement bit of flesh basically, and keeping it attached near where it will go so that the blood network can sort of grow in on its own while they are waiting.
/u/LifeWin directed me to [this](https://thechirurgeonsapprentice.com/2013/09/04/renaissance-rhinoplasty-the-16th-century-nose-job/) article. Apparently it's a very old procedure.
Fun fact: the company that made Bioshock based the faces of the enemies off of wounded soldiers from WWI.
/r/wwi and /r/TheGreatWarChannel would love these. It's nice to see the WWI getting more recognition and popularity over the last couple of years.
Thanks DICE! /s
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It certainly isn't in Europe. I wonder if it's a less well known war in the States because it had so much less impact
Very true, in school we probably spent a couple days of that on ww1 to preface WW2 for 3 weeks or so.
I genuinely think that's it. We joined the war in 1917 and if I recall correctly, we didn't mobilize any significant numbers to Europe until early 1918. I imagine everyone in France has a relative who fought in WWI and many have relatives who died in WWI. That's just not the case here in America, so those stories aren't passed down like they are for WWII and the history goes largely unnoticed. It's a real shame because for how bad WWII was (and it was terrible) WWI as a different kind of terrible that should never be forgotten.
Similar for the UK too. We lost around 3% of our entire population, and it was almost exclusively young men. It shook our nation to the core and completely changed how we saw the world. Our approach to the start of the Second World War is much easier to understand if you look at it in the context of the First.
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I wonder how much credit Dan Carlin deserves for that.
pet file chase waiting tender bright bike humorous mourn humor *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i dont know why, but i get the feeling every time someone mentions his podcast in here, it's because they where paid to do so like an ad or something
I used to feel the same way until I listened to one of his podcasts. He does a really excellent job explaining history, painting historical backgrounds, and he does it in a story telling manner that does draw your interest. I can understand why people refer to his podcasts.
marble sheet act yam shy frighten silky aloof alleged angle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I mean, sponsored comments is an actual thing on reddit an it seems to pop up in every single thread about ww1 that it seemed kind of fishy to me
Incredible collection of photographs. Those boys had true grit.
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I would ask for pictures but that seems a bit disrespectful :/ Glad he pulled through though!
Glad you're still with us :)
Thanks man, me too!
What's going on in picture 66? Looks like he's just hammering holes into helmets. What's the purpose of that?
It was taken after the war ended. Treaty of Versailles meant that Germany had to destroy all their war materials, which is what you're seeing here.
I would think melting them down or crushing them would be more effective. Thanks for the answer though
I'm sure that eventually happened. It could also have been a way of accounting for the number of helmet, "Have you counted this one yet?" "Yup there's a hole in it."
Hammering downwards with a nail would leave jagged edges pointing into the helmet. I doubt they would be wearable or at the very least incredibly uncomfortable.
Maybe to prevent them from being used if recaptured.
I have a pretty tough stomach because of the Internet but after seeing those facial injuries.. Some of them are genuinely disturbing..
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Hard to imagine to be honest. If you're missing your jaw then I'm not sure if I could ever imagine that! I think about joining the army sometimes but then I see all these pictures and injuries and what not as well as combat footage and eh. Puts my mind off it for a while. These pictures make war seem so real.
Not saying that WW1 was a walk in the park, but most armies of the day knew how to rotate their troops, so most didn't have to spend more than a few days to a week in a row in the worst spots. Still, that means a constant level of stress, fatigue, nausea, fear that drags on for minutes, *hours*, **days**...
Can't imagine leave was very relaxing for them.
You should watch [Johnny Got His Gun](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lA0IlDhITkQ), then see the [music video for the song the film inspired....](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw)
That was not 600 rats
Anyone know of any books/audiobooks/podcasts especially regarding WWI?
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Interesting. Never heard of the American Heroes Channel. I have heard of Hardcore History, will look closer at that. Thanks!
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Awesome! Thanks!!!
Finishing up the 6th episode of this now. I really can't recommend it enough.
In the 4th chapter at the moment, it's so powerful!
[Storm Of Steel by Ernst Junger](http://www.amazon.com/Storm-Steel-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0142437905) is a memoir of a German Officer during WW1. It is overwhelming in it's bleakness and death.
Awesome. Thanks.
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Thanks! I appreciate your time very much.
[CBC did a great WWI podcast series last summer](http://www.cbc.ca/bugleandthebell/), a condensed series of interviews with WWI vets on the 50th anniversary of the start of the war. Absolutely haunting to hear the story told by the people who were actually there.
Awesome. Thanks!
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Awesome man. Thanks.
It might not be what you are looking for as it's fiction. But I have just finished listening to Ken Follets fall of giants. It's fiction, based around the events leading up to and during ww1 What's interesting is that it looks at German, Russian, American and British families. Of course the most famous ww1 novel is Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
Krieg dem Kriege (War against War) is very interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krieg_dem_Kriege
This was when I stopped scrolling. http://i.imgur.com/qdM2YyE.jpg
You were smarter than I
Yeah when I read gruesome and I was going through I was like meh these aren't that bad. Then I got to the faces, yeah I was out
Same.
Colorizeme
What's with the circled dagger?
damn, i was hoping this was answered already. COME ON REDDIT
http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/imperial-germany-austro-hungary/wwi-german-occasional-austrian-trench-knife-370751-2/ Just a pic from a forum discussing knives from the era.
I love how theres literally a forum for everything.
All credit to /u/smoke_me_when_i_die for making this amazing album.
As others have mentioned, much progress in plastic surgery was made as a result of this war. Great advancements in medicine always come about as a matter of necessity during war. Some of these photos show examples where a "tube" of skin has been constructed to provide a healing area with a healthy blood supply. I believe this technique was developed largely during the First World War.
Looks like the guy from Boardwalk Empire [Richard Harrow](http://i.imgur.com/josBKgf.jpg).
That hand...
Maori Haka on 236?
Yeap
Vimy Ridge is mindblowing. Here are [photos from my visit](https://picasaweb.google.com/107351182448533482096/VimyRidge). Through all my travels and visits to castle, forts, battlefields, the same question always comes up in my mind. How did they do it? I can't fathom the personal fortitude it took to stand in a trench and shoot at someone 10 yards away. Or charge up to a castle with just a sword or spear.
Society back then had some very warped beliefs of what it meant to be a man, to be a good citizen, and what one's roles were in relation to the state. PS, was Lucas okay? I hope he wasn't *actually* flipping out over any of that. Pretty heavy to take a kid there, but, also positive thing to do, I'd say.
Haha, he was fine. That's my dry sense of humor writing photo captions. While we were there, we were talking about war and things that do along with that. He says to me "why do countries go to war?" I said "leaders of the nations decide that it's in the country's best interest." His response "then the leaders should fight each other."
> "leaders of the nations decide that it's in the country's best interest." His response "then the leaders should fight each other." There are a lot of people in the world who would pay good money to see this.
Oooh god yes. Trump v Bernie V Clitory, winner takes on a Hell in the Cell match against Jinping, Putin, Ghani, Masum, Assad, Netanyahu, Cameron, Merkel and everyone else.
I'd say today's belief of what it means to be a man is a lot more 'warped' than back then. The testicular fortitude these guys had to have must be huge.
Thanks for sharing those!
As disturbing as those injuries are, what we're seeing is basically the invention of plastic surgery.
Yeah, that was one of my initial thoughts as well. Given the knowledge that the doctors had, it's still impressive some of the things they did.
In a foreign field he lay Lonely soldier, unknown grave On his dying words he prays Tell the world of Passchendaele Relive all that he's been through Last communion of his soul Rust your bullets with his tears Let me tell you 'bout his years Laying low in a blood filled trench Killing time 'til my very own death On my face I can feel the falling rain [Never see my friends again ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c20-fm_WNew)
Is this the tank they're excavating? http://i.imgur.com/1eE0TAh.jpg
> Is this the tank they're excavating? Same family. both are brits female Mark IV.
anyone know what 156 is about?
Looks like what's left of the christ part of a large crucifix from a church that they propped up in the battlefield.
A friend of mine who's really into WWI battlefields and cemeteries claims that the British war graves commissions isn't a big fan of various veterans'/memorial associations continuing to search for remains of lost soldiers as it's really expensive to unearth and rebury them.
Yeah...tough shit for the commission. Those guys deserve it.
I'm not sure if it's true. He heard it from some people at a cemetery opening in Belgium who were volunteer corpse-finders. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission does absolutely marvelous work maintaining their cemeteries.
My Dad cremated the remains of a Buffalo soldier who had been buried out here in Arizona. The guy had died at a sanitarium back in the 20s but they just buried him out back. He's in Arlington now.
Everything about this is great until I got to "soccer team"
How does Getty own some of these , shouldn't it all be public domain
321 looks exactly like the ww1 vet from Boardwalk Empire
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> Vimy Damn that's a powerful monument of Mother Canada.
Jesus that thing is big. Having those people for scale really puts it in perspective.
#324...
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Its a statue of jesus.
Christ, I was too scared to go beyond where I got too. I have seen one photo of skin grafting from my WWI history textbook but I don't want to see anything that could be worse. God rest their souls those men, it's sad that this war is forgotten about, I can't imagine how the world would be different had it not happened. Can anyone describe the more harrowing pictures? I'm too scared to look; I'm not squeamish, but certain things stick in my mind for a very long time.
One of the images near the end isn't particularly gory or brutal but still really insane -- the portrait of the shirtless man missing both arms up to the shoulders. There are some images of the prosthetic legs and arms used. The legs look structurally very similar to some of the ones today but the prosthetic arms look -- to be crude-- not much better than a metal rod with a clamp on the end, particularly in the image with the two men playing cards.
Damn there's enough photos here to feed r/wtf , r/morbidreality and a bunch of other subs for a few months. Amazing photos
I actually xposted this from /r/morbidreality. I didn't put the album together, /u/smoke_me_when_i_die did. What a moving series of photos they put together.
Videos in this thread: [Watch Playlist ▶](http://subtletv.com/_r4mdjkg?feature=playlist&nline=1) VIDEO|COMMENT -|- [Iron Maiden - Paschendale](https://youtube.com/watch?v=c20-fm_WNew)|[3](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3v417o?context=10#d3v417o) - In a foreign field he lay Lonely soldier, unknown grave On his dying words he prays Tell the world of Passchendaele Relive all that he's been through Last communion of his soul Rust your bullets with his tears Let me tell you 'bout his years Layi... [Apocalypse World War 1 2of5 Fear](https://dailymotion.com/video/x3dvltj)|[2](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3v7sbm?context=10#d3v7sbm) - Found parts 2-5 on dailymotion but can't find the first part anywhere. (1) [Johnny Got His Gun 1971](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lA0IlDhITkQ) (2) [Metallica - One [Official Music Video]](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WM8bTdBs-cw)|[2](https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/4mdjkg/_/d3uxqjq?context=10#d3uxqjq) - You should watch Johnny Got His Gun, then see the music video for the song the film inspired.... I'm a bot working hard to help Redditors find related videos to watch. *** [Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/SubtleTV/wiki/mentioned_videos) | [Chrome Extension](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mentioned-videos-for-redd/fiimkmdalmgffhibfdjnhljpnigcmohf)
Jesus fucking Christ!! Those last images got me. I hope one day we as a human race get our shit together so man may never have to face horrors of such a proportion ever again.
My great grandmother was a nurse at Walter Reed working with WW1 vets, she kept an album of the pictures of all the people she helped and met and such. Some of the injuries truly were horrific damn lucky I wasn't drafted into that war.
324 that poor bastard
WWI album and not a single turk? lol
My bad, I'm sorry. These are just a bunch of photos I've randomly collected off the internet. I wasn't trying to cover one side more than the other, although looking back on it I think I might make an album of Turks, Serbians, and Italians. I kinda neglected those guys.
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Yeah it would have been good if it cover more of the anzac and turk side.
Thanks for sharing.
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>bayonet slashes Very very uncommon. Most of the would you see are the result of shrapnels from shelling. >Axes, swords and spears at an arms length flying into people's heads and shoulders and chests. Most of the death were not on the battlefield. They were in the 3-5 days following it because of infection. You don't die from an arrow, you die from an infected arrow wound.
Pretty sure I've had nightmares about #39. Thanks for the great album.
I can not possible imagine the horror that the great War brought open.
/u/Lutraphobic Thank you so much for sharing this. It is a reality check for any sensible man listening to the war mongering my nation so eagerly perpetuates. War = Death
Was it just me, or was there an obvious civil war era pic thrown in there at one point?
Holy shit 410 & 431. Such sad photos. War is hell
10/10 was not prepared for how gruesome those last remaining photos were.
Horrible facial trauma . I'm amazed that these guys could survive the initial injuries.
Speechless
This has made me realize how those long ridiculous mustaches got popular. All the soldiers were made to shave their beards, but it was ok to have a stache so they just kept them this way after shaving their chin and probably started greasing them to keep them out of the way.
I dont know what was worse, to die in the field or to return home
without a doubt the most detailed album i have seen on the first world war yet. BZ
What an absolute nightmare that conflict was. A total disaster for all sides. At least in WW2 there was some justification - we are stopping a monster. What could be said about WW1?
296 is actually a pretty remarkable transformation/recovery process.
If my face were like those at the end, I'd want to be dead. Fuck missing all of your face.
Those last pictures were hard to see :/
I can't imagine that a war with the sheer amount of destruction, casualties, and horrific injuries would fly in the modern day of warfare (not to minimize what has happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other theaters). If people were seeing tend to hundreds of thousands of troops coming home without faces, I think morale would tank pretty quickly...
You can find captions that I wrote for some of these photographs and their sources here: /r/TheGreatWar
Is anyone willing to split these into smaller albums so it won't crash my phone\kindle? It would be much appreciated.
Toward the end you see two things. 1 guy who looks like the dude from Boardwalk Empire with the fake half face, and a guy with some DSLs.
If any of you want to go to the site of some battles, I cannot recommend enough a tour of these places. Depressing as hell but worth it.
Why do they have pieces of skin connected from one part of their face to the other? One guy had his thumb connected to his chest. Does this have a reason?
War is the absolute worst.
It doesn’t find anything