War is Hell: What everyone knows about war is wrong, thanks to the movies (funny true stuff) by SIGNYM

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War is Hell: What everyone knows about war is wrong, thanks to the movies (funny true stuff)

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 29, 2015 00:27
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Sunday, September 20, 2015 12:26 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

YANNO THOSE LISTICLES? The ones designed to grab your eyes and take you to a website you would never have gone to to otherwise??? Yeah, THOSE listicles??

Well, I'm a sucker for them. Most of them are pretty meh, but every now and again I find one informative as well as being funny. Maybe I was having a major geek-spike, but I thought this was worth passing along. Hope you find it interesting too!

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Even if you've never been to war, you probably think you can spot where war movies get it wrong. Surely the Spartans didn't really go into battle wearing nothing but capes and loincloths, and obviously dudes aren't picking up heavy machine guns and mowing down entire armies, Rambo-style. But if you start to really delve into what war movies get wrong, you find out the answer is everything. Even the stuff that looks fairly authentic.

Common myths include ...
#5. "Ancient Battles Started With A Charge And Turned Into Melee Combat"

Where You Have Seen It:

Return Of The King, Braveheart, 300, 300: Rise Of An Empire, King Arthur, every single other movie in that genre

Two armies are lined up against each other on a field. The generals give the order to charge, and both armies will hold a disciplined formation for, oh, about one minute... At that point, any semblance of a formation comes apart as the troops just run-scream their way into a massive melee, Braveheart-style.

But Actually ...

Sure, some brave people used to fight like that. Or, rather, tried to. You know what history calls them now? Losers, or "I'm sorry, who?"

The reason the armies of ancient Macedonians and Romans tended to win against less organized folk (say, the Celts) is not because each and every one of their soldiers was more ferocious in single combat. It's because their professional troops stayed in those boring, organized formations and specifically avoided just charging into battle. Their well-armored and disciplined troops formed up into ranks and pushed their way down the field, one step at a time. That first minute of battle in the 300 clip was surprisingly accurate ... before everyone suddenly turned on Matrix Mode and gained the power to slow down time.

...

3. "Pretty Much Everyone On The Losing Side Dies"
Where You Have Seen It:

The Last Samurai, Platoon, Gladiator, Braveheart, Stannis' last stand on Game Of Thrones

The battle is over, and the dust has settled. Fallen men carpet the ground in all directions. The few surviving main characters look around and take solace in the fact that they are one of the lucky ones who managed to make it through. The opposing side has either been killed to a man, or the few still living turn tail and run.

("Spare the one they call 'Tom Cruise.' He is the chosen white one.")
The moral of the story: War is hell.

It sure is. But not because everyone ends up dead. You'd actually be hard-pressed to find a complete battlefield massacre anywhere outside a particularly bloodthirsty Call Of Duty session. Even a rare super-battle like WWI's Battle Of Verdun -- generally considered one of the deadliest battles in human history -- saw the majority of soldiers walk away with life and limb intact....

If you want to see real wartime destruction, head to the nearest military hospital instead. The biggest killer in all of mankind's battlefields is, hands down, disease.

The reason there are so few actual combat casualties by comparison has to do with our next myth ...

2. "Everyone Is Actively Trying To Murder Each Other"
Where You Have Seen It:

Pretty much any movie made about war

The one constant theme in war movies is, of course, people on opposing sides trying to kill each other. It doesn't matter whether it's ancient Greece, feudal Japan, or WWII-era France: In every war, every man is trying his best to kill the enemy. They don't necessarily like it, but they have to; because if they don't, the other side will gleefully kill their asses. If anyone refuses to participate in the battle, he's singled out as a coward. To win, we need every man to give his all, dammit!

("They may take our lives- I'M OUT!")

But Actually ...

You know what the vast majority of people are really, really uncomfortable with? Murdering random people that they have never met. So they skip that part of the warrin' experience. At least, most of them do.

After WWII, the U.S. military did studies on how many men would shoot at the enemy on their own accord. The results showed that only about 15 to 20 percent of men would voluntarily fire upon the enemy. The rest just would not fire unless an officer was present and specifically ordering them to do so.

("The only thing I see are the insides of my eyelids. Wait for orders.")

That's probably how it was for most of history -- most people just stayed out of it. It has changed recently, thanks to professional armies (that is, people who actually want to be there as opposed to conscripts or draftees) and conditioning techniques specifically designed to dehumanize the enemy and make killing easier*. By the time the Vietnam War rolled around, the U.S. military had managed to hitch its soldiers' fire rate up to 90 to 95 percent. But even this doesn't mean they were actually trying to hit the target.

Yeah, it turns out U.S. troops fired 52,000 rounds for every single human they hit during the Vietnam War. It's almost like there was a connection between this and that thing we just told you about most battles having surprisingly small fatality rates, and how full-on bayonet charges barely managed to kill anyone. Could it be people have been trying to deliberately miss each other as much as they can get away with? It's almost as if people don't actually enjoy war.

"Enemy Rifles And Machine Guns Are The Real Danger; Artillery Is Just Background Noise"
Where You Have Seen It:

Saving Private Ryan[Nathan Fillion!], Band Of Brothers, Gettysburg, All Quiet On The Western Front, War Horse, The Pacific

A group of soldiers is charging an enemy position, as dirt gets kicked up all around them from exploding shells. A couple extras may even get thrown screaming through the air, but for the most part you know all those artillery explosions are there mainly to create ambience. As long as the troops either keep quickly moving or find cover, we know they will probably be OK.

("You got dirt on my uniform, you Nazi bastards!")

But Actually ...

Look, we kind of understand that Hollywood mainly treats artillery as an afterthought -- they've spent decades convincing us that skeleton-liquifying explosions are a mere inconvenience.

In reality, however, artillery is your absolute worst fucking enemy on the battlefield. Machine gun pits can be -- and often are, as evidenced by our significant cache of war hero articles -- taken out by a single guy with a serious case of the Rambos. As for snipers, they're generally not considered weapons of mass destruction, unless you're up against The White Death himself. Artillery, however, has been the primary combat-related killer during most every period of warfare, from the invention of gunpowder to WWII. In WWI, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of enemy-inflicted casualties were from artillery, while machine guns and rifles were busy huddling in the corner and hoping Spanish Flu didn't find them.

More at ...

http://www.cracked.com/article_22750_5-stupid-war-myths-everyone-belie
ves-thanks-to-movies.html

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* Hmmm... who here is so conditioned and willing to dehumanize people that you can reliably point them, like a stupid gun, and they will be willing to kill this group today, another group tomorrow, and a third group the day after, just with the turn of a phrase? Hmm.... I can't imagine who....

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Tuesday, September 29, 2015 12:27 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

"Enemy Rifles And Machine Guns Are The Real Danger; Artillery Is Just Background Noise"

During WWII the Russians - Zhukov notably - drove the Germans back with artillery as the opener. First Russian artillery hammered the German lines from a distance. Tanks followed next, and then infantry. It was an almost-never fail sequence.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

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