Which world war was more brutal and devastating?

What a completely fucking nonsensical statement.

But, that's what you get when you ask that sort of question expecting people who don't know dick about life and war to answer.

Both WW1 and WW2 were terrible. WW1 had alot of artillery deaths probably more then gunshot. WW2 alot also died in the cold which is worse then combat casualties in some battles.

The one we're in. Apparently it has caused a horrendous ammount of suicides and lead to anxiety in a large part of the population.

WW1 Western front vs WW2 Eastern front

You decide

Both were definitely hodgepodges of misery. but World War 2 upped the scale to where everyone felt the effect of the war, not just soldiers in a field.

In World War I, civilians sitting in Bordeaux or Edinburgh never really saw the effects of the war on their city. everything went on like normal except a lot of your friends and relatives went off to fight and lot of them didn't come back.

A notable except can be made for Russia and Belgium, where they did have have civilians living in occupation zones, Belgium was sort of the harbinger of things to come for the following killing spree the German army committed against Belgian civilians, believing them all to be potential snipers or saboteurs.

During World War 2, if you were in the war and not from the US or fucking nowhere Siberia, the war was something you felt and experienced. From Wehrmacht soldiers on every street corner in Copenhagen to Englishmen hiding in subway tunnels during the blitz. From entire cities in Yugoslavia and Poland being erased from the map for resisting occupation, to an entire generation of people dying in the Steppes of Russia. Everyone felt the wrath of World War 2, where over 2% of the entire planet's population was killed as a direct result, and over 5-8% of the planet rendered homeless from the resulting destruction.

Dying was a gift for Russians, back then.

Meh, Timur's campaigns caused the death of 5% of the world's population. He was just one man. And he was even Timur the Cool, he was Timur the Lame.

WW1 made 2 look like fucking easy street.

>brutal
Depends entirely on the front of each respective war. Given a choice between the Western front fo WW1 and the Eastern front of WW2, I'm not sure which one I'd find worse.

WW1 was much more damaging to the psyche of Western Civilization and would have more important political ramification, though. War would be forever ruined as a romantic notion, we had an entire generation of seemingly listless and lost people (hence the term "lost Generation"). Let's not forget that WW1 completely destroyed the old world and ushered in the world as we know it. Centuries old Empires dissolved/cannablizing themselves, communist takeovers of nations become a real threat, colonial empires start to become more liability as the remaining colonial powers overextend themselves by taking on their former enemies' colonies, the stage is set for fascism to have its time in the limelight. In short, WW1 set the stage for WW2 and the modern world. It's really more accurate on the large scale to view WW1 and 2 as two parts of a larger conflict spanning the first half of the 20th century with a 20 year pause between the two.

Those poor Iranian, getting smacked first by Genghis, and then by Timur a couple of decades later.

>WW1 was much more damaging to the psyche of Western Civilization and would have more important political ramification, though
Are you retarded? Oh, right. You are.

Excellent refutation.

He's right though.

WW1 is pretty much the forgotten war. It's known mainly as the WW that came before the main one. Your average layman can rattle off 5 WW2 generals. He would have a hard time naming two WW1 generals. Stalingard, battle of Denmark strait, Iwo Jima, Midway, Kursk, etc are all individually magnitudes better known than any single battle from WW1. There are hundreds more movies and books about WW2. The world order from 1945 to 1990 was decided by the resolution of WW2, not WW1.

>WW1 is pretty much the forgotten war.

0/10 bait

>there are more movies about it so it's more important

That could be the worst argument I've ever seen on Veeky Forums, and that's really saying something. I've been here for years.

WW1 since it also changed how people thought about wars and destroyed the old romanticized version of it.

Falkenhyne
Hindenburg
Ludendorf
Currie
Petain

there you go 5 ww1 generals.
faggot

>Battle of Denmark strait
>Iwo Jima
>Midway
>Kursk
>known better than Verdun or Gallipoli

haahahahahhahahahahhaha thanks Veeky Forums for a good laugh

Same goes for WW2. Retard

The term lost generation is because they are all dead you fucking idiot

ww1 was a war for some land near turkey or wherever

ww1 was a war of survival for many nations and peoples

if a different side won ww1, not much would've changed, but if a different side won ww2... well, there still probably wouldn't be nazi zeppelins, but the world as we know it would not exist. no jews, no russia, no free africa, no leftism...

Tsar troops had it even worse

Thirty Years War

>more brutal
WWII

>devastating
WWI

They were both one war with an intermission really.

The causality rate says differently

I really hate this meme. It's very clearly touted by people whose knowledge of history comes from movies and TV shows.

The world before WW1 and the world after are entirely different. WW1 saw the destruction of a centuries old Turkish empire (the same one that laid siege to fucking Constantinople) . The resultant structure set up by the allied powers was literally the exact same power balance that existed in the Middle East until the Arab Spring and Desert Storm(s). WW1 changed how Europe viewed warfare forever. There were goddamn cavalry divisions using Napoleonic battle tactics when the thing started. Even the infantry marched off to war in Napoleonic columns at the beginning. They fixed that pretty quick.

It soon became apparent that technology had changed things forever. The honor of battle was stripped away by tactics that involved nothing but saturation bombardments. Continued bombardments that required such resources that the economies of every nation involved had to be critically restructured. A military industrial complex sprung up that changed the economies of the developed world forever. The entire economic organization of in Europe changed into a sort of quasi-command economy that still exists today.

WW1 brought America into the world stage as a superpower and Woodrow Wilson's ideas about 'making the world safe for Democracy' changed American political ideals about involvement in foreign affairs forever. Manifest Destiny now applied to everywhere and everything.

1/2

2/2

Europe's empires (the existing world order of the day) crumbled under the weight of the war and it's ideological aftermath. Expansionism was seen as a great evil forever onward and colonies quickly became a liability. As well, colonial subjects were taught the secrets of European military organization as they were drafted into the conflict so the seeds of their rebellions were planted and could never be excised. The world was heading towards globalism in the fucking Victorian era and WW1 stopped all of it.

I didn't even mention the rise of socialism, fascism and Japan's forays into European style imperialism. Please pick up a fucking book before you post here again.

Shit, I also forgot the League of Nations and the idea of an extra-national authority which could intervene in diplomatic affairs.

>The world was heading towards globalism in the fucking Victorian era

damn this sounds really cool... but the germanic savages just had to ruin it all.

>what is the war in China leading to Communist revolution
>what is the destabilization of colonial empires in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East
>what is Britain being forced to promise autonomy to India
>what is the scene being set for the division of Korea
>what is the fucking atomic bomb

WW2. Chiefly because of the Eastern front and the Pacific.

Yes, a couple of operations on the Western front in WW1 were a trench warfare meatgrinder with gas and mud and the chilling concept of the war of materiel/attrition.

But you also had nothing like mass strategic bombing, millions of civilians casualties, unchecked brutality against both the military and civilian populace, or (relatively) common atrocities commited by most of the combatant powers.

Wrong. The term derived from a quote from Gertrude Stein, who one day during the early 20's visited a garage in Paris and noticed the owner's assistant seem to permanently be in a daze and wandering about. When she asked the owner about this he commented, "They're all like that -- the ones who came back from the war." To which Stein commented, "Truly they are a Lost Generation."

Depends on your definition of "brutal and devastating".

During WW2 far more civilians suffered but "only" 3-4% of soldiers were KIA/MIA.
During WW1 far less civilians died but around 10% of soldiers did.

Obviously the Seven Years War. It was too great of a war for the minds of our generation to comprehend.