What was the most gruesome era of warfare for the soldiers Veeky Forums?

No such thing.

Can you manchildren just go back to your video games and understand that most people in a war didn't even die in combat or because of wounds?

Is football hooliganism the spiritual successor to medieval sieges?
youtu.be/N6IUCO80d8A?t=636
youtu.be/Ul1sF5sX9D4

World war 1 was pretty atrocious.

Some of the veterans that got disfigured are unbelievably grotesque.
Mental trauma as well.
Medical knowledge was still not the best. I just could'nt imagine being in a battle at all. All warfare up to now basically is gruesome. Nowadays they have drones and computers for things like this.

wouldn't a helmet make instantly killing blows almost impossible to achieve?

needs more formation 2/10

add to that the fact that there was no clear seperation between battle and quiet time, you could be attacked in every second and you could never relax even for a day

Especially at 10:48 when all those people are running through the alley and down the stairway.

hooligans in full plate when?

This just got me interested in football/soccer.

>flute destroyed by a musket 5 minutes after the battle starts

What do?

It's just drunken idiots letting off some steam, good clean fun.

youtu.be/kmRmGQRvBmY

>>rifles are inacurate af
cringe

John Keegan's The Face of Battle has a great little bit about how the soldiers ate before the battle of Waterloo. While a few officers shot fowl and rabbits, most didn't, because they were afraid of being shot in the belly and having undigested food leaking out of them.

But there's another book I've read called A German Deserter's War Experience from an anonymous author and holy fuck I would never have wanted to be anywhere near the first world war.

There are accounts of being stuck in the same trench for a month, someone coming just over the ground to grab a pack of cigarettes a few feet in the dirt out front, and getting shredded by gunfire.

And worse, soldiers that were hit in no man's land and didn't die would scream for days for someone to help them to no avail. Everyone in the trenches was too scared.

Musket warfare did not consist solely of lines, light infantry and in particular Voltigeurs were supposed to hide behind cover

Have to disagree, gunshot wounds can take days to kill you, a dismemberment can kill you in minutes.

You know that nasty feeling in the skin on your face when something long and sharp is in the closeviccinity to your face?
16th century must have ben FUN.

Pre-history

>Wake up, can't find Munga my current fuck woman in cave

>Go out, Trog tells me he saw Munga fucking Bunga in exchange for a rabbit he stomped to death

>Anonga is a cuckold

>Find Munga and Bunga. Fight Bunga with big stick. Get hit hard in mouth, lose some remaining teeth. Finally get the best of Bunga, smash he head in with rock.

> Remember Bunga is member of the Onga tribe.

>ohshit.stonecarving

>Have to rally rest of clan to meet me later so we can all bring big sticks to bash them with

>oh well, at least we get to rape if we win

>this is the 9th time something like this has happened since the last cold period

I imagine being a cavalryman must've been so fucking horrifying from 1450 to 1600. Especially in Burgundy.

the diary of peter hagendorf really shows how cruel this age was

Got a link to an english read of it? Google only yields me german reads.

The most common injuries during hoplite warfare were in the neck and groin, I can understand where you're coming from.

were you lucky enough to be on /pol/ in 2014 during the Maidan Revolution live streams?

cause they had dudes in full plate armor and shields complete with heraldry. And battle priests.

These ones, right?
According to Veeky Forums the Ukraine Battle of The Nations team lost several members because of that.

glorious bastards

(OP)
>what was the most gruesome era of warfare for the soldiers Veeky Forums?
>I would say musket line warfare
Honestly, I would say that war gets more and more gruesome over time. War has gotten faster, louder, more chaotic, and more unpredictable. There aren't even national borders in the wars we wage: they're fought in concrete jungles where death can come for you at any moment from any angle, often from miles away. You think taking a mace to the head is a hard death? Try taking a napalm bath. Even when you're Americans curb-stomping Afganis with your overwhelming military superiority it's still a damn nightmare to deal with.

Pre-gunpowder melees were glorified shoving matches. Most of the actual casualties occurred during the rout, well after when the fighting was at its thickest. And even then you're talking about months of tedious maneuvering for a single day of sheer horror followed by more months of maneuvering, and far more soldiers in history died of diseases associated with waging war than were actually killed in pitched battle. Plus there was a war season. Fighting wasn't year round, it was only in the spring and summer, between when the farmers sowed their fields and when they had to be back in time for the harvest. And even if they weren't going home they were still being quartered for the winter.

And during Napoleonic times armies were surprisingly small, often no more than a few thousand soldiers. "It takes a man's weight in lead for every soldier killed in battle" comes from the American Civil War, which was fought with rifles, and those are far more accurate than the smoothbore muskets that Napoleonic soldiers carried into battle. Those musket lines would have been throwing out a shitload of shot for only a scattering of casualties.

>dying quickly from a gunshot

Tell that to Marshall Lannes..

Run at the enemy lines and choke the other fluter's faggot ass to death, then use his.

Not necessarily related to the overall gruesomeness of the battles themselves, but I often wonder about what the sounds of war would do for morale in the pre-gunpowder age. Things like concentrated archer fire on armored targets must've been absolutely cacophonous, with the occasional scream of a man hit in an unlucky spot or a wail of a horse brought down just punctuating that awful racket. Or the sheer racket one must've heard being stuck inside a roman formation during the encirclement of Cannae when the dust kicks up and all around are the clangs of weaponry.

Man, movies never even scrape the surface of stuff like that.

if you can't speak german, there is sadly not much for you but you can read parts of it here: books.google.de/books?id=sPz3BgAAQBAJ&pg=106&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

You actually have accounts of the XIVth-XVth Century battles, when cannons were used for the first time. They weren't really powerful enough to be used as a proper battle weapon then, but the sound and the smoke was so loud, and incredible for people who never saw that, they some actually ran away completly scared.
At the battle of Formigny in 1450, the french canons were useless ; But the sound they made was enough to alert a nearby french detachment to intervene and save the day.

>musket line warfare

Close order formation fighting with musket and cannon has to rank up there, simply due to the fact that it was THE dumbest approach to warfare man had yet to come up with...

>mass formation shoots at other mass formation at close range
>charge with bayonet
>hope you don't get enfiladed with cannon

Just dumb...

Why did pike spamming take off so much in the 16th century?

>rifles are inacurate af
>rifles
>>>>>>>>"""""rifles"""""
retard

I'm always amazed at any sort of warfare with firearms where earplugs weren't a thing, like holy fucking shit guns are loud as hell how did people even deal

>like holy fucking shit guns are loud as hell how did people even deal

Sometimes you're too busy to notice...

>Just dumb...
It's not dumb when you consider how grossly inaccurate their muskets were and how the only real way to project force with them was massed volley fire.

The reason bayonet chargers were still a thing was because soldiers were extremely likely to run out of ammo (or powder) so it turned your now useless musket into a spear

It was murderously efficient, there was literally no better way to kill large groups of men with the tech of the time

The big battles of the western front in ww1. Objectively the most consistently horrible experience and large group of people has ever endured

No, it IS dumb.

There's absolutely zero reasons to attack somebody in the open when there is plenty of cover and concealment to be used, or when you can simply prepare fortifications.

Cover and concealment results in a very low density of muskets firing individually, aka totally worthless. You would get steamrolled by a block of line infantry or cavalry. also there was a whole class of light infantry that fought like that as sort of skirmishers or support

>There's absolutely zero reasons to attack somebody in the open when there is plenty of cover and concealment to be used, or when you can simply prepare fortifications.

You're not appreciating how shitty those muskets were. Like this user said , in order to really make them effective battlefield weapons you needed to mass volley fire. Otherwise you weren't causing enough casualties to make a difference in anything but your limited stores of ammunition. And fortifications are all well and good but soldiers need to take ground and hold ground, and when you're hunkering down in a fort your enemy is outmaneuvering you.

These were not sports teams clashing and looking for ways to bend the rules, this was war where you went with the most practical option available to you. They fought like that for a reason and not just because they were flashy pricks.

lol underated

>there was literally no better way to kill large groups of men with the tech of the time

Sure there was, by shooting them from covered positions while they are channeled through obstacles you emplaced.

It has been repeatedly stated that that is not an effective use of muskets outside of very specific circumstances. For muskets to have effective killing power they need to be fired in large groups and all at once.

Aside from that, they had a very short effective range, so that you would only get the chance to fire off MAYBE 3 or 4 rounds before the enemy was clubbing you to death. Large bodies of men in formation was the most effective way to use muskets in most situations, and you not liking that fact doesnt make it less true

What these people said.

Do you really think that if there were better ways to fight with muskets nobody would have thought of them?

By the way there were soldiers who fought as you envision, they were called skirmishers and sent ahead of the bulk of the army.

Whatever,you faggots just don't understand.Why I bet if I was a general in that time I wouldve curb stomped everyone

>Do you really think that if there were better ways to fight with muskets nobody would have thought of them?

But they did.

In North America....where they used the fucking trees and rocks to inflict casualties on the enemy without taking casualties in return.

Contrary to popular belief, it is indeed possible to mass fires from covered and concealed positions. You don't have to be standing out in the open like morons to do that. And if you're using obstacles to turn, channelize, and block your enemy, your massed fires will enfilade the fuck out of your target.

As a military dude, I can attest to the fact that military "leaders" more often than not do shit because "that's the way we always done it...." than because it's actually the best way, or even the right way, for that matter. This is demonstrated time and again throughout history, including the continued use of closed rank formation fighting.

shit mang, if everyone wasn't operating on international laws warfare by now would just be bombs and artillery shells full of horrible biological weapons

You do realize that the guerrilla tactics used by the Americans didn't really do much but piss the British off right? Things only started going in our favor when we lined up in blocks and fought head to head.
You do realize that if entire armies fought like this, spread out between cover, they'd just all be swept up by cavalry?

Are you talking about the civil war or fighting with the indians?

Holy shit your retarded

I completely agree. Soldiers would be entrenched deep in the mud (in certain areas) with decomposing bodies and their own filth strewn around them for weeks at a time. The constant artillery barrages drove men insane and the machine gun fire mowed down men unfortunate enough to be sent over the top of the trench by their commanding officers.The mustard gas used later in the war closed the throats of men and blinded them. I wholly believe that is the most extreme mass human experience in history.

>Those uniforms were fucking awesome

Why do people have such a trivial and childish understanding of line battles and general musket warfare? Is it the video games? Not everyone just "stood in a line and shot" and there was far, far more complexity to it

probably WW1
earlier than that you usually died from disease so it wasn't as gruesome.

>you will never storm Washington DC in full plate while wielding a war hammer
Why live?

Any combat involving what said:

>where you actually have to destroy someone's body with your own body, while they are desperately trying to do the same to you

Nothing can be more gruesome than that

Aye. A many a quests sprung up on Veeky Forums about the euromadan riots.

Another unfortunate victim of the combat. Those are arrow heads. Perhaps he was hit from behind unexpectedly... or turned around in a last ditch effort to hide from incoming arrow fire. We'll never know

>earlier than that you usually died from disease so it wasn't as gruesome

k

>What was the American Civil War

Meant for

>Contrary to popular belief, it is indeed possible to mass fires from covered and concealed positions

This is why armies who attempted it have lost engagements every single time, right?

>In North America....where they used the fucking trees and rocks to inflict casualties on the enemy without taking casualties in return.

Sorry, but what the fuck are you talking about here, exactly?

>visby arrow AND warhammer casualty

Did the arrows not kill him? The poor son of a bitch.

No, sadly they did not. Despite almost every soldier present on the Visby battlefield lacking head protection - only a rare few had mail coifs on for protection - this man did not die from the arrows. A foe with a hammer smashed his head in at the end. Just like this other fellow missing much of his face.

The hammer is in the background

Full plate wanker

not maybe sieges but tribal warfare

Christ, they couldn't lasso them in or something? If that ever happens to me either save me or administer a mercy killing

don't forget that trebuchet

...

Damn, if this fella invested in some shin guards he'd be invincible.

Rhaya Kiev right

Pleb.

Yes

Maidan is my favourite revolution because of it

Freezing cold in the middle of Kiev, barricades, makeshift shields, Orthodox priests trying to keep the peace, using w/e you can find as a weapon and armour, nights filled with fire

I will fondly look back on my freshman year of uni, comfy in bed watching a government get overthrown

>your

how long will this fucking shit take before you idiots learn the difference between you're and your

I saw The Patriot too

ww1 was probably the most traumatic on soldiers

I wonder how conscious he still was after taking those hits. Surely he couldn't have been fighting; seems the Danes just picked off everything and everyone in that mess.

I'd assume he'd get knocked to the ground and trampled after a hit like that, maybe he lucked out.

From what I understand, certain aspects of the entrenchment fights could go on for weeks at a time with very little ground gained, and not the kind of resupplying that makes that possible. There are accounts of officers seizing vehicles and never being seen among their men again.

A few quotes from a german deserter's war experience

" At that time I began to notice in many soldiers what I had never observed before—they felt envious. Many of my mates envied the dead soldiers and wished to be in their place in order to be at least through with all their misery. Yet all of us were afraid of dying—afraid of dying, be it noted, not of death. All of us often longed for death, but we were horrified at the slow dying lasting hours which is the rule on the battle-field, that process which makes the wounded, abandoned soldier die piecemeal. I have witnessed the death of hundreds of young men in their prime, but I know of none among them who died willingly. "

" All of us greatly feared those night patrols, for the hundreds of men killed months ago were still lying between the lines. Those corpses were decomposed to a pulp. So when a man went on nocturnal patrol duty and when he had to crawl in the utter darkness on hands and knees over all those bodies he would now and then land in the decomposed faces of the dead. If then a man happened to have a tiny wound in his hands his life was greatly endangered by the septic virus. As a matter of fact three sappers and two infantrymen of the landwehr regiment No. 17 died in consequence of poisoning by septic virus. Later on that kind of patroling was given up or only resorted to in urgent cases, and only such men were employed who were free of wounds. That led to nearly all of us inflicting skin wounds to ourselves to escape patrol duty. "

>what was the most gruesome era of warfare for the soldiers Veeky Forums?
American Civil War
massed rifled musketry
with virtually none of the European advances in tactics of the time

This is a reasonable answer. The combination of accurate rifles and napoleonic tactics was shockingly brutal

although arguably the (lack of) cavalry use in the ACW sort of made it slightly easier on the peeps on the ground
linear infantry getting shot up with rifled muskets is bad enough but then getting run down by cavalry would be straight out terribad

Cavalry werent as big a threat though due the previously mentioned rifled muskets. Cavalry had already had their day for anything other than harrassment or pursuit

>Christ, they couldn't lasso them in or something? If that ever happens to me either save me or administer a mercy killing

Some of the troops received training for mercy killing, actually.

And no, they couldn't just 'lasso them'. They'd have needed to head out into the no man's land between the two sides, which was guaranteed death during the day.

Going out and trying to either rescue or finish the wounded was a task for the night troops. But they could end up falling in the shellholes and become casualties too.

Because you know, chemical weapons? Gas falls to the ground, and tons of it ended up in the water that filled the shellholes, creating literaly pools of poisonous water.

Yeah, there were pools of toxic sludge all over the place, too. As if fields full of rotting corpses and screaming dismembered soldiers in agony weren't bad enough.

>Yeah, there were pools of toxic sludge all over the place,
Fucking gas man. Had virtually no impact on the fighting except to make everything that much more horrible for everyone

Well theres some WW2/Vietnam movies that achieve some of that atmosphere.
Platoon ending or Saving Private Ryan start for example.

Oh I totally get that, I just meant more of earlier period stuff. Braveheart etc.

Nothing else quite beats the Iran-Iraq War

>Modern equipment
>Shitty outdated tactics
>Theological indoctrination
>Trench Warfare
>Insane political leadership
>Incompetent General Staff
>Area Denial Weaponry in full use
>Both sides supplied and pushed into the fray by the same superpower.