Which type of warfare was the most traumatic?
>Ranged Fire fights, artillery, armoured warfare etc etc
>Hand to Hand combat, large groups of men rushing at each other to stab them in the face
I was idly wondering if the less empathetic nature of shooting a person from a distance vs stabbing them and watching their life extinguish and their final death throes made armed conflict much more frequent for a lack of better words
trench warfare
Eh...what do you think.
Sitting in some literal shithole (formerly artillery crater)/makeshift grave for weeks on end getting shelled constantly and gassed watching the horribly mutilated bodies of your former brothers in arms float and rot in pools of mud, blood, and gas while hearing the screams and calls of your fellow soldiers cry out for help knowing you can't go to them because if try to get to them and you don't get torn up by machine gun fire you might well fall into a pit of horror made by that beautiful combination of shell holes and chemical residue unable to climb out until you exhaust yourself and slowly drown hoping that, god willing, another shell will grace the same hole and kill you instantly so that you're not one of the poor fucks that starts calling to your brothers in their trenches beckoning them to risk their lives to save yours.
Or Cannae.
Well, we have historical accounts of knights suffering symptoms of what we now call PTSD, so things have definitely always reached that baseline of bad.
However, WWI was probably the worst. It had everything from aerial dogfights to men fighting to kill each other with knives in the mud like desperate animals.
In most battles of antiquity, few people would actually die. You'd have armies skirmish with ranged weapons resulting in few deaths because neither side wanted to press things into hand to hand combat, and then they'd withdraw. Then maybe lay siege to something. Giant set-piece battles like Cannae were very rare events.
Large scale melee fights were
A)infrequent
B)long in the preparation, quick in the execution
C)fought in close ranks with nearby men giving psychological comfort
Melees could be much more vicious, gory and terrifying than gunfights but they were two hours once a year. The Kursk lasted months. The Somme lasted years. It NEVER lets up to be in the muddy, frozen field mercilessly hunted and shelled.
Also in Medieval times, most mercenaries and knights wanted to capture the enemey because there was more money that way.
Until the English got tired of that shit and started killing French wounded during the 100 years war. They literally killed off a generation of French nobles at that one battle that I'm too lazy to look up (Crecy? or that other one Agincourt maybe both)
Hand to hand combat is far more traumatic. I recommend reading On Killing if you're actually interested in why.
Well it depends. You can have a combination of shells, snipers, gas, and hand to hand combat all in one day if you were on the front in WWI. Oh and a tank just rolled over your friend.... Very slowly.
On a side note... Sniper may have not traumatized, but they resulted in a lot of anger and hate from the people getting sniped.
Germans called down artillery on a single sniper once and brought down the entire building just because they could.
>The Kursk lasted months. The Somme lasted years.
Is this bait or are you just really retarded
Battle of Kursk lasted a little over a week.
And Battle of the Somme lasted about fivemonths
Oh its not like the US does that now with airstrikes.
This seems like a not unreasonable claim, but like these anons have pointed out wars involving hand to hand combo rarely actually involved a massive percentage of the two sides actually dying or most of the troops being prepared to get stuck into "do or die" desperate hand to hand fighting.
:)
We need some reason to use all the bombs
getting cannae'd would be pretty bad but it cant compare to the sheer scale and duration of a WW1 battle. Cannae was over in a few hours, imagine weeks of horror with no end, just to get shifted out and then sent back to the meatgrinder in a few months
got a source? this sounds really interesting
How is that even a response to what he said? Given the context is that he was replying to this post.
Randomly saying "what about contemporary US airstrikes?" doesn't even seem to come into it.
One of the primary causes of PTSD is the idea that artillery or guns can kill you at any moment from any distance and out of sight, there is ever present danger coupled with its very conspicuous nature LOUD and bright. Arrows don't have the same psychological trigger as a BANG and you'll see your enemy before they'll ever shoot an arrow at you.
Also as mentioned, melee combat is more sparse. While a battle might last hours or a hull day, the engagements are much shorter for an individual soldier.
forgot to mention.
One of the primary markers of PTSD is over-alertness. The effect of the ever-present danger of firearms is more subconscious than anything. Constant stress is far more powerful than a single event.
It's kind of scattered all over the place. If you search "knights" and "PTSD" and other relevant context words you're bound to find more comprehensive overviews.
But the short version is that in almost all historical descriptions of knights' actual lives outside of their accomplishments in battle, especially ones written by knights themselves, show all kinds of telltale signs- avoidant behavior, aversion to or panic at the sound of clashing metal or shouting, restlessness, you name it.
cool thanks, I'll have to research it further.
The Western Front of WW1 combined the best of both