It all kicked off today

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

August 4th 1914... Germany invaded Belgium, causing Britain to declare war on Germany.

 

The rest...as they say...is History

[Hellshade 110]

August 4th 1914... Germany invaded Belgium, causing Britain to declare war on Germany.

 

The rest...as they say...is History

 

All of that bloodshed, just to set the stage for something even worse. God Bless the souls of the men who didn't start the war but had to suffer and die in it.

 

Hellshade

[Olham 164]

The common men are never the ones who start the wars.

They only have to fight them; they get crippled and their souls get totured - and they die in them.

May they all rest in peace.

And may this incredible bloodshed and total waste have led to one good thing:

that we know it leaves only few winners, but millions of victims - it can't be won.

[Parky 8]

 

And may this incredible bloodshed and total waste have led to one good thing:

 

 

 

 

It did, Olham. It gave Winder and the rest of the OBD team something to model this "game" after...

 

 

Cheers,

 

Parky

[Olham 164]

Parky, I keep repeating it: this is no game!

[Wels 2]

Hello,

August 4th 1914... Germany invaded Belgium, causing Britain to declare war on Germany.

The rest...as they say...is History

 

And history is the lie we agree upon ..

"Causing Britain to declare war on Germany" - would Britain have declared war to France, if France had - after or before its declaration of war - invaded Belgium first ?

Would Britain have let Germany complete the Baghdad-Bahn, and accepted its consequences on Suez and the Middle East ?

You know this is not really my opinion, just stirring the pot

 

Greetings,

Catfish

Edited August 5, 2010 by Wels

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

Hello,

 

 

And history is the lie we agree upon ..

"Causing Britain to declare war on Germany" - would Britain have declared war to France, if France had - after or before its declaration of war - invaded Belgium first ?

Would Britain have let Germany complete the Baghdad-Bahn, and accepted its consequences on Suez and the Middle East ?

You know this is not really my opinion, just stirring the pot

 

Greetings,

Catfish

 

That didn't happen...so we'll never know

[OvS 8]

All of that bloodshed, just to set the stage for something even worse. God Bless the souls of the men who didn't start the war but had to suffer and die in it.

 

Hellshade

 

Very well said Hellshade.

[Parky 8]

Very well said Hellshade.

 

 

And here I was, thinking you were going to "educate" Herr Olham by pointing out that I deliberately used quotion marks around the term "game" for a reason......lol

 

Don't they have quotation marks in Germany, or is it that they just don't understand what they mean??

 

Come to think of it......that's all it really takes to start a war......a bit of misunderstanding, right?

 

(That was a weak attempt to stay on topic......I think)

 

 

 

Parky

[Olham 164]

We have quotation marks and use them the same way, Parky - I was just tempted to repeat my

favourite answer anyway, when someone writes "game" about OFF.

 

I see there is still a lot of seeing history a bit distorted, seeing "good sides" and "bad sides".

There may be starters of wars, but there are also others, who only waited for good reasons to join in.

 

World War One was not about defending the "good side", it wasn't defending Hobbitland against

Sauron and Saruman - all sides had their Saruman-like steel industries; all sides were dark, too.

There are and were no "good sides" - they were all very similar.

It was the inescapable clash of industrial super powers. It had to happen, one way or the other.

The shot in Sarajevo and what came of it, is just an unimportant starter. It could as well have been

another reason.That is the cheerless truth IMHO.

Edited August 6, 2010 by Olham

[Creaghorn 10]

We have quotation marks and use them the same way, Parky - I was just tempted to repeat my

favourite answer anyway, when someone writes "game" about OFF.

 

I see there is still a lot of seeing history a bit distorted, seeing "good sides" and "bad sides".

There may be starters of wars, but there are also others, who only waited for good reasons to join in.

 

World War One was not about defending the "good side", it wasn't defending Hobbitland against

Sauron and Saruman - all sides had their Saruman-like steel industries; all sides were dark, too.

There are and were no "good sides" - they were all very similar.

It was the inescapable clash of industrial super powers. It had to happen, one way or the other.

The shot in Sarajevo and what came of it, is just an unimportant starter. It could as well have been

another reason.That is the cheerless truth IMHO.

 

very well said and true. no dark side, and especially no bright one, on any side.

 

that's imho too much hollywood thinking. always having a good and a bad side. star wars, lord of the rings, every old us-western movie (thats why i love spaghetti western, because there everybody is dark), axis of evil etc...

everybody who fights for his country is the good one in his own world. on any side. no matter if he is an us-american, serbian or north korean or from iraq etc.

nobody is is standing, saying he's evil, doing mean things, eating raw meat, looking ugly with scars and fangs etc. besides in movies. no, they are praying to their god (who is mostly the very same as the enemies) and hoping to get out alive. hoping to have a good cause for that what he's doing. when really fighting for freedom even more than if just going to foreign countries (i mean really fighting for freedom, and not just going into foreign countries and propagading to their own people it's for their freedom)

[Von Paulus 8]

One of the best books I've ever read about the subject is "Lions of July: Prelude to War, 1914" by William Jannen Jr.

I cannot stop praising this book because it really helped me in giving a fresh new perspective about the why; by describing the events in the month before the beginning, William Jannen masterfully recreates the casus belli of all sides.

How can the fear of loosing a superpower status induce a conflict.

A good reflection.

[Hasse Wind 46]

Not one of the powers that fought WW1 were as ruthless and brutal as the great totalitarian powers of WW2. Of course all major wars are bloody and see their fair share of bloodshed, causing suffering both to civilians and soldiers. But possibly the only really large-scale atrocities of WW1 that can be compared to the crimes of the Nazis and Stalin's Soviets were done by Ottoman troops against Armenians, in the so-called Armenian Genocide starting in 1915 and leading to the death of over one million Armenians. (Turkey still denies this crime today, unlike Germans and Russians, who know what their dictators did in the 1930's and 1940's.)

 

The Great War that began in 1914 was inevitable, looking at the developments in Europe during the decades preceding it. There was just so much macho nationalism, imperial rivalry, and general idiocy all around, like the admiration of war and warfare that penetrated those societies that the explosion would have come some day, sooner or later. The real surprise for most people was the fact that the war lasted for so long and took such a heavy toll with countless people dead and injured and the destruction of whole empires. It wasn't over in a few months, just before the Christmas of 1914, with a few heroic and clean deaths you can see in the 19th century paintings, and plenty of glory and medals for everybody involved.

 

WW2 might have been prevented if Germany had been treated reasonably after the Great War and the economic situation in the world wouldn't have collapsed in 1929. But all this is useless hindsight. What happened is now history, and all we can do is to live with the consequences and make sure that nothing similar will ever happen again.

[Wels 2]

Good that we have diplomacy ..

explained here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=DE&feature=related&hl=de&v=RZUOkGxGUVs

 

lol

 

Greetings,

Catfish

[Olham 164]

A good one to leave the political terrain here with some laughter, Wels!

Edited August 6, 2010 by Olham

[Olham 164]

PS: Thank you, von Paulus, for the book tip - I'll order it.

[UK_Widowmaker 571]

More Historical than Political

[Von Paulus 8]

PS: Thank you, von Paulus, for the book tip - I'll order it.

I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy reading it. It's written in an easy style, almost like a novel. And it's not bias at all. That's a great quality for writing history books.

I didn't knew the author, so I didn't know what to expect. I was pleased to see the kind of bibliography he used to write the book.

Original sources and memoirs from all sides are abundant.

I've read many books about WWI, in fact I think I can say that have a pretty good WWI book collection. This one is undoubtedly one of the best and probably should be one of the firsts to be read in first place. IMO it just gives you the right perspective to start.

I hope you can find it Olham, because it's out of print. The digital version is more easy to find I think.

Edited August 6, 2010 by Von Paulus

[Olham 164]

No problem; I found several books in "Abebooks", two at "Amazon" and some in "Ebay".

[Hasse Wind 46]

For an excellent new introduction to WW1 in general, I can recommend Hew Strachan's The First World War. It's only a few years old and takes advantage of the latest historical research. Hew Strachan is one of the leading experts in WW1 history. He has written a lot about WW1, but this book contains all the most important events and backgrounds in a very compact form, just under 400 pages.

[Von Paulus 8]

For an excellent new introduction to WW1 in general, I can recommend Hew Strachan's The First World War. It's only a few years old and takes advantage of the latest historical research. Hew Strachan is one of the leading experts in WW1 history. He has written a lot about WW1, but this book contains all the most important events and backgrounds in a very compact form, just under 400 pages.

 

I agree with you Hasse. That is one of the finest , one volume WWI history, I've ever read. I know it might sound has sacrilege, but I think it's better than John Keegan's one.

The documentary from which the book was written for is also very interesting, Hasse.

[RAF_Louvert 101]

.

 

WWI was, and remains, one of the most God Awful periods of all our civilizations' history, bar none, IMHO.

 

And THIS still remains one of the most concise explanations of how it all came about:

 

How The War Started

 

All kidding aside, I pray to everything good and just that we never have to see it's kind again and I am sorry for all those throughout the ages who have had to endure and suffer war. I would hope we could leave something better to the generations to come, but I fear our nature will not allow it. I wish very much to be proven wrong on that last point.

 

.

[Flyby PC 23]

Not so much for the history of how the war started, (although there are issues here too), but more what it evolved from, I would strongly recommend you read up about the Crimean war.

 

I'm new to it myself, but it's fascinating, because some passages are taken straight from wars in the Napoleonic era, with columns and lines of infantry, with lancers and sabre wielding cavalry charges and artillery etc, but later, regarding the seige of Sevastopol, some of the passages I have read might just have easily have come from troops in the trenches of WW1. It really is quite uncanny. Granted the victorian armies didn't have machine guns, but grape shot and canister would still cut swathes through advancing troops, killing men in their thousands. But the digging of mines, (or fear of them), raiding parties, saps and carnage of going over the top, mortars dropping shells into the trenches,...it's all there 1856. Letters from home, war photography (censored), and kids of 16 and 17 frozen by fear - it's really a foretaste of what was to come, briefly in the American civil war, and wholesale in 1914.

 

It doesn't reflect the scale of the WW1 carnage, (though it has it's moments), but you can see the roots of where such warfare came from. Trench warfare isn't insane. It's desperate, absolutely desperate, but not insane. If WW1 interests you, then I urge you to read about the Crimean. It wasn't a long war. 1853-56.

 

Roger Fenton began recording war photographs in 1855, although these were often censored to reflect the stiff upper lip attitude of the Victorian Army, and some were quite possibly staged for dramatic effect. Its a great pity for our collective posterity that he wasn't there a year or two earlier and able to capture images of massed cavalry charges and soldiers of the line. But then again, the technology of his camera perhaps was against him too. But if only.....

 

"It is only the dead who have seen the last of war". (obscure source, but doubtfully Plato).

 

Oh, and 111 VC's.

[Olham 164]

A sausage factory in Tanganika... Blackadder's (not Baldric's) explanation of how it all started, is short, but spot on.

Can always watch it again.

[rabu 9]

I always liked the Time/Life book on the Air war of WWI, "Knights of the Air." It's got great art work and it's well written by Ezra Bowen. Also, "World War I" by H.P. Willmott is excellent and filled with historical photos. You can frequently find the Bowen book on sale for only a few dollars at major book chains or on line. Both are coffee table book size. Another book I picked up on sale about a year ago is a large 10x14" book of maps, "The West Point Atlas of World War I" It's chronological list with each map accompanied by a page of description of what was going on at that key point or battle.