Listing to a podcast on WWI. It's a really good series BTW and is timely with the 100 year anniversary of the start of the war (http://www.dancarlin.com//disp.php/hharchive) upon us.

Currently at the point of the Battle of Verdun (1915). Leading up to it Carlin mentions some of the most horrific battles soldiers have experienced. He mentions Stalingrad, Cannae (where Roman soldiers dug holes to bury their heads and suffocate themselves, it was so bad), and Verdun.

Given the conditions, length of time, and objective (Germany was trying to just set up a meat grinder to impose as much casualties on the French and British as possible), I'd have to say being a soldier at Verdun had to be the worst.

Other battles/sieges as candidates for the worst possible experience?

Verdun was a horrorshow, to be sure, but it was only the 4th bloodiest battle of WWI with 976,000 total casualties. The 3 worst battles were:

3. The Battle of the Somme (1916), 1,219,201 casualties (623,000 Allied, 600,000 German). On the worst day of that battle the British army suffered over 60,000 casualties.

2. The Ludendorff Offensive (1918), 1,539,715 casualties (850,000 Allied, 680,000 German).

1. The Hundred Days Offensive (1918), which basically ended the war: 1,855,369 casualties (1.07 million Allied, 786,000 German).

These numbers are staggering to the imagination. The bloodiest battle of the Civil War was Gettysburg, which resulted in 51,000 casualties. This in no way addresses the subjective level of horror experienced by combatants, which really can't be measured.

The numbers are bad but the conditions in the trenches along with the introduction of chemical warfare is appallingly grotesque.

Many civil war battles come to mind as do WWII,Korea and especially for me the A Shau valley in Vietnam.

Doc, I believe that Verdun was the Horror Battle of all time. Every official account or narrative I have ever seen agrees with that.

Carlin also talks about the length of the battles and how taxing that was on the soldiers. Churchill said that to use the term battles was incorrect.

They were more similar to sieges. Battles up to that time and after were hours to days at the most. Verdun lasted for something like 8 months.

Battles also tend to move.

Trench warfare just doesn't. Soldiers had to live amongst the bodies of the fallen for months on end. That some of the 'floors' of the trenches were spring like due to the bodies. That soldiers endured weeks of constant shelling.

That this was the first and last time that soldiers had to endure these types of conditions for those lengths of time.

Kinda makes one understand how Tolkien came up with Mordor and other scenes for his Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Before you take those accounts at face value, you have to remember that most of them were written by the French, as it was primarily the French army that took the brunt of the German offensive in that battle. I'm not saying the French are wimps by any means, but French battle histories in any war from Napoleon on tend to be a lot more florid than British or German histories.

For my money, I believe that Ypres might have been at least as horrific as Verdun, in a subjective horror sense, although it didn't produce the same numbers of casualties.

Passchendaele was no picnic.

http://www.veterans.gc.ca/eng/remembrance/history/first-world-war/fact_sheets/passchendaele

My great Uncle Ewan Cameron died there, he left Vancouver in 1914 went to England and signed up with the Royal Marines.

Those who haven't read "A Rifleman Went to War" by Maj Herbert McBride should give it a read. For all that war's horrors he maintained a "clinical detatchment" that appeared to make him oblivious to it. Jeff Cooper said it was the most remarkable book he ever read. NRA Bookshelf has it.

Yeah, I think the overall conditions of the "battle" have to be taken into account. A whole lot of Tommies didn't have it so rough on the first day of the first battle of the Somme, they were just mowed down and killed right away so they didn't have long to suffer. One soldier doesn't care that much about total casualties as long as he isn't one of them. The overall scope doesn't worry him either, he only cares about the volume of machine guns, rifles, spears, arrows or whatever directly ahead of him.

That idea of living for weeks or months on end among rotting bodies and human sh*t and the sights and smell accompanying those would have to account for "worst possible battle". E.B. Sledge describes some scenes in the battle for Okinawa that bring that idea to life.

To that end those trenches in WWI had to be among the worst conditions to live in ever. With honorable mention to the whole damn Russian front in WWII.

per the caption on the thread, I believe the answer is the one you are in.

Everybody seems to be focusing their responses on industrialized (modern) warfare, but consider that the soldiers from antiquity through the middle ages often suffered through thirst, starvation, exposure, and disease just to get to the battle, and that the surviving losers were often subjected to such niceties as enslavement, blinding, maiming, and emasculation.

It truly would have sucked to have been one of them.

Need to factor in a War in extreme cold. If you get a chance read ... Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir.

This sounds a lot like ISIS on the march currently.

I had actually put that one in my original post and then deleted it.

Intensity of battle over time would also factor in. Chosin and the Battle of the Bulge were both fought in painful cold. Iwo Jima was intense,non-stop fighting for weeks, as was Okinawa and many other Pacific battles, many fought in extreme heat.

To be honest, the German Army in the 20th Century could probably hold the title for having fought in the worst battles - and after brief initial victories they were always falling back which is a lot tougher to endure psychologically.

This is probably the right answer. To a soldier who was killed in the invasion of Grenada or the Honduras-El Salvador Soccer War, that battle was the worst.

Pelelui is considered by many Marines to be it's toughest battle. Especially when you consider it probably should have been by-passed rather than seized.

Was that so hard?

That was a worthwhile post that added something positive, you dumbass!


But to the thread, where do you battle-history students place Gettysburg?

Well in the Civil war about twice as many died from disease as died from battlefield wounds. So even when they weren't fighting, conditions were pretty horrible. And then when the fighting started, it just made a horrible situation much worse.

incredible


Americans expended 13.32 million rounds of 30-calibre, 1.52 million rounds of 45-calibre, 693,657 rounds of 50-calibre bullets, 118,262 hand grenades and approximately 150,000 mortar rounds

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Peleliu

A quick Google search on Verdun shows that 40 million artillery shells we expended over the battle.

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Battle_of_Verdun.html

This brings up percentages. Total casualties or casualties per numbers involved. Intensity.

Number of days. Some of the Civil War battles; one, two, three days, horrific days.
The worst day? Omaha Beach?
The worst hour? Vietnam HOT LZ's?

Daytime temperatures on Pelelui hit 115 degrees. To make things worse 'fresh' water was brought ashore in 50 gallon drums that had held petroleum previously and were'nt well cleaned.

If a man can read the reports of those battles without crying, and without giving thanks, he's no man.

Lest we forget.

The seige of Leningrad and the battle of Stalingrad didn't sound like a walk through the daisies..

I worked with a man who survived that, and Tarawa, and Okinawa. He was one of the kindest souls I've ever met. When he told me where he'd been, all I could do what stammer "My God, thank you". His response? He laughed and said "well, I wouldn't want to do it again, that's for sure. Your thanks is for those that didn't come home, but I'll say that I'm welcome nonetheless". Then, he wanted to go get lunch. I bought; he protested.

As long as we are speaking of incredibly harsh conditions of weather, including poorly equipped and often untrained troops, lets not forget the U.S. Army out on the vast plains of the American West, fighting the Sioux and their allies, and other Indian tribes.

For just one example of many, read of the constant two year fighting in 1866/1867 that went on around Fort Phil Kearney, including the Fetterman Massacre. Often in the winter it was -40� F to -60� F, and the soldiers were very poorly clothed. (As usual, the fault of the fat cat, ignorant, non-caring politicians in Washington, D.C.)

Or read of the "Piney Island" fight, aka the "Wagon Box" fight, where 32 U.S. soldiers held off 3,000 Sioux and Arapaho Indians until they were finally relieved by another column of soldiers from Fort Kearny. There were unbelievable acts of courage and sacrifice by both many officers and enlisted men.

It seems to me that it is rare that we consider the horrible fights and conditions that were standard with the soldiers of the U.S. Army in the West during the Indian Wars, but those soldiers suffered great losses.

Not to make light of our soldiers during the later foreign wars, but never downgrade what went on out West. It was misery personified for many years.

L.W.

Peleliu.

If you've never read this, you need to.

http://www.amazon.com/With-Old-Breed-Peleliu-Okinawa-ebook/dp/B000VMFDW2

Amen to that brother. Those left dead on the field of battle were the finest America had to offer.

That was the largest single battle in the history of mankind IIRC.

The Frozen Chosin, ranks high in my book.

OK, I will play.

How about being a Spartan at the Battle of Thermopylae? It sucked to be a Spartan, they all died, with honor yes, but dead is dead.

took a lot of those fuggin' persians with them..

Whatever the case may be, I don't think the Western world has the stomach for such things now. The Arabs do, and if they ever get some decent weaponry and organization, the West will be in big trouble.

I have read that the stench of the dead at Verdun was so bad that pilots refused to fly over the sector.

Still, as a participant I would much prefer the northern climes for a myriad of reasons, many battle-field related... bias of course, personal bloodlines are predominantly Scandinavian.

Funny, I was just looking at some old printed stuff from the First World War that I have lying around. Fascinating stuff, and just noticed that it's 100 years old this year.

Modern?
CHOSIN.

prior to that ...
Alexander's campaigns in Afghanistan

I have to wonder if the Germans ever compared Verdun against Stalingrad?

The First Marine Division commander, O.P. Smith, got the division out intact. Because he ignored the orders of X Corp commander Ned Almond. Had Smith followed the directives of General Almond and General McArthur the First Marines probably would have been destroyed by those twelve Chinese divisions. The Army's Regimental Combat Team at Chosin wasn't able to break out and was destroyed there by one Chinese division.

Just re-read "With the old Breed" last week. Imagine having to dig a foxhole under such instense fire that you have to dig right through an old rotting Japanese corpse.

It is very likely that Hagaru-ri would have fallen had not the Army's RCT absorbed much of the blow intended for the first night battle at Hagaru. I'm not saying the Army's RCT was comparable to the 1st Marine Divison in all facets, because it wasn't. There is an excellent book out about the Army's role called "East of Chosin" that details their fight quite well. With just a little better leadership they might have been able to make the perimeter at Hagaru

Beanman... The Chinese battle against the Army RCT on the East of Chosin absolutely delayed the Chinese division in their attacking Hagaru. Several military scholars agree that the RCT sacrifice saved the First Marines. But it's impossible to know whether or not it "saved" the First Marines... What is sad is that the RCT performance was severely criticized by the Marines and the Army.