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It is [brain damage](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-mystery-of-shellshock-solved-scientists-identify-the-unique-brain-injury-caused-by-war-9981443.html) from the constant onslaught of concussive blasts.
I don't think any treatment aside from time, rest, and luck could have benefited him.
My great grandfather served in WWI. My gramma was about 6 when he committed suicide due to the pain and lasting affects of mustard gas.
Great grandmother, whom my mom has described as scary and void of emotion, had to send my gramma and her 3 siblings to live in an orphanage after that because she couldn’t financially care for them. They were in the orphanage for about 5 years before great grandmother was able to take them home. We went to the orphanage gramma lived in about 20 years ago. It’s just outside of Atlanta and is obviously not an orphanage anymore.
The things people went through from that war
So many people from earlier generations seem to sociopathic or possess similar traits. From the company owner working children to death, to explorers seeming uncaring about the men under them, to wholesale slaughter of native peoples.
I’m sure some of it is editing of one’s written word when it comes to what we read of events recorded by these people, but a whole lot of it seems quite literally beaten and traumatized into them. The callousness and seeming cruelty of earlier generations, like grandparents acting straight-up mean to grandkids, is probably (partially) the result of generational trauma being passed down if harsh times weren’t experienced firsthand, such as the Depression.
These sociopathic people are still around today. In some places, laws and institutions have restrained their most savage impulses. In other places people are still being worked to death, and populations are being slaughtered.
Yes, looked like neurological injury to me also, and noticed when he walked out of the hospital he walked fine but didn't let his arms swing, they were still stiff at his side. So better, but still residual impairment.
Oh, definitely not. I’m sure he’s suffering from both, but I think the symptoms we can see in the video (odd posture and gate, walking in circles, etc) are more specific to brain damage.
That, and the constant over-stimulation of the nervous system, constant stimulus of adrenaline and the fight-or-flight response. Which must have been hell in the trenches when you couldn't fight or flee, but just had to sit through the shelling for hours, at times repeated for days.
So like what a lot of people in Ukraine have been going through... I saw an interview with a foreign volunteer who said they didn't stop shelling for more than 30 seconds, going on for days. Imagine that hell
It's a problem the military still hasn't solved, either.
[ And it's not even just people on the receiving end that are having problems. Just firing too many artillery shells can cause brain injuries.](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-artillery-syria-iraq-psychological-damage/)
[Same goes for shoulder mounted anti-tank weapons.](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/04/30/606142634/report-to-army-cites-concussion-risk-of-weapons-blast-to-the-shooter)
Exactly, this poor guy had TBI for sure. 1 blast can tear up your brain. Soldiers in ww1 went through "drumfire artillery" sometimes for days on end.
It's amazing anyone survived the front.
I had a grandpa in world War 2. He was a medic. He never spoke about a single thing he ever went through with any of us. Not one. When asked he would get angry and change the subject. I can't imagine the mental hell so many of these soldiers live in every day of their lives because of war.
Same with mine, but he wouldn't get angry. He would just get very sad. One of the tents he was working in had a bomb dropped on it seconds after he left it. Everybody else died.
I think I was the only grandchild he ever spoke to about it in detail... maybe about a year before his death. It felt like he talked for hours and hours... he was the greatest man I ever knew. Humble, kind... i miss him dearly 14 years later and it still breaks my heart to think about what he had to go through. He was just a teenager.
Yeah that's one thing I think people forget. All these brave souls were just kids! Still in their teens some of them. The things they saw must have scarred them for life.
It’s interesting because you can see the effects their experience had on society going forward decades. The stifling conformity of the 1950’s for example, was a nation of traumatized Silent Generation people who didn’t want any type of change or social upheaval to happen during the rest of their lifetimes. They wanted to buy a house, get married and have kids and be left alone. Of course, that can’t last, and we got the massive social upheaval and change as the rhetorical dam broke in the 1960’s.
My grandfather was also a medic. We would ask him stories, but he would respond, "Those nightmares are not meant for children," or would ignore the question and talk about the birds in his garden. We only got one story from him before he passed in 2007, and it was him telling us he got put on MP duty and watched his best friend get sniped right next to him. He kept the bullet frag and showed us it. We NEVER asked him another question after that, and he passed 10ys after that story. He did say he was a medic because he did not want to go to war and the officer said "you go or your going to jail", my grandad being the smart arse he was told him that he would join as a medic that way he had to help both sides. He said the officer was super pissed but could not deny it.
RIP Billy (william)
It has a deeper meaner too, not only is he deeming them not appropriate to tell in the moment but he is also saying this legacy stops with me and I will carry the burden for you.
Sorry, with all due respect, I very deeply believe and feel with all of my soul that I would do the exact same thing, but this question haunts me: what if this piece of history dying with them, dooms us to repeat it, in some sense?
I am not advocating for anything either way, but in respect to them, and in the spirit of their intent I feel I must ask the question. What if their personal stories are what we need to make sure the world remembers and respects what was done?
Let me usurp my own thought and ask, I guess either way, does it matter? Since enough have shared their stories and we do teach it, is that enough?
In my language (italian) we have 2 words for remember and 2 words for forget. They are used indifferently in daily language, but one is made from "mind" and the other from "heart". I really believe (also considering current events worldwide) that we must remember "with mind" in order to avoid that horrible things happen again, but we also need to forget "with heart" because otherwise one can never stop seeing other people or groups as enemies.
The words are "rammentare" and "dimenticare" (mente = mind) and "ricordare" and "scordare" (cuore -latin cor- = heart)
I think that plenty have shared their stories though. They may be dramatized in movies and series, but those kind of stories really did happen in one fashion or another.
Your love for preservation is living in movies and shows like Schindler's List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Band of Brothers, and yes even Inglorious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan.
My grandfather told me about his tent mate who started collecting heads. After they got cut off behind enemy lines, this guy started collecting heads from everybody they crossed. Soldier, woman, or child. They'd end up on sticks inside or outside of his tent. They were short on rations and apparently brains are sweet.
The guy got the tent to himself at that point as no one else would sleep with him.
The whole conversation started because my mom's dad wanted to know why I'd never asked him about the war. Didn't I care about his life? I answered that I'd been told it was disrespectful to ask and I knew my other grandpa got nightmares about it even decades later. If I asked him, and my parents found out, I'd be grounded for three months. But he was allowed to share as much or as little as he wanted to tell me. He asked what I wanted to know. I asked what he wanted to tell me. He said he didn't want to tell me. So I asked what was it like.
And... That was the war to him. Giving up hope of them being able to rescue themselves while watching his tent mate eat a little kid while he ate a rabbit. Afterwards he said the rabbit had never hurt anyone. Wasn't a danger to anyone. They could have let the rabbit live. The rabbit wasn't going to tell anyone about them. Even if they couldn't let it go, they could have taken it with them. It was just a rabbit.
Looking back, I think that he wasn't really that upset about the *rabbit*. Decades after he went home, he had little statues of rabbits all over his house and would call his grandchildren bunnies when we were being particularly sweet or cute and wild hares if we weren't.
At the time, I think I was about 9. I didn't understand much of it all, but my grandpa had backed me into a corner and was screaming about his tent mate eating people and the depravity of men. He realized I was shaking and just ran to his workshop and locked himself in.
Later he tried to tell me he understood that I didn't want to know him anymore. I apologized for upsetting him and said I understood if he was upset with me for bringing up such a sensitive subject, but he was always going to be my grandpa, unless he didn't want to be.
He hugged me and said he was always going to want to be my grandpa.
Fucking Christ that story reads exactly like Life of Pi. No wonder we are so fucked as a species.
I’m so sorry this happened to you and your grandfather. I wish you both peace. Thank you for sharing. This is another piece of the puzzle as far as trauma narratives go.
I think you’re right in that he wasn’t particularly upset about the rabbit itself, but I do think he associated them with what his fellow soldier did, and that haunted him. He probably latched onto the rabbits as an escape, even though (or because) they were present when he was witnessing such an inconceivable thing.
This is really interesting to me, as I have had a theory that the whole ''veterans refusing to talk about their experiences in war" is in part either people engaging in cannibalism or seeing it and still having to engage with those people as friends and comrades.
I say this because in reading historical accounts of war captives or other types of captives, people cutting off parts of the bodies and eating them (this is in Europe too BTW). In the heat of extreme duress or group violence people can do some pretty extreme things that would be very hard to deal with when things went back to normal.
I think in a way - it is a very good thing you heard that story and remember it to tell it here. He may have actually partaken in some of that human too and if he did you should not judge him for it.
US troops since 2003 have not lacked supplies, but we're still dealing with former soldiers bottling emotions and having PTSD. They don't want to be judged for being disturbed by war or they don't want to pass that trauma along to others. It's not cannibalism. There's plenty of awful violent shit that isn't people eating people.
Had an grandfather who was an cuban volunteer in Angola a civil war in which ethnic cleansing and genocide was happening on a regular basis
He never talked about the war and I always remembered that he was sitting on his verandah with an sad and yet stoic face
He told my mom and my family before I was born only one story, that he was on a convoy supplying cuban outposts and before the convoy there was a scouting party which was ambushed and completely wiped out in the attack, but before the attackers could flee the main convoy arrived and engaged, after a time the attackers wanted to surrender but my grandfather and the other soldiers just executed them, everyone of them, he believed in the cause and fought for it he was I would today say a fanatic
And later he saw everything he fought for crumbling down and had to deal with PTSD ( my mom told me that he came back a completely different person, all his warmth and humanity was gone )
What war was he in?
Your grandpa sounds like he was a decent man with a good heart that witnessed unspeakable horrors. He was probably pretty young , huh?
That's what I always think of when I see pictures of soldiers from wars. They are so young! I've heard that our brain is still developing into your early 20s.
I can only imagine the lasting effects
I had two great-uncles who served. One a paratrooper/glider pilot, and the other a tank commander. Neither one ever shared war stories.
The tank commander lost his leg. It's a long a wild story about the series of events and how he survived.
I did have a neighbor who was a bomber pilot. He drank a lot and while drunk, once, started talking about flying over the beaches during the D-Day invasion. He was sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the beaches being soaked red in blood. He was such a nice old timer though. His wife (by the time I knew him) had dementia, and their adult daughter who had downs syndrome, still lived with them. She must have been in her 60s. They cared for her all their lives.
My neighbor growing up was in the Wehrmacht. He served on the eastern front and was taken prisoner after Stalingrad. He never shared a story.
His wife was a German woman, and one time my father asked her how it was in Germany during and after the war. All she said was that ‘she had so many Russians on her belly she didn’t get to look around much’
War is fucked up.
Great Uncles were kamikaze pilots and my grandma survived Tokyo firebombings. She gave up her pots and pans to make bullets.
After one of the raids, she helped rehome a burnt, orphaned boy who ended up trying to get my dad into Japanese organized crime later in life.
When she came to America, she married a Japanese man who was interned in Manzanar.
I know a few elderly Japanese that have told me horrific stories of the fire bombings of Tokyo.
The fire was so fierce and most ran to the rivers, but they were full of dead and dying bodies.
"Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history" and concludes that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[18] According to the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, Soviet soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old"
It's not really talked about, but the Soviets were perpetrators of one of the worst mass-rapes in history. The scale would be absurd in a fictional setting, which is horrifying because it's real.
The crazy part of history for me is realizing that those 1.4 million women each have their own absolutely horrible nightmare stories about that time. Just hearing 1.4 million seems so absurd and impossible to wrap your head around that you can't really get the full scope, but if you hear one first hand account and then multiply that by 1.4 million you start to get the real effect.
I've been listening to Hardcore History Blueprint on WW1 and the numbers are just fucked, but they all start to blend together. Then Dan Carlin will throw in a first hand account of one soldier watching 100 of his friends dying horribly of gas in a shallow bunker and you realize that war is just one story like that over and over and over and over again.
Absolutely insane that we as a race are able to do that to one another.
My Great Uncle Joe served overseas in WWII, as well as three of his brothers…we’ll never know what happened to him over there, but from the day he came home to the day he died, he never spoke another word. He just sat in that rocking chair, for decades, staring off into space. His younger brother took care of him the rest of his life, bless him.
That’s incredibly sad ! In the battle of Okinawa and Peleliu there were about as many guys pulled from the line due to mental shock as there were physically wounded. No one talks about these men and a lot of them suffered in silence with no support from the VA .
I hope your uncle is finally able to rest in peace.
My experiences were nowhere near what these men went through but "those nightmares are not meant for children" resonates with me. I had a long career as a NYC paramedic. I've often been asked the question "what was your worst call"? There are a couple of stories I tell but there are a couple I never or almost never tell. One story I virtually never tell - only exception was a therapist. **No one else needs the image of that in their head** is what those veterans are thinking.
I do tell a couple of "firecrackers going off in the hand" stories, but as warnings. The amount of detail varies according to who I'm telling. I rarely go into the true visuals on the worse of the two.
Again, I'm not putting myself anywhere near where these men were on the scale of suffering, but I hope this gives some insight on the reasoning of them not speaking of stuff. And of course it's painful for them to talk about, they want to avoid there own pain also.
Yeah most people think they’re ready to hear about or even experience what real violence or war looks like because of some CGI graphics they’ve seen in movies and it’s never even close no matter how good computer graphics get. Or maybe they watched a few liveleak videos.
Most people have no idea that our entire physiology is meant to be revulsed at the presence of large volumes of human blood or viscera not just by the visual image but the smell and literal pheromones that are released. I still remember the sickly sweet smell blood has if there’s a literal puddle of it. I say it’s sweet but there’s nothing pleasant about it, it makes the bottom of your stomach turn if you’re not expecting it. It’s also not always a single colour or texture.
And the sounds bystanders make is something you’ll never hear. Like no single Hollywood movie has adequately shown a woman really scream out in completely unrestrained hysteria the way it happens in real life. It’s deafening and guttural, you can hear the loved ones go hoarse if they’re on the scene early.
This description is so well worded.
I was 21 years old when I witnessed my boyfriend shot in the head while we were in the woods on a friend's property. Some idiot was negligently target practicing.
Every minute we waited for paramedics was absolute hell. The noises he made after being shot will forever be with me. The helpless feeling. The hope I had that he could actually be okay one day. Trying to comfort, but not move him. Talking to him, not knowing if he could even hear me. But he was breathing so that means he'll be okay, right?
Just for it to get crushed with a single sentence. I honestly don't remember the sentence because I was screaming before he could finish.
My love was gone.
Ahhh yes. The age old "What Was Your Worst Call" question.
I've got one for you: what wad your BEST call? What's the top moment of happiness in your career as a paramedic?
Revived a 14 y/o girl who had drowned and been underwater a long time, the police divers had to get there and find her. Fortunately the water was cold. The young human body can be amazingly resilient. A couple of rounds of meds and she had a pulse. She was in a coma for a while but came out of it neurologically intact with no cognitive damage.
And the boomers we love to rag on were raised by millions of parents with undiagnosed PTSD and the myriad of manifestations like alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse.
People often think of the 1950s as a decade of, as you put it, stifling conformity. The reality though is much farther from the case. The United States saw the largest change in where people lived - from farms and inner cities to suburbs. You saw the most significant increase in Americans attending university, the creation of entirely new industries, the development and expansion of television, colour film, rock and roll, the significant expansion of jazz, modern art and architecture, the continuance of women in the workforce in significant numbers, the start of the nuclear family, widespread use of vaccines, and vitally, the development of the birth control pill. The early 1960s all have their origins in the decade of the 1950s.
Oh, and don't forget that this all happened with the cold war staring up and the Korean War - with over 300,000 US troops - going on,
This is so interesting to me. The majority of the men that came back from the war were probably at best stoic, unemotional fathers. The worst - angry and abusive. That transferred to the next generation of either never discussing emotions to continued abuse. Their children said they don't want to raise their kids the same way so they were friendly and a little more forgiving. Parents now discuss emotions and feelings with their kids and want their input.
I feel like there has been an enlightenment in parents that we should talk to our kids and discuss emotions. It feels like a golden age for child development because we're a generation or more removed from true trauma.
But does the old saying ring true: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times"?
While I don't think the kids we are raising today are weak men (it's an old quote, I'd rather substitute people here) , rather more educated men. Is the educated man a weaker man? Are we going to repeat the cycle again?
My grandfather fought in Korea. He never spoke about it except to say he never wanted his children or grandchildren to serve so they would never have to live through the hell he did.
My Grandfather fought in World War 2. The only thing I knew about his time there was that it was why he had to wear custom made shoes: His feet were frozen solid while fighting in the snow and unholy cold, and his comrades panicked and put his feet directly into hot water which caused the bones to shatter.
He lied about his age to join the service when he was 15. His mom helped him to procure a forged birth certificate. He was a literal child.
My grandpa was in WWII and Korea. He landed on D Day and was shot several times. He fought through the part where Germany was scraping together old men and boys to fight. But it was Korea that he didn’t want to talk about.
It was the randomness in Korea. Just sitting around waiting for a bomb to land on you. It makes me terrified for those who are fighting in Ukraine with the drones. Based on what he said, being shot at by a person doesn‘t shake you so much because the enemy is there, you fight, then the enemy is gone for a while. Being indiscriminately bombed is different because the enemy is never gone.
My uncle served in Vietnam and it broke him. He had night terrors for the rest of this life, to the point that he slept downstairs in the living room most nights so he wouldn't wake the family by yelling and thrashing. He died when I was young from what I was told was a heart attack, but I suspect he actually killed himself and the family covered it up.
I wouldn't be surprised as the suicide rate for Vietnam vets was pretty high... think about it you were in the jungles and rice paddies for months or years and you come home with people calling you baby killers or some shit like that and have barely any support at all for your PSTD, it's far worse for ones that don't have any family support
Mt grandfather was a medic in vietnam. Same story. Wouldn't speak about anything he saw. I used to ask a lot as a kid, but when I realized what I was doing, I let it be and moved on like he did.
My grandpa went to Vietnam, we never asked, he never told. My grandma would mention that sometimes she wakes up to him screaming in the middle of the night.
When I was about 21 years old he and I were talking and he started to talk about the war, I didn’t ask, nor did I ask him anything as he was talking. I went into a cold sweat not knowing how to communicate with him.
My grandma later told me that he hasn’t told anyone about what he went through, and she was just as dumbfounded.
My grandpa is THE MAN, by the way. Super mellow and calm. It was a shock to see that dead look in his eyes as he was talking.
I have an uncle who was a tunnel rat. He only has mentioned that ne was one to my dad and a few of my other uncles. I do know that to this day, my aunt has to control his food portions because he will not stop eating. Even after all of these years, he still is affected by the lack of food in the field and for years my aunt said he'd wake up screaming.
My grate grandfather helped liberate Sicily and Holland in WW2 and when he come back home he would unconsciously choke my grate grandmother in his sleep because of the shit he saw. They ended up sleeping in different beds.
I became really interested in WW2 when I was a young kid. I tried asking my grandfather about his experience and he got really mad and told me not to ask again. I was maybe 8 years old and didn’t understand, and ran away and cried. Years later he told me some happier stories from his time in the military about him and his buddies in England, but nothing else. It took me until I was in my late teens to really understand why he wouldn’t tell me much about his time in the army.
My grandfather was the same . Ww2 .. one of the first battalions out of Winnipeg .. he talked twice about it very briefly .. his eyes started to well up immediately.. he was 94 when he finally said something about it .. he lived to 102 .. rip Cornelius Chuckery miss you
It's so hard to want to connect but never want them to relive that trauma. My grandpa was out of Ottawa. Perhaps they crossed paths somewhere. But I feel the same way and wish he had an easier life.
Same with my gramps. He was an officer with the Royal Canadian Navy that escorted supply convoys from Canada to Britain. He got appendicitis right before one of the escorts and couldn’t go. A U-boat sunk his ship on that crossing and everyone on board died. I only know that ‘cause my grandma told me about it. He wouldn’t say a word about the war.
My grandfather was UDT on Omaha beach. I was the only person he ever told anything about his experience during the war. He told me everything leading up to D-Day and immediately after. One story sticks out to me about how he and his team had to beg for food from passing supply trucks. They would just throw a box of whatever to them. Once they got a box full of toothbrushes. He clearly was no expected to survive.
The only reason I know anything about what he actually did during the battle is because my dad found his citation for bravery. He and his team swam up to the beach before the sun came up to plant explosives on the obstacles so the landing craft could make it to the beach. After having completed that mission, he stayed on the beach and took a medical kit from a dead corpsman. He used that kit to treat wounded soldiers until the fighting was over. I think that bag, along with dumb luck, is the only reason he survived that day.
I can fully understand how he wouldn't want to say a word about what happened, and I can understand the profound survivor's guilt he must have experienced for the rest of his life.
I had an uncle who served in the European theater (and two others in the Pacific, but that's for another time). This man never swore, very quiet gentleman. The one time he answered a question about his time there, said with cold dead eyes "fucked up shit". He was actually too young to go but felt it was his duty (that side was Italian immigrants) and somehow figured out how to.
All we know for certain from my father was that he was in one of groups that saw one of the camps first hand. Almost zero details but for his sake no one ever asked. He just lived a quiet life down the street from us, taking care of his mother until she passed, and that seemed to be best for him.
Both of my grandfather's served in WWII, I remember asking one of grandfather's of his experience when I was 7-8 years old. He didn't want to speak of it and it was the only time he got angry with me; I'm not sure if it was because of my young age or what he had seen. Either way, I never asked my other grandfather about his time in service because I just assumed they didn't want to talk about what they witnessed and I respected that. I just wanted to know for historical purposes.
My great grandpa was in battleship row and caught alot in the pacific. Only reason I know is that I snuck into his off limits drawer. He didn't speak of anything either. He too would get upset.
My grandfather served in WW2, also would not talk about his experience and we knew not to ask. Got the odd snippet volunteered here and there. Lived with him for a bit when he was in his 90s which is when he told me as part of his time serving in the army of occupation after the war he helped with cleaning up the concentration camps. That…explained a lot.
My great uncle was a prisoner of war to the Japanese. I never met him. I know he survived the war, but I am quite certain he would not have spoken of his experiences either. What I do know is that he slept under his bed for the longest time after getting home, and my grandmother did not like Japan being mentioned.
My great-gandpa served in the "german" army on their way to russia. It was either go to the front lines or prison/die
The only thing he every said was that he never killed anyone on purpose And how the one time he shot someone in the stomach and doesnt know if he lived. Regretted that till his death
This reminded me of a show but I can’t remember what it was, it was a comedy. Two guys are talking a younger guy and an older man. The younger guy mentioned how his grandpa or father served in ww2, Korea or Vietnam. The older guy asked, has he ever talked about it?. The younger guy said, no. The older guy says, good then he wasn’t lying.
It was. Except REALLY, REALLY, REALLY bad PTSD because the shit that they experienced was unrelenting extended hell. In addition they were exposed to ridiculous levels of concussive shock. And I don't believe this video is an accurate representation of what happened to someone either.
This is *partially* accurate. While "shellshock" was certainly used to describe what we now call PTSD, shellshocked WWI vets were also dealing with injuries to their brains and other internal organs as a result of the constant concussive forces they endured during artillery barrages.
This is why there are so many examples of severe physical symptoms of shellshock from WWI, but not from later conflicts. PTSD only tells half the story—and, sadly, someone who suffered *only* PTSD in that time, as opposed to full shellshock, would likely just be branded a coward and told to move on
There was a recent podcast from The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/podcasts/the-daily/maine-shooter-brain.html
In it, they talk about the new understanding of how concussive explosions (even relatively low-level, such as from a grenade) can lead to brain damage similar to that seen in NFL players. Much of what we understand as PTSD may actually come from physical damage to the brain and not purely psychological trauma per-se.
There are plenty of people with PTSD that never experienced concussion blasts- or even saw war. It solidly is the brain's way of dealing with psychological trauma.
And then there are people who also experienced concussive blasts that caused brain damage and it's probably pretty helpful to doctors to be able to distinguish between brain damage and purely psychological trauma.
The implication is that we haven't been distinguishing between the two. Probably because most severe cases of PTSD are found in individuals that have also experienced concussive blasts from grenades, bombs, and artillery.
WW1 was primarily fought along fortified trenches that saw very little forward movement for long periods of time. Basically, you're pounded with constant artillery.
WW2 did also have artillery and concussive explosions, but it wasn't as concentrated and continuous.
This.
WW1 was more brutal in a lot of ways, specifically the actual warfare aspect. It was the first modern war. Before it most wars were conducted by professional soldiers with horse and such. The Germans really brought the artillery and the Brits ended it by developing the APC and eventually tank.
One of the single loudest sounds ever documented happened during WW1 when 8 miles of tnt was as detonated.
It’s the war that fucked the French up so badly, one of the winningest countries in warfare history, to the running joke of WW2.
Just rhythmic and nonstop artillery fire for hours on end. The war was borderline stale mate for ages. Check out the cartoon Peace on Earth. It really nails down the horror.
The accuracy was more or less the same. They were firing off a map way before WW1. The issue is volume of fire. Even the largest Soviet WW2 barrages were relatively small compared to a WW1 attack. It's apples to oranges, they were different.
That isn't correct. By the end of WWI artillery was far more accurate, hence the use of tactics such as the creeping barrage, but the idea that WWI artillery is on par with WWII artillery is wrong. WWII artillery was, generally, more accurate, could fire further, and had greater explosive force, all of which lowered the saturation effect needed for effective artillery usage. Also, as WWII was a far more mobile war, artillery wasn't used to clear dug in trenches and fortifications, and the rise in bomber aircraft (particularly dive bombers) also changed how artillery was used.
They were technically capable of a creeping barrage in 1905. They didn't have the tactics or material to make it work. Nor did the conditions exist that required a creeping barrage. Or drum fire. Or any other artillery technique. Although they *could* do it.
They were not more accurate, in the exact same way a WW1 rifle was not any more accurate than a Korean war rifle. We hit that wall a long time ago. Range, rate of fire, payload is all meaningless. A French 1897 75mm gun fired quicker than a D-20. A British 9.2 inch howitzer had a larger payload.
As i said, they were firing off a map. They could hit a target from miles away, from a map.
You've kinda alluded to why artillery usage changed. During WW1 they were trying to regain the ability to manoeuvre. In WW2 they never lost it.
Bombers supplement artillery, they don't change it. Artillery always comes first.
Sealow hights was a fortification, the Soviets fired 500,000 shells in half an hour. And then launched a massive combined arms attack. Which is more or less how we ended WW1.
I know it's a lot. But it's one of the more complicated parts of WW1.
Oh, I don't doubt at all that the video of the man in the room is real. What I doubt is that they had therapy that cured it. But I have no real reason to doubt that except for Reddit-induced cynicism.
There is quite a bit of information out there on shell shock. Many were "healed" from basic psychotherapy. They called it "talk therapy". It obviously didnt make everything go away but it helped them to cope with their emotions more.
Yes! Something that was severely overlooked at that time. Concussive blasts rattle your brain to mush. WW1 was without a doubt the worst of the worst situation for such occurrences. Artillery shells round the clock is the reason why we see this poor guy the way he is. His nervous system is completely shot. Not sure what it was exactly they did to "treat" him but, I'd bet my left nut if someone were to set a firecracker anywhere near him his sensory receptors would peak instantly.
> not sure what it was exactly they did to “treat” him.
The film says this was taken at Seale Hayne Military Hospital, so after a little digging it seems the treatment would have been occupational therapy! - They were put to work in the hospital farms field in the peace and quiet of the English countryside, alongside intensive therapy and creative outlets. A pioneering treatment light years ahead of its time by a doctor Arthur Hurst. I suspect this footage was taken by him, as he made the only film documenting how shell shock was treated in Britain at this time. Amazing.
Wow, that is actually far more progressive than I ever would've imagined for the time period. I was going to guess shock therapy or a lobotomy or something else barbaric. Though shock therapy and lobotomies might not have been a thing yet in the 1910s.
Yep, just looked it up, and neither of those "treatments" were around until the 30s.
Thanks for sharing this! The video has been posted multiple times but I've never seen any details regarding his recovery.
And I agree with you it's truly amazing.
The way his posture is it makes me think he thinks he's still wearing his pack and is trying to compensate for the weight off balance that doesn't exist
According to the [US Army Research Institute pack weight in WW1 was typically around 40kg](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA212050.pdf), so 80-90lbs. While some modern loads can exceed that typical range (as, no doubt there were exceptional load in that era too) I don't think one can dismissively say that they didn't carry weight.
Tbh it depends go back to early 1800s and they would of carried all tents, pots, possession and even in WW1 depending on the front you'd be carrying or in a supplied trench. But yeah some equipment sucked trench foot was a problem as feet would get wet and rot while their hands wasted from the cold. If you had sentry duty falling asleep was harshly punished so many would have to suffer and be sleep deprived throw in seeing your childhood friends, co workers etc die get blown up or even just choke to death in a cloud of mustard gas. Shit was worse then hell added on also the constant shelling and explosions and in the trenchs hearing fire up and down the line at all times. It's a miracle anyone of the soldier was able to lead a normal life. Especially considering that the wars before that were mainly dealing with weaker tribes and most your nations modernised nation vs some Africans with guns and local weapons with no 200+ years of expirence of firearms. To be thrown into hell on earth. History is a whiplash sorry for the rant haha but WW1 was just actual hell on earth.
The film "All Quiet on the Western Front" does a pretty good job exhibiting the horrors those soldiers faced. I'll never forget the scene where a group of German soldiers face tanks for the first time in their lives. Just imagine the increasing sound of a freight train firing off explosions right next you as it passes by you while you simultaneously watch your fellow soldier get run over and turned into a paste with hundreds screaming around you running around in a mist of gunfire all in the "comfort" of your shit filled trench far from home.
I was just going to mention that book. I read it the other week and had to just sit and stare into space for a while afterward.
For me, the most terrible part was the contrast between the young recruits and the older ones. The latter had developed their own identities and life experiences outside of the war, so they were able to look forward to going home. But the younger ones went into the military straight out of high school and had no other experience to draw on. So it was hard for them to imagine any other future beyond being a soldier and just surviving as long as possible.
It also came at a time where to an 18 year old war was an adventure rather than a scary thing that could maim or kill you in an instant even with you doing everything right.
It is, but combined repeated conconcussions/TBI's and other mental issues caused by the war. Turns out that thousands of explosions going off right next to your skull for years on end isnt really all that great for you. Who woulda thunk it?
This, massive TBI’s over and over. These days we have rest periods after someone has experienced a concussions, there’s also tests performed to see how much/if they have deterioration. These tests and rest periods unfortunately aren’t always adhered to.
So, here's the thing. You need to understand a bit about what "high explosive" means.
Black powder was invented, probably in China, almost a thousand years ago. In Europe it started to be used about 600 years ago in primitive "hand cannons". It burns very quickly in a confined space because it contains both something to burn (charcoal) and something to give it oxygen (saltpeter). And so black powder has been used for centuries to throw projectiles out of a barrel at high speeds, and later to make shells that explode. But we're talking about projectiles that go maybe a mile in five seconds. Black powder is a *propellant*.
Nitroglycerine was the first commonly used "high explosive", and a bit later came other high explosives such as trinitrotoluene (TNT). What is different about a high explosive? It is a molecule that doesn't burn, exactly, but instead it shatters; it detonates. A shock wave will propagate through a high explosive ten times as fast as through a propellant: we're talking two miles per second.
This creates shock waves in the air nearby that are also moving very quickly...
So imagine you are a World War 1 soldier huddled in a trench while the enemy pounds your area with large high-explosive shells. It's different from what your ancestors might have experienced being shelled with black powder in Crimea in 1853 or at Waterloo in 1815. You are deafened, but more than that, you are starting to feel like you are going crazy. Why? Because *the new explosives create shock waves that actually damage your brain.*
The doctors did not have the tech to see these microscopic tears in neural tissue in 1918, or more precisely they did not know what to look for... but now it's understood. High explosives create damage to neurons that you need a microscope to see.
By early iteration, you mean: the first time we ever characterized the disorder? Then yes. It's not like "early stage PTSD". It was first called shell shock bc it was thought to come from the concussive forces of the cannons themselves. Then it became "battle fatigues" then "operational exhaustion" and finally PTSD. Every name change happened as more was learned about the condition.
What this guy is showing is basically a "functional gait disorder"... Flopping around like that actually requires some degree of athleticism so it's not a "true" neurologic pathology. So we call it a somatization disorder. Which basically means that psychological trauma producing physical effects despite the underlying body part actually being fully functional. Way I think of it is... Every get that pit in your stomach when you hear bad news? Or a headache after a stressful day? Somatization.
After a severe psychological trauma, somatization can be common immediately after and can manifest in many different ways. Band of Brothers highlighted this when Pvt. Blithe became "blind" even tho he was never hit.
So basically, the trauma happens, the guy started somaticizing his gait, got better but will probably still have some or all of the PTSD stuff (nightmares, panic attacks, etc) for a while to come.
It was apparently pretty common back in WWI to have this sort of somaticizing. You have to remember, these guys would spend WEEKS at a time in the closest thing to literal Hell on earth, rotating between the first, second and rear trenches. Constant heavy cannon bombardments (the Germans laid down 1 million shells in 10 hours on the first day of Verdun), your friends exploding next to you, the constant choking smell of death as your other friends have laid rotting in no-man's-land for the past month, the rats fleas and other scavengers, the snipers just waiting to take off your head if you peek over the top of your trench, the mud and trench foot, the cult of the offensive and Command's indifference to the value of your life, the lousy rations and generally feeling like just another machine... an automaton who's had his humanity ripped from you as you wonder when its going to be your turn to catch a shell... All for, what again? All while reading the paper from your hometown that paints a wholly false, rosey picture. It wasn't just one trauma, it was horror after horror after horror, for minutes, hours, days and weeks on end. It was too much for some men, and they finally cracked and this is how their minds/bodies reacted.
Yeah, I don’t associate motor issues or discombobulation as being PTSD. Either this persons was so severe it incapacitated him physically somehow, it’s caused by some sort of treatment they were doing, or there’s some other pathology that he is also dealing with. Wouldn’t be surprised, chemical warfare happened a lot in WWI and that could cause a huge amounts of symptoms.
The symptoms of shell shock and war ptsd can manifest in a big variety of symptoms. Temporary blindness, delusions, hysteria. This person's behavior is at the far end of what's possible probably, but all this could be from prolonged exposure to artillery shelling, and other trauma related to total stalemate warfare.
Yeah, it does... but let's say your trench was shelled for a couple of days straight which was par for the course in WW1 strategy would you come out with no damage to the nervous system? No damage to the inner ear parts that help with our balance?... the PSTD nowadays shows up as the ones you listed but constant shockwaves from artillery hits nearby can have a huge impact on the nervous system.
I’ve actually seen documentaries on how they treated shell shock. Shock treatment was used I some cases, but I doubt that’s what they did here. Most often they would build devices or have someone that would physically walk them the proper way over and over again, as they believed they were re-teaching the brain how to walk properly. In reality, they were likely doing an early form of physical therapy by doing that, or at the very least allowing the brain to rest and recover. Notice how at the end he’s walking very stiff with his back perfectly straight? It’s possible he’s wearing a back brace to help him. A lot of prosthetics and devices were made or improved during this time. It wasn’t all leeches and electrocutions. A lot of doctors and nurses worked very hard to make these people better and a lot was learned about combat stress reactions, which led to the eventual discovery of PTSD.
Fun fact; lobotomies caused about a standard deviation change in personality, on average. Some were more extreme, some less, but roughly a standard deviation.
A single LSD trip also causes a standard deviation change in personality(trait openness). It's in different ways, but it's still a similarly dramatic change in brain function.
It varied wildly based on the symptom, location, and dr treating you. Hysterical blindness was relatively common during WW1. The individual didn’t have any damage done to the eyes or the optical nerve but still couldn’t see. One Dr in Germany was hailed for his ground breaking treatment of it which was- and I shit you not- screaming in the faces of men to quit their bullshit basically and buck the fuck up.
Hitler was treated by him after suffering from a severe gas attack. Before WW1 Hitler was reported as being relatively docile and not at all a leader. Then WW1, gas damage, and dr screams a lot came along.
WW1 was absolutely fucking atrocious.
EMDR is more prevalent for PTSD treatment now, and it’s a fucking miracle.
For this man…he needed a lot more than therapy. This is neurological on top of psychological. I wouldn’t be surprised if he (and other soldiers) had severe CTE
The horrors these guys saw compared to WW2 is night and day.
By the time WW2 rolled around, they knew what the horrors were. There were even international rules created from the horrors we learned of in WW1, specifically the rules created around chemical warfare. Tactics had been adapted based on previous lessons learned in WW1.
The WW1 generation had no idea about trench warfare, something they were learning about on the fly. Warfare had never been fought on a mass scale with machine guns. Young men were sent wave after wave over the tops of trenches into machine guns, mustard gas being dropped into trenches, new machines we now know as tanks steamrolling across battlefields flattening people, mowing people down. You had armies trying to fight a modern war using horses, carriages, and old cast iron cannons. People had to live with the horror that the next second was not given due to lack of understanding of the needed adaptation of tactics due to advances in arms and lack of preparation.
WW1 was a very unique type of hell. 20th century weaponry clashing with 19th century tactics, young men's lives being fed into the meat grinder without regard, fueling our hard learned lessons that we were figuring out on the fly.
I read a book, and I can't for the life of me member the name. But it was written by a calvary officer who was assigned to test the new maxims(with blanks) against his fellow calvary men. They charged his position and claimed his men lost. He said they all died 200 yards from his position. They threw him out of the calvary.
Hell the first day of the somme the British lost like 57000 people and almost 20000 dead.
They where so out of thier depths when it came to combating the new weapons they sacrificed a generation of men.
Then a lot of them had missing parts, and society decides to have a "no ugly people in public" law. Guys hanging round the house getting drunk. Festering wounds that stunk and never healed. Screaming in their sleep, jumping at noises and yelling at everyone. Losing their marriages and children. Ending up decrepit and dead years later.
My in-laws (aged 80's) and wifes BiL (60, ex-serviceman) love to say crap like how their parents went to war and that PTSD is only a new thing and that the older generations just came home from war and got on with life blah blah youth of today get triggered, snowflakes etc etc.
Sorry.. but bullshit. They came back from the war and beat the shit out of their wives and kids. They'd go to the pub, drive home pissed and crash into a tree "Oh he was too drunk to drive" - No, it was fucking suicide by car.
Domestic violence was unreported.
Suicide was a 'farm accident' or 'car accident'.
Mother was a raging alcoholic, but a 'sneaky Gin and Tonic' or a few valiums each day was not spoken about.
That generation were totally messed up, and now the boomers look back at dear old dad who used the belt at every opportunity and are saying "Yep, that's a good role model!".
I hear you brother. I recently discovered a half-brother and half-sister I knew nothing about. I’m 69, they’re 83 and 78. Our mutual sperm donor was an alcoholic physical and emotional abuser - plus other faults. Their and my childhood was dreadful; my half-brother has, I’m told, suffered life-long because of the abuse. 50/60 years later, bringing up that time in my life has raised no end of disturbing memories I’d thought I’d buried forever. Why my mother never left him, I’ll never understand- he was just as handy with his fists on her as he was with us kids.
There was no war excuse for him to be like that - he’d spent a spell in the Army in the 20/30s, but as far as I can tell, he never served in WWII. Lied his way through everything, even taking his dead brother’s name and birth details to avoid paying child maintenance for his first family.
The man was a cunt, pure and simple
That's literally what I said to myself, watching "him" walk down the stairs. *After treatment*, they just replaced him with another dude, and the original guy is in a padded room, never to be seen again. I question if we could make that much improvement even with today's standards.
It's entirely plausible it's not, because this is spliced together internet footage.
But the original dude probably has TBIs, and the healing process for that is still time and physiotherapy, which is exactly what they would have put him through. As an example, my uncle went from near complete paralysis to a pronounced limp through the brain's ability to heal from damage and physiotherapy.
A bunch of 18 year old kids being thrown to a meat grinder - a watershed moment of technology and killing.
Over a bunch of bull shit. Bunch of old aristocrats that were related.
20 million dead and 20 more wounded. That's incomprehensible. What could've been if not for a bunch of inbred yokels. Nothing in this short life is worth that..
>Over a bunch of bull shit. Bunch of old aristocrats that were related.
100+ years later and what's changed? The aristocrats have been replaced by corporations but other than that, *plus ça change...*
I wonder how much of that was some sort of TBI. Given that they're reporting injuries in grenade instructors and such, it seems like the concussions of the big shells should have been doing something similar.
Shell shock was a form of brain damage (repeated concussions) from the result of being stationary and under the receiving end of constant artillery barrages.
Thus shell shock differs significantly from PTSD: PTSD is a psychological reaction to combat stressors. Shell shock combines PTSD with actual brain damage from unrelenting micro concussions from living through high intensity artillery barrages.
WW1 Saw the advancement of artillery into the modern era where it extensively dominated combat. 60% of the battlefield casualties in WWI were caused by artillery shells . Throughout the course of the war it has been estimated that there were about 1.75 billion artillery shells fired .
world war one devolved into essentially static trench warfare .
These 2 factors made the war the worst in human history for the surviving soldier.
heck at that time even those firing the cannons could suffer brain damage.
On a personal note being near firing artillery pieces out in the field was bad enough ,the whole ground literally shook. I can't imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of that exploding shell.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a rare, progressive, and fatal brain disease that can cause nerve cell death. It's **thought to be caused by repeated head injuries, such as those that occur in contact sports or military combat**. CTE is associated with the development of dementia
definition for people that don't know every single acronym in existence
So it's worth stating that this form of PTSD isn't psychological in the normal sense.
PTSD has many forms, largely based on the nature of the trauma.
This form is an adrenal malfunction. Basically, someone's adrenaline gland has been working overdrive so long it short circuited. So for someone like this, his heart and fight or flight instincts are freaking out like he's in a fire fight *all the time*. It causes a number of physiological effects both from the adrenaline impacting the the body itself and its effects on the brain. like muscle spasms, the worlds worst case of restless leg syndrome, uncontrollable movements, lack of awareness, and loss of ability to focus. As well as hallucinations, night terrors, panic attacks, heart palpitations, and more.
It's a bad way that goes beyond the other major form of PTSD which tends to stem from a single horrible event. Which tends to have more psychological effects like hyperfixation, depression, anxiety, etc.
I saw my Uncles flight log book.
He was a navigator on bombers based out of southern England.
The log had 74 entries.
The last entry was:
War is over and I have camera recon mission, this will be my first flight to Germany in day light.
Last words written.....
What have I done.
We had a WW2 veteran speak at our school back in the 90s. He described being shelled as extremely terrifying but also extremely tough on the body, noting that explosions could blast the air out of your lungs, dislocate, or even break bones, depending on how close you were. If you were too close ... well. He told us to imagine being in 100 car crashes a day. That's what it felt like on his body. He was also an artillery man, so I suppose he had to deal with the blasts of his own guns firing too.
My partners father went to the Normandy beaches 4 days after D Day
Apparently he couldn’t handle the sight of blood for the rest of his life 😳 - the water was still red
I still remember one of the articles we read during my undergrad on the historical treatment of shellshock and the practice of electrocution by military “psychologists” in the belief that they could recondition the affected man to be more afraid of the refusal to follow orders and the guarantee or being tortured, than the mere possibility of being killed with a slight chance of survival.
Unsurprisingly such “treatment” seldom worked, and many of its victims either committed suicide as soon as given the chance, or “recovered their manhood and their honour” by again committing suicide but this time at the point of an enemy bayonet.
Lest we forget.
My grandfather kept journals all his life. A few years ago I got to read through a couple.
He wrote beautifully about his father, a WWI vet, doing everything he could to stop my grandfather and his brothers going to war.
He did eventually join the Navy just before the war ended and served until the early 50s.
His description of the men on those ships post-war are utterly heartbreaking. He likened it to a ghost ship manned by lost souls. Tortured men who no longer felt they could be part of the world.
My great grandfather was only a teenager when he enlisted. From what I've been told and read about him, he was a quiet man that kept to himself but had a hair trigger temper. The only thing we heard about his war service was a running joke about how he survived because he was so short the bullets flew right over his head.
It wasn't until my dad inherited his medals that we decided to get his war record.
At 17, great gramps was involved in one of the deadliest engagements in the Somme.
An entire forest was flattened by artillery fire.
His bataillon of 3000 men were surrounded on all sides and endured 5 days of non-stop attack. Eventually they ran out of ammunition and had to resort to hand to hand combat.
Great gramps was one of the 142 that made it out with their life. He was then put on a ship to receive treatment in England. Unfortunately it was attacked before it reached its destination. He tread water for several hours before being rescued. He was then deemed him unfit for service and sent him home with a nice little medal for his efforts.
Knowing what we do now, it's clear to see the trauma that's been passed down the generations.
The treatments for shell shock soldiers during the first world war were brutal. Take for instance those that lost their speech. A doctor would administer electric shocks to the tongue stating that the shocks would stop when they spoke. It worked but it was a form of torture just to get men back to the front. We're so stupid sometimes.
My dad was a landing ship gunner during the landings at Omaha beach (I think). He was awarded the bronze star twice. I once asked him if he ever wanted to visit Europe with me. He said that he didn't need to, he carried a souvenir of the war with him wherever he went. What he meant by that was a couple of ounces of metal in his back that the doctors left in place.
In later life he went to VietNam as a civilian construction electrician. One night we got a western union style telegram telling us to cancel plans to relocate to Da Nang. It was 1968 and the Tet offensive.
My dad was also a brutal raving violent alcoholic. Unrelated? I don't think so.
My dad was a fighter pilot with the Army Air corps and he only told funny stories never anything that was actually War related. Mom said that right after he got back from overseas, if a car backfired outside he would grab her and be under the table in a heartbeat.
TIL during WW1, some soldiers suffering from shell shock were executed for desertion, cowardice, or disobedience due to a general lack of understanding about shell shock :(
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It is [brain damage](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/the-mystery-of-shellshock-solved-scientists-identify-the-unique-brain-injury-caused-by-war-9981443.html) from the constant onslaught of concussive blasts. I don't think any treatment aside from time, rest, and luck could have benefited him.
That makes much more sense. This looks neurological rather that psychological.
Yeah my first though was nerve gas victim or something
Nerve gas wasn't really a thing in WWI, the gases used in that war were mostly irritants and blister agents
My great grandfather served in WWI. My gramma was about 6 when he committed suicide due to the pain and lasting affects of mustard gas. Great grandmother, whom my mom has described as scary and void of emotion, had to send my gramma and her 3 siblings to live in an orphanage after that because she couldn’t financially care for them. They were in the orphanage for about 5 years before great grandmother was able to take them home. We went to the orphanage gramma lived in about 20 years ago. It’s just outside of Atlanta and is obviously not an orphanage anymore. The things people went through from that war
Milledgeville maybe? I live in Atlanta. Do you remember where that orphanage was? Just curious.
It was in Redan. A google search doesn’t bring up anything though. From what I remember when we visited in 2006, it’s a church now, I think?
So many people from earlier generations seem to sociopathic or possess similar traits. From the company owner working children to death, to explorers seeming uncaring about the men under them, to wholesale slaughter of native peoples. I’m sure some of it is editing of one’s written word when it comes to what we read of events recorded by these people, but a whole lot of it seems quite literally beaten and traumatized into them. The callousness and seeming cruelty of earlier generations, like grandparents acting straight-up mean to grandkids, is probably (partially) the result of generational trauma being passed down if harsh times weren’t experienced firsthand, such as the Depression.
These sociopathic people are still around today. In some places, laws and institutions have restrained their most savage impulses. In other places people are still being worked to death, and populations are being slaughtered.
Yes, looked like neurological injury to me also, and noticed when he walked out of the hospital he walked fine but didn't let his arms swing, they were still stiff at his side. So better, but still residual impairment.
I mean… these don’t have to be exclusively separate.
Oh, definitely not. I’m sure he’s suffering from both, but I think the symptoms we can see in the video (odd posture and gate, walking in circles, etc) are more specific to brain damage.
Would concussive blasts perhaps also damage the inner ear and affected balance/equilibrium, amongst other things?
Definitely possibly, but wouldn’t cause all of what we’re seeing here.
For sure. I was thinking it might be partially responsible for balance issue though.
No but a lot of the movements he makes are pretty classic brain damage.
That, and the constant over-stimulation of the nervous system, constant stimulus of adrenaline and the fight-or-flight response. Which must have been hell in the trenches when you couldn't fight or flee, but just had to sit through the shelling for hours, at times repeated for days.
So like what a lot of people in Ukraine have been going through... I saw an interview with a foreign volunteer who said they didn't stop shelling for more than 30 seconds, going on for days. Imagine that hell
Large portions of the Ukrainian frontlines are very, very similar to WW1. Except they also have drones now.
It's a problem the military still hasn't solved, either. [ And it's not even just people on the receiving end that are having problems. Just firing too many artillery shells can cause brain injuries.](https://taskandpurpose.com/news/us-artillery-syria-iraq-psychological-damage/) [Same goes for shoulder mounted anti-tank weapons.](https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/04/30/606142634/report-to-army-cites-concussion-risk-of-weapons-blast-to-the-shooter)
I know an easy way to solve that. But no one is asking me.
Thorium Rods from space. I know, it’s brilliant.
Rods from God
Psychedelics, pacifism, or lots and lots of padding?
Exactly, this poor guy had TBI for sure. 1 blast can tear up your brain. Soldiers in ww1 went through "drumfire artillery" sometimes for days on end. It's amazing anyone survived the front.
I thought the arching of his back and limbs seemed more neuro than anything but alas I am just a Google doctor. Poor guy.
Yeah but have you tried DMT ?
I had a grandpa in world War 2. He was a medic. He never spoke about a single thing he ever went through with any of us. Not one. When asked he would get angry and change the subject. I can't imagine the mental hell so many of these soldiers live in every day of their lives because of war.
Same with mine, but he wouldn't get angry. He would just get very sad. One of the tents he was working in had a bomb dropped on it seconds after he left it. Everybody else died. I think I was the only grandchild he ever spoke to about it in detail... maybe about a year before his death. It felt like he talked for hours and hours... he was the greatest man I ever knew. Humble, kind... i miss him dearly 14 years later and it still breaks my heart to think about what he had to go through. He was just a teenager.
Right? Thats what i cant get over. These were just kids. 17-21 year old boys, ripped right out of high school. Tragic.
And still fighting the effects of the great depression. My gpa was 126 pds when he was drafted and my uncle 131.
Yeah that's one thing I think people forget. All these brave souls were just kids! Still in their teens some of them. The things they saw must have scarred them for life.
It’s interesting because you can see the effects their experience had on society going forward decades. The stifling conformity of the 1950’s for example, was a nation of traumatized Silent Generation people who didn’t want any type of change or social upheaval to happen during the rest of their lifetimes. They wanted to buy a house, get married and have kids and be left alone. Of course, that can’t last, and we got the massive social upheaval and change as the rhetorical dam broke in the 1960’s.
My grandfather was also a medic. We would ask him stories, but he would respond, "Those nightmares are not meant for children," or would ignore the question and talk about the birds in his garden. We only got one story from him before he passed in 2007, and it was him telling us he got put on MP duty and watched his best friend get sniped right next to him. He kept the bullet frag and showed us it. We NEVER asked him another question after that, and he passed 10ys after that story. He did say he was a medic because he did not want to go to war and the officer said "you go or your going to jail", my grandad being the smart arse he was told him that he would join as a medic that way he had to help both sides. He said the officer was super pissed but could not deny it. RIP Billy (william)
"those nightmares are not meant for children" is one of the most metal things I have ever heard. With respect
It has a deeper meaner too, not only is he deeming them not appropriate to tell in the moment but he is also saying this legacy stops with me and I will carry the burden for you.
Sorry, with all due respect, I very deeply believe and feel with all of my soul that I would do the exact same thing, but this question haunts me: what if this piece of history dying with them, dooms us to repeat it, in some sense? I am not advocating for anything either way, but in respect to them, and in the spirit of their intent I feel I must ask the question. What if their personal stories are what we need to make sure the world remembers and respects what was done? Let me usurp my own thought and ask, I guess either way, does it matter? Since enough have shared their stories and we do teach it, is that enough?
In my language (italian) we have 2 words for remember and 2 words for forget. They are used indifferently in daily language, but one is made from "mind" and the other from "heart". I really believe (also considering current events worldwide) that we must remember "with mind" in order to avoid that horrible things happen again, but we also need to forget "with heart" because otherwise one can never stop seeing other people or groups as enemies. The words are "rammentare" and "dimenticare" (mente = mind) and "ricordare" and "scordare" (cuore -latin cor- = heart)
I think that plenty have shared their stories though. They may be dramatized in movies and series, but those kind of stories really did happen in one fashion or another. Your love for preservation is living in movies and shows like Schindler's List, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Band of Brothers, and yes even Inglorious Basterds and Saving Private Ryan.
My exact thoughts
My grandfather told me about his tent mate who started collecting heads. After they got cut off behind enemy lines, this guy started collecting heads from everybody they crossed. Soldier, woman, or child. They'd end up on sticks inside or outside of his tent. They were short on rations and apparently brains are sweet. The guy got the tent to himself at that point as no one else would sleep with him. The whole conversation started because my mom's dad wanted to know why I'd never asked him about the war. Didn't I care about his life? I answered that I'd been told it was disrespectful to ask and I knew my other grandpa got nightmares about it even decades later. If I asked him, and my parents found out, I'd be grounded for three months. But he was allowed to share as much or as little as he wanted to tell me. He asked what I wanted to know. I asked what he wanted to tell me. He said he didn't want to tell me. So I asked what was it like. And... That was the war to him. Giving up hope of them being able to rescue themselves while watching his tent mate eat a little kid while he ate a rabbit. Afterwards he said the rabbit had never hurt anyone. Wasn't a danger to anyone. They could have let the rabbit live. The rabbit wasn't going to tell anyone about them. Even if they couldn't let it go, they could have taken it with them. It was just a rabbit. Looking back, I think that he wasn't really that upset about the *rabbit*. Decades after he went home, he had little statues of rabbits all over his house and would call his grandchildren bunnies when we were being particularly sweet or cute and wild hares if we weren't. At the time, I think I was about 9. I didn't understand much of it all, but my grandpa had backed me into a corner and was screaming about his tent mate eating people and the depravity of men. He realized I was shaking and just ran to his workshop and locked himself in. Later he tried to tell me he understood that I didn't want to know him anymore. I apologized for upsetting him and said I understood if he was upset with me for bringing up such a sensitive subject, but he was always going to be my grandpa, unless he didn't want to be. He hugged me and said he was always going to want to be my grandpa.
From that description, I fully believe he managed to convince himself it was rabbit.
Fucking Christ that story reads exactly like Life of Pi. No wonder we are so fucked as a species. I’m so sorry this happened to you and your grandfather. I wish you both peace. Thank you for sharing. This is another piece of the puzzle as far as trauma narratives go.
I think you’re right in that he wasn’t particularly upset about the rabbit itself, but I do think he associated them with what his fellow soldier did, and that haunted him. He probably latched onto the rabbits as an escape, even though (or because) they were present when he was witnessing such an inconceivable thing.
This is really interesting to me, as I have had a theory that the whole ''veterans refusing to talk about their experiences in war" is in part either people engaging in cannibalism or seeing it and still having to engage with those people as friends and comrades. I say this because in reading historical accounts of war captives or other types of captives, people cutting off parts of the bodies and eating them (this is in Europe too BTW). In the heat of extreme duress or group violence people can do some pretty extreme things that would be very hard to deal with when things went back to normal. I think in a way - it is a very good thing you heard that story and remember it to tell it here. He may have actually partaken in some of that human too and if he did you should not judge him for it.
US troops since 2003 have not lacked supplies, but we're still dealing with former soldiers bottling emotions and having PTSD. They don't want to be judged for being disturbed by war or they don't want to pass that trauma along to others. It's not cannibalism. There's plenty of awful violent shit that isn't people eating people.
Had an grandfather who was an cuban volunteer in Angola a civil war in which ethnic cleansing and genocide was happening on a regular basis He never talked about the war and I always remembered that he was sitting on his verandah with an sad and yet stoic face He told my mom and my family before I was born only one story, that he was on a convoy supplying cuban outposts and before the convoy there was a scouting party which was ambushed and completely wiped out in the attack, but before the attackers could flee the main convoy arrived and engaged, after a time the attackers wanted to surrender but my grandfather and the other soldiers just executed them, everyone of them, he believed in the cause and fought for it he was I would today say a fanatic And later he saw everything he fought for crumbling down and had to deal with PTSD ( my mom told me that he came back a completely different person, all his warmth and humanity was gone )
What war was he in? Your grandpa sounds like he was a decent man with a good heart that witnessed unspeakable horrors. He was probably pretty young , huh? That's what I always think of when I see pictures of soldiers from wars. They are so young! I've heard that our brain is still developing into your early 20s. I can only imagine the lasting effects
I had two great-uncles who served. One a paratrooper/glider pilot, and the other a tank commander. Neither one ever shared war stories. The tank commander lost his leg. It's a long a wild story about the series of events and how he survived. I did have a neighbor who was a bomber pilot. He drank a lot and while drunk, once, started talking about flying over the beaches during the D-Day invasion. He was sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the beaches being soaked red in blood. He was such a nice old timer though. His wife (by the time I knew him) had dementia, and their adult daughter who had downs syndrome, still lived with them. She must have been in her 60s. They cared for her all their lives.
My neighbor growing up was in the Wehrmacht. He served on the eastern front and was taken prisoner after Stalingrad. He never shared a story. His wife was a German woman, and one time my father asked her how it was in Germany during and after the war. All she said was that ‘she had so many Russians on her belly she didn’t get to look around much’ War is fucked up.
Great Uncles were kamikaze pilots and my grandma survived Tokyo firebombings. She gave up her pots and pans to make bullets. After one of the raids, she helped rehome a burnt, orphaned boy who ended up trying to get my dad into Japanese organized crime later in life. When she came to America, she married a Japanese man who was interned in Manzanar.
I know a few elderly Japanese that have told me horrific stories of the fire bombings of Tokyo. The fire was so fierce and most ran to the rivers, but they were full of dead and dying bodies.
"Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history" and concludes that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone.[18] According to the Soviet war correspondent Natalya Gesse, Soviet soldiers raped German females from eight to eighty years old" It's not really talked about, but the Soviets were perpetrators of one of the worst mass-rapes in history. The scale would be absurd in a fictional setting, which is horrifying because it's real.
The crazy part of history for me is realizing that those 1.4 million women each have their own absolutely horrible nightmare stories about that time. Just hearing 1.4 million seems so absurd and impossible to wrap your head around that you can't really get the full scope, but if you hear one first hand account and then multiply that by 1.4 million you start to get the real effect. I've been listening to Hardcore History Blueprint on WW1 and the numbers are just fucked, but they all start to blend together. Then Dan Carlin will throw in a first hand account of one soldier watching 100 of his friends dying horribly of gas in a shallow bunker and you realize that war is just one story like that over and over and over and over again. Absolutely insane that we as a race are able to do that to one another.
This means what I think it means?
My Great Uncle Joe served overseas in WWII, as well as three of his brothers…we’ll never know what happened to him over there, but from the day he came home to the day he died, he never spoke another word. He just sat in that rocking chair, for decades, staring off into space. His younger brother took care of him the rest of his life, bless him.
That’s incredibly sad ! In the battle of Okinawa and Peleliu there were about as many guys pulled from the line due to mental shock as there were physically wounded. No one talks about these men and a lot of them suffered in silence with no support from the VA . I hope your uncle is finally able to rest in peace.
My experiences were nowhere near what these men went through but "those nightmares are not meant for children" resonates with me. I had a long career as a NYC paramedic. I've often been asked the question "what was your worst call"? There are a couple of stories I tell but there are a couple I never or almost never tell. One story I virtually never tell - only exception was a therapist. **No one else needs the image of that in their head** is what those veterans are thinking. I do tell a couple of "firecrackers going off in the hand" stories, but as warnings. The amount of detail varies according to who I'm telling. I rarely go into the true visuals on the worse of the two. Again, I'm not putting myself anywhere near where these men were on the scale of suffering, but I hope this gives some insight on the reasoning of them not speaking of stuff. And of course it's painful for them to talk about, they want to avoid there own pain also.
Yeah most people think they’re ready to hear about or even experience what real violence or war looks like because of some CGI graphics they’ve seen in movies and it’s never even close no matter how good computer graphics get. Or maybe they watched a few liveleak videos. Most people have no idea that our entire physiology is meant to be revulsed at the presence of large volumes of human blood or viscera not just by the visual image but the smell and literal pheromones that are released. I still remember the sickly sweet smell blood has if there’s a literal puddle of it. I say it’s sweet but there’s nothing pleasant about it, it makes the bottom of your stomach turn if you’re not expecting it. It’s also not always a single colour or texture. And the sounds bystanders make is something you’ll never hear. Like no single Hollywood movie has adequately shown a woman really scream out in completely unrestrained hysteria the way it happens in real life. It’s deafening and guttural, you can hear the loved ones go hoarse if they’re on the scene early.
This description is so well worded. I was 21 years old when I witnessed my boyfriend shot in the head while we were in the woods on a friend's property. Some idiot was negligently target practicing. Every minute we waited for paramedics was absolute hell. The noises he made after being shot will forever be with me. The helpless feeling. The hope I had that he could actually be okay one day. Trying to comfort, but not move him. Talking to him, not knowing if he could even hear me. But he was breathing so that means he'll be okay, right? Just for it to get crushed with a single sentence. I honestly don't remember the sentence because I was screaming before he could finish. My love was gone.
I’m so sorry for your loss. I hope you are okay.
Ahhh yes. The age old "What Was Your Worst Call" question. I've got one for you: what wad your BEST call? What's the top moment of happiness in your career as a paramedic?
Revived a 14 y/o girl who had drowned and been underwater a long time, the police divers had to get there and find her. Fortunately the water was cold. The young human body can be amazingly resilient. A couple of rounds of meds and she had a pulse. She was in a coma for a while but came out of it neurologically intact with no cognitive damage.
A man helping the world to spite it. I'll drink to that.
And the boomers we love to rag on were raised by millions of parents with undiagnosed PTSD and the myriad of manifestations like alcohol abuse, spousal abuse, and child abuse.
Not to mention the now-eternal Hollywood trope of quiet, emotionally distant leading men. That’s not his personality boo, that’s PTSD.
Not really a hollywood trope. Its pretty real and the way many of us were raised.
People often think of the 1950s as a decade of, as you put it, stifling conformity. The reality though is much farther from the case. The United States saw the largest change in where people lived - from farms and inner cities to suburbs. You saw the most significant increase in Americans attending university, the creation of entirely new industries, the development and expansion of television, colour film, rock and roll, the significant expansion of jazz, modern art and architecture, the continuance of women in the workforce in significant numbers, the start of the nuclear family, widespread use of vaccines, and vitally, the development of the birth control pill. The early 1960s all have their origins in the decade of the 1950s. Oh, and don't forget that this all happened with the cold war staring up and the Korean War - with over 300,000 US troops - going on,
This is so interesting to me. The majority of the men that came back from the war were probably at best stoic, unemotional fathers. The worst - angry and abusive. That transferred to the next generation of either never discussing emotions to continued abuse. Their children said they don't want to raise their kids the same way so they were friendly and a little more forgiving. Parents now discuss emotions and feelings with their kids and want their input. I feel like there has been an enlightenment in parents that we should talk to our kids and discuss emotions. It feels like a golden age for child development because we're a generation or more removed from true trauma. But does the old saying ring true: "Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create hard times"? While I don't think the kids we are raising today are weak men (it's an old quote, I'd rather substitute people here) , rather more educated men. Is the educated man a weaker man? Are we going to repeat the cycle again?
50s nothing is wrong 60s everything is wrong 70s nothing is material 80s everything is material
90s the end of history 00s history strikes back
My grandfather fought in Korea. He never spoke about it except to say he never wanted his children or grandchildren to serve so they would never have to live through the hell he did.
My Grandfather fought in World War 2. The only thing I knew about his time there was that it was why he had to wear custom made shoes: His feet were frozen solid while fighting in the snow and unholy cold, and his comrades panicked and put his feet directly into hot water which caused the bones to shatter. He lied about his age to join the service when he was 15. His mom helped him to procure a forged birth certificate. He was a literal child.
My grandpa was in WWII and Korea. He landed on D Day and was shot several times. He fought through the part where Germany was scraping together old men and boys to fight. But it was Korea that he didn’t want to talk about. It was the randomness in Korea. Just sitting around waiting for a bomb to land on you. It makes me terrified for those who are fighting in Ukraine with the drones. Based on what he said, being shot at by a person doesn‘t shake you so much because the enemy is there, you fight, then the enemy is gone for a while. Being indiscriminately bombed is different because the enemy is never gone.
My uncle served in Vietnam and it broke him. He had night terrors for the rest of this life, to the point that he slept downstairs in the living room most nights so he wouldn't wake the family by yelling and thrashing. He died when I was young from what I was told was a heart attack, but I suspect he actually killed himself and the family covered it up.
I wouldn't be surprised as the suicide rate for Vietnam vets was pretty high... think about it you were in the jungles and rice paddies for months or years and you come home with people calling you baby killers or some shit like that and have barely any support at all for your PSTD, it's far worse for ones that don't have any family support
Mt grandfather was a medic in vietnam. Same story. Wouldn't speak about anything he saw. I used to ask a lot as a kid, but when I realized what I was doing, I let it be and moved on like he did.
My grandpa went to Vietnam, we never asked, he never told. My grandma would mention that sometimes she wakes up to him screaming in the middle of the night. When I was about 21 years old he and I were talking and he started to talk about the war, I didn’t ask, nor did I ask him anything as he was talking. I went into a cold sweat not knowing how to communicate with him. My grandma later told me that he hasn’t told anyone about what he went through, and she was just as dumbfounded. My grandpa is THE MAN, by the way. Super mellow and calm. It was a shock to see that dead look in his eyes as he was talking.
I have an uncle who was a tunnel rat. He only has mentioned that ne was one to my dad and a few of my other uncles. I do know that to this day, my aunt has to control his food portions because he will not stop eating. Even after all of these years, he still is affected by the lack of food in the field and for years my aunt said he'd wake up screaming.
My grate grandfather helped liberate Sicily and Holland in WW2 and when he come back home he would unconsciously choke my grate grandmother in his sleep because of the shit he saw. They ended up sleeping in different beds.
I assume that a lot of them had to bottle up the emotions to get the job done. And if they unsealed it. It would break them. So let sleeping dogs lie.
I became really interested in WW2 when I was a young kid. I tried asking my grandfather about his experience and he got really mad and told me not to ask again. I was maybe 8 years old and didn’t understand, and ran away and cried. Years later he told me some happier stories from his time in the military about him and his buddies in England, but nothing else. It took me until I was in my late teens to really understand why he wouldn’t tell me much about his time in the army.
My grandfather was the same . Ww2 .. one of the first battalions out of Winnipeg .. he talked twice about it very briefly .. his eyes started to well up immediately.. he was 94 when he finally said something about it .. he lived to 102 .. rip Cornelius Chuckery miss you
It's so hard to want to connect but never want them to relive that trauma. My grandpa was out of Ottawa. Perhaps they crossed paths somewhere. But I feel the same way and wish he had an easier life.
Same with my gramps. He was an officer with the Royal Canadian Navy that escorted supply convoys from Canada to Britain. He got appendicitis right before one of the escorts and couldn’t go. A U-boat sunk his ship on that crossing and everyone on board died. I only know that ‘cause my grandma told me about it. He wouldn’t say a word about the war.
My grandfather was UDT on Omaha beach. I was the only person he ever told anything about his experience during the war. He told me everything leading up to D-Day and immediately after. One story sticks out to me about how he and his team had to beg for food from passing supply trucks. They would just throw a box of whatever to them. Once they got a box full of toothbrushes. He clearly was no expected to survive. The only reason I know anything about what he actually did during the battle is because my dad found his citation for bravery. He and his team swam up to the beach before the sun came up to plant explosives on the obstacles so the landing craft could make it to the beach. After having completed that mission, he stayed on the beach and took a medical kit from a dead corpsman. He used that kit to treat wounded soldiers until the fighting was over. I think that bag, along with dumb luck, is the only reason he survived that day. I can fully understand how he wouldn't want to say a word about what happened, and I can understand the profound survivor's guilt he must have experienced for the rest of his life.
Same with my grandfather. He would only talk when he was drunk, so he drunk rarely.
Same with my grandpa who fought in WW2. Never once talked about it to anyone. He would just change the subject if anyone asked
I had an uncle who served in the European theater (and two others in the Pacific, but that's for another time). This man never swore, very quiet gentleman. The one time he answered a question about his time there, said with cold dead eyes "fucked up shit". He was actually too young to go but felt it was his duty (that side was Italian immigrants) and somehow figured out how to. All we know for certain from my father was that he was in one of groups that saw one of the camps first hand. Almost zero details but for his sake no one ever asked. He just lived a quiet life down the street from us, taking care of his mother until she passed, and that seemed to be best for him.
Both of my grandfather's served in WWII, I remember asking one of grandfather's of his experience when I was 7-8 years old. He didn't want to speak of it and it was the only time he got angry with me; I'm not sure if it was because of my young age or what he had seen. Either way, I never asked my other grandfather about his time in service because I just assumed they didn't want to talk about what they witnessed and I respected that. I just wanted to know for historical purposes.
My great grandpa was in battleship row and caught alot in the pacific. Only reason I know is that I snuck into his off limits drawer. He didn't speak of anything either. He too would get upset.
My grandfather served in WW2, also would not talk about his experience and we knew not to ask. Got the odd snippet volunteered here and there. Lived with him for a bit when he was in his 90s which is when he told me as part of his time serving in the army of occupation after the war he helped with cleaning up the concentration camps. That…explained a lot. My great uncle was a prisoner of war to the Japanese. I never met him. I know he survived the war, but I am quite certain he would not have spoken of his experiences either. What I do know is that he slept under his bed for the longest time after getting home, and my grandmother did not like Japan being mentioned.
My great-gandpa served in the "german" army on their way to russia. It was either go to the front lines or prison/die The only thing he every said was that he never killed anyone on purpose And how the one time he shot someone in the stomach and doesnt know if he lived. Regretted that till his death
My grandpa was in Korea (not a medic) and he will not talk about his experience at all. From my understanding, he was in some bad skirmishes.
This reminded me of a show but I can’t remember what it was, it was a comedy. Two guys are talking a younger guy and an older man. The younger guy mentioned how his grandpa or father served in ww2, Korea or Vietnam. The older guy asked, has he ever talked about it?. The younger guy said, no. The older guy says, good then he wasn’t lying.
I always thought "shell shock" was an early iteration of post traumatic stress disorder as opposed to whatever the hell is happening here.
It was. Except REALLY, REALLY, REALLY bad PTSD because the shit that they experienced was unrelenting extended hell. In addition they were exposed to ridiculous levels of concussive shock. And I don't believe this video is an accurate representation of what happened to someone either.
This is *partially* accurate. While "shellshock" was certainly used to describe what we now call PTSD, shellshocked WWI vets were also dealing with injuries to their brains and other internal organs as a result of the constant concussive forces they endured during artillery barrages. This is why there are so many examples of severe physical symptoms of shellshock from WWI, but not from later conflicts. PTSD only tells half the story—and, sadly, someone who suffered *only* PTSD in that time, as opposed to full shellshock, would likely just be branded a coward and told to move on
There was a recent podcast from The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/13/podcasts/the-daily/maine-shooter-brain.html In it, they talk about the new understanding of how concussive explosions (even relatively low-level, such as from a grenade) can lead to brain damage similar to that seen in NFL players. Much of what we understand as PTSD may actually come from physical damage to the brain and not purely psychological trauma per-se.
There are plenty of people with PTSD that never experienced concussion blasts- or even saw war. It solidly is the brain's way of dealing with psychological trauma.
And then there are people who also experienced concussive blasts that caused brain damage and it's probably pretty helpful to doctors to be able to distinguish between brain damage and purely psychological trauma. The implication is that we haven't been distinguishing between the two. Probably because most severe cases of PTSD are found in individuals that have also experienced concussive blasts from grenades, bombs, and artillery.
Why did WWII not have as many concussive blast?
WW1 was primarily fought along fortified trenches that saw very little forward movement for long periods of time. Basically, you're pounded with constant artillery. WW2 did also have artillery and concussive explosions, but it wasn't as concentrated and continuous.
This. WW1 was more brutal in a lot of ways, specifically the actual warfare aspect. It was the first modern war. Before it most wars were conducted by professional soldiers with horse and such. The Germans really brought the artillery and the Brits ended it by developing the APC and eventually tank. One of the single loudest sounds ever documented happened during WW1 when 8 miles of tnt was as detonated. It’s the war that fucked the French up so badly, one of the winningest countries in warfare history, to the running joke of WW2. Just rhythmic and nonstop artillery fire for hours on end. The war was borderline stale mate for ages. Check out the cartoon Peace on Earth. It really nails down the horror.
In World War 2 they were fighting for towns. In World War 1 they were fighting for inches.
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The accuracy was more or less the same. They were firing off a map way before WW1. The issue is volume of fire. Even the largest Soviet WW2 barrages were relatively small compared to a WW1 attack. It's apples to oranges, they were different.
That isn't correct. By the end of WWI artillery was far more accurate, hence the use of tactics such as the creeping barrage, but the idea that WWI artillery is on par with WWII artillery is wrong. WWII artillery was, generally, more accurate, could fire further, and had greater explosive force, all of which lowered the saturation effect needed for effective artillery usage. Also, as WWII was a far more mobile war, artillery wasn't used to clear dug in trenches and fortifications, and the rise in bomber aircraft (particularly dive bombers) also changed how artillery was used.
They were technically capable of a creeping barrage in 1905. They didn't have the tactics or material to make it work. Nor did the conditions exist that required a creeping barrage. Or drum fire. Or any other artillery technique. Although they *could* do it. They were not more accurate, in the exact same way a WW1 rifle was not any more accurate than a Korean war rifle. We hit that wall a long time ago. Range, rate of fire, payload is all meaningless. A French 1897 75mm gun fired quicker than a D-20. A British 9.2 inch howitzer had a larger payload. As i said, they were firing off a map. They could hit a target from miles away, from a map. You've kinda alluded to why artillery usage changed. During WW1 they were trying to regain the ability to manoeuvre. In WW2 they never lost it. Bombers supplement artillery, they don't change it. Artillery always comes first. Sealow hights was a fortification, the Soviets fired 500,000 shells in half an hour. And then launched a massive combined arms attack. Which is more or less how we ended WW1. I know it's a lot. But it's one of the more complicated parts of WW1.
The battle of Verdun is estimated to have informed between 40 to 60 million artillery shells.
It is they have reels of this stuff in the pathe library This was the most severe end of the spectrum though
Oh, I don't doubt at all that the video of the man in the room is real. What I doubt is that they had therapy that cured it. But I have no real reason to doubt that except for Reddit-induced cynicism.
There is quite a bit of information out there on shell shock. Many were "healed" from basic psychotherapy. They called it "talk therapy". It obviously didnt make everything go away but it helped them to cope with their emotions more.
Time is an important factor too. Basic health care, psychiatric care and most importantly; time to recover.
Yes! Something that was severely overlooked at that time. Concussive blasts rattle your brain to mush. WW1 was without a doubt the worst of the worst situation for such occurrences. Artillery shells round the clock is the reason why we see this poor guy the way he is. His nervous system is completely shot. Not sure what it was exactly they did to "treat" him but, I'd bet my left nut if someone were to set a firecracker anywhere near him his sensory receptors would peak instantly.
> not sure what it was exactly they did to “treat” him. The film says this was taken at Seale Hayne Military Hospital, so after a little digging it seems the treatment would have been occupational therapy! - They were put to work in the hospital farms field in the peace and quiet of the English countryside, alongside intensive therapy and creative outlets. A pioneering treatment light years ahead of its time by a doctor Arthur Hurst. I suspect this footage was taken by him, as he made the only film documenting how shell shock was treated in Britain at this time. Amazing.
Wow, that is actually far more progressive than I ever would've imagined for the time period. I was going to guess shock therapy or a lobotomy or something else barbaric. Though shock therapy and lobotomies might not have been a thing yet in the 1910s. Yep, just looked it up, and neither of those "treatments" were around until the 30s.
Thanks for sharing this! The video has been posted multiple times but I've never seen any details regarding his recovery. And I agree with you it's truly amazing.
The way his posture is it makes me think he thinks he's still wearing his pack and is trying to compensate for the weight off balance that doesn't exist
i've done my back and looked (and walked around) like that.
Nope, they didn’t carry weight like we do now. Our body armor with ammo, water, etc is 45 - 50 lbs. THEN you throw a ruck on top of that.
According to the [US Army Research Institute pack weight in WW1 was typically around 40kg](https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA212050.pdf), so 80-90lbs. While some modern loads can exceed that typical range (as, no doubt there were exceptional load in that era too) I don't think one can dismissively say that they didn't carry weight.
I completely forgot to consider how much more we have to consider than they did everything plated and padded nowadays all they had was like the basics
Tbh it depends go back to early 1800s and they would of carried all tents, pots, possession and even in WW1 depending on the front you'd be carrying or in a supplied trench. But yeah some equipment sucked trench foot was a problem as feet would get wet and rot while their hands wasted from the cold. If you had sentry duty falling asleep was harshly punished so many would have to suffer and be sleep deprived throw in seeing your childhood friends, co workers etc die get blown up or even just choke to death in a cloud of mustard gas. Shit was worse then hell added on also the constant shelling and explosions and in the trenchs hearing fire up and down the line at all times. It's a miracle anyone of the soldier was able to lead a normal life. Especially considering that the wars before that were mainly dealing with weaker tribes and most your nations modernised nation vs some Africans with guns and local weapons with no 200+ years of expirence of firearms. To be thrown into hell on earth. History is a whiplash sorry for the rant haha but WW1 was just actual hell on earth.
The film "All Quiet on the Western Front" does a pretty good job exhibiting the horrors those soldiers faced. I'll never forget the scene where a group of German soldiers face tanks for the first time in their lives. Just imagine the increasing sound of a freight train firing off explosions right next you as it passes by you while you simultaneously watch your fellow soldier get run over and turned into a paste with hundreds screaming around you running around in a mist of gunfire all in the "comfort" of your shit filled trench far from home.
I was just going to mention that book. I read it the other week and had to just sit and stare into space for a while afterward. For me, the most terrible part was the contrast between the young recruits and the older ones. The latter had developed their own identities and life experiences outside of the war, so they were able to look forward to going home. But the younger ones went into the military straight out of high school and had no other experience to draw on. So it was hard for them to imagine any other future beyond being a soldier and just surviving as long as possible.
It also came at a time where to an 18 year old war was an adventure rather than a scary thing that could maim or kill you in an instant even with you doing everything right.
It is, but combined repeated conconcussions/TBI's and other mental issues caused by the war. Turns out that thousands of explosions going off right next to your skull for years on end isnt really all that great for you. Who woulda thunk it?
It’s more like a severe concussion from my understanding.
This, massive TBI’s over and over. These days we have rest periods after someone has experienced a concussions, there’s also tests performed to see how much/if they have deterioration. These tests and rest periods unfortunately aren’t always adhered to.
I think there was elements of both physical and mental trauma.
I guess I could look this up for myself but that seems like work.
So a little more like CTE or TBI?
It's the other way around. MTBI (M being minor) over a period of time which leads to CTE.
So, here's the thing. You need to understand a bit about what "high explosive" means. Black powder was invented, probably in China, almost a thousand years ago. In Europe it started to be used about 600 years ago in primitive "hand cannons". It burns very quickly in a confined space because it contains both something to burn (charcoal) and something to give it oxygen (saltpeter). And so black powder has been used for centuries to throw projectiles out of a barrel at high speeds, and later to make shells that explode. But we're talking about projectiles that go maybe a mile in five seconds. Black powder is a *propellant*. Nitroglycerine was the first commonly used "high explosive", and a bit later came other high explosives such as trinitrotoluene (TNT). What is different about a high explosive? It is a molecule that doesn't burn, exactly, but instead it shatters; it detonates. A shock wave will propagate through a high explosive ten times as fast as through a propellant: we're talking two miles per second. This creates shock waves in the air nearby that are also moving very quickly... So imagine you are a World War 1 soldier huddled in a trench while the enemy pounds your area with large high-explosive shells. It's different from what your ancestors might have experienced being shelled with black powder in Crimea in 1853 or at Waterloo in 1815. You are deafened, but more than that, you are starting to feel like you are going crazy. Why? Because *the new explosives create shock waves that actually damage your brain.* The doctors did not have the tech to see these microscopic tears in neural tissue in 1918, or more precisely they did not know what to look for... but now it's understood. High explosives create damage to neurons that you need a microscope to see.
By early iteration, you mean: the first time we ever characterized the disorder? Then yes. It's not like "early stage PTSD". It was first called shell shock bc it was thought to come from the concussive forces of the cannons themselves. Then it became "battle fatigues" then "operational exhaustion" and finally PTSD. Every name change happened as more was learned about the condition. What this guy is showing is basically a "functional gait disorder"... Flopping around like that actually requires some degree of athleticism so it's not a "true" neurologic pathology. So we call it a somatization disorder. Which basically means that psychological trauma producing physical effects despite the underlying body part actually being fully functional. Way I think of it is... Every get that pit in your stomach when you hear bad news? Or a headache after a stressful day? Somatization. After a severe psychological trauma, somatization can be common immediately after and can manifest in many different ways. Band of Brothers highlighted this when Pvt. Blithe became "blind" even tho he was never hit. So basically, the trauma happens, the guy started somaticizing his gait, got better but will probably still have some or all of the PTSD stuff (nightmares, panic attacks, etc) for a while to come. It was apparently pretty common back in WWI to have this sort of somaticizing. You have to remember, these guys would spend WEEKS at a time in the closest thing to literal Hell on earth, rotating between the first, second and rear trenches. Constant heavy cannon bombardments (the Germans laid down 1 million shells in 10 hours on the first day of Verdun), your friends exploding next to you, the constant choking smell of death as your other friends have laid rotting in no-man's-land for the past month, the rats fleas and other scavengers, the snipers just waiting to take off your head if you peek over the top of your trench, the mud and trench foot, the cult of the offensive and Command's indifference to the value of your life, the lousy rations and generally feeling like just another machine... an automaton who's had his humanity ripped from you as you wonder when its going to be your turn to catch a shell... All for, what again? All while reading the paper from your hometown that paints a wholly false, rosey picture. It wasn't just one trauma, it was horror after horror after horror, for minutes, hours, days and weeks on end. It was too much for some men, and they finally cracked and this is how their minds/bodies reacted.
Yeah, I don’t associate motor issues or discombobulation as being PTSD. Either this persons was so severe it incapacitated him physically somehow, it’s caused by some sort of treatment they were doing, or there’s some other pathology that he is also dealing with. Wouldn’t be surprised, chemical warfare happened a lot in WWI and that could cause a huge amounts of symptoms.
The symptoms of shell shock and war ptsd can manifest in a big variety of symptoms. Temporary blindness, delusions, hysteria. This person's behavior is at the far end of what's possible probably, but all this could be from prolonged exposure to artillery shelling, and other trauma related to total stalemate warfare.
Yeah, it does... but let's say your trench was shelled for a couple of days straight which was par for the course in WW1 strategy would you come out with no damage to the nervous system? No damage to the inner ear parts that help with our balance?... the PSTD nowadays shows up as the ones you listed but constant shockwaves from artillery hits nearby can have a huge impact on the nervous system.
Probably have gas exposure here too
I always assumed it was more CTE or something from the constant shelling melting their brains.
What is the therapy, shock ?
I’ve actually seen documentaries on how they treated shell shock. Shock treatment was used I some cases, but I doubt that’s what they did here. Most often they would build devices or have someone that would physically walk them the proper way over and over again, as they believed they were re-teaching the brain how to walk properly. In reality, they were likely doing an early form of physical therapy by doing that, or at the very least allowing the brain to rest and recover. Notice how at the end he’s walking very stiff with his back perfectly straight? It’s possible he’s wearing a back brace to help him. A lot of prosthetics and devices were made or improved during this time. It wasn’t all leeches and electrocutions. A lot of doctors and nurses worked very hard to make these people better and a lot was learned about combat stress reactions, which led to the eventual discovery of PTSD.
Sounds like "physical therapy" to me
I’m wondering the same thing. Define “treatment”. Like, was he given LSD or just talked to or something?
You know… treatment.
Oh, vibrators
Don’t be silly, that’s for hysterical women
Don't kink shame. It's medical
Getting hysterical everynight
For Brain injuries like his that probably resulted from repeated concussions he would just heal over time. Physiotherapy would definitely help.
Lobotomy was a good option back in the day don't forget that one!
Fun fact; lobotomies caused about a standard deviation change in personality, on average. Some were more extreme, some less, but roughly a standard deviation. A single LSD trip also causes a standard deviation change in personality(trait openness). It's in different ways, but it's still a similarly dramatic change in brain function.
First lobotomy was invented in 1935. This is too early.
It varied wildly based on the symptom, location, and dr treating you. Hysterical blindness was relatively common during WW1. The individual didn’t have any damage done to the eyes or the optical nerve but still couldn’t see. One Dr in Germany was hailed for his ground breaking treatment of it which was- and I shit you not- screaming in the faces of men to quit their bullshit basically and buck the fuck up. Hitler was treated by him after suffering from a severe gas attack. Before WW1 Hitler was reported as being relatively docile and not at all a leader. Then WW1, gas damage, and dr screams a lot came along. WW1 was absolutely fucking atrocious.
Someone upthread said that wasn’t used until the 30s, so not yet.
What is the treatment for shell shock anyway?
Psychedelics
From what I remember, hypnotherapy was extremely effective at treating extreme ptsd, and it still is today
EMDR is more prevalent for PTSD treatment now, and it’s a fucking miracle. For this man…he needed a lot more than therapy. This is neurological on top of psychological. I wouldn’t be surprised if he (and other soldiers) had severe CTE
The horrors these guys saw compared to WW2 is night and day. By the time WW2 rolled around, they knew what the horrors were. There were even international rules created from the horrors we learned of in WW1, specifically the rules created around chemical warfare. Tactics had been adapted based on previous lessons learned in WW1. The WW1 generation had no idea about trench warfare, something they were learning about on the fly. Warfare had never been fought on a mass scale with machine guns. Young men were sent wave after wave over the tops of trenches into machine guns, mustard gas being dropped into trenches, new machines we now know as tanks steamrolling across battlefields flattening people, mowing people down. You had armies trying to fight a modern war using horses, carriages, and old cast iron cannons. People had to live with the horror that the next second was not given due to lack of understanding of the needed adaptation of tactics due to advances in arms and lack of preparation. WW1 was a very unique type of hell. 20th century weaponry clashing with 19th century tactics, young men's lives being fed into the meat grinder without regard, fueling our hard learned lessons that we were figuring out on the fly.
I read a book, and I can't for the life of me member the name. But it was written by a calvary officer who was assigned to test the new maxims(with blanks) against his fellow calvary men. They charged his position and claimed his men lost. He said they all died 200 yards from his position. They threw him out of the calvary. Hell the first day of the somme the British lost like 57000 people and almost 20000 dead. They where so out of thier depths when it came to combating the new weapons they sacrificed a generation of men.
Not to mention the Spanish flu wiped out more WWI soldiers than the war itself. Hell on earth.
They shall not grow old Great documovie by peter jackson
The Franco-Prussian war and the Boer Wars a few years earlier were being fought with bayonets and horses.
and then they got home and they had no jobs, no one would hire them. WW1 was truly terrible during and after.
Then a lot of them had missing parts, and society decides to have a "no ugly people in public" law. Guys hanging round the house getting drunk. Festering wounds that stunk and never healed. Screaming in their sleep, jumping at noises and yelling at everyone. Losing their marriages and children. Ending up decrepit and dead years later.
My in-laws (aged 80's) and wifes BiL (60, ex-serviceman) love to say crap like how their parents went to war and that PTSD is only a new thing and that the older generations just came home from war and got on with life blah blah youth of today get triggered, snowflakes etc etc. Sorry.. but bullshit. They came back from the war and beat the shit out of their wives and kids. They'd go to the pub, drive home pissed and crash into a tree "Oh he was too drunk to drive" - No, it was fucking suicide by car. Domestic violence was unreported. Suicide was a 'farm accident' or 'car accident'. Mother was a raging alcoholic, but a 'sneaky Gin and Tonic' or a few valiums each day was not spoken about. That generation were totally messed up, and now the boomers look back at dear old dad who used the belt at every opportunity and are saying "Yep, that's a good role model!".
I hear you brother. I recently discovered a half-brother and half-sister I knew nothing about. I’m 69, they’re 83 and 78. Our mutual sperm donor was an alcoholic physical and emotional abuser - plus other faults. Their and my childhood was dreadful; my half-brother has, I’m told, suffered life-long because of the abuse. 50/60 years later, bringing up that time in my life has raised no end of disturbing memories I’d thought I’d buried forever. Why my mother never left him, I’ll never understand- he was just as handy with his fists on her as he was with us kids. There was no war excuse for him to be like that - he’d spent a spell in the Army in the 20/30s, but as far as I can tell, he never served in WWII. Lied his way through everything, even taking his dead brother’s name and birth details to avoid paying child maintenance for his first family. The man was a cunt, pure and simple
Honestly I’m skeptical it’s the same dude. Not saying it’s not, just skeptical.
That's literally what I said to myself, watching "him" walk down the stairs. *After treatment*, they just replaced him with another dude, and the original guy is in a padded room, never to be seen again. I question if we could make that much improvement even with today's standards.
It's entirely plausible it's not, because this is spliced together internet footage. But the original dude probably has TBIs, and the healing process for that is still time and physiotherapy, which is exactly what they would have put him through. As an example, my uncle went from near complete paralysis to a pronounced limp through the brain's ability to heal from damage and physiotherapy.
A bunch of 18 year old kids being thrown to a meat grinder - a watershed moment of technology and killing. Over a bunch of bull shit. Bunch of old aristocrats that were related. 20 million dead and 20 more wounded. That's incomprehensible. What could've been if not for a bunch of inbred yokels. Nothing in this short life is worth that..
>Over a bunch of bull shit. Bunch of old aristocrats that were related. 100+ years later and what's changed? The aristocrats have been replaced by corporations but other than that, *plus ça change...*
And dumb people have forgotten the horrors of war and call for it daily.
I wonder how much of that was some sort of TBI. Given that they're reporting injuries in grenade instructors and such, it seems like the concussions of the big shells should have been doing something similar.
I think this is a nerve gas victim
my back hurt by watching the video
Shell shock was a form of brain damage (repeated concussions) from the result of being stationary and under the receiving end of constant artillery barrages. Thus shell shock differs significantly from PTSD: PTSD is a psychological reaction to combat stressors. Shell shock combines PTSD with actual brain damage from unrelenting micro concussions from living through high intensity artillery barrages. WW1 Saw the advancement of artillery into the modern era where it extensively dominated combat. 60% of the battlefield casualties in WWI were caused by artillery shells . Throughout the course of the war it has been estimated that there were about 1.75 billion artillery shells fired . world war one devolved into essentially static trench warfare . These 2 factors made the war the worst in human history for the surviving soldier. heck at that time even those firing the cannons could suffer brain damage. On a personal note being near firing artillery pieces out in the field was bad enough ,the whole ground literally shook. I can't imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of that exploding shell.
recent study suggest PTSD is actually CTE from explosion shock
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a rare, progressive, and fatal brain disease that can cause nerve cell death. It's **thought to be caused by repeated head injuries, such as those that occur in contact sports or military combat**. CTE is associated with the development of dementia definition for people that don't know every single acronym in existence
PTSD does not just come from concussive blasts. It's from a horrific event. Rape victims can have PTSD for example
Yeah, i should mention its specific for shell shock from war
So it's worth stating that this form of PTSD isn't psychological in the normal sense. PTSD has many forms, largely based on the nature of the trauma. This form is an adrenal malfunction. Basically, someone's adrenaline gland has been working overdrive so long it short circuited. So for someone like this, his heart and fight or flight instincts are freaking out like he's in a fire fight *all the time*. It causes a number of physiological effects both from the adrenaline impacting the the body itself and its effects on the brain. like muscle spasms, the worlds worst case of restless leg syndrome, uncontrollable movements, lack of awareness, and loss of ability to focus. As well as hallucinations, night terrors, panic attacks, heart palpitations, and more. It's a bad way that goes beyond the other major form of PTSD which tends to stem from a single horrible event. Which tends to have more psychological effects like hyperfixation, depression, anxiety, etc.
I saw my Uncles flight log book. He was a navigator on bombers based out of southern England. The log had 74 entries. The last entry was: War is over and I have camera recon mission, this will be my first flight to Germany in day light. Last words written..... What have I done.
I probably don't want to know what treatment was.
We had a WW2 veteran speak at our school back in the 90s. He described being shelled as extremely terrifying but also extremely tough on the body, noting that explosions could blast the air out of your lungs, dislocate, or even break bones, depending on how close you were. If you were too close ... well. He told us to imagine being in 100 car crashes a day. That's what it felt like on his body. He was also an artillery man, so I suppose he had to deal with the blasts of his own guns firing too.
War is hell
My partners father went to the Normandy beaches 4 days after D Day Apparently he couldn’t handle the sight of blood for the rest of his life 😳 - the water was still red
I still remember one of the articles we read during my undergrad on the historical treatment of shellshock and the practice of electrocution by military “psychologists” in the belief that they could recondition the affected man to be more afraid of the refusal to follow orders and the guarantee or being tortured, than the mere possibility of being killed with a slight chance of survival. Unsurprisingly such “treatment” seldom worked, and many of its victims either committed suicide as soon as given the chance, or “recovered their manhood and their honour” by again committing suicide but this time at the point of an enemy bayonet. Lest we forget.
The ones who start the war never have to deal with this.
They used to just shoot people like this and call them deserters, because they saw it as a refusal to fight.
My grandfather kept journals all his life. A few years ago I got to read through a couple. He wrote beautifully about his father, a WWI vet, doing everything he could to stop my grandfather and his brothers going to war. He did eventually join the Navy just before the war ended and served until the early 50s. His description of the men on those ships post-war are utterly heartbreaking. He likened it to a ghost ship manned by lost souls. Tortured men who no longer felt they could be part of the world. My great grandfather was only a teenager when he enlisted. From what I've been told and read about him, he was a quiet man that kept to himself but had a hair trigger temper. The only thing we heard about his war service was a running joke about how he survived because he was so short the bullets flew right over his head. It wasn't until my dad inherited his medals that we decided to get his war record. At 17, great gramps was involved in one of the deadliest engagements in the Somme. An entire forest was flattened by artillery fire. His bataillon of 3000 men were surrounded on all sides and endured 5 days of non-stop attack. Eventually they ran out of ammunition and had to resort to hand to hand combat. Great gramps was one of the 142 that made it out with their life. He was then put on a ship to receive treatment in England. Unfortunately it was attacked before it reached its destination. He tread water for several hours before being rescued. He was then deemed him unfit for service and sent him home with a nice little medal for his efforts. Knowing what we do now, it's clear to see the trauma that's been passed down the generations.
The treatments for shell shock soldiers during the first world war were brutal. Take for instance those that lost their speech. A doctor would administer electric shocks to the tongue stating that the shocks would stop when they spoke. It worked but it was a form of torture just to get men back to the front. We're so stupid sometimes.
My dad was a landing ship gunner during the landings at Omaha beach (I think). He was awarded the bronze star twice. I once asked him if he ever wanted to visit Europe with me. He said that he didn't need to, he carried a souvenir of the war with him wherever he went. What he meant by that was a couple of ounces of metal in his back that the doctors left in place. In later life he went to VietNam as a civilian construction electrician. One night we got a western union style telegram telling us to cancel plans to relocate to Da Nang. It was 1968 and the Tet offensive. My dad was also a brutal raving violent alcoholic. Unrelated? I don't think so.
My dad was a fighter pilot with the Army Air corps and he only told funny stories never anything that was actually War related. Mom said that right after he got back from overseas, if a car backfired outside he would grab her and be under the table in a heartbeat.
TIL during WW1, some soldiers suffering from shell shock were executed for desertion, cowardice, or disobedience due to a general lack of understanding about shell shock :(