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Comment by captainperl | Hacker News Reader

I'm ambivalent about WW1 since the US didn't do much fighting (too late into the war), and it was mostly trench warfare that wiped out European royalty, not necessarily a bad thing IMO.

But the inter-war years and WW2 are a fascinating epic.

The WW2 European conflict resulted from Germany losing WW1, but not being occupied. The WW2 Pacific conflict resulted from the USA embargoing Japan after they "colonized" Manchuria.

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I thought somewhat similarly about World War I not being as interesting as later 20th century history until I listened to Dan Carlin's excellent "Blueprint to Armageddon". It's a multi-part Podcast going through WWI. I loved his style. Each episode is a few hours long, but it goes quick.

Here's part 1:

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepr...

Check out the movie "The Blue Max". Initially, WW1 pilots were selected from the nobility. The death rate was so high that they ran low on nobility and were forced to recruit pilots from commoners. TBM is about the transition.

The soundtrack is also a favorite of mine. I don't think any other piece of music captures so well what it's like to fly.

WWI is super fascinating. It sort of marks the final transition period from stand in a polite line and shoot at one another style warfare to modern warfare.

I would put that transition at perhaps the Austro-Prussian or Franco-Prussian wars, at least for Europe.

WW1 was the first war with tanks. Pretty fascinating all the technology developed in WW1, and the war itself is really cool also.

The documentary has plenty of shots of tanks entering the battlefield. Probably my favorite part of the whole thing to be honest. It goes from men on horses to seeing tanks roll through.

Highly recommend this documentary.

And now we are back in a situation where the British Army has more horses than tanks!

Seriously? That's fascinating.

Fascinating isn't the word I would use... :-|

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-229...

“and the war itself is really cool” that is such a weird statement to read. Maybe “interesting“ would fit, but “cool“? I wonder if any of the people who died in the Ypres/Passchendaele region, or Somme, would call the war “cool“.

Please mind that you may not be talking to a native or fluent English speaker, and your comment just comes across as rude and unwarranted then.

Royals start wars; commoners fight them and bear their hardships

(A point exemplified by World War One)

The first world war is a bad example. While the war was absolutely started by royalty, they did send their sons to the front to die along with commoners.

> Although the great majority of casualties in WW1 were from the working class, the social and political elite were hit disproportionately hard by WW1. Their sons provided the junior officers whose job it was to lead the way over the top and expose themselves to the greatest danger as an example to their men.

> Some 12% of the British army's ordinary soldiers were killed during the war, compared with 17% of its officers. Eton alone lost more than 1,000 former pupils - 20% of those who served. UK wartime Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost a son, while future Prime Minister Andrew Bonar Law lost two. Anthony Eden lost two brothers, another brother of his was terribly wounded, and an uncle was captured.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25776836

Also, Princes Oskar and Eitel Friedrich of Prussia both served in front-line combat roles and both were wounded.

The hubris of the British at the time, where they fully believed that the war would only last a few weeks and they'd be 'Home for Christmas', is mainly what led to many sons of the Upper Class willingly signing up to fight in droves.

Alas, as we all know, the war lasted a lot longer than 'a few weeks'.

WW1 directly impacted the ability of many large estates across the UK to survive beyond the 1940s. It changed the cultural and class landscape of the UK significantly.

This has probably been thought, at least publicly, about almost every offensive war waged by a democratic nation. Few civilizations (there are exceptions) would stomach a war that they knew from the outset would last for years.

Cousins King George V and Tsar Nicholas II actually made a concerted effort to mediate with another cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II. However he seemed to be more influenced by his war-mongering generals, especially Von Moltke. If the blame for starting the war can be laid at any door, it is his.

In some sense the first shot fired was at royalty, by the student Gavrilo Princep.

One also could interpret WW2 in the Pacific to have been caused by the US forcing Japan to open up to foreign trade by sending Commodore Perry and his fleet. This ultimately resulted in the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate and lest to the nationalistic Meiji restoration. After that some elements in Japanese politics tried to get respect from Western powers by making nice nice and imitating Western culture. That didn't bring the hoped respect and better trade deals though. Japan ended up learning from Western empirialism and got it's respect by showing some military might on its own.

You could only interpret it that way if you believed that every step in the process was a necessary progression from the previous one. That is a very big stretch over the time scale of the 1850s to the 1940s. At every stage there were possible alternative choices that would have resulted in different outcomes. Don't make the mistake of believing that what actually happened was set in stone at the beginning like a row of falling dominoes.

This is a difficult criticism since it applies to nearly every human interpretation of history. Cause and effect are so wired into our perception of the world. It's like saying, don't be fooled by your eyes, you're not seeing the truth, just a reflection of photons on your retina. Technically true, but totally useless.

No, it's not like that at all. The outcome was not determined in advance because there were multiple possible outcomes. People could have chosen to take different actions than they actually did. The events of the 1940s were not set in stone in the 1850s.

I don't disagree with that. I'm saying that no events are ever set in stone, so you can't talk about history without tying together events that are only partly related.

The same is true for the US response to Japan's invasion of Mongolia and Japan's response to the US response. If any step along the way had been different the outcome would have likely been as well.

An important point here is that it's much harder to find a clear starting point of WWII from a Japanese perspective. The whole thing pretty much was a mess starting with Commodore Perry's arrival.

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