Lego Battle of Verdun [video]
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> The amount of shells fired at the battle of as Verdun is so extremely high that you find layers of shells everywhere
On the first onslaught on the city, it is estimated the German fired around 2 millions shell on Verdun in two days. [1]
It is hard to imagine by today living standards the hell that people lived there.
> The land is literally filled with shells, bullets, scrapnel everywhere. Some are still live and just brought to the top of the soil by farm tractor machinery
Some forest area are still today considered the 'zone rouge'. There is still so many shell inside them that the access or activities there are forbidden [2].
Even in the area not considered 'zone rouge', it is still pretty common for farmers or forest workers to find back non-exploded shell regularly, even today.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fINsiiUZtuc [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_Rouge
I don't have sound at the moment but think https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hscEoupkqv4 is something similar. The scale of these attacks is mind boggling.
> A barrage like this is referred to as "drumfire" by veterans to describe artillery that is so constant, unceasing and uninterrupted, that it sounds like drums. Others say that it sounded almost like a sea. It is agreed that it was impossible to hear individual shells, due to the sheer amount being fired.
>
> A video to describe the sheer scale of WW1 artillery barrages and how they may have sounded. It may also help to convey the experience of shell shock (PTSD) a WW1 soldier may have developed. Although this video pretends to be the experience of an artillery barrage, a true artillery barrage especially on this scale cannot ever be felt in the same way through a demonstration as the world would shatter, pressure and concussive forces would be felt throughout the entire body with each blast, and the noise would be so extremely violent and loud that anyone would have their ear drums ruptured.
11 of those lines and you can be keeping up that rate forever.
The main issue today, is such stockpiles are easily found by recon (satellites, airplanes, drones), and then blown up by enemy artillery / rocket artillery.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Aftermath-Remnants-Landmines-Warfare-...
The locality got so hammered with poison gas shells, it all seeped into the ground water making it mildly poisonous!!
Lovely part of the world, but a sad legacy of military buildups.
If it is, why and how do people still live there?
But lots of people do live there, and from albeit biased observation, they seem happy enough just drinking beer and wine (and maybe bottled water).
Total casualties for the 1916 battle were ~755,000, maybe less. The battle lasted 302 days, from 21 Feb to 18 Dec. Doing a bit of math, you arrive at just shy of two casualties per minute.
That comes out to crashing a fully loaded 737 jet into the ground every 2 hours, every day, every night, for 300 days straight.
The total casualties of WW1 are worse. In terms of 737-crashes, it comes out to one every ~14 minutes for the ~4.25 years of the war for military casualties. Including civilian casualties you get a 737 plane crash every ~10 minutes for the four years, three months, and two weeks of the war.
Imagine a Lion Air Flight 610 tragedy every 10 minutes, 132 times a day, every single day, every single night, for over 4 years straight. No breaks.
Just building plane after plane, fueling them, training pilots, finding people, getting them on the plane, taxiing, taking off, getting to altitude, and then intentionally running them into the ground, every ten minutes, for 4 years, nonstop.
Where would you even find a place to put all the wreckage? What airstrip's tarmac could support that many planes taking off that quickly? How could you even get that many willing people onto planes at that rate? What kind of airport fuel system could support that amount of consumption for 4 years without maintenance? How could you possible train pilots that fast?
The sheer scale of the slaughter in WW1 is just mind boggling. It truly, really, does make my just head go 'fpoooom!'.
EDIT: I'm having some trouble with my math (maybe?), if someone could double check, that would be great.
The correct term is 'shrapnel', but your 'scrapnel' means so much more.
/'Scrap', being the root of the word.
(well, except for Lego Star Wars of course, somehow that seems to pass both the corporate and my personal "no way toys!" filters)
As a preventative, this was not entirely effective - we war-mad kids still had red bombers intercepted by white fighter aircraft over a battlefield of blue armoured vehicles, we didn't care!
The real military stuff comes from clones/competitors, not from Lego.
They weren't averse to reusing pieces to make guns (the early Star Wars sets used megaphones for that) and they have revolvers, etc: https://www.bricklink.com/catalogList.asp?catType=P&catStrin... has all Minifig, Weapon that are made by LEGO.
For my part, I remember (in addition to the SW kits) cavalry vs indians kits, full with sabers, rifles and pistol, which we often used with modern-day kits.
Until you watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WmLmPYvrMA
Seriously, were they holding a phone in their hand while moving minis around?
I made this when I was 14. Yeah, camera stability was a major problem for me in pretty much all my videos, and this one is especially bad.
I'm trying to remember exactly what I did over half my lifetime ago... This was made with a point and shoot camera. I think the 2nd shot was indeed me holding the camera with my hand. I don't think there's any actual character movement there though, so that shot didn't involve me moving the characters. I had the actual Episode 3 up and was going through it frame by frame trying to replicate the scene with the same camera angles and possibly camera movement. I think simply setting the camera on the table wouldn't have given me the angles I wanted. There was no tripod short enough to get the camera as low to the table as necessary. I would need cutouts in the set's floor for the camera, requiring multiple sets or a set that can be broken into different pieces. That was too complicated for me and I'm not even sure if I had a tripod at that time.
For the 1st shot, it looks like the camera is sitting on top of something (maybe a book) because its elevation seems constant. Its angle though is quite erratic, so I think I was tilting it down with my hand because simply setting it flat on the book wasn't giving the necessary downward angle.
For the last shot, I think the camera was sitting level on the table. This shot is the most stable, but is still pretty shaky. The camera had a shutter button that required a fair amount of force to press. Every time I pressed it there was a large chance that it would move the camera. Also it was a crowded set. Sticking my hands in there to move the characters often resulted in me bumping the camera.
For the 3rd shot, possibly the camera was also sitting on something.
Another problem is I think the camera was on autofocus, auto exposure, and auto whitebalance. So between each picture these settings could change, which also contributed to inconsistencies between frames. I don't even think that camera had the option of manual focus.
As I got better at stop motion, I started using a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 USB webcam attached to my laptop. That allowed me to trigger a frame by pressing a key on my keyboard, which wouldn't shake the camera. I also then enabled manual focus, exposure, and whitebalance, and could use onion skinning. The camera also had hinges allowing the height and vertical angle to be adjusted easily. I focused more on keeping the camera steady, by building a LEGO cage around it, and trying to avoid bumping it while moving the characters.
I didn't have a cell phone at the time. I think I got my first phone a year and a half after this video. It was a feature phone and I think its picture quality was a lot worse than this point and shoot's quality or that of the QuickCam. I never thought about using it for stop motion; that would have been worse than this.
I’ll take a peer-reviewed cohort study before I believe that “Lego has been consistent in promoting aggressiveness”.
City kits always had police and my cousin mostly owned Castles/Knights. There were pirates and pirate ships with cannons that can shoot bricks (we loved those) Pirates seem to be mostly gone and replaced by Ninjago but police stuck around. No surprise, kids love police stories.
On the civilian side of Lego City, a large collection of civilian space exploration has been added. Space definitely has been demilitarized.
I'm from the region that is home to playmobil and we have a joke here that by count of items identifiable as "handgun" we have the world's largest guns manufacturer at our doorsteps, given the number of pirate and wild west kits sold each year.
I remember as a kid finding one of the then-old "shooty" cannons and it was the most prized one I had.
They've said that a main reason is there's a direct visible story with those, and their main customers are boys (not as much with LEGO Friends which is their first girl-oriented and successful line) and boys want conflict/story. "Save the people from a fire" or "catch the robber" - even a hospital falls a bit short there.
The old joke is LEGO City has fifty five thousand police stations, almost as many fire stations, one gas station, and one house.
The current hospital: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/hospital-60330 goes up against (at my count) two police stations, two fire stations, and some various "smaller" police/fire sets.
To be fair, LEGO has always had houses available, but they often fell under LEGO Classic or LEGO Creator (and now LEGO Friends).
Over time this has changed. There is an entire page on Wikipedia dedicated to chronicling this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_Lego
Because classic space had rayguns, and the pirate ships had working cannons.
But yearning for a 12 year period in the middle of the last century and talking about it as if deviating from it is a recent sign of the company losing its way, is a little odd IMHO.
It's literally written in the article that the person you are responding to linked. I'd recommend reading it.
I’m observing my kid picking up lego and assembling my old sets and they take that the same way without prompting.
Using bricklink as proof that the number of weapons increased is hilarious. Many kits used and still use regular bricks in places where they can clearly be read as weapons. (1) Lego definitely has a trend to make more specialized pieces now, so it’s not surprising at all that more specialized weapons show up.
(1) The cannonballs are listed as “Brick Round, 1x1 open stud”, because that’s what they originally are.
https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3062...
The first minifigure is from 1978, the first weapon is from the same year.
There is demand for all sorts of things the society in general considers harmful.
If one chooses to offer it anyway, be prepared for the criticism.
Part of the problem is that dedicated toy stores are almost dead, so if Walmart or Target's shelf of LEGO doesn't have it, it basically doesn't exist.
When I was a kid I had a ton of castle sets. They were pretty much "neutral". Various factions doing their thing, some a bit more shady sure, but you could set up whichever story and alliance you wanted. In early 2000 it turned into humans vs ugly trolls. I felt like so much was taken away from kids by doing that.
Edit: looked at the rest of his channel. It’s a mix of stop motion, rigs to throw bricks/simulate brick explosions, and CGI.
What makes you say it contains CGI?
there are even stop motion movies on the Ukraine war
People think World War 1 was all trenches and mud, but it wasn't. There was action in Africa and the Middle-East as well.
Bad taste, whoever did this. Bad taste.
Personally I think it is excellent, and stuff like this will encourage the younger generation to ask "What was Verdun?". It has way more capacity for teaching/inspiring interest than me having been forced to sit in class and read about Verdun in a textbook.
IMO, those most willing to call for violence from behind the keyboard are those who least understand the real world consequences, those who have the least knowledge of the horrors that have come before. It's really important for people to know just how cruel and awful we can be to each other, and most importantly, how damn pointless it all was. Media like this can help bridge that gulf.
IIRC there is. A polish artist created an Auschwitz Lego Set a few years ago. (IIRC with Lego's blessing)
https://culture.pl/en/work/lego-concentration-camp-zbigniew-...
Even more reasons to remember it. It’s also a law of nature: anything that can be remade in Lego bricks eventually will be. Resistance is futile.
(Besides the fact that this is how someone uses their free time without hurting anyone, so I have a really hard time getting outraged about it)
Seeing a stand-in for humans may let you watch it further than you would be inclined to if it were actual humans (or live footage).
Dumbing down history to the level of modern day action figures because "the kids can relate to it" is missing the point of "reading history." It's to realize that the past was not like now.
Yes, it takes an effort to get the kids off their phones and pay attention to something other than each other. No one said teaching was easy.
I'm sure it IS hard to make them realize that they didn't have cell phones, Internet, or flush toilets out there, and when a soldier was wounded, he suffered, screaming and thirsty, often for hours, and they didn't have good medical care for him when he was finally stretchered off. Somehow throughout history, some teachers and parents have managed to do it.
Similarly, a Lego Auschwitz would probably be a good way to explore history. Again, not to glorify it, but to educate people in engaging ways on how horrific human beings can be to each other.
Based on the jokes from WWII, they must have not recovered that tenacity in time. "We have these gently used WWII French rifles. They've only been dropped once"
1. The German army in 1940 was utterly unstoppable. They didn't just conquer France, they conquered half of Europe. The French army was seen as the best army in the world at the time, but they were utterly unprepared for the new way of warfare the Germans introduced.
2. Petain.
Of course, our friends across the pond also think state healthcare is communism, and republicans are “literally” nazis so, I wouldn’t truck too much with such statements.
Source: am English, am attempting to become decreasingly ignorant over time.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_France
EDIT: Wait, crap, I forgot Brexit. I guess your statement remains _technically_ incorrect, since England is in (the continent of) Europe but not in the EU.
France was the most populated and richest country in Europe for a very long time.
Despite this, what one could consider natural French territory, Belgium and Netherland France never managed to hold for a significant amount of time.
And then they decisively lost the global great power struggle against Britain despite France being much richer and having larger population.
France is constrained by pretty natural frontier boarders that when looking the Medieval Kingdom of 1223 and modern day France, it doesn't seem like its the most amazing achievement.
Specially considering its German neighbors, for 1000 years were far more fractured, and France never managed to really take full advantage of that situation.
What's natural about this? Those countries had been fendong off occupyers for centuries by the time the French made any serious progress during Napoleon. If you're refering to the Rhine/Maas delta, after the Roman empire it never was a (significant) border again, at least not in the Netherlands.
Where is the center of power of the French crown? And then measure how far away the lowlands are.
The French kings have been struggling to control Flanders for literally more the 1000 years.
Given how much larger and richer France was, and how incredibly valuable that land is, the most successful military in history should have managed it.
> Those countries had been fendong off occupyers for centuries
Yes but if they had been opposed by the best military in history then they shouldn't have been able to.
Where they failed is in terms of their officers, command&control and training. The French Generals made some horrible mistakes and never managed to recover.
It isn't clear that Chamberlain believed what he said, politicians are sometimes cleverer than they appear.
This is not really the case. The most important things the British could do against the Germans was the Blockade. And the Blockade was available at literally any time since WW1.
And the Germans were already in full buildup, they delay between 1938 and 1939 helped the Germans far more then it would have helped the Allies. Not to mentioned it took out the Czech military.
Specially since its only when the Germans invaded Prague that the British really started the buildup.
And in the end, the British army was kind of useless in the Battle of France, since the breakthrew happens in Verdun and the British were in Belgium.
It's a sad irony to see 'Dunkirk Spirit' being rolled out at a time of crisis, despite it being a rout of the British army. It was a logistical triumph, which no doubt allowed the British army to live to fight another day. But I also consider Dunkirk Spirit to be about standing helplessly on a beach while being machine gunned by German pilots, while 30,000 Frenchmen die, guarding your rear.
The Allied Army was surrounded because of a Break threw in the South. The British Army could literally do absolutely nothing and they don't do anything to lose the overall battle.
In fact British keeping minimal organization alive and managing even limited counterattack had a strong effect German planning.
And then of course despite massive help by the British Pétain essentially stabbed them in the back.
Attacking your opponent's strengths is a time proven rhetorical strategy.
Swift Boat Vets successfully depicted war hero Sen John Kerry as a pacifist. Ditto Sen Max Cleland.
Sen John McCain was mocked as weak for being a POW.
Ad nauseum.
More nauseating is that it works. "Balanced" media coverage signal boosting the agitprop, muddying the waters, begatting cynicism and apathy.
Not really. Those offensive were very unlikely to win the war. They look more impressive on a map then in reality. He really had no strategic plan, its was basically 'Lets attack and hope for the best'.
You clearly have never been to Switzerland.