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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Armies got a lot better when the officers stopped being restricted to the nobility. This was forced on European armies by the slaughter of the nobility in WW2.

The subtext of the movie "The Blue Max" was about commoners becoming acceptable as fighter pilots because the knights were wiped out.

P.S. It's a tragedy that an excellent movie like TBM is not available on bluray. Sigh.

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> P.S. It's a tragedy that an excellent movie like TBM is not available on bluray. Sigh.

I was curious, and it looks like it had a Blu-ray release, but it was a limited production run. I guess they decided to constrain supply in order to get a high price.

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Blue-Max-Blu-ray/87746/#O...

Thanks. I just bought it! Woo-hoo!

Always looking forward to Stachel showing us some real flyink!

> This was forced on European armies by the slaughter of the nobility in WW2.

History is a bit more complicated.

History is always complicated. But you're free to provide nuance.

If you focus on Britain only then this was effectively turned around with the Cardwell reform of 1871: https://victorianweb.org/history/armyrefs.html (and you can find examples going back to the 17th century where "commoners" became officers in areas where competence was considered more important than anything else). As for the rest of Europe, that happened long before WW2 as well. Did you mean to write WW1? Even at that time nobility didn't have much to do with the army in most of Europe.

Yeah, I meant WW1. Sorry about the mistake.

Now that's a claim that I wouldn't have nearly as much beef with as the version with WW2.

Well for starters the first modern European army with commoner officers was France's when it had to take on all of Europe in 1790. So dating it to WWII is being more than a century late.

Yes. And nobility was going out of fashion in most of Europe after WWI at the latest. Eg in Austria you weren't allowed any titles at all anymore.

Though if you concentrate on Germany, because of the smaller armed forces demanded by the Versailles treaty, you probably did have a higher proportion of noble officers during the Weimar Republic.

Some countries, including - regrettably - my own are still solidly stuck in the past on this.

I made a mistake. I meant WW1.

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