re: Which War Would Result In The Most Severe PTSD For Soldiers?

WW1. Easily. Modernization of the battlefield, trench warfare, and chemical weapons.

Pacific WWII beach landings. Not sure how you could come out of that mentality healthy.

WW1 by a mile. Sleeping in a mixture of mud and the decomposing bodies of your comrades for months on end, dodging gas and artillery attacks. And if you get lucky, "going over the top", and charging entrenched machine gun positions.

Every war is traumatic. When a human kills another human or witnesses the killing of one, it messes with their brain. Only desensitized/sick people can get away with not having any negative feelings or trauma because of it.

That being said, The Great War was the most traumatizing when looking at all wars in a relative way. Soldiers of that era were not prepared for the heavily industrialized way it was fought. The massed introduction of very lethal artillery, poisonous gasses, flamethrowers, machine guns, etc changed everything.

ETA: From there, we'd have to look at the next radical change in the wars were fought and that has to be with guerilla tactics. Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were/have been very traumatizing due to the way the enemy operated unseen by being in plain sight.

We are entitled now. Soldiers are millennials that are soft as shite. I have heard the "war stories". Don't fricking join and then cry about the same stuff that you knew was a possibility. I think they do it for the attention. They want to seem like the harden quiet type that every feels for.

WW1, Imagine you were a civil war era trained soldier.
Now all of a sudden planes flew over and dropped bombs, people manned guns that could wipe out platoons between reloads. Gas came down and killed or maimed. You lived in a trench, slept in a trench, ate in a trench, shite in a trench, died in a trench. People who made it through WW1 are some tough SOBs.

It was the first truly modern world war. The first big war with new technologies.

The first tanks, the first mobile machine guns, first aerial bombings. You just had no idea what to expect and training did not prepare for actuality.

Just read through the thread. Yes, WWI is by far the worst war in military history. The generals often get bad reps for how the battles were fought, but they were old school generals fighting a mechanized war. The communication or lack-thereof cause offenses to stall once the objective was reached only to be counter attacked. They didn't know how to fight on a new battlefield. So the men essentially became science experiments. The only country that figured out how the new style of warfare would be fought were the Germans. Artillery barrages that lasted for days, the tunneling that the sides would dig in order to set off a mine underneath the other side's trenches. Gas attacks, no man's land and the advent of the machine gun. And like others have said, modern combat with not modern medicine.

Now, the Pacific Theater and Eastern Front were horrible in their own right. Eastern Front was worse for civilians, obviously. No telling how many rapes happened then. And think about Leningrad, the siege lasted from 1941-1944, people turned to canibalism. But the battles in the Pacific were probably much tougher.

Chosin Reservoir in Korea was beyond imaginable as well.

Eta: If you have a chance, read the book "The Last Stand of Fox Company" it's on a company of Marines that held the route open for our troops to get out of the Chosin Reservoir. One company took on multiple regiments of Chinese forces. Toughest sons of bitches ever in my opinion.

I really think Vietnam had to have been bad on soldiers because they weren't fighting for the freedom of their own country and families. They knew they could die at any time in a war a lot of them didn't want to be in.

The World War soldiers were fighting for their countries and the fate of the entire world. The soldiers believed in the cause for the most part.

I would think the PTSD per soldier would be higher for Vietnam than the World Wars. That doesn't mean one was more terrifying than the others but a soldiers mindset would be part of the cause.

Vietnam, Korea, World War I, the Civil War, the American revolution. All of those with more hand to hand combat.