re: Would you rather have gone “over the top” in WWI or been on the first wave on D-Day?

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D-Day, no question. There is a reason they called the areas between the trenches "No Man's Land". If you set foot in it, you were going to die, period. Withering emplaced and interlocking fields of machine gun fire, snipers, landmines, and artillery zeroed in on No Man's Land made sure of that. No man could hold it. No man could take it. No man could survive it.

D-day was brutal, bloody, and terrifying, but most of the men who landed on the beach, even Omaha, survived. Most of the men who set foot in No Man's Land died.

First wave of D-Day and going over the top of a trench in WW1 is the difference between a pretty good chance of death and certain death.

Another way to put it into context is that you can walk on the beaches of Normandy today with no problem. There are still parts of France that were No Man's Land in WW1 where there are still unexploded shells (chemical and conventional) buried there, there are an absolutely massive number of animal and human remains still strewn about, there are unexploded mines, there is rusty decaying unspent ammo everywhere and the soil is so polluted from the chemicals used that nobody is allowed to build, farm, visit, etc. They STILL pull tons and tons of ordnance out of the ground there every year and we're 100 years down the line. There are places that 99% of all plants still die because of the soil pollution.

That's what you were crossing when you went over the top.

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Yep. This right here.

Listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast on WW1 called "Countdown to Armageddon". I suck at remembering numbers but he talks about the inconceivable number of soldiers that died in trench warfare pushes PER DAY, day after day after day. For MONTHS. It's insane.


And the amount of ordinance fired across the battlefields in crazy. The Germans would do this tactic where they would have hundreds of cannon lay down continuous fire in a line to clear that area. Then on a set time, they would all move their fire forward. The German troops would move up behind the wall of falling ordinance to where the shells had been landing. With precision synchronous timing, something the Germans are known for, they'd walk the rain of death forward, and move their troops in behind it.

The way Dan Carlin describes the hell of trench life will stagger you. The muck was so deep and vile that it was it's own form of weapon. Soldiers that slipped off the duckboards in to the mud would slowly sink to their death. The mud was so foul and so treacherous that when soldiers tried to pull the victim out, they's slip in as get stuck as well. After too many instances of that, they were ordered not to try to pull the guys out.

Carlin reads the letter of a soldier that was headed to the rear from the Front and saw a soldier stuck in the mud. He was pleading for someone to shoot him in the head. The guy had to just walk on past. 2 weeks later on his way back to the front, he passed the body of the guy, mostly submerged in muck now, with a bullet hole in his head. Someone had mercy on him.


frick THAT.