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

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I feel like yall aren't grasping the question.

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Then what is it? Over the top was certain death. Look at the casualty numbers at the Somme or Verdun. D-Day 4,400 people died out of 156,000. I don't see how this is much of a question if you know anything about World War I. Normandy you at least feel like a bad arse and had a pretty good chance at survival. The Somme was pure hell and you knew that your enemies were in the same boat.

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Over the top was miserable with a low chance of success but Omaha was a meat grinder.

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But that meat grinder had less than 10,000 casualties. There are multiple venues in WWI that beat that. I'd still pick Omaha since the death would likely be quick, and if it wasn't and I lived long enough, I could feasibly get decent medical treatment and live a long life. No one was going to come in No Man's Land after you if you were shot there though, and your death was certain and slow.

Plus in WWI they had to contend with gas attacks. That was something WWII soldiers thankfully didn’t have to face.

Plus the heavy fighting in D-Day was over by sunset. If you were shot or had a limb blown off and just laid low behind a rock and putting pressure on your injuries, the medics weren't all that far behind. That wasn't going to happen in WWI. You were totally fricked.

"Over the top" by a long shot. I didn't even know arm wrestling was an option for combat. We should still settle wars this way.

I just realized that "Over The Top" was probably a Rambo sequel.

Did Dan Carlin cover this in Hardcore History?

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Over the top. Not getting buzzsaw’d by an MG-42

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That's true. You wouldn't be buzzsawed by an MG-42.

You'd be buzzsawed by an MG-08. That's like 34 worse.

I'll take getting shot over getting blown up and gassed.

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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.

My dad flew a glider in before 6 am.
82nd airborne. Ill go with that.

If you see the movie Gallipoli, that should cure anyone of ww1 nostalgia.
Turks with machine guns across a plain.
450k British commonwealth.
250k wounded. 37k dead.
Turks defended with similar numbers, 400k. 200k wounded.
Similar dead. After nearly a year of that, the Brits had 105k left and they retreated.

The whole damn war started over coveting ottoman empire pieces. They got them. We are still paying for it.