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World War I: Difference between revisions
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* [[Body Horror]]: Soldiers who survived the [http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/photos/uncategorized/mask_pair4.jpg worst] [http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f149/89557d1251704696-world-war-1-facial-injuries-ww1pic3.jpg imaginable] [http://www.documentingreality.com/forum/attachments/f149/89555d1251704681-world-war-1-facial-injuries-ww1pic2.jpg injuries] often had to exist in a state of [[A Fate Worse Than Death]] ''[[And I Must Scream|for the rest of their lives...]]'' If you were injured and disfigured young? Too bad for you...
* [[Break Out the Museum Piece]]: Rear line troops often got quite outdated equipment with black powder firearms seeing regular use.
** Mortars, invented in the 16th Century and otherwise discarded for some time after the 18th, saw a major renaissance in this war.
* [[Didn't See That Coming]]: The Germans were caught by surprise by the French using tear gas on their soldiers, and the Allies were even more surprised when the Germans deployed poison gas. Also, [[Tank Goodness|tanks]] was an absolute and terrifying surprise.
** The MAS (short for ''motobarca armata SVAN'', SVAN being the original manufacturer), the torpedo boats of the Italian Navy, were essentially speedboats with a torpedo strapped on either side and discounted as nothing more than a nuisance. The Austro-Hungarian Navy literally failed to see two of them having a chance encounter with their flagship, sink it, and run away, and thought the ''Szent Istvan'' had been sunk by submarines until the Italian propaganda started boasting.
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* [[Crying Wolf]]: A lot of people did not take reports of German rearmament or the [[World War Two]] Holocaust seriously because the last generation was jaded from exaggerated propaganda about the brutality of the enemy in this war.
** The Holocaust started well after World War II began. Also, in addition to a jaded populace, the British government knew that war with Germany would be, at best, a [[Pyrrhic Victory]] (They did lose their superpower status at the end of World War II, so their fears were justified).
* [[Dawn of an Era]]: A rather dark example, as the war and its aftermath, would decisively shape the modern world as we know it
* [[Disaster Dominoes]]: How that war was triggered. And arguably what the war's end [[World War II|eventually triggers]].
* [[Earth Is a Battlefield]]: Although it's mostly known for fighting in France, Belgium and Russia, there were battles all over the place. Technically, as they were Empires, the governments involved covered the entire earth, but the fighting was heavily concentrated on small fronts.
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"The lights are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." - Sir Edward Grey, British Foreign Minister, as the war began
"This is no peace, it is an armistice for twenty years." - French Marshal Ferdinand Foch, on the Treaty of Versailles. }}
** Continuing on the Foch quote; US general Pershing hated the idea of an Armistice
** A cartoon from the time of the Versailles treaty shows Lloyd-George saying to his fellow leaders: "Listen. Do you hear a child crying?" Said child is unseen in a corner weeping over a torn copy of the treaty. Virtually any boy born in England or France in 1918-1919 would have been conscripted in 1939.
* [[Friend or Foe]]: Everywhere, especially with artillery and between the Austro-Hungarians, who were divided by language.
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* [[General Failure]]: On virtually every side and a large part of why the war was as horrible and bloody as it was. Generals, and most senior officers, of the time, often had their position from politics rather than competence, having never seen combat in their career, dreamed of glorious victories with lost men as statistics, and often hated other countries ''that were on the same side'' all while refusing to embrace modern tactics.
* [[Go-Karting with Bowser]]: On Christmas, 1914, forces in certain areas took a break from the war to go into No Man's Land and play soccer/football with each other and generally fraternize with the enemy. It was not universal, and ended up being stopped by the higher-ups on both sides, but stands out as a bit of heartwarmingness in one of the bleakest periods of the Twentieth Century.
* [[Gray and Gray Morality]]: Unlike [[World War Two|the sequel]], the good-versus-evil battle was far less obvious; as almost all the countries initially involved were motivated by a combination of greed, racism, and nationalistic fervor. While the Central Powers did things like [[Fascists' Bed Time|impose extremely nasty measures in the areas they occupied]] and [[Obligatory War Crime Scene|violated several agreements regarding the rules of war that they were party to]], as well as [[What Could Possibly Go Wrong?|giving the Bolsheviks the leg up they needed to seize power]], and the use of genocide to "Germanify" or "Turkify" several regions under their control, [[Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat|all of which ironically probably led to their defeat.]] The Allies were better, but they still were willing to launch air attacks against civilian targets (though not on the scale of the sequel), and blockade Germany and its allies even AFTER the war on the justification that the war was not over until Berlin signed the peace treaty and recalled its holdouts in some of the still-occupied regions, used poison gas, smuggled war materials in neutrally-flagged ships, and (in the case of the Russian government) indulged in anti-Semitic paranoia. Nobody descended to QUITE the level [[Those Wacky Nazis]] did, [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero|but the failure to prosecute war criminals after the war doubtless didn't discourage them.]]
* [[Harsher in Hindsight]]: Immediately after the war ended, many people were so disgusted by the scale of death and destruction that they declared that they had finally seen the worst humanity was capable of. [[World War Two|They]] [[Adolf Hitler|were]] [[Nazi Germany|wrong.]]
* [[Historical Hero Upgrade]]: Very rare in today's media, but in the immediate aftermath Hindenburg (who didn't do much) and Ludendorff (who lost) both made out that they were True German Heroes who had been betrayed by defeatists at home.
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* [[Hollywood Tactics]]: Heavily exaggerated by, ironically enough, Hollywood, but some pretty stupid things were done.
** Sadly enough, this was justified. Technology had far outstripped an understanding of tactics by then. The last big wars were fought against Napoleon, using formations and muzzle-loading muskets - or at the very least, artillery that was short-ranged and slow to load. Of the nations fighting ''this'' one, only one had had any prior experience with the levels of Dakka flying around: the late-coming Yanks, from [[The American Civil War]]. (And even then we would have been out of our depths with the aircraft and tanks.)
*** It's hardly true that the American Civil War was the most recent or relevant war by WWI. Later and more relevant military experience came from the British during the Boer War (1899-1902), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). Both wars involved much of the same technology that lead to the stalemate in the Great War-barbed wire and long-ranged, rapid
** The 1870 Franco-Prussian War was the main reason for France to declare war to Germany in 1914. Some of the tactics (and clothing, with red "shoot-me" pants) were still in use in the French army more than forty years later, much to disastrous effects, which lead to trenches warfare and blue outfits.
* [[Home by Christmas]]: The countries involved were confident that their soldiers would come home victoriously within months, a popular belief too; the soldiers on their way to the front were cheerfully saluted and joined by the citizens for a few miles. The scenario of an industrialized meat grinder war of attrition had not been experienced in Europe yet.
* [[Idiot Plot]]: The [[Idiot Ball]] gets passed back and forth between everyone. France and Britain went to war with Germany, which produced 90% of their high explosives, without the ready ability to manufacture elsewhere. The Belgians claimed their forts were still holding out weeks after the Germans had captured them, the
** [[Fridge Logic]] was introduced by the Mexican General Staff, which was forwarded the Zimmerman Note for analysis by President Carranza. They concluded that Germany was trying to incite Mexico to attack the United States [[Let's You and Him Fight|with no risk or sacrifice to Germany]]. Assurances of German financial support were meaningless, as the only country capable of selling Mexico enough arms to defeat the United States ''was the United States itself!'' And Germany's own wartime demands (to say nothing of the British blockade) ensured that the Germans could not provide Mexico with additional troops, weapons, or technical support. The Mexican army also concluded that the occupation would not be worth the trouble even if Mexico did manage to win and that provoking the United States would alienate the rest of Latin America (or possibly bring them into the war on the side of the Allies). Carranza, subsequently, told the Germans what they could do with their note.
** Nothing beats the Italian general staff, though. When somebody sticks to the same Napoleonic Era
*** Less the Italian General Staff (who were all things considering- about as competent as anybody else and probably the equals or superiors of their Austro-Hungarian opponents) and more Luigi Cadorna, who came within a few steps of turning Italy into a military dictatorship under his command and who practically ran the war for the first two years of Italy's involvement. How bad was he? To this day the term Cadorna is still used as slang for something crappy BY THE ITALIANS. Unsurprisingly, the front turned around almost immediately when Cadorna was finally removed from power and replaced with Diaz in spite of Diaz inheriting the exact situation Cadorna had had with the additional negative effect of the enemy's smashing victory and Caporetto a month or so earlier.
** Also the way war broke out was because of the various war plans. If Russia thought there would be any trouble with Austria they would mobilize against Austria and Germany, and if Germany thought Russia was mobilizing they would immediately invade France and Belgium. Guess what happened.
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* [[Last of His Kind]]: Most of the last surviving veterans of the war have died in the past 15 years. As of 2011, nobody who saw active combat remains (the last, Claude Choules (British-born Australian, served in the RN and RAN) died May 5th, 2011). The last known survivor was Florence Green (British, last female veteran, died 7 Feb 2012). The last Canadian, Polish, Ukrainian and Austro-Hungarian veterans died only recently, only one to four years ago. Also, the last American veteran, Frank Buckles, died on February 27th, 2011.
* [[Memetic Badass]]: Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, commander of German forces in East Africa, intentionally built up a crazy reputation among both his enemies and his own troops through such acts as personally reconnoitering a battlefield on his bicycle. When he lost his glass eye and one of his Askaris (African troops) found it, returned it, and asked why he had dropped it, he replied "I left it there, to make sure that you would do your duty." By the end of the campaign, his enemies believed he was carrying his men on his back and going barefoot to conserve boots. After the war, he managed to get England to pay the retirement funds of his African troops. Let me repeat that: he managed to get England to pay for the retirement of the people who had ''shot at their soldiers''.
** He was also a [[Father to His Men]], insisting that his black troops be treated the same as his white troops. When Lettow-Vorbeck returned to
** Lettow-Vorbeck was offered the ambassadorship to Great Britain by Hitler but, distrusting the Nazi party, [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|told Hitler what he could do with the proposal]]. According to one interview:
{{quote|"I understand that von Lettow told Hitler to go fuck himself."
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* [[Mordor]]: What the most frequented frontlines looked like after years and years of bombardment and endless battles, notably on the Western Front. The battlefield near Paschendale looked particularly dreary in 1917 - a hellish, completely blasted-to-bits muddy wasteland.
** Tolkien even hinted at, years later, that the frontlines in Belgium and France (where he served as an army medic) gave him a lot of inspiration for Mordor. So, oddly, they sort of count as a [[Trope Codifier]].
*** In particular, the Dead Marshes crossed by Frodo, Sam, and Gollum in ''[[The Two Towers]]'' were directly inspired by things
* [[More Dakka]]: Probably set a record for extreme concentrations of firepower. As just one example, the Battle of the Somme saw the British fire 12,000 ''tons'' of artillery ordnance at the German lines. The Germans, largely sheltered in excellent German engineering bunkers, emerged to intercept the following infantry attack - and inflict ''60,000'' British casualties in one day with machine guns. ''Nineteen thousand people were shot to death in one day'' and that was just the start of the battle; it went on for five months and ultimately caused well over ''one million'' casualties.
** A detachment of the British Machine Gun Corps with 12 Vickers machine guns worked their way through a ''million'' rounds in 12 hours at High Wood.
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** After all was totted up, it's reckoned that one ton of explosives was spent killing each of the war's casualties.
** There is also the Paris Gun, an enormous cannon built by the Germans that could fire shells ''eighty miles'', so far and high that Coriolis Force affected the shots.
* [[Mundane Utility]]: One of the first militaries uses for aircraft, a technology
** [http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2016/04/04/the-winchester-machine-rifle-wwis-anti-balloon-assault-rifle/ Winchester prototyped an assault rifle], decades before the Germans made the STG44, for the purpose of shooting down balloons.
* [[Multinational Team]]: Applies to most belligerent empires/states:
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** The Austro-Hungarian Empire included not only Austria and Hungary but many other central European and Balkan regions, nations and city-states as well.
** The Ottoman Empire included modern Turkey and all of the middle east from present-day Iraq to Egypt (although Egypt split off almost as soon as the war began--being semi-independent since the early 19th century and occupied by Britain since the 1880s).
** Russian Empire formed the first Latvian Riflemen brigades during this war. That came to bite them in the ass when the Riflemen supported Bolsheviks, giving the
* [[Neutral No Longer]]: Several examples. The British Empire after the invasion of neutral Belgium and the United States when Germany enacted unrestricted submarine warfare.
* [[Never My Fault]]: The Ottoman Empire's reaction to its crippling loss to the Russians after trying to invade in the dead of winter. Instead of blaming bad judgment on their part, they turned on the minorities within their empire for allegedly 'helping' the Russians.
** It is certain that a good number of the Armenians and Pontic Greeks on the campaign were spies for the Russians (though they were ironically outnumbered by the number of spies amongst the ethnic Turks the Russians had been cultivating since the
*** Ironically if the Ottoman army had invested more in helping the Germans fight rather than using much of their firearms and soldiers executing a [[Final Solution]] on their own citizens they may have stood more of a chance of winning. But, since they'd been massacring their Christian population on and off since the 1890s, they likely just saw their defeat by Russia as a good excuse to spread paranoia about all of them being traitors and finish them all off, regardless of how many actually were rooting for the other side. But one can hardly blame, for instance, the Armenians of the city of Van for holding out for the Russian army to liberate them while being put under siege because they wouldn't let the Ottoman army march them into the Syrian desert to die.
* [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero]]: The Treaty of Versailles. Especially the debate in the United States over its ratification. Anti-Treaty Republicans wanted to compromise, especially in
** There's also a far-reaching incident that happened with Wilson while he was eating at a restaurant. A Vietnamese waiter came up to him and wanted to talk to him about French Indochina and the possibility of its independence from France. Wilson brushed him off. The waiter's name? [[wikipedia:Ho Chi Minh|Ho Chi Minh]].
** The first recorded cases of Spanish flu were among soldiers in ''Kansas''. This makes it likely that American soldiers sent to the front lines were the ones who unknowingly carried it over to Europe, [[Typhoid Mary]] style.
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* [[Russian Guy Suffers Most]]: They had the largest death toll, followed by France and Austria-Hungary.
** Debateable: Germany suffered the largest ''confirmed'' death toll at around 2 million. Russian figures may have been higher, but no one is sure. If you include the immediately subsequent Russian civil war, then this trope is played straight.
*** Problem with Russia is how
** Less debatable is the Russian military equipment being pretty sub-par. Malnourished and ill-
* [[Schizo-Tech]]: The introduction of poison gas, tanks, and surveillance aircraft (as well as one of the first campaigns of aerial assault led by [[Colonel Badass|Lt. Commander Peter Strasser]]) mixed with distinctly old-world attitudes and aesthetics.
* [[Seductive Spy]]: The folklore that arose around former [[Trope Namer]] [[Mata Hari]] essentially codified the trope during this war.
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* [[Ur Example]]: Some historians credit the [[Seven Years' War]] from 1756 to 1763 as the real first World War, because of its global nature. World War I may then just be the [[Trope Codifier]].
* [[War Is Hell]]: This war was so horrible that everyone involved decided to never engage in war again.
* [[Warrior Poet]]: Many many poets and writers served in the war. Siegfried Sassoon, JRR Tolkien, and John McCrae are only a few examples.
** Gabriele D'Annunzio is the most ''in''famous due his
* [[The War to End All Wars]]: An example where it didn't work at all. Also, the [[Trope Namer]].
* [[We Have Reserves]]: The war, unfortunately, was made of this trope.
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** Charles I of Austria-Hungary can arguably be described as the right person at the worst possible time. As all his efforts to save the Habsburg domains and end the war ultimately proved to be either for naught or too little, too late.
* [[You Fail Economics Forever]]: Germany's strategy for paying for the war, instead of increasing wartime taxes and other such things that the other countries did? Just print money. This left the Germans with a useless form of currency, with the life savings of a retired citizen barely enough to cover a table. People were ''using marks as fuel for their fires or wallpaper'' because there was nothing else they could do with them.
* [[Young Future Famous People]]: Due to conscription, you generally couldn't throw a brick in the trenches without hitting someone who would grow up to be an important writer/actor/scientist/future political leader etc. (Most notably [[Adolf Hitler]]).
* [[Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters]]: Many cases. Most notably, the war's triggering event- if not its outright cause due to the powder keg nature of diplomacy at the time- was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip of the Anarchist/Nationalist (go figure) group Young Bosnia, which was a front for Unification Or Death AKA the Black Hand, and who is still viewed as a hero by large segments of the population of the former Yugoslavia. Also, see the nationalist undergrounds within the Turkish and Russian Empires and the Bolsheviks.
* [[Zerg Rush]] - A commonly used strategy, usually leading to a resounding victory - for the defenders.
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