r/AskReddit • u/DrCompenomics • 12h ago

Who’s the best real-life example of “you either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” and what happened?

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u/Tim-oBedlam 8h ago

Really good comment.

This obviously won't be news to you, but I think a lot of other countries, ESPECIALLY Americans, don't realize the shattering effect WW1 had on France. Around 30% of all French men in their 20s when the war broke out were dead by the war's end. That's an entire generation lost in the trenches. And that's *dead*: the 70% of the survivors includes people who were gravely wounded, or perhaps survived with no injuries but had the lifelong trauma of seeing their friends Claude, Jean-Pierre, and Jacques blown to bits in front of them.

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u/MaximumFlow7491 6h ago edited 6h ago

yeah, 70% of all French military aged males were killed or wounded in WWI

to put things in perspective: imagine the bros you went to high school with, now imagine the vast majority of them dying or maimed in a period of 4 years

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u/Tim-oBedlam 6h ago

The other statistic that I recall about France in WW1: they had approximately 1.4 million killed in action.

That is roughly equal to ALL USA war dead in our ENTIRE history going back to colonial times, counting both sides of the American Civil War. In four years.

Most of USA war deaths were the Civil War (750,000, more or less), and WW2 (a bit over 400,000).

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u/GrumpyFalstaff 4h ago

Holy shit, that's an insane statistic. Did not know that thanks

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u/nikogrande 4h ago

If you’re any sort of history buff at all, I cannot recommend enough Blueprint for Armageddon from Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. No story of any war anywhere has gripped my soul like that one…. Note: it’s 24 hours long

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u/cairdeas 2h ago

Any recommendations on where to listen to it? 13 years old now and it doesn't look like it's on the show's feed anymore.

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u/Doikor 2h ago

You can buy his older stuff from his website

https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blueprint-for-armageddon-series/

There is also a bundle with all his hardcore history episodes for $100 there.

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u/cairdeas 2h ago

Thank you!

I'll also add a recommendation for "The War that Ended Peace" by Margaret MacMillan, which also takes a pretty long road to the great war.

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u/Beachsbcrazy 1h ago

There’s a channel on Spotify called This Too Shall Pass that has the full series

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u/komstock 24m ago

Blueprint for Armageddon made me hate war in a way I never thought I'd be capable of. I listened to it in my early 20s and I realized all of the men who were being blown up for...next to nothing were all men just like me with my same capacity for interiority and my same capacity to feel and my same capacity to love.

People talk all the time about all kinds of conflict. People say 'never again' about a lot of events. WWI is the top of my 'never again' list.

Never has there been such an utter waste of humanity that caused such permanent destruction. Every other atrocity in the 20th century is tied to it.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”

“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”

“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”

“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

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u/turducken69420 2h ago

Around 4.5% of the French population was killed in the war. In the US Civil War it was 2% and that was counting both sides. Plus 2/3 of deaths in the civil war were from disease. World War I was the first was where more soldiers died from combat rather than disease.

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u/YoureInHereWithMe 1h ago

This is why I can’t stand it when people make jokes about the French being cowards when discussing WW2. They either have no idea of, or no empathy for, the massive sacrifice the French made to hold Germany back the first time around.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 39m ago

Exactly. Same here. There are still parts of France that are uninhabitable because of buried ordnance, over 100 years after the guns fell silent, and it may take another century to remove all the UXO. And that's notwithstanding the countless dead.

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u/massive_cock 3h ago

In a country of much more modest size and population. The utter scale.

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u/F1shermanIvan 1h ago

France had more people killed in Verdun than the USA lost in the entire war.

Mind you, Verdun lasted longer than American troops were in theatre.

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u/MaximumFlow7491 39m ago

This is out of a pre-war population of 40 million in Metropole France btw

some of the 1.4 million were colonial troops but vast majority were born in Metropolitan France. KIA+WIA combined for France was 5+ million. Which means that around 1/8 of the -entire population- of France were casualties of war. This a society where it was the norm for you to have lost close friends/relatives in the war.

To put that into perspective, 1/8 of today's US population would be ~43 -million- people.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 37m ago

That's almost incomprehensible. And like I said in an earlier comment even if you were one of the rare French men who came through the war unscathed, you saw first-hand the horrors of war and also probably lost a huge number of your friends.

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u/MaximumFlow7491 32m ago

yeah and it did contribute to why France surrendered so quickly in WWII

it was a society which decided that that the Third Republic wasn't worth defending when so many of their fathers, brothers, sons and friends had already died defending it 20+ years ago.

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u/Gnl_Winter 5h ago

And now imagine after that : the Spanish flu epidemic happens.

The world of 1914-1920 in western Europe is simply the most horrific time to be alive. The sheer amount of grief one had to live through is simply unfathomable.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 4h ago

Eastern Europe between Germany and the USSR in 1939-1944 easily tops that

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u/Gnl_Winter 3h ago

I was being hyperbolic, not literal. Otherwise we can do a contest of all the horrific times and places to be alive and Chinese history is gonna enter the chat pretty quick.

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u/SofieTerleska 2h ago

The Black Death and the Plague of Justinian would have a pretty solid case as well.

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u/laxrippe 3h ago

I was gonna comment in the same spirit as Gnl_Winter - it is not wrong to say it was a horrific time (it absolutely was and your point stands), but it's sadly not hard to find even worse points in space and time to be in.

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u/REDDITATO_ 3h ago

Io in 80,000bc being the obvious WOAT. Damn Jupes.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Excellent point.

Chinese history, which I don't know very well, is fascinating. You have long periods of stability and prosperity when you get a well-run dynasty, then these savage civil wars/periods of anarchy when the dynasty collapses.

I think most of the "bloodiest wars in history" pre-1800, save the Mongol conquests, are Chinese simply because they had the largest population.

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u/InfluenceAutomatic95 3m ago

Eastern Europe from around 1800 - 1945 was generally a terrible place to live. Mass genocide and massacres almost every decade. Double so if Jewish.

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u/Ok_Historian_1066 1h ago

The Black Death would like a word with you.

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u/KaraAliasRaidra 3h ago

That reminds me of the 1930 film version of All Quiet on the Western Front (which I was not expecting to be that graphic 🙀. That's what happens when you watch a movie made before the Hays Code!).

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u/TheBookfinder 1h ago

In some villages, it's the entire fighting age male population that got wiped out. There were kids, elderly, women, and a gaping hole in the middle, all dead, no survivors.

When WW2 started, in a large city you could still hardly come out of your house to go to work or for a stroll or whatever without coming across WW1 vétéran invalids everywhere, missing limbs or whatever.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 31m ago

The French called the generation of kids born in the 1910s the "hollow class" because there were so few of them, because all of the potential fathers were off in the war and a huge percentage of them never came back. That lasted a generation, as there were fewer kids born in the 1930s because there just weren't many men around to father children.

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u/trilobyte-dev 1h ago

Not arguing but enhancing your comment because it’s worse than that. Imagine you have a group of 10 great friends in high school, and 10 years later you are lucky enough to be one of the three still alive.

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u/bulbaquil 24m ago

Better yet, if you happen to have your high school yearbook around, put an X beside every third boy in your class. They died in the war. See how many X's there are just on the first page. See how many of them are people you personally knew.

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u/RumHamComesback 6h ago

People really criticize European leaders for giving into Hitler but the reality is nobody wanted another WW1 because it was so deeply traumatizing with so much loss. The problem was they expected Hitler to stop because he felt the same way but instead he kept going.

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u/Eldias 5h ago

This is why comments on reddit bemoaning "appeasement" drive me crazy. The heads of Europe would have been dragged in to the streets and shot had they openly talked about war to stop Germany a single moment sooner than they did.

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u/nolok 5h ago edited 3h ago

Exactly, Chamberlain coming back with "war" would mean Chamberlain in a cell or hanged. That guy had no choice, which doesn't change that it was still the bad choice

People saying the opposite are clamoring for politics starting a war against the majority wish of their own people and I don't think they thought that through...

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u/axeil55 3h ago

And to give Chamberlain some grace he knew that the UK (and France) were completely unable to fight at the time of the Munich Conference. He sold "peace in our time" as the best of a bad situation and then started directing a lot of defense actions in case Germany tried something.

It was a fairly good play in a rough situation.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Their biggest mistake was not rolling into the Ruhr when Germany invaded Poland. The "peace in our time" like you said bought Britain time to build up arms, which came in handy in 1940.

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u/OldAccountIsGlitched 1h ago

Britain wasn't ready to back up France and French doctrine wasn't very mobile. Not to mention Stalin started pulling shit almost immediately. It's an easy decision to make in hindsight. But I can understand why the French pulled back.

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u/Mabfred 2h ago

Well, it might seem so if you are British, but it was part of the reason, why Czechoslovak public opinion was much more open to Soviets after the war. Sure, the Soviets shortly showed their real intentions, but that did not much help to cover the "Munich Betrayal".
The feeling of betrayal by UK and France is relevant to this day - I believe it is one of the factors playing into the anti-EU sentiment of the West being callous and not really our ally (which is a narrative strongly pushed by the Russian propaganda).

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u/axeil55 2h ago

Oh yeah if you were Czechoslovak I can imagine it would be rather infuriating and build some deep resentment and I don't blame them for it. They were abandoned and that sucked.

As an aside, I've visited Prague and it was probably my favorite city I've ever been to. Absolutely wonderful place.

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u/inevitablelizard 3h ago

Chamberlain also made a lot of efforts to prepare us for the outbreak of war. There is an argument that he was simply buying time and didn't actually believe it would work long term.

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u/Scuterius_Floridae 2h ago

Id be wary if I had to fight in the Somme and lived

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u/adamgerd 5h ago

Sure that’s true, but it’s a lot easier when it’s not your country that’s the one being sold for peace

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u/woodubahoo 6h ago

"They expected Hitler to stop."

Deja vu in 2026...

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u/AltGrendel 4h ago

This is an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered, thank you.

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u/this_knee 6h ago

A cancer

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u/KaraAliasRaidra 3h ago

There was a part in Maus by Art Spiegelman in which Vladek explained that when the war first started, a lot of people in Poland assumed the Germans would take back the territory they'd lost previously and that would be the end of it. There were people (such as Vladek's father-in-law and his friends) who didn't take the war seriously at first because they assumed it would be over "like lightning" and there wouldn't be any issues.

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u/ZirePhiinix 7h ago

WW1 was a real meat grinder. Literally blown to bits was how cannons worked. Those are the lucky ones. If there were trees then you get to eat a face full of splinters mixed in dirt and guts, and die from infections instead.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 5h ago

All wars are hell but I can't think of a more terrible place to be a soldier than the trenches of WW1 in the Western Front.

Stalingrad probably tops it for "most horrible" but not many other battles would.

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u/nolok 5h ago

It's also thé first time we learned how "modern" factories could produce weaponry, and the first time we tried all those cool chemicals stuff on an industrial war scale and... Eventually Hitler banned some stuff like chemicals weapon because what he saw in ww1 was not to ever be allowed again.

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u/oompaloompa465 2h ago

you don't even need to be in pieces..Explosions also kill from internal trauma. You are whole on the outside, but all your blood vessels bursted internally

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u/MCJokeExplainer 5h ago

My high school history teacher really hammered home how bad WWI was and it really helped me understand European history a lot better. America gets taught a lot about WWII, but very little about WWI.

Also, I think the film A Very Long Engagement is one of the better "horrors of war" movies out there. Highly recommend. (And nothing the director made after that lol)

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u/Tim-oBedlam 5h ago

I think that's true. To the extent that American high school students learn about WW1, it's often "hey, we showed up and kicked German ass and showed those Frenchies a thing or two, right?"

We actually had pretty high casualty counts considering the US was only involved in active combat for a few months.

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u/Freakears 4h ago

I had a professor once tell me that if you go to France’s military academy, they have plaques listing the names of the members of each graduating class that were killed. You get to 1914 and it doesn’t list names. It simply says that every single cadet from the class of 1914 was killed.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 4h ago

whoa. that's sobering.

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u/julius_sphincter 4h ago

America just doesn't have any living generations that have experienced Total War. America hasn't been faced with a real threat on it's soil since the Civil War.

I am NOT trying to diminish the effects that our wars have had on our service members that have been involved or their experiences in them, I'm only speaking of our civilian population. As an elder Millennial, the US has been involved in a war pretty much my whole life, but it's always been distant. Our population overall opposes war, but it doesn't have the visceral effect on the population the way it would for countries that have had massive conflict within or near their own borders

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u/PropagandaPagoda 4h ago

Americans are taught in schools that we don't really have context for the idea of a war at home in living memory. Many of us are at least aware we don't get it and have thought about it.

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u/Tim-oBedlam 3h ago

Right.

The only time that's happened was the Civil War in the South, and certain areas in the Indian Wars, like western Minnesota during the Dakota Conflict in 1862 or King Philip's War in New England in the 1670s.

The generation that remembers WW2 is passing into memory, and I think that might account for the increase in bellicosity we see around the world in the last 10 years.

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u/Medicine_Ball 5h ago

We are taught about this in school, 8th grade for me. It's just that no one pays attention or remembers.

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u/OldeManKenobi 4h ago

This was incredibly difficult for me to visualize as an American. A single visit to Douaumont Ossuary instantly put the losses into perspective. I've never seen anything like it.

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u/Gavorn 4h ago

It's more so that the last war that was fought on our soil was the Civil War.

To compare it would be like having a second civil war 20 years later.

The end of the Civil War turned into a trench warfare meat grinder.