Remember the 70th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge...mans called

A little know fact is that more American lives were lost in the battles to regain the lost ground than was lost in the German attack itself.

 

At the risk of getting this moved into the purgatory sub-forum.....

Every single battle in WWI was pointless. Every death was meaningless.

WWII was a war about something: do we want a world with one master race subjugating all the others, or not? Do we want to exterminate races we think are unworthy, or not? Do we want a violent military dictatorship run by a psychopath, or not? Whichever side of that argument you fall - and I would hope that most people fall on the same side as me - that's an argument worth fighting and dying for.

WWI was not about that. It was a series of minor disputes between the ruling classes. The people who were fighting and dying had nothing to gain and very little to lose from the outcome. It really didn't matter who won: the losing side would have a horrible 20 years of economic depression and reparations payments, creating the conditions necessary for the next really big war, and that was it.

The ruling classes knew that. So they needed things like the white feather campaign and stupid nationalistic campaigns to shame the working classes into fighting. And they succeeded. They sent millions of people who they did not care about to live and die in appalling conditions to fight meaningless, brutal battles.

WWI is still seen as a time of heroism. There were individual acts of heroism, certainly, and I don't want to diminish the millions who died. In Britain, Australia and America, it's often marketed as some great moment of national defence and nation building. It was not that. What WWI should be seen as is a stain on our history.

Australia is particularly bad. Anzac Day is a national holiday.

Anzac Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It commemorates when the Australian and New Zealand forces were massacred in a horribly-ill-planned attack on Turkish forces at Gallipoli. Politicians and newsreaders and commentators and celebrities talk about how it marked the true birth of Australia. It's nonsense. Australian troops were fighting for the British, against a country that posed no threat to Australia, more than 7,000 miles from the closest part of Australia. More specifically, working-class Australian and New Zealand troops were fighting for the British ruling classes against Turkish troops who were fighting for the Turkish, Austrian and German ruling classes, because the two sets of ruling classes were having a minor argument. And the Australian and New Zealand troops were massacred because the invasion wasn't planned properly, and that was because they were seen as entirely expendable by the British planners. And this, apparently, was the birth of our glorious nation. Fighting for the ruling classes of a different country against a country we had nothing to do with.

It's the same with the Battle of the Bulge. The American troops who fought in it had nothing to gain. They were just sent in to die, because the British ruling classes asked the American ruling classes to send over some cannon fodder.

As you may have guessed, WWI really makes me angry. And we have learned nothing from it.

 

I don't disagree about WWI. Worst part of WWI is that it's indefinite conclusion and aftermath directly led to WWII.

However, I gotta strongly disagree about The Battle Of The Bulge. Although I'm not a historian, I consider myself very well-versed in WWII history and I've never heard that assertion put forward until now. The Bulge directly resulted from an overextension of the American supply lines and the German army capitalized on that and counterattacked to create "the bulge." It was imperative that the Allies break that situation in order to continue with the march on Germany. As far as the part about the British ruling class taking advantage of Americans, that belies the fact that the Normandy invasion and the Allied Offensive could not have taken place successfully WITHOUT US troops. Those troops and their reinforcements were the ones who took the casualties in the Ardennes.

Maybe I missed the point of your post, but I don't see American troops as the victims of a cynical governmental objective here, but rather the victims of failed military planning. Ultimately the military strategy was successful, albeit at very high cost.

I know a little about Gallipoli and would tend to agree with you there, but I don't think it is a fair comparison to The Battle Of The Bulge.

 

Sorry - my mistake - got my Battles of Bulges mixed up.

The WWII one was absolutely necessary.

 

Then there was Malmedy and eventually Hiroshima.

Bob Wilson

 

In WW II, allied code breakers became so adept at reading German radio messages, that the allies had German messages decoded before the Germans did and it was a great help in the allied victory, but at the time of the Bulge, the Germans, being pushed back into their own territory were using land lines, so no messages could be decoded, hence the initial success of the Germans in December 1944, therefore I guess you could call it a failure of allied intelligence....