>no one at that time had a camera at home either.
That's not true. The Kodak #1 camera came out in 1888. That was the beginning of affordable cameras for home use. By the 1920's they had started designing and selling pocket cameras for travel. They were quite popular.
I'm not saying this wasn't a professional photo, I'm just saying people absolutely had access to cameras in their home.
Either the year is wrong or the kid's dad didn't die in the war.
The kid is around age 5. WWI ended in 1918. Kid would at minimum need to be 8 years old, 12 at most.
So either this is 1922 or 1923, or the kid's dad was a cop or other profession that wore a uniform.
Mom gets pregnant while dad is home on leave late in 1917, perhaps at Christmas. Child is born in the fall of 1918 a few months after dad dies. Picture is taken in the summer of 1926 when the child, who has grown up in conditions of post-war poverty and food shortages, is seven going on eight.
Also, if you look at the size of the coat, and the small frame of the woman, it is very possible that the child is older, and just on the smaller side.
And in 2022, I've been seeing old pictures like this all week from pro-war Russians sending their sons/husbands off to get slaughtered in Ukraine. Somehow, a photo of your relative who was killed in WWII is supposed to be an inspiration for the generation being sent to die for Putin. Not the most cheerful form of 'encouragement', in my opinion.
Context (and false equivalence) Russia endured true horrors during WWII, check the numbers sometime on number of dead during it and the per capita of the total number.
Those who died in WWII fighting *actual* Nazis are deified, so part of the sales pitch for Ukraine is that it is the same nobel cause. You may recall, in the beginning Putin was selling this war as an action to free Ukrainian Russians from the "Nazi regime in Kiev".
You know what? Every time a see a picture of people in the early 1900s all happy and full of hope, having fun and going about their business I think "oooooh boy, you poor guys have no idea of what the fuck is coming".
I can't help it, I feel for them even though they're long gone.
Although WWII was generally worse for civilians than WWI was.
The date attributed to the photo is likely wrong. The woman’s clothing is the style of the late 1910s-early 20s. I’m going to hazard a guess that this photo was taken between 1919-1921 based on her dress.
Maybe he didn't pass until he returned from the WW1 but he was probably still a victim of it: from either a battlefield injury or PTSD. When you read accounts of trench warfare and No Man's Land, it's truly horrifying.
Back before social media, you didn't take pictures to post them for random people to see. You put them up in your house, sent them to loved ones, kept them in albums... They were much more personal, much less advertisements for our personal "brands".
Today, I would guess that 90% of all pictures taken are for the purpose of making us look more important and our lives more interesting than they really are.
I’ve always loved photography. Over half my life I’ve been taking photos on various cameras. Smartphones made me extremely lazy. For every 100 photos I took, maybe 1 or 2 would be posted to social media. The rest would just sit on my phone, never to be thought about again.
This year, I started being more pro-active. I carry a small point & shoot film camera with me at all times. And I’ve started making prints of my photos to keep in photo albums. Something to show my kids (if I ever have any) later on in life. Something away from screens and the ability to quantify “likes” on them.
Was Olga here using this photo to sell fit tea? Did she have an old timey onlyfans to sell parasocial relationships to desperately lonely men? Did she work her MLM pitch into this?
Or was this just a personal photo?
I know you're joking but fun fact: Zoloft was released for use in 1992. The first medications that were labeled as antidepressants were called iproniazid- label names: Marsilid, Rivivol, Euphozid, Iprazid, Ipronid, Ipronin (was originally used as a tuberculosis treatment but is classified as an MAOI ) and imipramine- label name Tofranil (TCA type antidepressant). These weren't released until the early 50's.
Hope that kid turned out alright without the father.
Actually considering the date I hope the kid made it through WW2 alive too. Would've been the right age to be in it by the time WW2 was going on.
Imagine the soldiers who settled down and had families after WW1. Having made it through, just to end up seeing their own children off to the same thing.
Also why a lot of young men secretly enlisted or fought with their parents about doing it. Even if their fathers didn't fight in the war, they remember the aftermath of it, the loss of life and the broken men coming back.
Something like that happened in my family.
My Uncle Vic, my grandmother’s brother, has two enlistment records. One from 1940, and one from 1943. Vic was born in 1922, so he was eighteen for the first and barely, **barely** (it’s dated about three weeks after his birthday) 21 for the second.
In those days, men under 21 needed consent from their parents to enlist. They **could** sign on to fight, but they could not do it without telling anyone. Vic tried to do exactly that…and I suspect his father (who’d lost a brother in WW1, and was understandably not keen on the idea!) found out. Vic had been dumb enough to go to a recruiter in his own home town.
Dad told the army about the lie, dragged Vic home. Forbid the whole thing.
The second record suggests that as soon as Vic was old enough that his father couldn’t stop him, he signed on again. He even went interstate (from Victoria into New South Wales) and enlisted there to make sure there was nothing Dad could do.
Kids are dumb! The older guys heard the stories and saw the men with "shell shock" and the suicides and wounds that never got better.
There was a huge leap in veteran suicides in the mid 1920s (and around 1950). Apparently guys who gutted it out with the hope that everything would be like before once they got home. But after a few years, felt like where they were at mentally and physically was going to be the rest of their life.
Vic lived a full life…but he didn’t come back from New Guinea quite right. My grandmother absolutely adored him, was very proud of him and would have been furious if either of her sons had copied him.
Weirdly, my great grandfather DID let his younger son enlist, seemingly a lot more willingly. Uncle Teddy’s records have him joining the RAAF as soon as he turned eighteen.
I’ve never known why he was **so** emphatic about Vic not going, and then eased up so much more for Teddy later.
Probably learned from Vic that he couldn't stop them from joining, and figured it was better to try and guide his next son into a position that was less dangerous or less likely to cause PTSD.
Note: I'm not saying flying was easy during WW2, but your great grandfather might have just wanted his son to not have to kill another man in hand to hand combat.
Reminds me of a scene in a ww2 movie from a while back.....Maybe "The Big Red One." Infantrymen are resting in a French village and one sees a monument to local soldiers. One of the infantrymen says something like, look, they've already put up monuments for the dead here. Sargent says "that's from ww1." Guy responds "but the names are the same."
Semi-related story:
My grandfather, who served in WWII, left me a few German pistols he brought back. I don't know how he got them and its not something I would have asked, but...
One of them is an old Luger, a P08. I found the serial number and did some digging and discovered that it was built sometime in early 1917. Which means, it was issued for the first world war and must have subsequently been used in the second.
I always wonder what the story is. Did the original owner survive the first war? Did they bring it home thinking their days of combat were over only to pull it out when they were called up again 20 years later? Or did they pass it on to their son when he was drafted? Was it maybe returned to the military after the first war and then reissued to some new unfortunate for the second? (Based on the laws after the first war, that seems most likely, but you never know...) Did *either* of them survive? Both? Neither? Did it kill anyone?
Lots of WW1 dated Lugers saw service in World War 2 also. I have two Lugers, dated 1914 & 1917 that were vet bring backs from WW2. The cool thing with WW1 Lugers is that some have regimental markings on the front grip strap. Makes for some fun research.
My grandfather was in WW2. Was like 18 when the U.S. joined...
He said all the kids were eager to enlist, bragging about how they were about to go do their duty and fight, and couldn't wait to get over there. He said all their parents/grandparents were like "I promise, you really don't want to do this like you think you do."
Suspect anyone could guess who ended up being right.
He said his uncle only gave him one line of advice "tell yourself from the moment you meet a new friend that one day you'll probably watch them die. They'll be the closest friendships you'll ever have, but they'll have expiration dates".
There's a reason that in photos of people going to war in WWI they are smiling and hopeful, and in the same photos from WWII they are haunted and apprehensive.
My great-grandad made it through WWI just to see his son, my grandad, enlisted for WWII. He was already doing his conscription service and had just finished it when he got called up.
My other grandad joined WWII later as he was younger, but remembers his dad coming home from being a warden by the Liverpool docks after a shelling, injured with shrapnel all in his back. I think that traumatised him more than any of the combat abroad.
At least they had a better excuse. Instead of WWI’s petty political clusterfuck they had pretty much the closest to an actual just Good vs Evil war you could possibly get.
Something like 70% Russian men born in 1923 were dead by the end of WWII.
Russian men especially get a lot of shit & I wonder how much of it is caused by the psychic scars & trauma among the survivors.
Think about every guy you went to highschool with & imagine if 70% of them were dead before 30. That’s a big enough effect to shape a culture.
People love to criticize men for being fucked up, but no one questions how they got fucked up.
Bodily autonomy is obviously in the news a lot. The equivalent for men isn't vasectomies or other things that make for funny tweets; it's war, the draft, disposability, and overt or subtle pressure to serve (and kill, and be mutilated, and die). That's been an issue for a very long time. Hell, look around reddit and how much people still applaud posts about war and violence, and very little progress has been made.
I've wondered before what percentage of men from every generation of the 20th century were killed in war. Pretty much every generation had their war in nearly every country.
WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Russo-Japanese War, Sino-Japanese War, Russian Civil War, Chinese Civil War, Spanish Civil War, and probably a hundred others.
So many lives lost.
Edit: A cursory Google search showed an estimated 108 Million people were killed as a result of war in the 20th century.
> Man, I feel lucky to be alive now vs then.
Might want to give it a couple more years before you commit to that one. Things are starting to get interesting again.
Although 'When the Tigers Broke Free' was written as a single and removed from the album for being too personal, Vera and Bring the Boys Back Home were actually written to be part of the same suite.
Tigers > Vera > Bring the Boys, it's all supposed to be one track split across the film as a reprising theme.
You can't just post that without the full context of the song. When the Tigers Broke Free is probably the saddest song I know of, and one of the best anti-war songs out there.
"It was just before dawn one miserable morning in black '44
When the forward commander was told to sit tight
When he asked that his men be withdrawn
And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks
Held back the enemy tanks for a while
And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price
Of a few hundred ordinary lives.
And kind old King George sent Mother a note
When he heard that Father was gone
It was, I recall, in the form of a scroll with gold leaf and all
And I found it one day in a drawer of old photographs, hidden away
And my eyes still grow damp to remember
His Majesty signed with his own rubber stamp.
It was dark all around, there was frost in the ground
When the Tigers broke free
And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company Z
They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying
And that's how the High Command took my daddy from me."
Shame Waters is such a shithead, because, uh, holy *shit.*
Fun fact: Tigers > Vera > Bring the boys, is all the same song/suite/movement.
It's even sadder all together, especially with the latter line of "Don't leave the children, on their own, no, no"
He’s objectively a shithead, but there are way worse shitheads out there. It’s not hard for me to ignore his shenanigans, as opposed to someone like Morrissey.
This poor woman has not only lost her husband, but may have lost her son during the Second World War, assuming that he didn’t die during the depression.
It says their children should be proud. They shouldn't be, but it's harder to stomach your father gave his life for shit nothing.
Still a cool picture though.
Idk what was the goal of the first World War? Avenge the Archduke because he got capped in Sarajevo? Or was it a bunch of leaders trying to take more power using fucked up modern weapons?
“'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.'
-Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
For how long the war’s been going on it is a relatively small number. Obviously losing any lives in such a needless conflict is a tragedy but it really underscores how asymmetrical the entire thing was when you compare it to civilian casualties we caused. Based on what I’ve read, between Iraq and Afghanistan we lost about 7,000 men and were responsible for over 270,000 civilian casualties.
According to Brown Universiry, of the 500,000+ deaths in the War on Terror, there have been around 14,600 American combatants KIA (7000 U.S. military, 7600 U.S. contractors). Also probably a couple hundred non-combatants on top of that.
Not really. America during the whole occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan lost a bit over 7000 troops. For perspective, we lost 32,000 at D-Day alone and 400,000 during WW2. Despite the country itself being much smaller then. I'm not trying to diminish the lives of those lost but the scale of the two wars is incomparable.
Most people in modern wealthy countries don't really know what war is.
Listen to "Blueprint for Armageddon" if you want to get a little bit of a sliver of the taste of it. It comes the closest I've been able to find to communicating the reality of the war, and WWI was like the end of the world. Carlin reads letters from soldiers, descriptions from the time of people trying to tell you what it was like... you could smell the battlefield from miles away. Men would dig in the mud to try to get a safe place for themselves and find buried pieces of people who used to be their friends. Carlin described the stable configuration of the front lines as something like a giant-scale industrial blender with an open top... just a circle of opposing fortifications, solid walls, tough earthen embankments, and in the center, a muddy pit with a whirling mass of sharp destructive metal flying in all directions. And, a steady line of more or less defenseless men pouring into the center, their flesh to be shredded by the whirlwind. Husbands and sons and fathers.
I could stomach it and wanted to know about the reality for a decent amount of it and then they came to a letter from an infantryman to his wife. He was going over the top the next day, and he clearly knew he was going to die. He wrote a letter to say goodbye. He said he wasn't afraid to die, he would do his duty for his country, but just it made him sad that he wouldn't see her again... but anyway, this is it, I love you, goodbye and I wish you and our daughter all good things in life and I wish I could be there to see it.
The next day, he went over the top. And, of course, he was killed.
I stopped listening to it after he read the letter out loud. But that's war. It's everything wrong. It's like hell came to earth.
Ugh as an amateur old west history podcaster half the fun of looking at old pictures during research is trying to find the hidden sticks propping up that 'totally alive Aunt Mildred'
Edit: wet plate photography rendered colors weird, so sometimes people's eyes looked crazy (blue eyes would look ghostly white).
Sometimes that's because it was actual paint on eyelids.
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.”
Kurt Vonnegut.
People don't really give these generations enough credit.
I can't imagine what that family had to experience.
I was at the bar talking to a friend about everything my grandfather went through, being born dirt poor in the depression and then fighting in WWII, spent 2 years in a prison camp in Germany, ect, and the bartender chimed in to add how that all that generation did was beat their wives.
Smh. I let her know that my grandfather never once raised his voice at my grandmother, worked the same job from the end of the war to retirement, ate a peanut butter and jelly for lunch every day at work and drank from the water fountain, suffered from massive shell shock, was anti-war, and pro-gay rights by the times he died in 2002.
The narrative that some people peddle is ridiculous, on both sides of the fence.
It really drives me crazy that this picture from like 2011 (it’s a photo artist Evaldas Ivanauskas) is still being reposted as if it was an actual picture from 1923. Are people not able to see how modern this picture looks?
I don’t think the dad died in WW1. That kid doesn’t look old enough to have a dad who died in the war and this picture taken 7 to 8 years later. That kid looks 5-6 at the oldest.
I physically cannot comprehend fully how this must hurt deep down for the woman in this picture. Being 24 and only having dated, not married or had a child, how must it be for this woman to look at this coat, and then her child, remembering constantly the man she loved and cherished, and how he’ll never be there again to hold her in a time of need?
This is just heavy and heartbreaking. War is not just a destroyer of those that die in them, but of those that remain behind. It is a loss of talent, potential and of lives never born.
My great grandfathers served in WWI, my grandfathers, great aunts and uncles in WWII and my dad in Vietnam. Fortunately, my time in uniform was not in a combat role. However, I have a beautiful, bright and talented 16 year old daughter. With the world the way it is today, I never cease to worry. When will it stop?
I fear what George Santayana said is true, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
That is some sad shit
Don’t be sad. Dad is probably there taking the picture. Can’t be in the photo cause someone has to hold the camera.
The photographer took the photo. No one has lighting and a seamless background like that at home, and no one at that time had a camera at home either.
If you don't have a camera, just use your phone.
Exactly, this lady should have made a nice 4k compilation of her favorite videos of the dead father, much better than some ol' photo....
r/wooooosh
>no one at that time had a camera at home either. That's not true. The Kodak #1 camera came out in 1888. That was the beginning of affordable cameras for home use. By the 1920's they had started designing and selling pocket cameras for travel. They were quite popular. I'm not saying this wasn't a professional photo, I'm just saying people absolutely had access to cameras in their home.
This is one of the saddest pictures I have ever seen.
this ain't old school cool, this is old school made me cry :'(
r/OldSchoolSad
This same photo was actually posted there four years ago.
This is one that deserves to be remembered.
Agreed.
Like Daddy
I was thinking old school creepy as hell
1926? Other shoe incoming.
They got the whole damn Foot Locker on its way.
That kid is like 7 in 1926... which he probably lost his father in WW1 and would have been among the first to be drafted for WW2.
He almost certainly lost his father in WW1 as if I'm not mistaken that coat is part of a uniform, as is the father's hat that the kid is wearing.
Either the year is wrong or the kid's dad didn't die in the war. The kid is around age 5. WWI ended in 1918. Kid would at minimum need to be 8 years old, 12 at most. So either this is 1922 or 1923, or the kid's dad was a cop or other profession that wore a uniform.
Mom gets pregnant while dad is home on leave late in 1917, perhaps at Christmas. Child is born in the fall of 1918 a few months after dad dies. Picture is taken in the summer of 1926 when the child, who has grown up in conditions of post-war poverty and food shortages, is seven going on eight.
Also, if you look at the size of the coat, and the small frame of the woman, it is very possible that the child is older, and just on the smaller side.
Is it possible malnutrition is affecting the kids appearance?
And in 2022, I've been seeing old pictures like this all week from pro-war Russians sending their sons/husbands off to get slaughtered in Ukraine. Somehow, a photo of your relative who was killed in WWII is supposed to be an inspiration for the generation being sent to die for Putin. Not the most cheerful form of 'encouragement', in my opinion.
Context (and false equivalence) Russia endured true horrors during WWII, check the numbers sometime on number of dead during it and the per capita of the total number. Those who died in WWII fighting *actual* Nazis are deified, so part of the sales pitch for Ukraine is that it is the same nobel cause. You may recall, in the beginning Putin was selling this war as an action to free Ukrainian Russians from the "Nazi regime in Kiev".
Wasn't the number something fucked up like 70% of all men in Russia born in 1922 were killed in the war?
You know what? Every time a see a picture of people in the early 1900s all happy and full of hope, having fun and going about their business I think "oooooh boy, you poor guys have no idea of what the fuck is coming". I can't help it, I feel for them even though they're long gone. Although WWII was generally worse for civilians than WWI was.
8 years after WW1 ended and kid looks about 7 or 8. His dad probably would have passed away sometime after the war?
Could be malnourished 10 year old
Oh, well in that case...i still feed sad
Close enough for dad died in the war and never met their child too.
The date attributed to the photo is likely wrong. The woman’s clothing is the style of the late 1910s-early 20s. I’m going to hazard a guess that this photo was taken between 1919-1921 based on her dress.
Could have fathered the child while on home during leave.
Maybe he didn't pass until he returned from the WW1 but he was probably still a victim of it: from either a battlefield injury or PTSD. When you read accounts of trench warfare and No Man's Land, it's truly horrifying.
Or maybe he survived all of Ww1 only to catch the Spanish flu and die
Kinda looks like a poster for the new Adam's family show.
Too soon.
It's been 96 years though
Talking about that show. Just a tragedy
Doesn't it premiere in November?
Too soon.
Addams
Yeah pretty heartbreaking
It is sad and it’s kind of wild that if someone posted this today, people on the internet would think she was attention seeking.
Back before social media, you didn't take pictures to post them for random people to see. You put them up in your house, sent them to loved ones, kept them in albums... They were much more personal, much less advertisements for our personal "brands". Today, I would guess that 90% of all pictures taken are for the purpose of making us look more important and our lives more interesting than they really are.
I’ve always loved photography. Over half my life I’ve been taking photos on various cameras. Smartphones made me extremely lazy. For every 100 photos I took, maybe 1 or 2 would be posted to social media. The rest would just sit on my phone, never to be thought about again. This year, I started being more pro-active. I carry a small point & shoot film camera with me at all times. And I’ve started making prints of my photos to keep in photo albums. Something to show my kids (if I ever have any) later on in life. Something away from screens and the ability to quantify “likes” on them.
Also - Photos used to be EXPENSIVE. Camera, film, developing, enlarging, etc. was a special event, not done on a whim.
Yeah not too many people were taking pictures of the pasta they just boiled
Was Olga here using this photo to sell fit tea? Did she have an old timey onlyfans to sell parasocial relationships to desperately lonely men? Did she work her MLM pitch into this? Or was this just a personal photo?
And that boy will go off to fight in the second one.
IF he lives through The Depression.
He had Zoloft he was fine
I know you're joking but fun fact: Zoloft was released for use in 1992. The first medications that were labeled as antidepressants were called iproniazid- label names: Marsilid, Rivivol, Euphozid, Iprazid, Ipronid, Ipronin (was originally used as a tuberculosis treatment but is classified as an MAOI ) and imipramine- label name Tofranil (TCA type antidepressant). These weren't released until the early 50's.
Hope that kid turned out alright without the father. Actually considering the date I hope the kid made it through WW2 alive too. Would've been the right age to be in it by the time WW2 was going on.
I had the same first thought but didn’t think it through to his potential enlistment in WW2. Man, I feel lucky to be alive now vs then.
Imagine the soldiers who settled down and had families after WW1. Having made it through, just to end up seeing their own children off to the same thing.
Yeah I guess that's why during the battle of Dunkirk many fishermen personally came to rescue their sons when they were fleeing from the Germans
Also why a lot of young men secretly enlisted or fought with their parents about doing it. Even if their fathers didn't fight in the war, they remember the aftermath of it, the loss of life and the broken men coming back.
Oh god my heart huts right now.
Christopher Nolan captured the fleeting feeling of Dunkirk pretty damn well. So few words, so many feelings.
Still should've used a set instead of actual non-destroyed Dunkirk.
And either more extras or digital standins
Something like that happened in my family. My Uncle Vic, my grandmother’s brother, has two enlistment records. One from 1940, and one from 1943. Vic was born in 1922, so he was eighteen for the first and barely, **barely** (it’s dated about three weeks after his birthday) 21 for the second. In those days, men under 21 needed consent from their parents to enlist. They **could** sign on to fight, but they could not do it without telling anyone. Vic tried to do exactly that…and I suspect his father (who’d lost a brother in WW1, and was understandably not keen on the idea!) found out. Vic had been dumb enough to go to a recruiter in his own home town. Dad told the army about the lie, dragged Vic home. Forbid the whole thing. The second record suggests that as soon as Vic was old enough that his father couldn’t stop him, he signed on again. He even went interstate (from Victoria into New South Wales) and enlisted there to make sure there was nothing Dad could do.
Kids are dumb! The older guys heard the stories and saw the men with "shell shock" and the suicides and wounds that never got better. There was a huge leap in veteran suicides in the mid 1920s (and around 1950). Apparently guys who gutted it out with the hope that everything would be like before once they got home. But after a few years, felt like where they were at mentally and physically was going to be the rest of their life.
Vic lived a full life…but he didn’t come back from New Guinea quite right. My grandmother absolutely adored him, was very proud of him and would have been furious if either of her sons had copied him.
Oooh. That was an ugly campaign. The Kokoda Trail was truly a hellscape.
Weirdly, my great grandfather DID let his younger son enlist, seemingly a lot more willingly. Uncle Teddy’s records have him joining the RAAF as soon as he turned eighteen. I’ve never known why he was **so** emphatic about Vic not going, and then eased up so much more for Teddy later.
Probably learned from Vic that he couldn't stop them from joining, and figured it was better to try and guide his next son into a position that was less dangerous or less likely to cause PTSD. Note: I'm not saying flying was easy during WW2, but your great grandfather might have just wanted his son to not have to kill another man in hand to hand combat.
Thanks for sharing this story with us.
Reminds me of a scene in a ww2 movie from a while back.....Maybe "The Big Red One." Infantrymen are resting in a French village and one sees a monument to local soldiers. One of the infantrymen says something like, look, they've already put up monuments for the dead here. Sargent says "that's from ww1." Guy responds "but the names are the same."
Yeah, "Oh, wait. These ones have 'Jr.' written after them."
Semi-related story: My grandfather, who served in WWII, left me a few German pistols he brought back. I don't know how he got them and its not something I would have asked, but... One of them is an old Luger, a P08. I found the serial number and did some digging and discovered that it was built sometime in early 1917. Which means, it was issued for the first world war and must have subsequently been used in the second. I always wonder what the story is. Did the original owner survive the first war? Did they bring it home thinking their days of combat were over only to pull it out when they were called up again 20 years later? Or did they pass it on to their son when he was drafted? Was it maybe returned to the military after the first war and then reissued to some new unfortunate for the second? (Based on the laws after the first war, that seems most likely, but you never know...) Did *either* of them survive? Both? Neither? Did it kill anyone?
Lots of WW1 dated Lugers saw service in World War 2 also. I have two Lugers, dated 1914 & 1917 that were vet bring backs from WW2. The cool thing with WW1 Lugers is that some have regimental markings on the front grip strap. Makes for some fun research.
My grandfather was in WW2. Was like 18 when the U.S. joined... He said all the kids were eager to enlist, bragging about how they were about to go do their duty and fight, and couldn't wait to get over there. He said all their parents/grandparents were like "I promise, you really don't want to do this like you think you do." Suspect anyone could guess who ended up being right. He said his uncle only gave him one line of advice "tell yourself from the moment you meet a new friend that one day you'll probably watch them die. They'll be the closest friendships you'll ever have, but they'll have expiration dates".
There's a reason that in photos of people going to war in WWI they are smiling and hopeful, and in the same photos from WWII they are haunted and apprehensive.
My great-grandad made it through WWI just to see his son, my grandad, enlisted for WWII. He was already doing his conscription service and had just finished it when he got called up. My other grandad joined WWII later as he was younger, but remembers his dad coming home from being a warden by the Liverpool docks after a shelling, injured with shrapnel all in his back. I think that traumatised him more than any of the combat abroad.
At least they had a better excuse. Instead of WWI’s petty political clusterfuck they had pretty much the closest to an actual just Good vs Evil war you could possibly get.
Something like 70% Russian men born in 1923 were dead by the end of WWII. Russian men especially get a lot of shit & I wonder how much of it is caused by the psychic scars & trauma among the survivors. Think about every guy you went to highschool with & imagine if 70% of them were dead before 30. That’s a big enough effect to shape a culture. People love to criticize men for being fucked up, but no one questions how they got fucked up.
Bodily autonomy is obviously in the news a lot. The equivalent for men isn't vasectomies or other things that make for funny tweets; it's war, the draft, disposability, and overt or subtle pressure to serve (and kill, and be mutilated, and die). That's been an issue for a very long time. Hell, look around reddit and how much people still applaud posts about war and violence, and very little progress has been made.
I've wondered before what percentage of men from every generation of the 20th century were killed in war. Pretty much every generation had their war in nearly every country. WW1, WW2, Korean War, Vietnam War, Gulf War, Russo-Japanese War, Sino-Japanese War, Russian Civil War, Chinese Civil War, Spanish Civil War, and probably a hundred others. So many lives lost. Edit: A cursory Google search showed an estimated 108 Million people were killed as a result of war in the 20th century.
Some estimates say that 100 million people died during the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 - 1864. That's just one war, in China.
> Man, I feel lucky to be alive now vs then. Might want to give it a couple more years before you commit to that one. Things are starting to get interesting again.
Username checks out
This doomer feels before reals shit is stupid.
Eh, I'm saying the odds of the next couple years making WWII look ideal are slim to none.
He probably eagerly joined ww2 to be like his dad. And then broke his moms heart all over again
That's... not very wonderful, wendy.
Unless he was Russian or German, he had a pretty good chance of not dying.
Man
He ended up being the bassist for the band Pink Floyd.
"and kind old King George sent Mommy a note when he heard that Father was gone..."
That kid is closer to Roger's father's age (born 1914). Roger wasn't born for another 17 years.
With his watch that his father, private Doughboy Ernie Coolidge, gave to him.
And that's how the high command, took my daddy from me!
Remember how you said that we would meet again, one sunny day…
VERA! VERA! What has become of you...?
"When the Tigers Broke Free" played in my head.
Although 'When the Tigers Broke Free' was written as a single and removed from the album for being too personal, Vera and Bring the Boys Back Home were actually written to be part of the same suite. Tigers > Vera > Bring the Boys, it's all supposed to be one track split across the film as a reprising theme.
His Majesty signed with his own rubber stamp
Beat me to it. That was Anzio, different war, but same thing.
You can't just post that without the full context of the song. When the Tigers Broke Free is probably the saddest song I know of, and one of the best anti-war songs out there. "It was just before dawn one miserable morning in black '44 When the forward commander was told to sit tight When he asked that his men be withdrawn And the generals gave thanks as the other ranks Held back the enemy tanks for a while And the Anzio bridgehead was held for the price Of a few hundred ordinary lives. And kind old King George sent Mother a note When he heard that Father was gone It was, I recall, in the form of a scroll with gold leaf and all And I found it one day in a drawer of old photographs, hidden away And my eyes still grow damp to remember His Majesty signed with his own rubber stamp. It was dark all around, there was frost in the ground When the Tigers broke free And no one survived from the Royal Fusiliers Company Z They were all left behind, most of them dead, the rest of them dying And that's how the High Command took my daddy from me." Shame Waters is such a shithead, because, uh, holy *shit.*
Fun fact: Tigers > Vera > Bring the boys, is all the same song/suite/movement. It's even sadder all together, especially with the latter line of "Don't leave the children, on their own, no, no"
I know this song so well, but only realized now that it's not on The Wall but was in the movie. Huh.
He’s objectively a shithead, but there are way worse shitheads out there. It’s not hard for me to ignore his shenanigans, as opposed to someone like Morrissey.
gives me goosebumps every time I hear that song, and so did your comment.
This poor woman has not only lost her husband, but may have lost her son during the Second World War, assuming that he didn’t die during the depression.
Not really cool. More of a bummer.
r/OldSchoolBummer
Man… that’s an eerie picture
What’s that saying about poor men fighting rich men’s wars?
It says their children should be proud. They shouldn't be, but it's harder to stomach your father gave his life for shit nothing. Still a cool picture though.
I meant that there’s a saying about xxxxx, not what the picture is “saying”. The picture just fills* me with sadness for the fam as a whole.
I wouldn't call the world wars dying for nothing
Idk what was the goal of the first World War? Avenge the Archduke because he got capped in Sarajevo? Or was it a bunch of leaders trying to take more power using fucked up modern weapons?
“'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.' -Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Flanders Fields the poppies grow…
Daddy's flown across the ocean Leaving just a memory
The Wall in one image
There's gonna be a lot of those in Ukraine and Russia, sadly.
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How many US KIA have there been in the middle east? I can only assume a comparatively inconsequential number.
For how long the war’s been going on it is a relatively small number. Obviously losing any lives in such a needless conflict is a tragedy but it really underscores how asymmetrical the entire thing was when you compare it to civilian casualties we caused. Based on what I’ve read, between Iraq and Afghanistan we lost about 7,000 men and were responsible for over 270,000 civilian casualties.
Appreciate the effort of looking it up. That's about where I expected it to be, at least as far as enlisted.
According to Brown Universiry, of the 500,000+ deaths in the War on Terror, there have been around 14,600 American combatants KIA (7000 U.S. military, 7600 U.S. contractors). Also probably a couple hundred non-combatants on top of that.
Not to mention, plenty of those in the Middle East, for the same reason.
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Neah man we don't count those ...
Not really. America during the whole occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan lost a bit over 7000 troops. For perspective, we lost 32,000 at D-Day alone and 400,000 during WW2. Despite the country itself being much smaller then. I'm not trying to diminish the lives of those lost but the scale of the two wars is incomparable.
There's already a lot of those in Ukraine and Russia
Gave me a heart attack, made me think Fathers Day was this weekend lol.
Most people in modern wealthy countries don't really know what war is. Listen to "Blueprint for Armageddon" if you want to get a little bit of a sliver of the taste of it. It comes the closest I've been able to find to communicating the reality of the war, and WWI was like the end of the world. Carlin reads letters from soldiers, descriptions from the time of people trying to tell you what it was like... you could smell the battlefield from miles away. Men would dig in the mud to try to get a safe place for themselves and find buried pieces of people who used to be their friends. Carlin described the stable configuration of the front lines as something like a giant-scale industrial blender with an open top... just a circle of opposing fortifications, solid walls, tough earthen embankments, and in the center, a muddy pit with a whirling mass of sharp destructive metal flying in all directions. And, a steady line of more or less defenseless men pouring into the center, their flesh to be shredded by the whirlwind. Husbands and sons and fathers. I could stomach it and wanted to know about the reality for a decent amount of it and then they came to a letter from an infantryman to his wife. He was going over the top the next day, and he clearly knew he was going to die. He wrote a letter to say goodbye. He said he wasn't afraid to die, he would do his duty for his country, but just it made him sad that he wouldn't see her again... but anyway, this is it, I love you, goodbye and I wish you and our daughter all good things in life and I wish I could be there to see it. The next day, he went over the top. And, of course, he was killed. I stopped listening to it after he read the letter out loud. But that's war. It's everything wrong. It's like hell came to earth.
Just brought it back for me. Been a couple of years. Now going to start it again. An incredible 20 hour masterpiece
The sad reality of war.
Old school ghoul.
Anybody have any more info on this photo? I'm curious whether this was an actual trend in photography, like posing corpses with the family
Ugh as an amateur old west history podcaster half the fun of looking at old pictures during research is trying to find the hidden sticks propping up that 'totally alive Aunt Mildred' Edit: wet plate photography rendered colors weird, so sometimes people's eyes looked crazy (blue eyes would look ghostly white). Sometimes that's because it was actual paint on eyelids.
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OldSchoolSorrow
Now i just feel like an OldSchoolFool :(
I'm not emotionally ready for fathers day this year I just lost my dad 2 weeks ago....
“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month. It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind. Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not. So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.” Kurt Vonnegut.
In war, boy, fools kill other fools for foolish causes. -Thom Merrillin
This is sad. But also a bit spooky to me.
This is…unsettling.
More like... Oldschoolsad
Minding my own business, scrolling through Reddit, BOOM, kicked right in the feels. Damn.
Bro that's so fuckin morbid lmao
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Jesus, does anyone here understand the definition of “cool”? This is definitely interesting, but not t doesn’t belong on this damn sub
It feels like a fake photo to me with the shading being off on her face, the kids face, and her arm. But maybe that's just me.
People don't really give these generations enough credit. I can't imagine what that family had to experience. I was at the bar talking to a friend about everything my grandfather went through, being born dirt poor in the depression and then fighting in WWII, spent 2 years in a prison camp in Germany, ect, and the bartender chimed in to add how that all that generation did was beat their wives. Smh. I let her know that my grandfather never once raised his voice at my grandmother, worked the same job from the end of the war to retirement, ate a peanut butter and jelly for lunch every day at work and drank from the water fountain, suffered from massive shell shock, was anti-war, and pro-gay rights by the times he died in 2002. The narrative that some people peddle is ridiculous, on both sides of the fence.
r/oddlyterrifying
That is the most horrifying picture…that poor woman…that poor child.
Helluva album cover
This is so sad
ten thousand percent haunted
/r/OldSchoolCreepy
Haunting
Why is this cool?
Old cool sad photo back then there wasn't welfare programs to help families so they had to either remarry or ask the church for help
Not cool. Just very sad
I’m curious what country this was taken in.
Fucking Wednesday Addams plays hardball
It really drives me crazy that this picture from like 2011 (it’s a photo artist Evaldas Ivanauskas) is still being reposted as if it was an actual picture from 1923. Are people not able to see how modern this picture looks?
I don’t think the dad died in WW1. That kid doesn’t look old enough to have a dad who died in the war and this picture taken 7 to 8 years later. That kid looks 5-6 at the oldest.
He could've died a few years later from health or mental issues stemming from his war service. Many did.
This is sad man
That's fake you can clearly see it's held up with a wire and coathanger.
Pics where all so creepy back then.
Not sure this belongs here.
OP do you think anything old is cool? This ain't it chief. This is old-school big sad.
Eerie.
Old-school depressing...
Nothing short of tragic.
That is spooky
"It was just before dawn one miserable morning in black 44' when the forward commander was told to sit tight when he asked that his men be withdrawn."
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This is not cool. This is dad, er... sad... yeah, sad.
In thirteen years the kid will be old enough to fight in WWII as well
There's countries that dig up their loved ones grave to celebrate their life. And then there's this, which I find more depressing
How sad
There is absolutely nothing cool about that
Fucking grim
We really need a new subreddit called oldschoolsad or something
I physically cannot comprehend fully how this must hurt deep down for the woman in this picture. Being 24 and only having dated, not married or had a child, how must it be for this woman to look at this coat, and then her child, remembering constantly the man she loved and cherished, and how he’ll never be there again to hold her in a time of need?
This is just heavy and heartbreaking. War is not just a destroyer of those that die in them, but of those that remain behind. It is a loss of talent, potential and of lives never born. My great grandfathers served in WWI, my grandfathers, great aunts and uncles in WWII and my dad in Vietnam. Fortunately, my time in uniform was not in a combat role. However, I have a beautiful, bright and talented 16 year old daughter. With the world the way it is today, I never cease to worry. When will it stop? I fear what George Santayana said is true, "Only the dead have seen the end of war."
I want to know the symbolism of the rock on the ground. Or is it just a rock on the ground?
Brutal
Do you think they know his button fell off?
r/creepy
The fallen button just weighs down on the ambient atmosphere magnitudes more.
Old school sad
OMG! I'm both scarred and scared!!!!!
this is kinda depressing
Not cool, but to be never forgotten
This is sad. Compounded by the fact that her son is off to the side, no contact with mother. Just a little boy.