My Life As A Historian: Sabaton History Returns To "Attack Of The Dead Men"

This is a follow-up to a previous episode (here), so enjoy this episode where the Germans apply what they learned from using gas previously.

On 22. April 1915, a wall of greenish-yellow fog, up to 2m high, was slowly creeping towards the Allied lines on the Ypres salient. A sweetish-chloric smell preceded the horrific effects of the deadly gas. Coughing, spitting, and retching, men were abandoning their trenches, hurrying to the rear, or falling to the ground, clutching their throats. It was the same desperate, gruesome scenery, the Russian soldiers at Osowiec Fortress had to fight through. From then on, a scientific race to counter and protect against those deadly chemicals began.

There's a reason most people regarded World War I as "The War To End All Wars", and things like the widespread use of poison gas played into that. That you didn't see such gas being used so much in World War II (it was used; it was not nearly so extensive or on the front lines) should tell you how much of an impact it had on the elites and the common people alike.

The takeaway here should be the how and why for its widespread use and subsequent depreciation: the ability of the elites to avoid repurcushions. They employed this weapon with the aim of winning without risking themselves; just gas the enemy, have some tea, then send in the corpse retrieval teams to clear out the dead and Bob's your uncle. When they got on the wrong end of these gasses, and found themselves vulnerable to death or worse if they so much as noticed it, that's when the scramble to self-protect began; when that proved insufficient, as it became clear after the war, that's when gas got depreciated.

It's also why these days you see it used almost entirely by internal security agencies and terrorists. Properly employed, it's an IWIN button. (Just check Antifa's riot manuals; they know how effective tear gas is.)

Regardless of what you think of "The Great War" as an album, Sabaton's single-handedly returned a period of time before the lives of most fans' grandfathers to life in a way that others either did not (Battlefiend 1, looking at you) or could not (just about any media made before 2000). Call temporal chauvanism if you like, but it is fact that the band's relently history focus has had a positive impact on keeping vital events alive for young cohorts deliberately denied their rightful connections to those events- willfully so most of the time.

That is why I love this band, and I am glad to see them continuing to work with Indy on this side project.

(N.B.: Shadowlands roundup pushed tomorrow.)