@SuperbattleshipYamato Yeah I get you 100%. Alternate History is a niche interest in the first place so finding other people willing to go down the rabbit hole is always tough.
Military Kit through the ages.
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Ridiculous number of items.
Enjoyed that, thank you. -
I thought it interesting how similar each was. But I’m with you on the ridiculous number of items. The most modern loadouts just seem over-loaded.
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Fascinating article with great pictures. As I was reading down the 43-item list of gear carried by a 1916 private soldier at the Battle of the Somme, I noticed that item #33 was “Bullet” in the singular. I wondered if this meant that the soldier was so overloaded with other junk that he could only carry a single bullet…but then I saw that item #34 was “Ammunition belt, containing clips of bullets”, which was reassuring.
Soldiers always seem to get overloaded. Everytime a weight-saving innovation comes along (like the change from 7.62mm ammunition to 5.56mm ammo), the poor infantryman is simply given more stuff to carry so he never ends up with a lighter pack.
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Here’s another modern day one. It’s meant to be a “travel light version.”
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That’s a good point about the lists being a bit expanded by itemizing everything. It would probably be more informative to categorize the items and then look at the weight devoted to each category through the ages.
I’m reminded of the scene in “Forrest Gump” or one of the Vietnam flicks at any rate where the new guys show up and their officer starts taking stuff of their packs and dropping it on the ground. Like with the new translator in “Saving Private Ryan.”
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It’s amazing how quickly soldiers categorize “needed” and “unneeded” items after just one patrol…We have a saying “ounces equal pounds and pounds equal discarded”…
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It’s amazing how quickly soldiers categorize “needed” and “unneeded” items after just one patrol…We have a saying “ounces equal pounds and pounds equal discarded”…
Somewhere at home I have a book about the US Civil War which includes a modern colour photograph (obviously of preserved or reproduced artifacts) showing all the stuff that a soldier typically carried at the beginning of the war, including all sorts of personal effects. The caption says that the soldiers very quickly learned to jettison all but the essentials, the latter category including such basics as a blanket, a cooking pan, some eating utensils, a canteen, and of course bullets and gunpowder.
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It seems the more things change…the more they stay the same…for the grunts at least lol.
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It seems the more things change…the more they stay the same…for the grunts at least lol.
Yes indeed. The Annals of Thutmose III inscribed into the walls of the Amun-Re temple at Karnak, which are considered to be the first reliable description ever recorded of a battle (the Battle of Megiddo, circa 1457 BC), include a line which says that the men in Thutmose’s army stepped off “by the left” – just like every other army in recorded history. If the language barrier could be overcome, infantrymen from across the centuries would probably find a lot of common stuff to talk about if you got them together.
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@CWO:
It seems the more things change…the more they stay the same…for the grunts at least lol.
Yes indeed. The Annals of Thutmose III inscribed into the walls of the Amun-Re temple at Karnak, which are considered to be the first reliable description ever recorded of a battle (the Battle of Megiddo, circa 1457 BC), include a line which says that the men in Thutmose’s army stepped off “by the left” – just like every other army in recorded history. If the language barrier could be overcome, infantrymen from across the centuries would probably find a lot of common stuff to talk about if you got them together.
Or things to gripe about at least lol…sore backs and sore feet are timeless.
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Or things to gripe about at least lol…sore backs and sore feet are timeless.
Or, in the case of enlisted men, griping about their NCOs. In the 1943 movie Sahara, Humphrey Bogart plays a tough, no-nonsense (and occasionally sarcastic) US Army sergeant who’s in command of an American tank in North Africa. Early in the movie, while proceeding alone across the desert following a hard-fought action, Bogie’s tank picks up an assorted handful of Allied soldiers from a bombed British field hospital: an Englishman, a South African, a British Sudanese, a Free Frenchman, and so forth. A bit later, two of the enlisted men who are riding on the hull of the tank are having a shouted conversation (because of the noise of the tank engine), and if I recall correctly one of them grumbles, “Why is it that a sergeant is always the same no matter what army you’re in?”
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