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Dan Carlin's description of Wehrmacht, presaging of uniforms in WWII


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Has anyone listened to Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History - Blueprint for Armageddon" series? It is brilliant, putting the scale of modern warfare (as of WWI) into thorough context. Here is an exert from episode 4, where he's talking about the first appearance of the German army's new uniform in 1916 at the Battle of Verdun, as German infantry advanced following a day-long artillery barrage:

 

"And then the French survivors see the first signs of German infantry activity... What they see is like something out of a time machine... Gone are the Pickelhaube, the iconic pointed helmets that the German troops wear that harken back to the greatest days of Prussia. [The Pickelhaube are] symbolic... and they're replaced by something that looks like a miner should wear it. Thoroughly working class. Nothing romantic, gentlemanly, officer, or aristocratic about it. The Germans are wearing the Stahlhelm, which with a minor modification or two is the exact same helmet that the Germans will wear in the second world war. These "storm troopers" as they're called, and have been known to history, look like the Wehrmacht. And they're carrying flamethrowers. They have machine guns. They have men who are wearing clothes with big bags in them that are stuffed with hand grenades..."

 

In total, the Blueprint for Armageddon series is over 10 hours of audio, so be prepared for lots of direct quotations of first hand accounts of WWI if you're interested. 

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It's a bit anachronistic, isn't it? Stormtroopers was a gradual evolution, rather than a sudden new concept, but even so they weren't a recognisable 'thing' on the Western Front until early 1918, and maybe 6-8 months earlier on the Eastern Front. The flamethrower was first used en-masse on the Western Front in mid-1915, some 12 months before Verdun.

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