An unidentified American soldier, shot dead by a German sniper, clutches his rifle and hand grenade, March 1945, Coblenz, Germany

An unidentified American soldier, shot dead by a German sniper, clutches his rifle and hand grenade, March 1945, Coblenz, Germany.

You could hear bombing from the Battle of the Somme all the way from London (~300 miles / 480 kilometers) and according to some testimonies, soldiers had to rely on their.watch to know if it was day or night. because.everything was on fire all the damn time. It's hard to even wrap your mind around it, the deadliest day in the war saw the French lose.27,000 soldiers (on August 22, 1914) and

some of those who survived the early days of the war still had 4 years of fighting ahead of them. It's crazy that some Germans wanted another go at it only 20 years later and it's a

wonder most survivors didn't completely break.down afterwards (though PTSD was starting to

get documented, it seems surprising that not everyone was totally shell-shocked after getting through those battles).

My great grandfather was at Passchendaele, aged 17, toward the end of the battle, and he lived until the late 1990's. Every story I remember him telling about the war involved

humorous tales about how awful the food was (the flour was full of beetles, stuff like.that), how his feet were never dry, how they played a lot of cards, etc. I wonder nowadays 

if it was a kind of coping mechanism those dudes used to deal with how batshit insane it

My grampa was in the German arnmy on the Eastern Front and was only one of 2 survivors in his battalion actually. The other guy died in a soviet prison camp while my grampa escaped by

crawling through a cabbage field during the nights and laying still during the days. Not sure how true it was but he did see some stuff when he got back to to yugoslavia to fight with the

partisans. He showed my dad once how to make a timed fuse from just a matchbook, and said he once threw one in an open boxcar and ran like hell

through the forest, then when he turned back at the top of a hill the entire train was on fire.

He said when the Germans came to his village and lined up everyone they said they're all going to be in the German Army. One guy stepped forward and said never, and the officer shot him in the head with a pistol. My grampa said the guy probably

thought he was being a hero, but everyone thought he was an idiot because if you didn't want to at

least wait and try to escape when you have a chance, maybe even after you have a uniform and gun, not when you're lined up like cattle. He said the guy threw his life away for nothing.

Another story was he said the worst day of his life was when they were handing out uniforms and he was hoping to get one of the Tan ones, which.meant he was going to Africa. Instead he got a grey one which meant the Eastern Front.

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