NationStates Jolt Archive

What battle featured the most people killed and injured for the least palpable gain? Cast your nets wide, friends. Speak your mind.

Let's hear something about how fleeting and futile armed conflict - state-sanctioned organized mass-murder - really IS, for once, instead of the nonstop wanking over guns & ammo we get all too often.

I no next to nothing on the battle or war. I just don't know why Britain wanted to defend the falkland islands, couldn't they have negotiated something with Argentina?

Gallipoli was a total balls-up from the start. It went downhill from there.

I once killed a spider cuz I was bored....and um...I got bit by a mosquito...I think they were working together , so that's 1 killed and 1 injured out of boredom, how's that?

What battle featured the most people killed and injured for the least palpable gain? Cast your nets wide, friends. Speak your mind.

Let's hear something about how fleeting and futile armed conflict - state-sanctioned organized mass-murder - really IS, for once, instead of the nonstop wanking over guns & ammo we get all too often.

The Somme. In fact, virtually any battle in the western front of the first world war accomplishes that gain. Make that the eastern front too... in fact, just the whole war. And it certainly counts as futile armed conflict and state organised mass murder.


EDIT: as far as the falklands go, I'm in agreement with that conflict. a Negotiation would've been nice, but since the only morally acceptable terms would be "it's not your island so go away", the outcome would be the same.

The battle of New Orleans wasn't that bloody but it was kinda pointless since a peace treaty between the US and Britain was signed way before...

Any battle fought after the peace agreement has already been signed - and there have been plenty.

How about one of the battles of the Isonzo?

Paeschendale comes to mind...Verdun of course, and the Somme. In fact, how about WWI as a whole?

What battle featured the most people killed and injured for the least palpable gain?Speak your mind..I dont know..

the 100 years War?

Iraq-Iran War?

which had more deaths?

I'm sure there are many better examples but: The Battle of New Orleans

I dont know..

the 100 years War?

Iraq-Iran War?

which had more deaths?
OD3, I'm surprised. I hadn't expected you to demand some sort of qualifier.

The Somme.

Gettysburg.
summary: Confederates go to Gettysburg(the town) to get some new shoes. Then, they tried to kill some Union troops. Long story short, the battle crippled the Confederate military and marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy. All for some shoes.
"Idiot"-Napoleon Dynamite's most famous line after "Vote for Pedro".

OD3, I'm surprised. I hadn't expected you to demand some sort of qualifier.actually I hadn't expected myself to participate in one of your silly threads :D

unexpected things do happen ;)

The battle of New Orleans wasn't that bloody but it was kinda pointless since a peace treaty between the US and Britain was signed way before...
The battle of New Orleans had a lot of bad effects you might not realize. ONe is the recognition of andrew jackson, the President solely responsible for putting many indians on reservations and causing the trail of tears due to laws passed during his reign that he could have easily vetoed.

Verdun.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/war/wwone/battle_verdun.shtml

Gallipoli is one, in fact pretty much every major battle in the first world war was completely pointless. Actually what was even worse were the battles on the last few days of the war when everyone knew the armistice was coming on the 11th, but still decided to start more fights anyway. A few thousand men came with in hours of being alive to go home after the horrible conflict for no reason except their commanders wanted one last bash for their own fun.

Gallipoli.

I've read numerous accounts of botched assaults that left the corpses of comrades only a few feet from the trenches, but completely out of reach. The Agean sun roasted the corpses, bloating and making them fester. The men were forced to pop shots at the carcasses of the men they'd shared their trenches with a few days later, hoping to 'pop' them and hasten their decomposition.

Digging latrines in previously fouled earth?

Fuck alot of that.

I would say the current iraq war(In general).

Just hear me out, before you instantly assume I just hate bush and the war, etc.

I know of battles like the somme, gallipoli, etc. However, look at it this way: Both sides gained something large. They killed large numbers of enemy troops. In total warfare, this is important.

If I dug deep, I would probably find a better battle, but this one works fine and dandy. Tens of thousands of people dead, potentially over 100,000 wounded, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, all to gain a higher death rate and less stable economy/society, which is headed toward civil war.

Seeing as these things are bad things for both sides, this really seems like the most pointless battle in history.

new Orleans
Tolouse
somme
Gallopi

I'd say Pearl Harbor

I'd say Pearl Harbor
That wasn't pointless, for the japs it was a masterstroke, destroy a hell of a lot of the US fleet. They knew that they would come into conflict with the US at some point and decided on a pre-emptive strike.

How about one of the battles of the Isonzo?

Paeschendale comes to mind...Verdun of course, and the Somme. In fact, how about WWI as a whole?

Completely agree, with Verdun as the acme of pointless bloodshed.

Another all time favourite:

"Since 05.45 the fire is being returned."
"Ab 5 Uhr 45 wird jetzt zurückgeschossen."

1939

The battle of New Orleans wasn't that bloody but it was kinda pointless since a peace treaty between the US and Britain was signed way before...
But no one knew on the British Invasion force right?

Some battle with the Austrians and Duke of Marlborough vs French.

Gallipoli is one, in fact pretty much every major battle in the first world war was completely pointless. Actually what was even worse were the battles on the last few days of the war when everyone knew the armistice was coming on the 11th, but still decided to start more fights anyway. A few thousand men came with in hours of being alive to go home after the horrible conflict for no reason except their commanders wanted one last bash for their own fun.
Did you watch that History Doco too, Monkeypimp?

The Somme.

Ten Men per foot of land gained. If you laid them Sideways on, more land would have been gained...

The Somme.

Ten Men per foot of land gained. If you laid them Sideways on, more land would have been gained...
Aye, Haig was a moron it's true. as Blackadder said "Haigs having another go at moving his desk a meter closer to berlin!"

the bombing of dresden... or perhaps antietam

Gallipoli was a total balls-up from the start. It went downhill from there.

Gallipoli was never ment to happen. It was an accident.

anything under the heading

"Celebrity Boxing".

Aye, Haig was a moron it's true. as Blackadder said "Haigs having another go at moving his desk a meter closer to berlin!"
And the night before blackadder goes over, sweeping all the troops off his little mock battle field with abrush :D

And the night before blackadder goes over, sweeping all the troops off his little mock battle field with abrush :D
:D yep, god i love Blackadder. It's now a GCSE History Exam source!

I used it in my GCSE course work a few years ago... it's just brilliant for everything.

I used it in my GCSE course work a few years ago... it's just brilliant for everything.
Any epriod of history...

WW1

The Azerbijan-Armenian War, a war whose frontline is WW1 style trenches. There is fighting, then peace, then fighting, then peace, but no gains are made by either side, no offensives, no retreats. All over a piece of land.

The Ethiopean-Eritrean War, the largest deployment of 'armies' of men in War for quite a while, and waged in the mid 90's.

Fears grow that a ceasefire will soon be broken.

There are more candidates from the chronicles of history, present, and sadly, the future.

Any battle of the Anglo-Dutch wars.

While abounding in heroic seabattles, the Anglo Dutch wars were utterly pointless. After 3 inconclusive wars, both parties had exactly what they had before, and the head of state of the Dutch Republic and and the King of England became the same person, William.

In keeping with the pointless nature of this conflict, he died childlesly after his horse stumbled over a molehill.

Battles are rarely, if ever, "pointless". Unsuccessful or with hindsight not a good idea, maybe, but nations do not go to war lightly. If you examine the situations mentioned a little, you will find valid reasoning behind them.

Battles are rarely, if ever, "pointless". Unsuccessful or with hindsight not a good idea, maybe, but nations do not go to war lightly. If you examine the situations mentioned a little, you will find valid reasoning behind them.

Try Barbara Tuchman's excellent 'The First Salute'.
Lord North decided to go to war with the Dutch Republic while sodding drunk.

The other possible decisionmakers kept their traps shut for fear that THEY might become PM, at a moment in history when no one who wasn't sodding drunk would want to touch that Office with a pole a mile long.

The affair petered out.

When sober again ( several piffpoffs later ) , Lord North himself could not explain WHY he'd done it.

That does seem a little pointless. How many casualties were there?

I think Haig and WWI are getting a bad press.

In WWI, at the end of the day once trenches developed the two armies were going to have to wear each other down.

The Somme wasn't pointless, firstly, the main point of it was to relieve pressure on Verdun, which it did.

Secondly, it was to kill a lot of enemy troops, which it did. You can criticise it all you like, but if you have more troops and you equal casualties, you win the war, simple as that.

Thirdly, the Somme proved that the tactics weren't working, up until then the defeats were blamed on the equipment, particularly the artillery shells (which were crap, it's not unreasonable to think that the reason an artillery barrage isn't working is because a lot of the shells aren't exploding). After the Somme tactics like sapping etc becamse more used.

Fourthly, Haig wasn't a bad general. The first time the myth of "lions lead by donkeys" came about was when David Lloyd-George (who hated Haig and the generals because they were from the aristocracy) published his memoirs, which were about as biased as you could get; and Basil Liddell Hart, who was injured in WWI and invalided out of the army, and took it as a personal embarrasment and an afront. Haig was also constantly undermined by Lloyd-George during WWI.

Fifthly, most of the impetus for repeated attacks came from the French, not from Haig; the French wanted to get the Germans off their land as quickly as possible, and thought if they threw enough men at them they could.

Sixthly, with Gallipoli, the Russians asked for help from Britain/France with an implied hint that they might not be able to keep fighting without help. Something had to be done and the idea of Gallipoli was a lesser evil (and nothing to do with Haig).

Finally, after the war Haig set up and ran the scheme for compensating soldiers incapacitated by the war; a strange act for a man who apparently didn't care about his men.

It's a long *bump* to Tipperary...

:D yep, god i love Blackadder. It's now a GCSE History Exam source!
you know how in that last episode he says
"yes i wouldn't want to be facing a german machine gun position without my stick"-:p

Gallipoli and the Dieppe raid rank up there in my opinion.

http://kittenwar.com/

Absolutely pointless.

THe Anglo-Zanzibar War fought for the great and long time of 45 minutes

Well, the Somme and Gallipoli spring to mind, but there was also one major instance in WWII that I can think of as being pointless and costly:

When the Russians launched a counter-assault on the German Army in an attempt to reclaim the hill called Mamaev Kurgan, they lost an entire division of 10,000 men in one single day. They retook the hill and drove the Germans back, but Mamaev Kurgan truly had little to no tactical advantage of any kind. The Russians saw it as a battle to resist the German invaders, and so they threw down over 10,000 lives for the hill. If you go to Mamaev Kurgan today, you're still likely to find bones and discarded, rusting pieces of metal from the attack.

Well, the Somme and Gallipoli spring to mind, but there was also one major instance in WWII that I can think of as being pointless and costly:

When the Russians launched a counter-assault on the German Army in an attempt to reclaim the hill called Mamaev Kurgan, they lost an entire division of 10,000 men in one single day. They retook the hill and drove the Germans back, but Mamaev Kurgan truly had little to no tactical advantage of any kind. The Russians saw it as a battle to resist the German invaders, and so they threw down over 10,000 lives for the hill. If you go to Mamaev Kurgan today, you're still likely to find bones and discarded, rusting pieces of metal from the attack.

I might well be wrong on this one but if I recall correctly was the Mamayev Kurgan was the hill in the city of Stalingrad from which an artillery battalion had an oversight of the entire city, I wouldn't call it a battle in and of itself since I'd consider it part of the overall battle of Stalingrad but from what I remember reading the hill was of considerable importance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Halbe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fr%C3%BChlingserwachen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Offensive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Seelow_Heights

All of those would also have to be contenders...

I'd say the Little-Big Horn. The Seventh Cavalry pretty much wiped out (except for a couple of horses and scouts) all to satisfy the grandiose ambitions of a glory hungry grandstander. And no gains at all.

The battle between me and the Mars Bar that refused to open.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieppe_Raid

Largely because I'm Canadian I guess...

I'm gonna go with the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Too many people died because Custer wanted to be president. As a second I'm going to say the battle between myself and the chemistry homework that just kept on going. Which reminds me, I need to do my chemistry homework.

Gallipoli.

Well, I Wouldn't Call It "Pointless", Infact It Was Only Part Of A Battle, But The Charge Of The Light Brigade WAS Pretty Funny. "Come On Men, Let's Charge Into The Middle Of Two Armies Shooting At Each Other!"

chances are the most pointless battle in history was so pointless that it was never recorded and no one knows about it.

i will say though, ww1 as a whole was pretty pointless. but then, aren't all wars pointless? fight war, not wars. =)

In 1993, the united states sent the U.S. rangers, delta force, and 160th SOAR to Mogadishu,Somalia to take down a dangerous warlord named Mohamed Farrah Aidid. 6 weeks after the taget deadline, they still didnt have him. In october, a mission to take down some of Aidid's advisors and captives was blown to shit and our soldiers were running around blind in a city for a day. Afterward, they got out and only about 20 american soldiers lost their lives while about 1000 somali militia were dead. 2 weeks later washington pulled them out. A few years later, Aidid was killed in Mogadishu. Tell me, what good did that entire operation even do? Oh and by the way, they made a movie about this a couple years ago called black hawk down.

Well, lets see, the entire Isreal-Palestine conflict has claimed quite a few and they're fighting over basically one city.

I'm going to offer a 'defence' of sorts of the Gallipoli campaign (and it's worth pointing out here I live in Australia) as I don't think it was nearly as 'pointless' as some of the other candidates mentioned in this thread.

I'd argue that the basic concept behind the Gallipoli campaign was strategically sound even while the tactical execution was tragically inept. Had the allies punched their way through to Constantinople, they would have opened up a better supply route to Russia as well as possibly neutralise - or at least deeply distract - the southernmost Central Power. Given the stalemate on the Western Front, I can see why the British and French were strongly tempted to have a go. It only seems pointless in retrospect because the campaign failed, but had the navy not arguably lost its nerve during the initial assault on the straits, and had the subsequent landings not been handled so ineptly, the outcome might very well have been very different.

It would only have been as 'pointless' as some people apparently consider it to be had there been no chance of success when the campaign was initiated - and I don't think any objective study of the campaign can make that claim. And I also don't think that the received opinion of Australian (and New Zealand) national mythology should be allowed to say otherwise.

All of that said, I do very much accept that once the landings had been made, a lot of lives were pointlessly and tragically thrown away, but that certainly doesn't mean that the battle or campaign itself were inherently pointless from a military or strategic perspective.

As to my candidates... under the terms of the initial post, I'd say the Battle of New Orleans, or any of the battles and campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden after Poltava - sometimes a man just can't admit he's beaten.

The beer and pizza battle

So many good students lost:(

And it was pointless because the are both good:(

O god the horror!:eek:

But seriously though.... I'm gonna say Flodden

How about one of the battles of the Isonzo?

Paeschendale comes to mind...Verdun of course, and the Somme. In fact, how about WWI as a whole?

Isonzo was indeed pointless, but as for Verdun and the Somme...

The German commander wanted to bleed the French Army out of the war, and for that reason alone, he attacked the strategically useless but emotionally important fort system of Verdun. The number of deaths on both sides makes our generation squirm, but at that time, it made sense. At least to the German Army.

The Somme battle was necessary, albeight horrific, The English had to attack, and soon, to take pressure off of the French Army, that would have surely collapsed once and for all.

For that reason alone, the Somme was not a useles battle. One could even argue that it was an important defeat, for it kept the French Army in the war long enough to allow the American Expeditionary Forces to join the war. Had the French Army collapsed, the German Army could have put alll of it's Western Front weight up against the British and it's colonies...and won...

IMHO

What battle featured the most people killed and injured for the least palpable gain? Cast your nets wide, friends. Speak your mind.

Let's hear something about how fleeting and futile armed conflict - state-sanctioned organized mass-murder - really IS, for once, instead of the nonstop wanking over guns & ammo we get all too often.
The battle of New Orleans in 1814 was a wonderful victory over the British. Too bad the war had been over for weeks.

The battle was pointless in the war sense, yes. But it did a lot to advance the career of Andrew Jackson and wheter you liked him, or more acuratley hated him, it definatley was key in his election as president.

Isonzo was indeed pointless, but as for Verdun and the Somme...

The German commander wanted to bleed the French Army out of the war, and for that reason alone, he attacked the strategically useless but emotionally important fort system of Verdun. The number of deaths on both sides makes our generation squirm, but at that time, it made sense. At least to the German Army.

The Somme battle was necessary, albeight horrific, The English had to attack, and soon, to take pressure off of the French Army, that would have surely collapsed once and for all.

For that reason alone, the Somme was not a useles battle. One could even argue that it was an important defeat, for it kept the French Army in the war long enough to allow the American Expeditionary Forces to join the war. Had the French Army collapsed, the German Army could have put alll of it's Western Front weight up against the British and it's colonies...and won...

IMHO

I would have to agree with you. Though many argue that the battles fought in WW1 were pointless, it is the war itself that was pointless. The war as fought because a Serbian revolutionary shot the Austri-Hungarian Crown Prince. Then the Ruskies felt that they needed to help "their fellow Slavs" and declared war on Austria. The rest as they say... is history.

The War of Jenkins' Ear

Sure the war had a point, but the way it started was pointless and odd.

What battle featured the most people killed and injured for the least palpable gain? Cast your nets wide, friends. Speak your mind.

Let's hear something about how fleeting and futile armed conflict - state-sanctioned organized mass-murder - really IS, for once, instead of the nonstop wanking over guns & ammo we get all too often.

The war against drugs, of course. And I am only being slightly facetious here.

I no next to nothing on the battle or war. I just don't know why Britain wanted to defend the falkland islands, couldn't they have negotiated something with Argentina?
Galtieri needed the military success to prop up his regime. Not much of a chance of negotiating something. However although the loss was a disaster for him, in the long term it was of benefit for the Argentines, as they got rid of him and returned to democratic government.

As for why Britain wanting to defend the Falklands? Well, Thatcher needed the military success to prop up her regime...but also to defend the basic democratic principle that the Falklanders (aka Kelpers) should be able to choose their own government and to support Article 2 of the UN (right to self-determination).

Galtieri needed the military success to prop up his regime. Not much of a chance of negotiating something. However although the loss was a disaster for him, in the long term it was of benefit for the Argentines, as they got rid of him and returned to democratic government.

As for why Britain wanting to defend the Falklands? Well, Thatcher needed the military success to prop up her regime...but also to defend the basic democratic principle that the Falklanders (aka Kelpers) should be able to choose their own government and to support Article 2 of the UN (right to self-determination).

The British were really lucky during the Falklands, with the state of their navy at the time. The British were really foolish (and still are)to cut back on their navy so much.