Out of 50 tanks sent to attack the Somme, only 36 made it. The rest broke down and/or got stuck in the mud, with horrendous results. WWI's Siege of Fray Bentos at Passchendaele, a very fancy name for what ultimately boils down to "a protracted assault against a tank that got stuck in the mud," is a perfect example of this. Cheekily named after a tinned meat company, the Fray Bentos was chugging along until it fell into a crater and couldn't get out again. One gun was pointing at the sky, the other at the ground -- and to make matters worse, the Germans had noticed.

via The Telegraph
They do have an infuriating attention to detail.

For three days, the men of the Fray Bentos found out just how shitty being in a tank could be. Any attempts to get out were met with death and grievous injuries, and escape was made almost impossible after the corpse of one of the crew wedged the door shut. The temperature inside rose to about 90 degrees fahrenheit. The breach of one of the main guns crushed a man's ribs and left him to die slowly. German forces made several attempts to swarm the tank with grenades and had to be repelled. On the third night, when water and rations had been exhausted and those still alive were low on ammo, they decided to mount a suicidal escape. But the Germans were only interested in capturing the tank and so let the Fray Bentos survivors leave in peace. That's how much WWI tanks sucked -- even the enemy didn't have the heart to shoot you once you finally managed to escape one.

Things did improve for tank crews in WWII, but not a lot. It was still an insanely miserable, dangerous, flammable place to fight a war. And mud was still a problem.

US Army
"Aw shit, I knew we forgot about something."

The makeup of the most common Allied tank, the Sherman, was riddled with so many small weaknesses it might as well have been a miniboss in a video game. If hit low, the interior was liable to erupt into a ball of hellfire, roasting everyone inside. That's the opposite of how a tank is supposed to work. In WWII, the loss rate of Allied Sherman tanks was a blood-pressure-ramping 580 percent. They malfunctioned, caught fire constantly, and were basically horrible death traps for those inside. In fact, one of the reasons the Allies achieved armor superiority over the Germans is that they had so many bullshit Sherman tanks they were forced to continuously improve them. So don't listen to the movies -- you were as likely to die from merely occupying a tank as you were from being shot by one.

However, it's not the byzantine nature of the ROE that's toughest on soldiers, but the fact that it keeps changing, as it did throughout Iraq and Afghanistan to accommodate the U.S. military's ever-evolving tactics. It wasn't uncommon for troop leaders to contact military lawyers in the midst of some engagements, just to get confirmation of whether they could shoot back or not. It wouldn't make for good cinema if Rambo had to spend half of each movie on the phone with Jameson from legal asking how many of the 300 potential enemies rushing his location he's allowed to point his machine gun at.

Soldiers didn't even spend that much time in a position where they could be sent into the veritable meat grinder that was over the top of the trenches, because they were rotated through the different trenches so frequently. It's estimated that the troops only spent 15 percent of their time in the frontline trench, as opposed to 10 percent in the support trench, 30 percent in the reserve trench, and 45 percent having some well-earned R&R in a French whorehouse. We can't stress this enough -- while men did go over the top to their inevitable deaths, it was more of a lottery than a conveyor belt of slaughter.

Of course, some stereotypes still hold true. The trenches, for instance, were indeed muddy, waterlogged holes. But wherever possible, military engineers would lead their trenches into underground rock quarries, literally everywhere in France, to use these natural bunkers as sleeping quarters, medical bays, and shelter from artillery. Some of these underground warrens were so complex that in one, they were able to install "electric lights and telephones, command posts, a bakery and butcher's, a machine shop, a hospital, and a chapel." These warrens were so vast, the troops had to construct makeshift "street" signs in order to prevent people from getting lost -- you really didn't want to take a wrong turn somewhere and wind up in the German neighborhood.

British Army
It does have better food, though.

Even the main threat to the troops -- poison gas -- wasn't the unstoppable force of bloodshed that we've been led to believe. It was an absolute crapshoot whether it'd work or not. If you wanted to douse your enemy, you had to time it precisely according to the wind and hope that a mild breeze didn't either blow it off-course or disperse it into nothingness. Even worse, troops would then have to risk burns and suffocation walking through their own gas cloud because chemical compounds don't give a hoot whose side you're on. Waiting for these perfect conditions could also take weeks. Basically, poison gas attacks in World War I were like an incredibly lazy Hulk that was just as likely to turn on you when it finally deigned to enter the battlefield. Waiting for your enemy to die of old age was a more effective technique.

No, soldiers are subject to the same amount of petty squabbling, mistrust, and competitiveness that befalls any large group of people. And while you do see some of this in movies -- Full Metal Jacket, Heartbreak Ridge, Captain America: The First Avenger -- those are less extreme than what actually happened during the Battle of the Bulge. To clarify, we're not talking about the 1965 movie Battle Of The Bulge with Henry Fonda, which was so inaccurate that Eisenhower held a press conference just to talk about how severely the film cocked everything up. Unlike the beautiful camaraderie in the movie, the actual battle was fraught with so much hostility and infighting among the Allied troops that if a camera crew had documented the battle, they would have accidentally invented the reality show format.

During the Battle of the Bulge, many troops thought that German soldiers were disguising themselves as American troops in order to sow chaos behind the front lines (they were doing exactly that, by the way, but that's beside the point). After rumors started flying (and a convoy went missing), paranoia spread through the Allied ranks. In order to root out possible spies, camp guards began asking returning soldiers questions that only "real Americans" would know, mostly related to baseball ... with mixed results.

National Archives
That's not even factoring in having to keep Yankees and Red Sox fans from murdering each other.

Some poor bastards were locked away because they got the questions wrong, some got locked away because the sentries themselves didn't know the correct answer, and some were straight-up shot. They also apprehended soldiers with names that sounded suspiciously German, or those who had collected German trophies while in Europe. Even General Bruce C. Clarke was detained for five hours for getting a question about the Chicago Cubs wrong. Guess he wasn't a fan of baseball. Or patriotism.

When they aren't reading about weird history and making awful ... ly good puns, Marina and Adam spend their days on Twitter. Adam also has a Facebook page, if you're into that sort of thing.

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