The Glade 4.0

Unlike ancient bloodlettings lost to memory, World War I lingers in our collective DNA. The image of the trenches is our icon of hell on earth. Ten million soldiers died in mud-ditches and no-mans-land during the Great War, and we remember this dark narrative because they died for nothing....But there is another irony, sadder still, now forgotten: Medieval armorers and men-at-arms knew a secret that would have spared perhaps 30 percent of those who died in battle.

...If Afghanistan and Iraq were blast and shock wars, World War I was a fragment war. [Bashford Dean, head of the American body armor program circa 1917], writing after the war, cites different medical sources, but the range of casualties due to fragments (artillery and mortars) was as high as 70 to 95 percent.

Steel fragments do not come at the soldier like rifle or machine gun bullets, at high velocity (up to 3000 feet per second). Nearly all of them move at less than 1,000 feet per second. The best helmet steel could and did defeat these. But helmets only protected the head -- and Allied helmets covered the head poorly. Still, 18 to 20-gauge helmet steel (.036-.040 inches) could stop a hot cupro-nickel jacketed 230 grain slug from a .45 Automatic Colt Pistol (ACP) fired pointblank. So alloys like silicon nickel or nickel-manganese-vanadium could protect against almost all fragments. With such steels already in high production for helmets, why not protect the torso too?

Enter Bashford Dean and his team. [Metropolitan Museum] armorers crafted a battle harness with complete torso protection, front and back, for about 8.5 pounds With pauldrons (shoulder guards), couters (elbow) and vambraces (forearm), add another 4 pounds With helmet -- and Dean offered the two finest battle helmets of modern times -- it all came to just over 15 pounds Quite wearable, you would think, given that U.S. soldiers' full panoply today can reach 40 pounds, close to 15th century full-body plate armor.

Moreover, Dean's panoply was fully cushioned with "vulcanized sponge-rubber," and with the latest alloys, could stop a .45 ACP at 1000 ft. per second (and a rifle ball at 1250 ft. per second). In terms of coverage, ease and comfort, and raw protection, this was as close as anyone in the war came to the Holy Grail of personal body armor. Deployed in the big American Expeditionary Force (AEF) offensive at the Meuse-Argonne, it could have cut 26,000 battle deaths by one third or more.

So why was nothing done? I believe that there were three impediments worth noting.

The first, fear and loathing of "The Hun" by the Allies was the upfront impediment to American helmet design. Stalhelmophobia lasted for decades. When the U.S. finally adopted a new helmet, the M1 (Pot) in 1941, it was a distinct improvement over the [helmet worn by Allied soldiers in WWI]. But it still held off protecting temple and neck -- for fear it might look too German. Studies show that...had Dean's Model 5, or better yet Model 2, been adopted, it would have saved perhaps another 5,000 American soldiers. Get this: We let 5,000 of our young men die after 1941 because we did not want them to look like Germans.

The second impediment was the myth of weight, as in: those boys will never wear this stuff; they'll throw it off the first opportunity. But in Iraq and Afghanistan, our "boys" wear stuff as heavy as a medieval Gendarme. They suffer up to 40 pounds (with helmet): Not gladly, but dutifully, because it saves lives. Weight was not the real reason but an excuse, a rationalization. The general staffs and higher leadership of that age held a mindset wholly wrong to us. It was not exactly a mindset of death, but rather, in the spirit of that age, of sacrifice for the nation.

Hence, the third reason body armor was not the utmost priority was that leaders of World War I believed that sacrifice was inevitable and necessary in war, and moreover, society would willingly sacrifice its young men on the altar of the nation. We know this from the outpouring at the news of war in August 1914. In Berlin, people were crying out that this was: "A holy moment," lit by the "holy flame of anger," were we passed "out of the misery of everyday life to new heights," to a "rebirth through war," "a revelation," finally to "awaken the belief in the future of our people," in a "wonderful unity of sacrifice, brotherhood, belief." Gertrude Baumer cried, "the limitations of our egos broke down, our blood flowed to the blood of the other, we felt ourselves one body in mystical unification."

The spirit of 1914 did not seek to shepherd and preserve lives at all costs. Today our soldier's lives are a precious treasure we spend at our peril. We are always afraid to lose too many, whatever "too many" might be. But in that breathless time men were kissed and embraced on their journey to death, because their sacrifice would not only renew the nation; but in blood let it come alive. Protecting soldiers was not part of the program.

Except for the fact that Japan did not have the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

You must have missed the part where he said "if all things were equal."

No, I got that part just fine. Did you have anything to contribute, or just want to nitpick semantics.

Technology available at the time limits what they can do.

Furthermore, while a great many lives may have been saved, those people would not all have escaped unscathed. Casualty =/= dead. While there would be fewer casualties overall, and fewer deaths, part of what happens with body armor is that many people that would have died end up maimed or wounded instead. They're still out of the fight, most likely, and thus a casualty, but the end-of-war death total would be lower (although the wounded total would be higher, most likely).

the only actual states Japan managed to attack were Hawaii and Alaska, and their Alaskan forays were in mostly limited to vast stretches of frozen wasteland, that leaves Pearl Harbor as the target for the theoretical nuclear weapon.

Since clearly we have a few people in the thread who don't understand what "all things being equal" means.

If all things were equal, Japan would have had nuclear weapons to deploy on U.S. cities. Since the only actual states Japan managed to attack were Hawaii and Alaska, and their Alaskan forays were in mostly limited to vast stretches of frozen wasteland, that leaves Pearl Harbor as the target for the theoretical nuclear weapon.

In attempting to provide rebuttals, all you guys are doing is reinforcing that all things were not equal. The United States had a technological superiority over the Japanese, which is clearly visible in how that conflict shook itself out.

It's called a hypothetical situation. A situation in which both the USA and Japan have identical motives, resources and abilities.

This is exactly what is happening now. PTSD is a much larger problem today because far more of our soldiers are making it back "alive" from war. I say this only from the point of discussion, but there is an argument to be made that we've cursed those soldiers far worse than if they would have died in combat.

PTSD is more noticeable today because we recognize it for what it is. In WWII, at some points we were taking psychological casualties faster than we were inducting new troops.