5 Miserable Fates You’d Suffer in War, If the Enemy Didn’t Get You First
War is hell. Combat can kill you. If you survive, you could still lose a limb, lose an eye or at least lose your composure. But today, let’s leave aside what the enemy’s guns can do to you. Let’s look at all the other terrible things you could suffer.
For this, we’re going to be focusing exclusively on Britain during the World Wars. The reason for this is obvious: Britain is the worst.
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(If you’re British, that last sentence was a joke. We’re really focusing on Britain because Britain is the best.)
A Ban on Fresh Bread
When a country’s at war, the quality of food takes a hit, naturally. We don’t have quite so many ships willing to deliver mangoes, and we don’t have the usual number of chefs operating fine restaurants. Even the most basic foods can degrade, thanks to government mandates. In 1917, Britain introduced the Bread Order, which banned anyone from selling bread within 12 hours of baking it.
The reasoning here was that if bakeries sold stale bread, people would buy less of it, and this would help with the flour shortage. The government also claimed that stale bread is more nutritious, which was a complete lie. Nutrients don’t spontaneously generate in bread when you leave it on the shelf for 12 hours. People were willing to believe this, however, having long been told that the tastier the food, the worse it is for you.
National Archives
The Bread Order followed several failed attempts to merely urge people to change their bread habits rather than force them. The government encouraged bakers to use lower-quality flour or to mix potatoes into the dough. Shoppers didn’t like either option (if they wanted to eat potatoes, they’d just eat potatoes). We have a record of at least one man being arrested for buying fresh bread, and he was fined the 1917 equivalent of $4,000. They pardoned him in the end, though, when everyone wised up and realized the ban had been the stupidest thing since America banned sliced bread.
Blackout-Induced Crashes
From September 1939 right till September 1944, Britain enforced a blackout. Streetlights went out, and residents had to seal up their windows to avoid providing targets to enemy bombers. During actual air raids, this made sense to people, who agreed that being bombed didn’t sound like a fun time. But the mandate persisted at other times as well, and it’s possible they didn’t even make sense during the raids (planes weren’t targeting individual homes or using them for navigation).
So, people walking outside found themselves landing in more accidents just by missing their footing and falling. More cars hit pedestrians. Crime rose. And woe to the train passenger that did not mind the gap:
The darkest stat we have on this covers the rise in deaths on the roads. In a typical prewar month, 540 people might die in accidents. The first month of the blackout, accidents killed 1,130. “By frightening the nation into blackout regulations,” wrote the royal physician in the British Medical Journal, “the Luftwaffe was able to kill 600 British citizens a month without ever taking to the air.”
Other than during the seven-month Blitz, that’s actually higher than the monthly civilian death toll from being bombed.
Trench Rats
Let’s jump now to what soldiers experienced during war. We know we said we weren’t going to talk about combat, but that’s hardly the only threat that awaited you when you were literally in the trenches. For starters, have you considered what it’s like to wade around in the mud and then have six rodents run up your pant leg?
Rats swarmed the trenches in World War I, attracted by the soldiers’ waste, their food and by the dead. A soldier might wake up to a rat on his chest staring at him. Rats would pull the food right out of his hand, and the man who then gave chase could expect the rat to turn around and bite. Armies adapted by sending in dedicated dogs to catch the rats:
Killing the vermin was for the best but often didn’t feel worth the effort because they’d surely just be replaced by other rats before long. For that reason, the army would sometimes offer an incentive, paying soldiers for every dead rat they turned in. One army corps turned in 8,000 of these rat corpses in two weeks.
Hold on. We’ve heard stories about how perverse incentives work. This sounds awfully like those soldiers suddenly had a reason to breed rats for a maximum payout. They must have been baiting the trenches to attract rats from afar, and this explains where all Britain’s flour was going.
Running out of Toilet Paper
Rats nibbling on your toes can make for a shitty-ass time. You know what else makes for a shitty-ass time? Actual shitty asses.
British soldiers had to ration their toilet paper during World War II. Each man was issued just three squares a day. That might not be enough for even a single bowel movement, and it’s surely not enough for two. We don’t know who came up with this allotment. Maybe someone said soldiers need “three square meals a day,” and one crucial word was lost before this was implemented.
American soldiers, in comparison, were issued an average of 22.5 squares of toilet paper a day. American soldiers had better provisions of all kinds, and civilians in Britain palled up to the Americans stationed there in hopes of getting some of these sweet supplies. Forget fresh bread: American soldiers had chewing gum, fresh fruit and delicious canned spam.
Those British civilians probably had access to zero squares of toilet paper a day themselves, by the way. But when you have your own home and own private toilet facilities, you’re able to better improvise.
Enslaved in the Mines
Some people in Britain during World War II got conscripted, while others stayed home. Some did both. In 1943, the country realized that with so many men going off to war, they were running out of people to work the coal mines. So, for the next two years, one-tenth of all conscripts weren’t drafted into the military. They were sent into the coal mines.
We’re not going to say coal mining was worse than fighting in World War II. It was better, figured most people who heard about these men (such people wrongly assumed these conscripts were conscientious objectors who’d opted for the mines). But many of these men did think mining was the less preferable option, if only because it’s less honorable. Many appealed their conscription, preferring combat, and some went to prison because they refused to go to the mines. And of course, mining’s hard and dangerous, and some of these men died down there.
Here's the real shocking part, though, about these conscripted miners. After the war ended in 1945? They had to keep mining. The last round of conscription was in May 1945, and the government kept them down there, against their will, for another three years.
“This involutory servitude idea has a lot of advantages,” said the government. We’re lucky they didn’t make the arrangement permanent. Maybe they only stopped because the Olympics was in London that year, and they were afraid of observers from the developed world.
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