- 16 hours ago
What made some wars so brutal for the ordinary soldier? This military history video explores the punji traps and jungle warfare of Vietnam, the freezing retreat from Chosin Reservoir, Civil War disease and battlefield surgery, and Napoleon’s disastrous march through Russia. It also examines poison gas in the Iran-Iraq War, famine and plague during the Thirty Years’ War, the trenches of World War I, and the starvation, captivity, and extreme cold of World War II’s Eastern Front.
A narrated historical overview of combat conditions, survival, and the human cost of war, this video connects major conflicts across centuries. Discover military history, famous battles, wartime conditions, and stories of soldiers facing disease, frostbite, chemical weapons, and relentless fighting—ideal for viewers seeking an engaging history documentary and deeper context on the worst wars to serve in.
A narrated historical overview of combat conditions, survival, and the human cost of war, this video connects major conflicts across centuries. Discover military history, famous battles, wartime conditions, and stories of soldiers facing disease, frostbite, chemical weapons, and relentless fighting—ideal for viewers seeking an engaging history documentary and deeper context on the worst wars to serve in.
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00:00From poison gas that throws your body into a violent seizure, to eating your own horse on a frozen death
00:07march, to getting your legs sawed off while you're still wide awake, these are the worst wars to be a
00:14soldier in.
00:15And let me just say, I am so lucky to be a Secret Service agent, because there's no way I
00:20would have survived these conditions.
00:21Like the jungles of Vietnam, where the scariest thing wasn't the enemy you could see, it was the enemy that
00:29was invisible, because the Viet Cong knew they couldn't beat American firepower head on.
00:35So they turned the jungle itself into a weapon.
00:39Tripwires, buried mines, and the infamous punji pit, a camouflaged hole filled with sharpened bamboo stakes.
00:47And just to make it extra nasty, those stakes were often smeared with filth to guarantee infection.
00:54Eww!
00:56But here's the truly evil part.
00:58Many of these traps were designed to injure, not kill.
01:02Why?
01:03Because a dead soldier stops the mission for a minute.
01:07A wounded soldier stops it for hours.
01:10His buddies have to carry him, protect him, and evacuate him, all while wondering where the next trap is hiding.
01:17And it worked.
01:18Roughly 11% of American deaths in Vietnam came from booby traps and mines.
01:24So every single step became a coin flip.
01:28Especially when you're dealing with storms, jungle rot, leeches, and 100 degree heat.
01:34And that did something to men's mines.
01:37Because you couldn't trust the trail.
01:39You couldn't trust the tree line.
01:41You couldn't even trust a souvenir.
01:43Because the Viet Cong rigged those with explosives too.
01:47And when the sun went down, it got worse.
01:50The night belonged to the enemy.
01:52They moved through hidden tunnel networks, popped up behind American lines, struck, and vanished.
01:58So even back at base, nobody ever truly relaxed.
02:03Imagine walking for hours, soaked to the bone, knowing the ground itself might be trying to kill you.
02:09Oh, and the average age of the American men killed over there?
02:13Just 23 years old.
02:16Oh man, they were just kids.
02:18But while those soldiers were sweating through the jungle, these next guys were freezing on the other side of the
02:25world.
02:25Welcome to the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea.
02:29Where roughly 30,000 UN troops pushed deep into the frozen mountains, thinking the war was almost over.
02:36But on November 27, 1950, around 120,000 Chinese soldiers came pouring out of those mountains and surrounded them completely.
02:46And as if that weren't bad enough, the temperatures dropped to negative 35 degrees Fahrenheit.
02:53Oh, it's so cold, sir.
02:57At that point, the cold becomes its own enemy.
03:01Rifles jammed.
03:02Rations froze so hard that men chipped their teeth on them, and medics had to thaw morphine surrettes in their
03:09own mouths just to treat the wounded.
03:12Even digging a foxhole was a battle, because the ground was frozen like concrete.
03:17So men fought all night on exposed ridgelines, then tried to sleep in the same clothes, in the same wind,
03:24at 35 below.
03:26Sweat from the fighting would literally freeze against their skin.
03:30And the attacks came every single night.
03:33Bugles and whistles screaming out of the dark, then waves of Chinese soldiers charging through the snow.
03:40Come morning, the Marines counted their dead, treated their frostbite, and got ready to do it all over again.
03:47Frostbite took fingers, toes, and feet by the thousands.
03:52But believe it or not, the Chinese had it even worse.
03:55Many were sent into those mountains wearing tennis shoes.
03:59And entire units were later found frozen solid in their firing positions.
04:05So the Marines did the only thing they could.
04:08They attacked in reverse.
04:10Because when you're surrounded, there is no retreat.
04:14Every direction is enemy territory.
04:16So they fought 78 miles through the mountains to the sea, bringing their wounded and their dead with them.
04:23Nobody got left behind.
04:25Now that's the stuff legends are made of.
04:28But at least those Marines had modern medics saving lives.
04:33Because 90 years earlier in the American Civil War, the hospital tent was almost as scary as the battlefield.
04:40Back then, doctors had never even heard of germs.
04:44Surgeons wiped their blades on their aprons, moved to the next patient, and got right back to cutting.
04:50As a result, if you got shot in an arm or a leg, the treatment was usually amputation.
04:56No sterile tools.
04:58Sometimes barely any anesthesia.
05:01Just a saw, a strap of leather to bite down on, and a surgeon working as fast as he could
05:07while you were still awake.
05:08Oh, and about one in seven wounded soldiers died anyway.
05:13So, for many soldiers, the sound they feared most wasn't cannon fire.
05:18It was the saw.
05:20But here's the number that says it all.
05:22The Civil War killed over 620,000 American soldiers.
05:27And roughly two-thirds of them died from disease.
05:31Typhoid, dysentery, and measles tore through camps where the latrine sat a few feet from the cooking fire.
05:38Just think about that.
05:39A soldier could survive Gettysburg, Antietam, the worst battles in American history,
05:45and then die in his tent from a bad drink of water.
05:48But if you were captured, it got even darker.
05:52Cause at a confederate prison camp called Andersonville, some 45,000 Union prisoners were packed into 26 acres with one
06:01stream for water.
06:02A stream that was also the sewer.
06:05There was no shelter.
06:07Men dug holes in the dirt or huddled under blankets.
06:11And a simple wooden rail ran around the inside of the walls called the Deadline.
06:16Cross it even by accident, and the guards shot you.
06:19So, nearly 13,000 of them died.
06:23During the worst months, that was 100 men a day.
06:27Man, it doesn't really get much worse than that.
06:30Or does it?
06:31Cause we haven't even gotten to the war that erased an entire army.
06:36In June of 1812, Napoleon marched into Russia with over 600,000 men.
06:42The largest army Europe had ever seen.
06:45Six months later, that army ceased to exist.
06:48Cause the Russians refused to give Napoleon the big battle he wanted.
06:53They just kept retreating, burning their own crops, villages, and even Moscow itself, so the French would find nothing but
07:00ashes.
07:01So, naturally, hunger and disease started killing Napoleon's men long before the famous winter ever arrived.
07:09Typhus swept the ranks, and horses dropped dead by the thousands.
07:13But when winter did come, it came with temperatures near 30 degrees below zero.
07:19Soldiers ate the dead horses.
07:22Then they fought each other over the dead horses.
07:24Men fell asleep next to campfires and never woke up.
07:28Frozen upright where they sat.
07:30Uniforms fell apart, so soldiers wrapped themselves in stolen curtains, dresses, and rugs from Moscow, shuffling through the snow like
07:39ghosts.
07:40And the entire time, Russian Cossacks circled the collar, picking off anyone who fell behind.
07:46Falling behind meant death.
07:48Stopping meant death.
07:50So, they just kept walking.
07:53And the worst of it, the army was losing thousands of men a day without fighting a single battle.
07:59The road behind them became one long trail of abandoned wagons, dead horses, and frozen men.
08:06And at the Berezina River, the survivors had to cross makeshift bridges while under attack, with men drowning in the
08:13icy water.
08:14By the time it was over, hundreds of thousands of Napoleon's soldiers were dead.
08:20Most of them killed by cold, hunger, and disease instead of combat.
08:25Out of the 600,000 men who marched in, only a shattered fraction ever stumbled back out.
08:31And I thought my winters were rough.
08:34Sheesh.
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09:56Now, you'd think by the 1980s, the world had moved past this kind of suffering.
10:01But it hadn't.
10:02Because on September 22, 1980, Iraq invaded Iran.
10:07And for the next eight years, both sides fought a war that looked like it was straight out of World
10:13War I.
10:14Trenches.
10:15Barbed wire.
10:16No man's land.
10:17Except this time, with modern weapons.
10:20Iran, short on equipment, answered with human wave attacks.
10:25Where tens of thousands of men, and heartbreakingly tens of thousands of teenage volunteers,
10:31were sent charging across open ground, and even across minefields.
10:36But picture the other side of that.
10:38Iraqi soldiers in those trenches watched wave after wave keep coming.
10:43No matter how many fell.
10:44Many of them broke down, describing it years later.
10:48This war spared nobody's mind.
10:50On either side.
10:52And Iraq answered back with poisoned gas.
10:56Over the course of the war, Iraq used thousands of tons of chemical weapons.
11:01Including mustard gas that blistered skin and lungs.
11:04And for the first time in history, nerve agents were used on a battlefield.
11:09Think about what that means for the soldier in that trench.
11:13One moment, the air is fine.
11:15The next, you're thrown into a violent seizure.
11:18And a mass that leaked, or went on three seconds too late, could mean a lifetime of scarred lungs and
11:24blind eyes.
11:26Decades later, tens of thousands of survivors are still being treated for it.
11:31Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed or permanently scarred by gas alone.
11:36And by the end, somewhere between half a million and a million soldiers were dead.
11:42But here's the part that makes it all feel so pointless.
11:45After eight years of this, the border barely moved.
11:49All that suffering?
11:51For almost nothing.
11:52But the war that Iran and Iraq copied will get too soon.
11:56First, we need to talk about the oldest war on this list.
12:00Because it might have been the closest thing to the apocalypse Europe ever saw.
12:05From 1618 to 1648, the Thirty Years' War turned Germany into a battleground for basically every power in Europe.
12:13And the soldiers fighting it?
12:15Mostly mercenaries hired guns who often went unpaid for months.
12:21So how did an unpaid soldier survive?
12:24Simple.
12:25He took whatever he wanted.
12:27Armies swept across the countryside like locusts, stripping villages bare and leaving famine behind them.
12:34And soldiers didn't march alone.
12:36Behind every army trailed a second army of wives, children, and traitors, all living off the same plundered land.
12:44When the food ran out, everyone starved together.
12:48But the deadliest enemy wasn't the fighting.
12:51It was what followed the armies everywhere they marched.
12:55Typhus, dysentery, and the plague.
12:58Because thousands of men from all over Europe, packed together, filthy and hungry,
13:03made the perfect delivery system for disease.
13:06A single campaign season could kill more soldiers than every battle in it combined.
13:12And we actually have a diary from a real mercenary named Peter Huggendorf,
13:17who marched an estimated 15,000 miles back and forth across Germany over 25 years of service.
13:24Along the way, he was wounded, robbed, and buried several of his own children.
13:30That was a good outcome for a soldier in this war.
13:33Because there was no going home, no end of tour, no discharge papers.
13:39For most of these men, the army was home.
13:42And the war just kept going.
13:44Year after year, and decade after decade.
13:47Some soldiers were born into the camps, grew up in them, and died in them without ever knowing peace.
13:54And by the time it finally ended, war, famine, and disease had wiped out as much as a third of
14:01Germany's entire population.
14:04But if you thought 30 years of mud and plague was the worst it could get,
14:08the next war packed all of that into single days.
14:12Welcome to the trenches.
14:13Because for four years, millions of men lived in muddy ditches carved across France and Belgium.
14:20And I mean lived there.
14:22Ate there.
14:23Slept there.
14:24Standing in cold water for weeks at a time.
14:27That water rotted men's feet inside their own boots.
14:31They called it trench foot.
14:33And in bad cases, it ended up in gangrene and amputation.
14:37Then there were the rats.
14:39These little buggers got fat feeding on the dead and gnawing on sleeping soldiers.
14:45And lice was so relentless, they caused a disease called trench fever.
14:49But the strangest part?
14:51Most days, nothing happened at all.
14:54Trench life was endless boredom.
14:57Interrupted by moments of pure terror.
14:59A sniper shot.
15:01A random shell.
15:02A raid in the night.
15:04Death came without warning and without pattern.
15:07And in 1915, a new horror arrived.
15:11Poison gas.
15:13Chlorine and mustard gas drifting over the trenches in greenish clouds.
15:17Burning eyes, skin, and lungs.
15:20This is actually where the Oran-Orak playbook came from 70 years early.
15:26But the true king of this nightmare was the artillery.
15:29Shells falling day and night for years.
15:32You couldn't fight back against a shell.
15:35You couldn't even see it coming.
15:36You just sat there and hoped.
15:39And that helplessness broke men's minds.
15:42They called it shell shock.
15:44Soldiers trembling.
15:46Unable to speak.
15:47Staring at nothing.
15:49This was a brand new way for war to destroy a person.
15:53And when the whistle blew, you climbed out of that trench and walked into machine gun fire.
15:58On July 1st, 1916, the first day of the Battle on the Somme, the British Army suffered around 57,000
16:06casualties.
16:07Roughly 19,000 dead in one day.
16:12The worst day in British military history.
16:15But there's one war that took everything you just heard.
16:18The cold, the cold, the disease, the industrial slaughter, and somehow made all of it worse.
16:24And that's the Eastern Front of World War II.
16:27The largest and deadliest theater of war in human history.
16:31Because when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, this wasn't a war for territory.
16:38Both regimes treated it as a war of annihilation, which meant for the ordinary soldier, all the normal rules were
16:46gone.
16:46And nowhere showed that, like Stalingrad.
16:50Soldiers fought room to room, floor to floor, through a frozen, bombed-out city.
16:56Germans called it the Rattenkrieg.
16:58The War of the Rats.
16:59You might hold the kitchen of a building while the enemy held the living room.
17:03In the worst sectors, a soldier's life expectancy was measured in days.
17:09Fresh troops were ferried across the Volga River under constant fire, straight into the meat grinder.
17:15And when the German supply lines collapsed, the Trap 6th Army starved inside the city they'd been ordered to take.
17:22Men ate their horses.
17:24Then rats.
17:26Then nothing.
17:27And remember the cold from the Chosin Reservoir?
17:30And from Napoleon's retreat?
17:32Well, it's back.
17:33Except now, soldiers were living in it for entire years.
17:37In a war where wounds froze and weapons jammed.
17:41In the first winter alone, the German army suffered over 100,000 frostbite casualties.
17:47Because Hitler had promised them victory before the snow fell.
17:51So they marched into Russia with no winter gear at all.
17:54Sound familiar?
17:56Napoleon could have warned them.
17:57But here's what truly made the Eastern Front the worst war to be a soldier in.
18:03Even surrendering couldn't save you.
18:05When the German 6th Army finally gave up at Stalingrad in February 1943, about 91,000 men marched into Soviet
18:14captivity.
18:15Only around 5,000 to 6,000 of them ever made it home.
18:19And Soviet prisoners fared even worse.
18:23Of the nearly 6 million Soviet soldiers captured by Germany, roughly 3 million died in captivity.
18:30Two armies of ordinary men trapped between a merciless enemy in front of them and their own ruthless regimes behind
18:37them.
18:38Man, that's why this is number 1.
18:40Because on the Eastern Front, surviving the battle didn't mean surviving the war.
18:45But after all that, I've never been more thankful for the peace we have today.
18:50Because freedom isn't free.
18:52Somebody always pays for it.
18:54And the best way to honor these soldiers is to actually understand the wars they fought.
18:58So this is World War II Explained.
19:01From sailors diving into a sea of burning oil, to a president's son storming the beach with his cane.
19:08To a general walking into the largest invasion in human history, with an apology note hidden in his wallet.
19:14If you want to see how the deadliest war in human history really went down, click right here and keep
19:20watching.