I wasn’t able to find much on the comparative history between the two. Not being at least 200 years old, I don’t know which came first if they are commonly related or why each culture came to use something that looks so similar.
Hi :)
I just finished the excellent Band of Brothers (which, on a side note, would be good to know how accurate it actually is) and, assuming it is relatively factual, it was quite a candid insight into the realities of war. One scene in one of the first few episodes in particular surprised me as, when attacking a bunker, a soldier knocked out a surrendering German soldier. Initially, this shocked me; that's no way to treat a prisoner of war! Then I realised that that was a stupid way of looking at it, and in fact what he did was the best thing he could do - he couldn't take him prisoner (he was attacking a bunker) but he couldn't just let him go, so he could either shoot him or knock him out to prevent him from returning to the fight.
Anyway, this got me thinking - how often did stuff like this happen, and how often were POWs just executed, either because they didn't have enough supplies to actually detain and look after them, or because of the psychological pressures of war? Later on, a soldier was rumored to have shot a load of German prisoners for no reason, but how common was this, and were soldiers punished?
There were multiple times in the series thereafter when I thought, given their inability to fulfill their duty of care towards POW, what would they do if they captured a group of German soldiers? It's the sort of thing, given is written by the winners, that's never really mentioned in film and tv so I was surprised, perhaps I shouldn't have been, when Band of Brothers did touch upon it.
It would be really interesting to know, so any replies would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
I'm doing a research on these and I'm finding them more interesting than I thoght.
I've discovered that at one point in Italy, there were so many eruptions that the sky remained obscure for a lot of time creating a kind of ice age, changing climate and temperature, all this during a plague that wiped out a lot of the population in Europe, something around 40%.
I found this strangely interesting, so much that I wanted to go deeped into old pandemics, but there is not too much around, especially about data.
I get that at the times, there were not computers and data wasn't that easy to guess, we can only guess what the numbers were, but there are sources for some plagues and I can't find any for others.
Like total population during those years, total deaths or what did they do to avoid it, etc.
Anything you know is precious to me! If you can point me to any source, or you want to share something I appreciate it! :D
Any other suggestion is appreciated!
La peste di Giustiniano (Giustinian's Plague 1346-1353)
Black plague
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