Editing The World Wars (section)

==The appeal of the World Wars==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across entire continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern war was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg, the flanking in France, the naval and air wars in the Pacific, the grinding hell in the Eastern Front cities, in the bombing of Europe from the air, in the atomic fire of Hiroshima and Japan. We entered the century and went 14 years thinking everything was right and as great as it could be. Thirty years, a war, a pandemic, an economic crash, another war and several genocides later the man who was born into the first large scale factories witnessed the power of the atom burn the hopes and dreams of two cities. Ernest Shackleton is perhaps the perfect example. He journeyed out to the Antarctic believing the war would soon be over, then returned to find that it had become a nightmare with no end in sight, a unique perspective.

Of these two conflicts, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, and the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear "right" side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some angry Illyrians in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. It's hard to make easily dehumanized rank-and file villains for a narrative when the soldiers of neither side actually want to be fighting at all.

When it was all over, the country that got blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing. Germany was still the one to go to war with Belgium and get the British involved, so they could certainly take some blame.) All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and is widely considered a pointless and wasteful war as winnings were slim on the Allied side. If Russia didn't get involved or if the Axis didn't go for Belgium or if Italy either started under the allies or stayed in the axis or if Italy was the cause of WW1 as it likely would have been depending on how things would have continued in AH if the either the Duke dying didn't result in a war or if the Duke was never assassinated a war with one side getting a much greater victory could have transpired.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WWI was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the Red Baron. Richthofen was the most famous fighter ace of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane (which only accounted for his last 17). He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute. This didn't stop the ruthless pragmatism, as a few pilots even publicly boasted of shooting down parachuting airmen to prevent them from returning to the fight.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again and even cracked down when a few small mutinies arose over the matter. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive and as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other. Sometimes temporary truces were declared for around kilometer wide sectors to clear corpses, but that was about it.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs. Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives and Italy playing the incompetent sidekick/comic relief in a series of spectacular displays of military incompetence on the part of Mussolini and his generals. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium and probably forever). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WWII also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WWI, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did (mind, it was still industrial weight and technology that won the war, but it is far easier to remember the deeds of Simo Häyhä or Audie Murphy than say, Alvin York (They all have Sabaton songs though!)).

As a result, a solid majority of [[Alternate History]] fiction is set in WWII one way or another. Even if WWI (or any of the many, many 19th Century to 1913 events and trends that lead to it) is the point of divergence, the story is likely to be in the late interwar to WWII periods.