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Imperial Guard

2023-05-10T07:27:54Z

2001:8003:1C20:8C00:7D2B:6BCE:E7FE:9253: Undo revision 886691 by 2605:6400:30:F4AE:8F7B:CC6E:D1D7:B978 (talk) As an Aussie, there's literally no ANZAC/Gallipoli/etc elements to the last chancers

{{Awesome}}
[[File:Macharius Charge.png|500px|thumb|right|And his name struck fear into the hearts of men.]]
{{Topquote|Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. All men are afraid in battle. The coward is the one who lets his fear overcome his sense of duty. Duty is the essence of manhood." "Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.|George S. Patton}}

{{Topquote|When one has two hundred artillery pieces per kilometer of the frontline, he does not report contact with the enemy or ask for whereabouts. He reports successful breakthroughs and asks for further orders.|Attributed to Aleksandr Vasilevsky}}

{{Topquote|Hey guys, they're called Astra Militarum now!|Game Workshop, shortly before everyone proceeded to ignore them.}}

The '''Imperial Guard''' (officially titled the '''Astra Militarum''' as of [[Warhammer 40,000 6th Edition|6th Edition]], ‘cause fuck your original name if GW can't trademark it), also known as [[If the Emperor had a Text-to-Speech Device| '''THE WALL OF GUNS''']], are the foot soldiers of the [[Imperium]] in [[Warhammer 40,000]]. They exist only to fight (and die) gloriously in the [[Emprah]]'s name. [[Commissar]]s (like [[Holt]] and [[Ciaphas Cain]]) ensure that they do so regularly, and any cowards or deserters tend to be summarily executed. During the [[Great Crusade]], the Emperor only intended for them to be [[Solar Auxilia|auxilia]] for his [[Space Marines|SPESS MEHRENS]] (and to man masses of tanks, artillery, and aircraft). After [[Horus Heresy|Horus' little tantrum]] and the [[Second Founding|breakup of the Legions]], trillions upon trillions of humans were drafted to make up for the difference. Although these are, for the most part, mere men and women, they have held the line in the Imperium's wars for 10,000 years. Many consider their dogged perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds to be what makes them so balls-to-the-wall [[awesome]].

It is recommended that you put either [https://youtu.be/CIGHCoVzqtk] or [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqWHIq-aZw] on loop before reading the rest of this article.

Basically, the Imperial Guard is what happens when you remember that quantity has a quality all its own, and that there is no problem that can't be solved via the application of a sufficient level of [[Dakka|firepower]]. While the elite forces of the Imperium gain all the glory, the Imperial Guard wages war on thousands of fronts with or without support. They are the soldiers of Humanity who fight and die in numbers beyond counting.

Without the Imperial Guard, the Imperium could not exist.

==Overview==
It is worth noting that in a universe where opposing armies include:

* Cults of [[Space Marines|genetically-engineered killing machines]];
* Cults of [[Chaos Space Marines|EVIL genetically-engineered killing machines]], with a variety of sorcerous powers;
* [[Ork|Barbaric super-fungi]] that grow in size and number the more you fight them;
* [[Eldar|Creepy space elves]] with psychic powers, incomprehensible technology, and a habit of materializing out of nowhere;
* [[Dark Eldar|EVIL PIRATE creepy space elves]] that literally get off on making others suffer, whose creative use of slaves makes an agonizing death seem merciful;
* [[Harlequins|Extra creepy space elf clowns]] whose motives are obscure even among the rest of the space elves and make it their collective goal to turn mass slaughter into a literal art form;
* [[Tau|Samurai space communists]] with AI-enhanced battlemechs, infinite firepower and [[Kroot|cannibal dinosaurs]] in tow;
* Endless swarms of [[Tyranid|screeching, hyper-evolved space bugs]] that, combined, spew voracious parasites and corrosive acid from more orifices than most forces have bullets;
* Nightmarish [[Genestealer Cult|hybrid abominations]] that infest the darkest corners of your world until they breed enough thralls to overwhelm your armies and summon the aforementioned space locusts;
* [[Daemon|Extradimensional monsters]] that live to [[Khorne|slaughter]], [[Tzeentch|corrupt]], [[Nurgle|infect]], and [[Slaanesh|violate]] mortal bodies, before tearing out their souls to do it all again, but ''much slower'';
* [[Lost and the Damned|Your former friends,]] having forsaken themselves to the above creatures;
* [[Adeptus Mechanicus|Martian Illuminati]] with ancient war machines, a monopoly on modern technology, and religious objections to humans attached to their original limbs;
* [[Adepta Sororitas|Fanatic warrior nuns]] who can heal themselves through prayer;
* [[Inquisition|A shadowy secret police]] who will have you executed for simply blinking wrong;
* [[Imperial Knight|Multi-story bipedal mechs]] bristling with tank-sundering guns from head to man-crushing toe;
* [[Chaos Knight|EVIL Multi-story bipedal mechs]] bristling with tank-sundering guns from head to man-crushing toe;
* [[Necron|Nigh-immortal zombie robots]] that snuff out stars for kicks;
* [[Leagues of Votann|Cyborg midgets]] with the technology you've long since lost, who will never, ''ever'' forget you;

[[File:Trance.jpg|300px|right|thumb|"Welcome to the jungle, we've got fun and games!"]]
... the foot soldiers of the Imperial Guard take to the field equipped with nothing but [[Flak Armour|flak armor]], [[Lasgun|glorified laser pointers]], a ''highly'' variable amount of training, [[Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer|some toilet paper]], and a pair of Mars-pattern, titanium-plated balls. In truth, a typical Guardsman's equipment is ''significantly'' more effective than the gear fielded by any real-world modern nation. It's just that the threats a Guardsman must face are often incomprehensible in comparison. As such, the Guard makes up the difference with numbers, overwhelming firepower, and sheer nerve.

In many cases the Imperial Guard will function as a sort of galaxy-spanning firefighting force, responding to uprisings, rebellions, and other threats as needed. When a world is threatened by a major invasion, the local PDF is expected use its extensive network of defensive assets to hold the line until external help arrives. In the vast majority of situations, that help will consist of the Imperial Guard. In theory if not always in practice, the arrival of an Imperial Guard army is intended to end any such threats, with or without additional help from specialist formations such as the [[Space Marine]]s and the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]].

It would be a mistake to assume that the Guard's sole purpose is simply to help the PDF hold out until ''even more'' help arrives at some indeterminate point in the future. On the contrary, the Guard's purpose is to ''end the threat''. They are, sometimes quite literally, [[Rough Riders|the cavalry riding to the rescue]].

On that note, there's an important detail to remember here: while the Imperial Guard does indeed perform a defensive role, it is ''also'' the Imperium's primary ground-based ''offensive'' force. When a Crusade is called, it is almost always the Imperial Guard that will provide the vast majority of the Crusade's fighting strength. Depending on the nature of the threat, dozens or even hundreds of regiments will be called up; a fighting strength in the tens of millions would be considered quite ordinary. Vast formations of infantry from varied worlds will be supported by columns of tanks and other armored vehicles, air support, and artillery... very, very large amounts of artillery. The pictures you see in sourcebooks that depict vast numbers of doggedly advancing human soldiers aren't just artistic license- this is ''actually'' how many Guard armies prefer to fight, a sheer wall of firepower stretching from horizon to horizon that nothing can stand against, and against which fancy tactical maneuvering means very little. This is why the Imperial Guard has the nickname, "Hammer of the Emperor."

==Recruitment and Deployment==

Every Imperial world is expected to pay the [[Imperial Tithe]], which is essentially a tax that supports the greater Imperium. This tithe includes the expectation that the world will produce certain goods and resources, that it will comply with Imperial doctrines, and that it will provide a regular levy of soldiers for induction into the Imperial Guard.

The exact amount of soldiery that a world is expected to contribute is based on an arcane formula that even the most wizened member of the [[Administratum]] would struggle to fully explain. Nevertheless, contribute each world must, for a Governor who fails to meet the Tithe will find no sympathy, and risk being branded as a renegade. Aside from this, the quality of the soldiers being contributed is not necessarily important. Many worlds take great pride in drawing new Guard regiments from the best and brightest of their PDF, where such foundings are a matter of great pomp and circumstance. Many of these make a point of contributing Guard levies far in excess of their required tithes. On other worlds, prospective recruits will compete with each other (sometimes bloodlessly, sometimes not) for the right to wage the Imperium's wars. On yet others, the tithe will be filled with undesirables and criminals.

While the exact manner in which a new founding is equipped is not standardized either, it ''is'' expected that the new formation should be ready and able to fight, and the Governor who neglects this requirement risks drawing the ire of the Administratum. Otherwise, the precise character, fighting style, and preferences of the regiment will of course be colored by the world that it was drawn from.

In some cases that are experiencing an active war zone, such as on [[Armageddon]], new foundings will be deployed directly to theaters on their home world. Most often, however, the [[Departmento Munitorum]] will coordinate with the Imperial Navy as to where the regiment goes next. The first stop will often be to a nearby Forge World, where the regiment will receive additional gear, equipment, and vehicles. If they are very lucky, a regiment might even receive one or more super-heavy tanks such as the [[Baneblade]]. All the while the regiment will continue training, while its newly assigned [[Commissar]]s work to stamp out any lingering weakness and disloyalty. Soon enough, the new regiment will find itself deployed in one of the Imperium's endless number of conflicts.

It is important to note that once they are deployed off-world, a Guardsman will never see their home planet again, aside from certain highly rare and unusual exceptions.

A regiment's first taste of combat is often a very difficult crucible, and it is one that many regiments do not survive at all. If it does, then the regiment will continue to be deployed as long as it retains fighting strength. Eventually, a regiment that might once have consisted of thousands of soldiers might be whittled down to only a few hundred survivors, or even down to just a single squad. By then such hard-bitten veterans will often consist of some of the toughest and most experienced soldiers that the Imperial Guard has to offer. These survivors are often folded into another regiment where their talents can be transferred to the greener troops. In other cases, two understrength regiments might be combined to form a completely new regiment with a new founding number. In very rare circumstances, a regiment that has fought with distinction through many, many campaigns will be granted the honor of colonizing a newly captured world. For most guardsmen, this distant and highly unlikely outcome is the only hope for a life after service.

Therefore, although the average frontline Guardsman does not have good odds of surviving his first deployment, some ''do'' survive, and these veteran soldiers may accumulate ''decades'' of experience. They are some of the manliest motherfuckers the Imperium has to offer, capable of putting even the fucking SPESS MEHRENS to shame. Disturbingly, if Imperial Guard tactics advanced from WWI-style warfare (<s>overuse of artillery</s> (modern militaries make use of artillery spam whenever possible) and mass charges against machine guns and tanks) to modern military strategies (such as taking cover and using air/armor/support, which while many elite regiments often do, there’s so much damn variety you can't really have good quality control), the Imperial Guard ''could'' become the most feared army in the whole universe. But '''NO''', that's not [[grimdark]] enough! However, do note that while the Imperium is generally unconcerned with individual casualties, and while some commanders do therefore order their men to charge enemy lines with or without heavy armor/artillery support and regardless of terrain, fluff has also noted that incompetent commanders who are ''wantonly wasteful'' of Imperial resources tend to be weeded out rather quickly by the Commissariat.

Examples of Guardsmen going above and beyond even this inherent badassery, demonstrating the possession of testicles so massive they should be deployed in battle as a separate unit, are plentiful: [[Ollanius Pius]] is one such Guardsman, standing up to fucking [[Horus]] himself (depending on whose canon you prefer). [[Dawn of War]] sees the Blood Ravens running into a pair of Guardsmen who have held their position, without support, in the middle of a combined Chaos/Ork/Eldar invasion, for more than a week. [[Dawn of War II]] has Guardsmen rescued in an earlier mission returning in the finale to provide infantry support while the Blood Ravens launch an attack... on a fucking [[Tyranid]] hive. These same guardsmen (led by the ever awesome [[Merrick|Sergeant Merrick]]) SURVIVE the suicidal mission and fight on for ''ten more years'' against the remnants of the Tyranids/Orks/Eldar. A different group of about 72 loyal Guardsmen also managed to hold out for those ten years. In a frozen wasteland. Surrounded by former comrades taken by Nurgle, bands of Black Legion Chaos Marines, and a growing Daemonic incursion.

Fluff-wise it seems that the Guard's most common methods of war are to use lots of heavy weapons, tanks, and artillery to smash the fuck out of the enemy while Guardsmen mop up the shards of their foe while supported by more heavy weapons, special weapons, and Infantry Fighting Vehicles. So, honestly, the combined arms doctrine of the Imperial Guard is really fucking powerful even without considering their numbers are so vast they could just drown you with their own blood and corpses, and the paper to write the report on for said casualties would be literally not worth the paper. On top of that, their flak armor (which includes flak shirt and flak pants apparently) actually gives pretty good protection against stub weapons and most other mid-tech small arms. Keep in mind that the Imperial Guard are often fighting other humans such as rebels most of the time, who nearly always use stubbers and armor inferior to Guard flak armor. When fighting things that make mince meat of Guardsmen, the Guard tends to utilize concentrations of artillery, air support, tanks, superheavy vehicles, IFVs, and heavy weapons of all kinds to smash the enemy so the infantry merely has to occupy the smoldering crater that once consisted of the enemy's position.

In short... do '''''NOT''''' fuck with the Imperial Guard!

==Standard-Issue Equipment and Knick-Knacks==

It is known that the Imperial Guard is (in)famously known as the dudes in [[Flak Armour|T-shirts]] and [[Lasgun|Flashlights]], but did you know that the 'Guard also carries a bunch of other stuff that may aid his/her's merry journey of murder? Whilst each regiment may differ on what [[count as]] 'standard-issue', what they do share in common however, are a shit ton of equipment that all Guardsmen no matter their background usually lug around with them. These are:

====[[Lasgun]] Weapons Case and Maintenance Kit====
[[File:IIUPLasgun.jpg|400px|right|thumb|Lasgun with accessories.]]
No duh. Your standard-issue flashlight is given to ''all'' Guardsmen upon their first enlistment into the Astra Militarum. Each Lasgun comes inside a weapon's case which in itself contains several accessories inside its maintenance kit such as:

*'''Lasgun''' (Pattern varies): Your standard flashlight you all know and love. The pattern of lasgun varies depending on which regiment you came from, but overall, this is your most trusted friend on the battlefield. Learn to take care of it as it is better to shoot things dead from afar than to kill things up close and personal.
*'''Lasgun Power Pack''': ''THE'' most important part of your Lasgun weapon's case outside of the Lasgun itself. You can't fire a Lasgun if you have no power pack, can you? Each Lasgun always comes equipped with ''one'' power pack to ensure that each weapon is combat-ready from the get-go. The power pack is obviously separated from the Lasgun itself to avoid 'accidental misfires'. In addition to this, each Guardsman is issued with four additional power packs in case the original was either lost, ran out of ammunition, or was damaged.
*'''Long Pattern Bayonet/Combat Knife with Sheath''': Each Lasgun weapon's case comes equipped with the standard-issue butterknife. Like the Lasgun, the knife's pattern varies from regiment to regiment. It always comes in a sheath to prevent accidental self-harm and is always pre-sharpened. Guardsmen can carry the knife as a standalone weapon if they so choose, although some may just attach it to their Lasguns before being forced to bayonet charge a tank. By far the most versatile weapon as it can also be used for non-military roles such as cooking, chopping wood, or making other arts and crafts.
*'''Targeters/Scopes''': Not ''really'' standard-issue but can be requested by your regiment. A targeter or a scope is designed to improve a Guardsmen's accuracy over conventional iron sights. The style of scopes may vary depending on where you're from, but they all serve the same purpose. To be issued a scope, a Guardsman must prove to his superiors that s/he can actually aim for shit as their lensing materials are quite expensive. The ranging accuracy for most scopes/targeters is +/- two metres under most circumstances. The max range of a scope depends on the reflectivity of the target and the environmental conditions at the time of firing. Guardsman who have these neat equipments should always attempt to shoot his/her's target at a 90 degree angle as this is more likely to provide an accurate range (Take note, this is only for conventional Sniper Rifles, Long-Las avoid such a thing due to the nature of lasers). A scope/targeter can have its magnification distance adjusted depending on the shooter's preferences.
*'''Sight Calibrator''': As its name implies, a piece of equipment that allows the Guardsmen to adjust the weapon's sight according to his/her's preference and comfort. May or may not be for a targeting laser attachment, but since no Lasgun actually were seen with such attachments, it can be assumed to be for the standard-issue optic sight. Mostly consists of small tools such as screwdrivers and the like to adjust the aiming reticle, etc.
*'''Sanctioned Cleaning Agent''': As its name implies, it is a bottle of cleaning agent meant to nick away the grime after battle and to improve the lifecycle of the Lasgun alongside your other weapons and tools. Quite important in maintaining the firing lens of a Lasgun as any attached dirt sticking on the Lasgun's lens will flash-vapourise; damaging the lens in the process. Most likely a water-free agent, so you can just dip it on your standard-issue soft-cloth and proceed to clean your weapon so when the day comes for parades, you don't end up looking like a [[murderhobo]].
*'''Oiling Agent''': A small bottle of oil that may or may not overlap with the [[Derp|Bottle of Sacred Oil of Lubrication]], so consider the latter as a spare. An Oiling Agent is used to 'grease-up' your weapons to prevent jamming. Given that the Lasgun has little to no moving parts, it is most likely reserved for your Autopistol.
*'''Bottle of Sacred Unguent of Cleansing''': Somewhat akin to the above mentioned Sanctioned Cleaning Agent. The Bottle of Sacred Unguent of Cleansing is a vial containing a water-free vial that cleanse any dirt or grime on your weapons and equipment. Most likely a superior version of a Cleaning Agent in a sense that it has most likely be 'blessed' to ensure a tip-top shine. Given how religious this bottle sounds, there's definitely a use for this against Warp-like shenanigans such as Nurgle's taint.
*'''Bottle of Sacred Oil of Lubrication''': The aforementioned Bottle of Sacred Oil of Lubrication. Like the Bottle of Sacred Unguent of Cleansing, the Bottle of Sacred Oil of Lubrication is most likely a superior version of your average Oiling Agent that is most likely 'blessed' by a Techpriest. Again, seems to be used against [[Heresy|heretical taint]] whilst also offering better lubrication to your weapons or vehicles.
*'''Tin of Blessed Sealing Wax''': A small metal tin containing solidified sealing wax. It is not a sealing wax meant for Purity Seals however. When heated, the wax would liquefy. One can than pour the liquefied wax to 'fix' a broken piece of equipment or seal a written message for communication purposes.
*'''Blessed Soft-Cloth for Swabbing''': Your standard-issue cleaning cloth the size of a large handkerchief. A relatively smooth cloth that makes it great for either cleaning your tools or lubricating your weapons. One of the most important piece of equipment when maintaining your Lasgun, as without it, wear and tear will suffice.
*'''Holy Toolbox with Repair Instruments''': Each Lasgun weapon's case comes with a secondary case in the complete package. This separate case holds the necessary tools needed in case your Lasgun or other weapon breaks down. The toolbox may contain a wrench, screwdrivers, additional screws, additional batteries, spare electrical equipment, hammers, a saw and spare binding agents.
*'''Spare Lasgun Stock''': A spare Lasgun stock that comes with an engraved icon of faith. In case your current gun stock gets damaged, you got a spare around. May come in different style's of gunstock depending on your both your regiment and preferences. Stock may come in plastic, wood, metal or is completely collapsible, it is up to you to mix-and-match.
*'''Spare Lasgun Barrel''': A spare Lasgun barrel engraved with an icon of true-shot. Like the gunstock, this is a spare in case your Lasgun's lens barrel gets damaged or worn out. This spare is there for when you want to still shoot whilst waiting for the [[Administratum]] to offer you a new one.
<gallery>
File:Power_Pack_Lasgun.PNG|Different styles of Lasgun power packs.
File:Bayonets.PNG|An assortment of bayonets.
File:Scopes.PNG|An assortment of scopes.
</gallery>

====[[Autopistol]]/[[Laspistol]]====
[[File:Autopistol_Image.PNG|200px|right|thumb|A standard Autopistol.]]
The ''secondary'' weapon issued by Guardsmen. Depending on the regiment, a Guardsmen after being issued with his Lasgun, would then be issued his sidearm which can either be a Laspistol or an Autopistol. Like its bigger brother, these pistol also come with its own weapon's case although its maintenance have to be shared with it big brother which comes in everything. These are:

*'''Autopistol/Laspistol''': Depending on the regiment as aforementioned, you may be equipped with either the bang-bang or the pew-pew variety of pistols. They all come cleaned and furbished inside their case.
*'''Autopistol Clip''': Each Autopistol comes equipped with a single <s>clip</s> magazine of bullets alongside five additional magazines as standard. Like the Lasgun, the Autopistol and its magazine is separated to avoid a misfiring. Guardsmen may be issued more magazines for their Autopistols if there is enough stock within the regiment's armoury which can be requested via a form to HR. Just pray the [[Administratum]] arrives in time for a entirely new batch of ammo in case the armoury is emptied out.
*'''Muzzle Rod and Swab''': A cleaning rod with cloth that is meant to clean out your Autopistol or any slug-throwing combustion guns. Definitely not meant for the Lasgun as it technically has no rifling. But for conventional slug-throwers, it may come in handy for maintaining and cleaning out any grime stuck inside the barrel; improving its lifespan and weapons safety.
*'''Laspistol Power Pack''': Unlike the Lasgun, it seem that the Laspistol is only offered one power pack to come along with the product. Like its big brother, the power pack is the most important part of the Laspistol and it also comes separate to avoid misfiring. The power pack itself is smaller and weigh dramatically less than its larger brother.

====[[Grenades & Explosives|Grenades]]====
[[File:Frag_Grenade_Internal.PNG|120px|right|thumb|An internal of a Frag Grenade.]]
Like all regiments, each Imperial Guardsmen is equipped with several grenades. The type of grenade may differ depending on what squad the Guardsmen would be enlisted as. All Guardsmen will be trained with practice grenades before they are entrusted in throwing around these explosives around. These grenades are:

*'''Frag Grenades''': In mix-standard teams within a [[Infantry Squad]], the Frag Grenade is the most common type of grenade a Guardsmen would be issued. S/he will be given four grenades maximum, although more can be requested via filling out a request form and with approval from senior officers.
*'''Krak Grenades''': For teams specialising in anti-armour offensives. They will be issued a Krak Grenade instead. Like their frag counterparts, four grenades seem to be the optimum for each Guardsmen.
*'''Melta Bomb/Demolition Charge''': For [[Breacher Squad]]s, one member may be in charged with a single Melta Bomb or Demolition Charge for anti-tank and demolition purposes. They are heavier than usual and require special training and expertise to master. Not really standard-issue all things considered.
<gallery>
Grenades_and_Bombs.PNG|List of explosives your typical Joe would carry.
</gallery>

====Armour and Clothing====
[[File:Uniform.PNG|150px|right|thumb|Fig 1.1 Your average Guardsmen. A dude in a shirt.]]
Outside of his weapons, clothing is the most important piece of equipment that every Guardsmen must have. You ain't gonna go out fighting on Valhalla butt-ass naked now would you? Again, the type and style of clothes differ by regiment. Some like the [[Scintillan Fusiliers]] treat their fatigues with higher value than their lasguns whilst others like the [[Catachan Jungle Fighters]] scoffs at fatigues and go completely bare-chested. The list of attire are:

*'''Combat Fatigue/Dress Uniform''': The first piece of clothing that nearly all Guardsmen wear. Uniforms or fatigues are mass produced in order that the countless number of Guard regiments will be equipped quickly and efficiently. Typically, uniforms or fatigues are made from hard-wearing fabrics designed to resist all types of environments passively. They need to be proven hardy in the field and resistant to snags and tears. Nevertheless, overtime, clothing just simply deteriorate either through combat or frequent usage so spares are always up for order. In peacetime or in parades, they can be used to show off the regiment's discipline and all-round [[Awesome|awesomeness]].
*'''Shirt and Undershirt''': Your ''actual'' t-shirts. Literally. This is what most Guardsmen wear beneath their fatigues or uniforms. They are made from light fabric like cotton or linen and is designed for maximum comfort. The Catachan Jungle Fighters if they are forced to wear something on their torso, would usually opt for a shirt rather than fatigues to show off their bulky muscles.
*'''Flak Armour''': You know'em, you love'em. Everyone's favourite cardboard armour is issued throughout the Imperium. Like all things in the Guard, the style of Flak Armour differs from regiment to regiment. But overall they are the most important piece of equipment outside the Lasgun as the Flak Armour provides ''some'' form of protection. Whilst it won't do too hot against direct impact from anything above WW2-levels of firearms, it does provide an adequate form of defense against shrapnel. Given that in modern warfare, artillery shrapnel is one of the highest form of casualties, this is actually quite important for the Guard.
*'''Helmet with Micro Bead Pick-Up''': Each Guardsmen is issued with a standard-issue Flak helmet with micro beads attached. Other than for head protection, the micro bead is important for communication purposes without the Guardsmen making a sound. Micro beads essentially translates the vibrations of your throat and transmit that as sound without saying a single word. Very useful for stealth operations.
*'''Dog Tags''': Works the same way we have here today. A metal necklace that shows the Guardsman's regiment, squad, name, date of birth and place of birth. Whilst most Guardsman would never really get the chance to have their dog tags retrieved once they kick the bucket, their superiors should at least have the acumen to dot down who they lost over the years and send it to the Administratum for records keeping.
*'''Socks''': No sane Guardmen want to go out in the battlefield with chilblains or frostbite on their dinky toes now do they? Each Guardsmen is issued four pairs of socks that are dried and neatly packed. Each pair of sock needs to be washed if possible and dried to prevent trench foot or any other feet-related ailments. Socks are made of some form of thick, warm fabric like wool or cotton.
*'''Undergarment''': Your [[/d/|bras, panties and underwear]]. Used to keep your manly and womanly bits from flailing around awkwardly in your trousers and to keep them supported and warm. Like socks, they need to be washed as soon as possible to avoid cases of crotch rot.
*'''Greatcoat/Rain Overalls''': Some Guard regiments are known to issue greatcoats or rain overalls to either keep their cannon fodder warm and dry during winter and the like. They are made of thick, heavy and sometimes waterproof fabric to ensure maximum warmth. The complete opposite of the shirt. [[Valhallan Ice Warriors]], [[Vostroyan Firstborn]]s, [[Armageddon Steel Legion|Armageddon Steel Legionnaires]] and the [[Death Korps of Krieg]] love the shit out of them.
*'''Combat Boots and Laces''': Standard-issue military boots meant to be rugged enough to survive in nearly any ground. Each boot is fashioned to ensure comfort for the Guardsmen's feet and comes in three sizes. Each boot is ensured to be waterproof and hard wearing, with each pair expected to last for a while. Like nearly everything else, a combat boot may differ from regiment to regiment. Cadia for example have boots made of rigid hard leather that protects the upper ankle and steel plates that protect the shins; they are called ankle-breakers. Meanwhile, Valhalla favours a rigid, heavily insulated boot with particularly sharp crampon-like grips on the soles. Whilst Attila and Tallarn favour a flexible-soled, lightweight boot that allows the foot to breathe through semo-permeable membranes within the boot's fabric. All combat boot boxes comes with additional spare laces in case the original was damaged or lost.
*'''Leg Gaiters''': Tl;dr, these are leg warmers. Largely used during snowy operations and therefore, are popular for snowy regiments like the Valhallans, leg gaiters offer an additional form of warmth around the ankle regions as a normal sock ain't cutting it. Not really that standard, but the Administratum just slaps every Guardsmen with one just in case.
*'''Webbing''': Every Guardsmen going into battle requires quite a lot of kit to carry around with. To do so in a ergonomic factor, each Guardsmen would be issued a form of combat webbing that allows a great deal of equipment to be layered onto the chest rig or backpack whilst leaving the arms free to fight. Typically, the front face of the webbing is fitted with pouches whilst the inside is fitted with mesh that forms a map pocket and has space for an additional two standard-issue Lasgun power packs. Combat webbing can be worn over Flak Armour or alone and has several hooks for grenades or entrenching tools.
*'''Belt and Holsters''': Every Guardsmen is given a standard-issue leather belt and a holster to ensure their big boy/girl pants don't accidentally drop down to their knees during inspection day and that their sidearm stays in place. Useful to avoid a wardrobe malfunction but also useful for the local [[Commissar]] or officer to use one as a makeshift flogging equipment.
*'''Bandolier''': Whilst regiments are all given bandoliers to hold additional ammunition, some regiments like the Catachan Jungle Fighters are obsess with them. Being a bunch of [[LARP|Rambo cosplayers]] is no surprise given how useful a bandolier is for holding additional ammo whilst looking [[Awesome|absolutely baller in the process.]]
*'''Field Rucksack with Straps''': Everyone's companion. This large canvas sack backpack holds all your necessary goodies to ensure a Guardsmen isn't completely fucked on duty. It can provide enough room for MREs, field equipment, trenching equipment, spare ammo, repair equipment and sleeping materials. You don't wanna lose one.
<gallery>
Flak_Chest.PNG|Chest piece of a Flak Armour.
Helmet.PNG|Flak Helmet, standard issue.
Micro_Bead.PNG|Micro Bead, comes standard with said helmet.
Boots_and_Sock.PNG|Combat boots and socks. Number one vector of the [[Poxwalkers|Walkingpox.]]
Webbing.PNG|Webbing, for when you want to [[LARP]] as Rambo.
Backpack.PNG|Field rucksack/backpack carrying all your needs.
</gallery>

====Survival Equipment====
[[File:UpliftingPrimer.jpeg|150px|right|thumb|Everyone's favourite used toilet paper.]]
Guns and armour isn't the only thing a Guardsmen needs. Here, all forms of survival equipment is important for him/her to survive beyond the safety of civilization. Such equipment includes:

*'''[[Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer]]''': Everyone's favourite standard-issue <s>toilet paper</s> booklet. Every Guardsman is issued one and they are expected to read this thing down to the T. Every piece of survival tips and tricks, alongside useless propaganda is written down in the book. A mix-bag all things considered but is better than nothing. It is also the ''one'' piece of equipment that a Guardsman must '''NEVER''' bring withim him/her on the battlefield for fear of it falling to the enemy's hands. Although to be honest, what useful info they may glean over would be as important as real-life toilet paper.
*'''[[Imperial Munitorum Manual]]''': Not as common as the Primer but orders of magnitude more useful. The Imperial Munitorum Manual is a booklet that goes in-detail towards the functionality of the [[Departmento Munitorum]], the list of equipment and how to maintain them, the list of punishments expected if breached, and the hierarchical structure of the Imperium wit-large. Again, not as common as the Primer, but when available, it usually comes with the complete package.
*'''Combat Ration Packs''': Hmmm...sweet lovely food. Every Guardsmen is expected to carry around five units of Combat Ration Packs (CRP). They are designed to sustain a soldier directly engaged in combat or under military training. Useful when normal food services aren't available, their long shelf-life and caloric-dense nutrition makes them an important part of a Guardsmen's survival. The CRP consists of a full meal packed in a flexible meal bag. The full bag is lightweight and easily fits within a Guardsmen's pockets. Each meal bag contains a nutrient-rich compound as well as foods designed to enhance the energy levels and stamina of a Guardsmen. Whilst it is theoretically safe to eat from the get-go, most Guardsmen like theirs cooked. CRP can be cooked traditionally or through a flameless heater via chemical reactions with water.
*'''Portable Hexamine Stove/Flameless Heater Pack''': When cooking CRPs or food caught by the Guardsmen themselves. They can cook their food through a standard-issue collapsible and portable Hexamine stove. These miniature stoves use solid fuel to heat up the food or beverage until the Hexamine tablets are used up. Some are also fitted with an adapter to hold a canteen or cup. Each stove comes with eight tablets in a waxed box, although sometimes a tinder box is issued as well. Although there are complaints that the fuel might be toxic or smells like shit, most Guardsmen can't complain too much as it is a convenient way to cook food on the go. If behind enemy lines, the light coming from the stove or the smoke used to burn up gathered materials may attract enemies. So a Guardsmen is also issued the aforementioned flameless heater pack that uses water as a pyrotechnic heating mechanism which lasts for fifteen minutes. Simply put the meal bag inside the heater pack, fill it with water and shake it until it chemically activates.
*'''Magnocular''': A binocular by any other name. The magnocular is meant for surveying purposes. Some magnoculars are compact and lightweight, but most are bulky and heavy. Magnoculars offer high light transmission and optical performance, enabling a Guardsman to view objects at a great distance away. Magnoculars are rubber armoured, shockproof and waterproof and can withstand the harshest battlefield conditions.
*'''Rebreather/Gasmask with Mk VIII Filter''': Gas masks for all intents and purposes. Rebreathers are used in environments that are too toxic to breath in. Depending on the type of engagement, some rebreathers merely covers the mouth and nose in near-Terran like atmospheres, but others like the gasmask with the Mk VIII Filter that filters out toxic particles cover the entire face in truly hell hole conditions. The Kriegers and the folks from the Steel Legion has an absolute hard-on for these things.
*'''Tent Kit''': Each Guard Squad is expected to have one member be the tent carrier. He/she carries the necessary materials to build a tent for everyone to sleep in. The tent kit includes the tent, several collapsible stainless steel poles, tensile rope, pins, a hammer and adhesive tape to fix any potential damages to the tent. The kit is designed to be as lightweight as possible whilst still being big enough to house a three-five men team.
*'''Medi-Pack''': Every Guardsmen is issued a portable medi-pack which is something like a convenient narthecium in a bag. Every Guardsmen is expected to be trained in various ways to alleviate injuries of various kinds through military practise although each squad must have a designated medic. The design of the medi-pack can range from a small medical kit to a complex scanning devices depending on the original source of the regiment and the planet's technological base. Basic medi-pack kits will usually contain drugs and bandages to treat a variety of injuries and illnesses, such as cataplasm patches, contraseptics, gauze/bandages, sterilised vein clamps, lotion of embalm, phials of morphia X4 (Space morphine), sterilising fluid of cleaning, cleansed surgical grapple, sanctioned insect repellent, and [[Anal circumference|blessed lotions, acid, alkali, medicinal tonics, tablets and internal cleansers for enema administration.]] More advance models might include a diagnostic Cogitator with bio-scanner and probes to determine the patient's ailments. The most advanced types, available to the elite of the Imperium, can include cast sprays, tox wands, synthskin applicators and more.
*'''Surveyor Gear''': Surveyor gears are piece of equipment used for tracking and mapping purposes so you know where the hell you're going and avoid accidentally entering the firing range of a Basilisk. The most common type of gear are Auspex Surveyor Units that can register varying levels of background radiation, infrared signatures and electromagnetic emissions to discover enemy troops. They are simple to operate and require only rudimentary intelligence to read. All a Guardsman has to do is simply point the Surveyor Unit in the general direction and pull the trigger to tell him/her the information to his/her's squad. The screen then displays the machine's findings as coloured dots on the slate (Red for hostile, blue for friendlies) in the various range bands (Ten metre increments).
*'''Orientation Gear''': The ''other'' piece of equipment that is designed in making sure your average Joe won't end up stumbling inside a Tyranid's nest. Orientation gears are your maps and compasses. They allow a Guardsman a better understanding on the battlefield they are on and where to go. The compass is accurate, rugged and reliable, being both waterproof and shockproof due to being encased in steel with metal hinges. The compass also comes with a built-in magnifying lens, finger loop and cord lanyard. Particularly 'advanced' models of compass may be fitted with chemical fluorescence vials, allowing the compass to be read at night.
*'''Mess Kit''': The things your average Joe eats from. Each mess kit from the Guard is constructed from enamelled steel and contains everything they need to prepare and serve. They are small, lightweight and very portable and their design differs from regiment to regiment. A Cadian version for example, contains a skillet, a small kettle, a plate, a cup and a Swiss army knife-style cutlery. The handles of these appliances are foldable to save space and can be detached to use with other cookware. The lids of each container can be used for preparing, cooking and/or eating and usually come in two or three pieces. Moreover, to complement the kit, Cadian mess kits use a specially moulded cup that fits over the bottom of the standard litre canteen for anything that requires a deep pot such as boiling water.
*'''Sleeping Equipment''': Do I have to spell it out? Each Guard regiment is given a quilted sleeping bag with blanket that tapers towards the end. Most of these bags are quilted with feathers that provide insulation against the cold, although some regiments is known to use synthethic materials instead. The outer layers of a sleeping bag must provide a high degree of tearing strength and must be waterproof. Some sleeping bags may incorporate hoods and are sometimes embellished with extra layers to allow [[/d/|more than one person to share the bag.]]
*'''Hygiene Kit''': No one and their mothers want to have a Guard regiment smelling like an [[Ogryn]] during parade day, so every Guardsmen is expected to be given a hygiene kit to look down and proper. Each kit comes with a bar of hard soap, dry scrub brush, shaving brush, razors, abrasive tooth cleaning paste and a tooth brush, alongside a sharpening stone to sharpen a Guardsman's bayonet for shaving purposes. Moreover, the kit comes with delousing powder that can be used to eradicate most forms of parasites or leeches. Although care must be taken as the powder is caustic and shoud be avoided around the groin or eyes. Some hygiene kits such as the Cadian pattern also includes a anti-fungal powder and anti-lice gel that should be employed regularly to ensure the prevention of the spread of diseases.
*'''Entrenching Tools''': Everyone's favourite shovel is listed under here. Entrenching tools are multi-purposed and can be used for a wide variety of things. This includes building trenches, planting seeds for food, burrying bodies or using it as a makeshift weapon. They have a foldable stock which allows a Guardsman to fit them in a nice, compact form and save space. The most well known of these shovels are the [[Miscellaneous_Weapons#9-70 Entrenching Tool|9-70 shovel]] which has its edge either sharpened or serrated. Kriegers hug these in their sleep.
*'''Hand Axe''': A [[Basic Close Combat Weapons#Axe|small hand axe]] is given to each Guardsmen for largely non-military purposes such as chopping wood, clearing trees or vines and cutting up meat. Pretty damn versatile and can be used as a makeshift weapon in case your bayonet breaks or you run out of ammunition. It is often made of stainless steel or ceramics.
*'''Lamp-Pack''': Each Guardsmen is also issued a lamp-pack. Now this may resemble a typical lamp to your typical flashlight (No, not ''that'' [[Lasgun|Flashlight]], ''the other one''). It is a primary light source for night patrols and is often powered via batteries. Should not be used behind enemy lines for obvious reasons.
*'''Anti-Contaminants''': Pretty important stuff when it comes to purifying the waters or killing parasites. Whilst each Guardsman is expected to carry a canteen filled with water, sometimes you run out and the next avaliable source of water is in the toilets. This is where this kit comes in handy. To avoid sudden case of [[Nurgle|explosive dirrahea,]] each Guardsman is issued with water purification tablets made from salt in the kit which would kill most virulent pathogens. Although drinking such purified water is unpleasant (Think soda water with the taste of salt), it is better than the alternative. The kit also contains vials of iodine which when taken orally, prevents 99% of the damage to the thyroid gland before being exposed to radiation.
<gallery>
Ration_Packs.PNG|Combat ration packs. Yum yum.
Collapsible_Stove.PNG|Portable hexamine stove, a convenient way to heat up your instant noodles.
Magnoculars.PNG|Magnoculars. I spy with my little eye.
Rebreather.PNG|Rebreathers, for when you're finding it a bit difficult to breathe.
Gas_Mask_Filter.PNG|A gas mask, for when you're breathing in [[Krieg]].
Medi-Pack.PNG|A medi-pack with its accessories.
Medi-Pack_Model.JPG|Krieg medi-pack model.
Surveyor_Gear.PNG|A surveyor gear, the motion tracker of 40k.
Orientation_Gear.PNG|An orientation gear console.
Compass.PNG|A compass, part of the orientation gear.
Map_IG.PNG|A map, another part of the orientation gear.
Mess_Kit.PNG|A Cadian issued mess kit.
Hygiene_Kit.PNG|A hygiene kit with its complimentaries.
9-70 Entrenching Tool.PNG|The 9-70 Entrenching Tool, everyone's favourite shovel.
Anti-Contaminants.PNG|Anti-Contaminants with all its accessories.
</gallery>

==Fluff and stuff==

Dan Abnett and the Guard’s latest Codex turned the IG into gods of mechanized warfare, though they still suck compared to 8-foot-tall Daemonic killing machines with chainaxes. To be fair, though, that's like comparing a sedan to a tank. How are you NOT supposed to suck against things that can slice through meter-thick speshul-steel armor like so much cheese?

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that the lowest currency in the Imperium is human life. Whereas the modern day commander would sacrifice expensive equipment (a cruise missile ain't cheap) to save even a single life, in the grim darkness of the far future, emphasis on civilian morale and "leave no man behind" ideals would screw up an already overtaxed bureaucratically fucked Munitorium. Instead, commanders do risk assessment. They're not going to devote resources just to save one lowly grunt if they will expend resources more expensive in return. Although to be fair, commanders who make these decisions know the moral implications of what they're doing while the Imperium treats this as a perfectly normal act.

[[File:Lord Solar Macharius.jpg|250px|left|thumb|"The meaning of victory is not to defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavors, to crush utterly his every achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."]]

A bit of maths, if you will. According to one calculation of the frequency of Hive Worlds, there are 32,380 Hive Worlds in the Imperium. The average population of these worlds is around 200 billion each. We put these together and we get 6.476E15 (6,476,000,000,000,000 or 6.476 Quadrillion) people on Hive worlds ALONE. Eventually there would be more human babies than there would be lasguns coming out of the Forge World assembly lines. So now you see why humans are worth so little. But this also means that once they get their ass in gear and onto the battlefield, they ALWAYS win, because they have practically unlimited manpower and resources. Compare it to water bashing against rocks. A few gallons won't do jack, but countless billions of tonnes crashing down on it WILL destroy it in a surprisingly short amount of time. Apply actual tactics, and it becomes [[rape|even more effective]] (Do keep in mind, it's not like they commit trillions of troops to one battle. The Imperium frequently has to withdraw, but it's like saying "We lost the battle, BUT NOT THE WAR!").

In fact, it is point-blank stated numerous times that guardsmen are way cheaper than their lasguns, because there are far more Hive Worlds to ''produce'' humans than there are Forge Worlds to produce lasguns. And to add more grimdark, the Imperium lost numerous forge worlds and mining worlds during the [[Time of Ending]], so there are even fewer lasguns and cardboard jackets coming from assembly lines. The [[Death Korps of Krieg]] have a specific guy who runs around battlefields shooting the wounded and collecting their gear (as well as blood and organs to fix those who still can be saved to fight next day).

Sometimes this creates a disparity with other parts of the setting, as an example, games and art with Hive Gangers make it clear that they can be better equipped and armed than Guardsmen, including varieties of ammunition (such as exploding bullets) and [[Rage|fucking powered exoskeletons and thunder/power weapon equivalents]].

Think of the Red Army from the Hollywood movie [[wikipedia:Enemy at the Gates|Enemy at the Gates]]: Soviet Russia there had a fuckton of soldiers to draw from, but many were not issued spare ammunition or even rifles, and were expected to loot supplies off dead bodies. On an individual level the Germans had the obvious advantage, but send in enough cannon fodder to keep them pinned inside they city, then cut them off, and they eventually cracked.

But what the Imperium does have going for itself is the individual heroism of its protectors. The Guard bears countless heroes, without whom the Imperium would have fallen ages ago. Notable heroes of the Imperial Guard include: [[Ollanius Pius]], [[Straken]], [[Creed|CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED]], [[Lord Solar Macharius]], [[Ciaphas Cain|Ciaphas Cain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM]], [[Vance Motherfucking Stubbs]], [[Yarrick]], [[Sly Marbo|SLY FUCKING MARBO]], [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt| Colonel-Commissar fething Ibram Gaunt]] and countless others. These extraordinary men and women inspire the masses around them to truly heroic deeds, and through those deeds, ensure that the Imperium will never falter. Which is kind of weird since the setting is supposed to be one in which everyone is worthless and heroes have no impact.

==Play Style==
[[File:Glory.jpg|300px|right|thumb|Men of the Brimlock Eleventh, fighting on Voor against Orks. Note the [[Judge Dredd]] pattern frown.]]

The Imperial Guard are notorious for their SIGAOD methodology: Shooty Imperial Guard Army Of Doom for the less than nerdy. The basic lasguns are downright pathetic, but can [[Dakka|still be effective if used en masse]], and we mean ''en masse''. The effect is a little like how cavemen throwing rocks could still be a threat to fully armored knights. It only takes one lucky shot and they don't stop shooting until they get lucky. Scientifically speaking, the lasguns are strong enough that they damage most materials, even Space Marine powered armor. It's just so minor against most foes that it doesn't matter. Until you get a hundred guys shooting at one target. Then it matters pretty damn quickly. Add in special weapons and heavy weapons and indirect fire like mortars all blazing away at an enemy and... yeah. Also, a lasgun used with precise aiming is quite lethal as you can devastate any vulnerabilities of a target easily. For example, the Vostroyan Firstborn are famous for their great precision and it shows in the massive kill-counts they rack-up. Who the fuck knows why that isn't a requirement for Guardsmen but it's probably because some goober in charge didn't notice and so never mentioned it in a memo to who-cares.

The IG has loads of vehicles. ''Loads'' of vehicles. Most of them are fairly cheap and pretty good for what you pay for, so it is quite easy for IG armies to have half a dozen vehicles or more in a medium-sized game. There are 4 principal IG ground vehicles of note:
* First is the [[Chimera Transport|Chimera]], which is the basic IG troop transport. In modern terms, it would be considered an Infantry Fighting Vehicle, not a mere APC. It is not particularly fast, but it is reasonably durable, it has good firepower, it's cheap, and the passengers can still shoot while inside. Bread and butter. It's also used as the chassis for various other vehicles. Overall it's far more useful than the [[Rhino]].
* The second is the iconic [[Leman Russ Battle Tank]]. It is in every way a solid, dependable warhorse. Key features include the BFG on the turret (that can potentially fire twice per turn as of 8th Edition), the optional heavy weapon sponsons, and the completely exposed engine in the rear. Apparently, they ran out of badass when they designed it. It is a very tough nut to crack.
* Third is the [[sentinel|Sentinel]]. It's a support walker, and while not generally as effective as the other big 3, it earns its place by virtue of utility. The sentinel can serve as a reliable escort and scout while also providing useful fire support. Featuring a decent variety of weapon options, it is also a cheap way to add Hunter-Killer missiles. It's hard to go wrong by taking a Sentinel.
* The last vehicle of note is the [[Basilisk Artillery Gun|Basilisk]]. Apparently, some tech-priest decided to take a Chimera, rip out the turret and troop compartment, and bolt on the biggest piece of artillery he could fit on it. The Earthshaker Cannon is far more powerful than even the BFG they stuck on the Leman Russ and has much longer range. No game of WH40k has been played where a target has been out of range of the Basilisk.

The four vehicles above are only a small selection of what the Guard has to offer, but they are all pretty reliable workhorses for most builds and strategies. Most other vehicles are specialized variants of the above, being largely situational units.

Let's not forget the Deathstrike Missile, which GW used to give UNLIMITED RANGE. Players have called up GW stores the next town over and told them that they're dropping a Deathstrike in the middle of whatever battle is closest, and they've accepted. ''The Range is 200" as of 8th edition, but 16 feet is still ridiculous.''

Also of note is 6th Edition's contribution of flyer units. The IG has the most non-apocalypse flyer units in 40k, and while some of them are absolutely useless for anything but flavor, some of them kick all kinds of ass. Triple twin-linked Lascannon, twin-linked Punisher Gatling cannons, or a flying tank-busting mega-bolter kinds of ass to be specific. Rape from above.

In summary, the Imperial Guard wins by having firepower, cannon fodder, and lots of both, transported in a massive variety of [[METAL BOXES]].

Unfortunately for the Guard, though, the Imperial Navy has a bad habit of taking ships that were designed to launch atmospheric craft in support of the Guard (such as Marauders) and instead sticks void combat attack craft inside (such as Furies) them. The result of this is painfully obvious if you're a Guardsman on the ground. Not to say they don't have air support, but that their air support has a presence that is completely at odds with the number of atmospheric fighters and bombers a ship can carry. The Navy literally fits whatever atmospheric fighters and bombers they can into whatever excess space remains after putting their Furies and Starhawks into hangers designed for holding countless Lightnings, Thunderbolts, Marauders, and Avengers, instead. Grimdark? Yep. Thanks to [[Roboute Guilliman]]'s reforms, the inability of Guard to fight at maximum efficiency (or make it to their destination in time without borrowing civilian transport ships) is kinda the point - it makes revolt much harder, and he didn't care if countless Imperium worlds would go to shit thanks to this, to exclude the possibility of [[heresy]] was much more important. Of course, the reason why a third of the Imperial Army rebelled was due to the Imperium violently conquering their worlds. Fortifying and consolidating conquests post-Heresy would have helped prevent rebellion and Administratum control (it was efficient back then) would have prevented the populace from feeling rebellious because their lives would be great. Damaging the Guard only prevented them from doing their job and really, any rebellious Guard regiments would be (and usually are) quickly annihilated by the loyalists surrounding them. Generally, they steal transports and Chaos forges provide plenty of aircraft for them. Defeating the point of weakening the Imperial Guard and actually making rebel regiments stronger.

Enter the Hydra. The only tank designed to take out aircraft. That is BADASS. Screw the navy. Hell, some regiments have a Leman Russ for every infantry squad! Do that with Thunderbolts or Lightnings in addition to the Russ and... yeah, epic stomp.

It's not inaccurate to think of tanks in the Guard as the actual infantrymen and as the footsloggers as supplemental.

So what's the catch? First thing, the Guard are quite good for what you pay for point-for-point, but they aren't exactly renowned for their individual resilience in the same way Astartes or Necrons are: Guardsmen are just T3 and 1W with a measly 5+ Sv provided by their flak vests, so most anti-infantry fire will turn them into red paste. This effectively requires you to bring infantry in bulk; in most other armies (Orks and Tyranids not withstanding), 70 infantry models would be a fairly large amount but for the Guard, that's a paltry figure and you can reasonably expect all of those guys to be dead by the end of round two. Their tanks fare somewhat better - the Leman Russ is their iconic mainstay and has T8 and 12W and a nice +2 Sv so it can shrug off a lot more than the flimsy infantry squads, but lacking any native invuls or FNP or other tricks to mitigate damage, the tanks will still go boom if dedicated anti-tank concentrates hits on them.

As anti-infantry massacre your squads in short order and anti-tank wrecks your vehicles in short order, this encourages a combined-arms approach to play. As in modern military strategy in real life, synergy between different arms working together is vital to your success. The Imperial Guard suffer greatly from good target selection on the enemy's part and it can be tricky to deny their efforts. Sadly this means the Guard are an army where you can still lose even if you do everything right. For example, should an Eldar player snipe your key officer with Rangers, blow up your artillery with Fire Dragons or get some Banshees or Wraithblades in your infantry line, you are in deep... and even one of those things happening can ruin your game in the long run (Eldar due to their extreme specialization are perfectly placed to exploit destroying Imperial Guard keystone units which is why they are traditionally a bad matchup for Guard, but it's not just them, many other armies definitely have the tools to put you in this situation). Ultimately, Guard is an army where you have a unit that can answer any situation but you'll have to get used to the idea of taking casualties and making sacrifices, and get smart at picking which vital unit is ''least'' vital to your long-term success.

That, and close combat. Unless you mob the enemy in bodies, buff your infantry to the point where they can be somewhat competent, or use Ogyrns/Bullgyrns, anything remotely optimized for close combat will go through your infantry line like shit through a goose. Guardsmen with proper support can ''sometimes'' handle low-tier TEQs like Guardians, Fire Warriors and Termagaunts but then it's a wasted effort - Guardsmen are much better in shooting, and any Eldar or Tau player using these units in melee should really just give up and play a Khorne army.

==Steel Balls, Then and Now==
[[File:Marines and ig.jpg|thumb|The Imperial Guard back in the [[Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader|Rogue Trader]] days, a Guardsman pulling a wounded Space Marine to safety, proving they were badass even back in the first edition. <s>holy shit is that a [[Squat]] in the background</s>|250px]]
In the ancient days of /tg/ before the Great Purge of 2009, the running meme for the Guard was that they had "steel balls", and it was well-deserved. In 4th edition and most editions prior, the Guard were stuck in the awkward position of being the Imperium's first line of defense, but were also obligated to be objectively worse than everyone at everything. The Guard were like the little brothers to the Space Marines, and when the Marines got a tank that had spearheaded human dominance for millennia, the Guard got a hand-me-down tank that used to be a tractor. This constant relegation, coupled with the Guard's system of shooting anyone who backed down from a fight, gained them a reputation as being patently badass against all odds. Everyone was a bully to them, and yet they stood up tall and spat in every bully's face!

But in 5th edition, Robin Cruddace took the helm for writing the Imperial Guard, and since it was his personal army and these were the days of "Spiritual Liege" writing, the Guard have shaped into bullies themselves. Since that time, the Guard have been able to field some of the most devastating weapons the game has to offer, with the largest armored battalions, to create some of the most frustrating meta environments possible. Tanks variants were also introduced that allowed the Leman Russ to escape the thumb of the Space Marines, so the "little brother" stigma came to a close. In fact it's now treated as a major crunch advantage to have access to some of the Guard's armory and design structure, and any competitive list will take the Guard meta into consideration. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll be in the upper tiers of play.

While it is logical that Space Marines would become an auxiliary to the Guard given the lore, and their sheer numbers set victory by attrition to be assured in the long run, the factions that would rival them based on the stories (though would lose strategically due to Imperial manufacturing power and organization) haven't held up well on the table. Orkz, the most militant and numerous combatants in the galaxy, have spent many long years suffering from poor accuracy and inane tactical pigeon-holes. It was, for example, standard procedure for Ork players to kill tanks by punching them because it's easier to have Orkz run after a moving vehicle than it is to get Tank Bustaz to shoot straight. As for Tyranids, the other race beyond numbers - Cruddace was allowed to write their codex and they paid dearly for it. For the better part of a decade, the bugs have also been using limited options to jury-rig solutions to basic problems that appear in every conventional 40k game.

[[Bullshit|Over time, people quit talking about how "badass" the Guard were.]] They aren't really underdogs in lore or crunch, and it's difficult to think of them as "bold" when you watch a Guard player table your army in a single round of shooting. If anything, it's the Orkz and everyone else who are brave as all hell for standing up to the bastards, or too stupid to stop, or both. Although, if you became a Guardsman you’d probably go insane quickly from the horrific space monsters and daemonic shit. So, still balls of steel. And their kit and tanks are so damn cool.

==Notable Figures of the Imperial Guard==
[[File:Stormtrooper vs Ork.jpg|250px|right|thumb|Who's "ded 'ard" NOW, you grammatically-challenged cucumber?!]]
*[[Ciaphas Cain]] - '''HERO OF THE IMPERIUM''' (Charming Commissar in the Harry Flashman/Edmund Blackadder tradition.)
*[[Jurgen|Ferik Jurgen]] - Cain's assistant/bodyguard many of the '''HERO OF THE IMPERIUM'S''' victories have been due to Jurgen and his skill with a melta gun. That and he's a psychic blank so magic bs doesnt work on him.

*<s>Colonel-Commissar</s> <s>Lord Militant Commander</s> [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt|First Lord Executor Militant Ibram Gaunt]] - (Rambo + Sharpe + 40,000 king of awesome) Main protagonist of Gaunt's Ghosts, and a REAL hero of the Imperium, [[grimdark|unjustly doomed to lowly obscurity]].
*[[Commissar Yarrick]] - Old one-eye. Saviour of Armageddon, twice. Known for having an Ork Klaw on his arm, having a personal Baneblade, and a [[gay|bizarre]] relationship with the ork warlord [[Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka]].
*[[Holt|Commissar Holt]] - Awesome cinematics are awesome, from Warhammer 40,000: Final Liberation. Don't you dare to simply call him Holt. {{BLAM}}
*[[Commissar Dan]] - "But Commissar Dan says we're on a blaze for glory run!" "Commissar Dan is a ''maniac''! Never listen to anything he says." Also canon thanks to FFG.
*[[Commissar Fuklaw]] - Currently in service with the [[Angry Marines]].
*[[Commissar Raege]] - Currently trolling [[Space Marines]].
*[[General Sturnn]] - Manly damn old son of a bitch, from [[Dawn of War#Winter Assault|Dawn of War: Winter Assault]]. Struggles with grammar because of the grit in his teeth.
*[[Castor|Lord General Castor]] - Sporting a manly mustache and known for having a trophy room full of Tyranid heads.
*[[Ollanius Pius]] - The catalyst for the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Emperor]] finally ''erasing'' [[Horus]] out of existence. (Erased from canon at one point, later restored, and as of the Horus Heresy book series the fluff for him is a bit complicated, but he's still awesome in his own way.)
*[[Vance Motherfucking Stubbs]] - Another manly bastard, <s>famous for "losing" a hundred [[Baneblade]]s.</s>{{BLAM}}{{BLAM|LIES AND CHAOS PROPAGANDA!!! There is nothing written about the Baneblades being lost.}}
*[[Colonel "Iron Hand" Straken|Colonel "I ate a Miral landshark for breakfast" Straken]] - Yet another manly fucker and another solid contender for biggest balls in the Imperial Guard.
*[[Knight Commander Pask]] - Rain man in 40k. An autistic Leman Russ tank ace that has destroyed Titans and Gargants. With a Leman Russ. He somehow manages to wreck his tank in every battle, always getting a new one and renaming it "hand of steel." He's managed to claw his way out of hundreds of burning wrecks somehow.
*[[Colonel Greiss]] - Straken's former commander and proof that the manliest fuckers the Imperial Guard have aren't necessarily the biggest.
*[[Creed|Lord Castellan Usarkar E. Creed]] - Famous for outflanking enemies with Titans. Must have been the work of some sort of tactical geniu-CREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED!!!
:*After [[Trazyn]] put Creed into his vault, Geedubs replaced him with his totally-also-a-genius (<s>actually elevated by Imperial nepotism-</s> {{BLAM}}) daughter, Ursula <s>[[Meme|Trumbull]]</s> Creed.
*[[Merrick]] - Tough bastard who survived a Tyranid Invasion, a Chaos uprising, ten years of nonstop combat, and putting a gun to his superior's head. Also fucking strong, since he can carry an entire heavy weapons setup on his own.
*[[Sly Marbo]] - ...by time you have read this... you are already dead... <strike>Gone, just like Creed's ability to scout titans, because GW hates awesome things.</strike> He's ''baaaaaaack...''
*[[Doom]] Marine - because, why the hell not?
*[[Enginseer|Engineseers]] - All of them. Want to repair your own tank, do you? HERE'S THE FUCKING MANUAL. By the way, it's [[Heresy]] to do it yourself.
* [[Lord Commander Solar Macharius]] - A Brilliant tactician who [[/tg/_Gets_Shit_Done|Gets Shit Done]] (in fluff) and the most useless command choice from the Second Edition Codex: Imperial Guard who would habitually screw up your entire battle plan since he rolled for his strategy rating on a D6 (which decided who got the first turn) and 4-6 would stop you firing your army-fucking pre-battle barrage. On a 6 you also had to put everything you had in reserve on the table. He also had no model and the fluff gave no idea what he looked like. IMPROVED IN 3RD ED WHEN HE GOT BETTER RULES AND A MODEL: Baseline stats are: WS D3+2, BS4, S3, T3, W4, I4, A D3+1, LD10
**Because he is slow in his old age, he has an initiative of 4, which is pretty bad, but he can potentially have four attacks with a mastercrafted power weapon at a WS of 5. He's still too wild of a character to use in a serious game, so save him for your fuck-around games, or Apocalypse.
**In conclusion, he has a terrible crunch but have a ridiculously awesome fluff being as the most successful Warmaster ever existed since the Great Crusade
*[[The Last Chancers|Colonel Schaeffer]] - The craziest, malicious, heinous and downright evil imperial guard officer to ever exist. Most other officers are either incompetent when battlefield tactics are concerned or egocentric to the point of believing nothing else around them has a pulse, ultimately resulting in the average footslogger having such a brief lifespan. Colonel Schaeffer on the other hand, intends to make those under his command suffer in the most grueling, painful and surprisingly productive way possible. He is there along with them too.
*Colonel Jurten - Nuked the living shit out of his own planet, 'cuz Krieg ain't belonging to no one but the Big E. Then inhabited it solely with clones, mostly of himself.
*[[Commander Kubrik Chenkov]] "Now see here comrade, is all for great glory of great Stalin empero- Нет! Вернись, свинья! {{BLAM}} Essentially a stereotypical Soviet General IN SPESS. Known for being the most famous user of the "send in the next wave" tactic, [[Grimdark|wherein a squad of 50 conscript guardsman are sent into a minefield to clear it by triggering them and another 50 are sent in immediately when they all inevitably die]]. The biggest waste of flesh the Imperial Guard will likely ever see, he's only survived by dint of never running out of soldiers and somehow clawing together victories. Emperor help Chenkov's ass if he meets Ibram Gaunt, Ciaphas Cain or Vance Motherfuckin Stubbs as he will most likely end up in the Penal Legions if they hear how that idiot spends his men like autogun bullets. Heck its a surprise that no other Imperial Guard leader or commander above Chenkov has shanked his ass yet. His only redeeming factor is that he considers his life no more important that anyone else's and leads his men from the front.

==Main Advantages of Fielding an Imperial Guard Army==
*Shit loads of men to throw around the battlefield[[File:tautears.png|500px|right|thumb|Sweet, sweet-salty tears.]]
*'''[[Basilisk Artillery Gun|BASILISKS]]'''
*'''[[Baneblade|BANEBLADES]]'''
*'''[[Manticore Rocket Launcher|MANTICORES]]'''
*'''[[Leman Russ Battle Tank|LEMAN RUSSES]]'''
*'''[[commissar|*BLAM*]]'''
*[[Creed|Titans acting as scouts]].
*Reasonable prices for vehicles. Sorta.
*Tank Squadrons.
*The first and best [[Hydra Flak Tank|Flak Tank]].
*Loyal soldiers that can and will [[Ollanius Pius|hold the line to the bitter end]].
*[[Commissar Yarrick]]
*Cool looking models and plenty of variety to choose from.
*Standard issue adamantium balls.
*'''YOU COULD NOT POSSIBLY FORGET THAT YOUR GUYS FIELD ''THE BEST TANKS OF THE GAME'', RIGHT?'''
*'''VANQUISHERS, FUCK YOU [[tau|BLUE SKINNED PANZIES]]'''
*Did we forget to mention that all units have standard issue balls of steel? Except for Yarrick. He has adamantium balls. And [[Sly Marbo|that guy in the cardboard box]]. <del>He has Power Balls.</del>(No one has ever been able to confirm what kind of balls he has (EXCEPT FOR YO MAMA! OOOOOH!) no one fucks with Sly is any form of the word and lives to tell the tale) [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B2w0abQazg| Your dudes are basically this guy.]]

==<del>Downsides to being a Guardsman</del> Highly fanciful scenarios that most likely will not occur during your glorious service as a Guardsman==

While your local propaganda might say that being in the guard is the most honorable thing you could ever get into, and it is! Here is a small list of things that will very likely never happen to you and are entirely preventable with forethought, your trusty lasgun, and endless faith in the Emperor:

[[File:709869c659acffb373baece7b5d00582-d6lzjxz.jpg|right|thumb|300px|[[Awesome|Heroic last stands]] not included, [[Grimdark|but encouraged greatly]].]]

*You will die in the line of duty and no-one but your family and friends will remember you unless you've done something that only a Space Marine could do in combat. ''Anyone can do it!''
*You're expendable in every sense of the word. ''Freedom isn't free and you're the currency that pays for it!''
*Your Commissar might execute you to make your friends fight harder. ''You deserved it.''
*Your Commissar might execute your friends to make you fight harder. ''They deserved it.''
*Unless you're in a special forces division like the Kasrkin, you're really just a meatshield in large scale assaults. ''A glorious, spiffy looking meatshield!''
*"See how great this is? Your very own laser gun!" Too bad it's a bad joke compared to everyone else's guns. ''You're just using it wrong.''
*You can't even die when you want to. ''You don't want to be a quitter, do you?''
*You might be: [[Chaos Space Marines|mutilated, disemboweled]], [[Tyranids|eaten alive]], [[Orks|chopped into meat chunks by a rusty slab of metal]], [[Necron|disassembled into your component atoms]], [[Chaos Gods|sacrificed to the Chaos Gods]], [[Imperium|left for dead]], [[Dark Eldar|tortured for fun by xenos]], [[Chaos|mutants, heretics and zealots]], [[Eldar|stuffed with shurikens and lasers better than yours]], [[Tau|or blasted by high-power rounds from miles away]]. ''But you'll earn the eternal gratitude of the Emperor!''
*You will be sent into hopeless situations and your superiors expect you to fight without retreating or showing cowardice. ''Just do it, no one likes a crybaby!''
*You may be used as mine clearance. By being marched through the minefield. ''That's right boys, you can teach those dastardly mines who's boss by blowing them up!''
* Even if after losing your entire regiment, watching your last-minute friends die horrendous deaths, and generally do the most gruesome work to win the day; the minute Space Marines come crashing down from the sky; They'll take all the credit for it, even if the Marines themselves attribute the win to you. ''They deserve it.''
* Those same Space Marines might [[Marines Malevolent|bomb you and the civilians you're trying to save into mulch because you're too weak to be worth rescuing.]] ''You deserve it, weakling.''
*You will be taken from your home planet and dropped on the other side of the universe to fight in a war you didn't know existed. ''Think of the interesting people you'll meet, and then subsequently possibly kill!''
*You will NEVER see your home planet again unless you are stationed there. In which case it is likely under siege by yet another one of the Imperium's foes, and will likely remain so for the remainder of your short life. ''Think of the interesting places you'll see, and then subsequently blow up!''
*5 Million of you dying under a four hour assault by orks, is considered a flawless victory by Segmentum Command (Then again that would likely be either a very large ork warband or a WAAAGH!, so GOOD JOB!). ''Better than 5 million and one, am I right?''
*If you fight along side Grey Knights, you will be *BLAMMED*, or mindfucked and lobotomized, after the battle in the interest of secrecy. ''Grey Knights don't exist, that's silly.''
*Hell, just fighting Chaos has a slight chance of you getting disposed of after the battle because the Inquisitor investigating your regiment thinks that you may be a slight, bit, tad tainted. ''You wouldn't want to spread that taint would you?''
*Even when your army are the only ones that still uses combined arms warfare, your army still sucks, since it's routinely losing entire brigades (complete with Armor vehicles and aircraft) to any single bog-standard Space Marine and/or xeno mook. ''But not you! Your buddies and you can definitely take 'em!''
*God forbid you dare complain. Fucking Commissars. ''Morale must be maintained!''

==Memorable Quotations==

[[File:Astra Militarum Symbol.jpg|right|400px]]

- "Enemies of the Imperium, hear me. You have come here to die. The Immortal Emperor is with us and we are invincible. His soldiers will strike you down, his war machines will crush you under their treads, his mighty guns will bring the very sky crashing down upon you. You cannot win. The Emperor has given us his greatest weapon to wield. So make yourselves ready. We are The First Kronus Regiment, and today is our victory day!" - [[Governor-Militant Lukas Alexander]]

- "The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush his achievement and remove all record of his very existence. From that defeat there is no recovery. That is the meaning of victory." - [[Lord Solar Macharius]]

- "What is the strongest weapon of mankind? The god-machines of the Adeptus Mechanicus? No! The Astartes Legions? No! The tank? The lasgun? The fist? Not at all! Courage and courage alone stands above them all!" - [[Lord Solar Macharius]]

- "Though our tanks and artillery are mighty, it is the vast ranks of Imperial Guardsmen that shall trample the enemy to dust - let them come" - [[Creed]]

- "I have at my command an entire battle group of the Imperial Guard. Fifty regiments, including specialized drop troops, stealthers, mechanised formations, armoured companies, combat engineers and mobile artillery. Over half a million fighting men and thirty thousand tanks and artillery pieces are mine to command. Emperor show mercy to the fool who stands before me, for I shall not." - Warmaster Demetrius

- "The enemies of mankind may employ dark sciences or alien weapons beyond Humanity's ken, but such deviance comes to naught in the face of honest human intolerance backed by a sufficient number of guns."

-DRIVE ME CLOSER! I want to hit them with my sword! (originally a meme that started from a picture of a Commissar standing up in a tank hatch brandishing his sword, the phrase became so popular it is one of Commissar Lord Bernn's in campaign/skirmish/multiplayer lines when he gets in a Chimera in Dawn of War II, Retribution)

- "Look at me. Look at me! ''This'' is home now, Trooper! This is the zone! It doesn't like you, but by the Throne, it's where you are! The Emperor wants you, boy! Did no one ever tell you that? The Emperor wants you to make his glory for him! And if you're scared, I'm terrified. The [[Chaos|archenemy]] is no playmate. You're going to see things, and be expected to do things your poor mother would have a fit at. But the Emperor expects, and the Emperor ''protects'', all of us, even you. Especially you - I promise you that." - [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt]]

- "Pain is temporary, Honour is forever" - [[Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt]]

- "That which I cannot crush with words alone, I shall crush with the [[Baneblade|tanks]] of the Imperial Guard!" - [[Lord Solar Macharius]]

- "You're a fearsome warrior! Act like it!" - [[Dawn of War II|General Castor]]

- "[[Commissar|You don't die until I say so!]]"

- "[[Commissar|Forward you dogs to victory!!]]"

- "[[Commissar|Glory to the first man to die! CHARGE!!!]]"

- "[[Regimental Commissar Anton Gebbet|If you will not serve in combat, then you will serve on the firing line!]]"

- "To each of us falls a task, and all the Emperor requires of us Guardsmen is that we stand the line, and we die fighting. It is what we do best: We die standing." - General Sturnn, Dawn of War: Winter Assault

- "Only in death does duty end" - [[Sturnn]]

- "All right men! TIME TO WAGE TO WAR!" - [[Sturnn]]

- "A true servant never yields to doubt" - [[Vance Motherfucking Stubbs|General Vance Stubbs]]

- "Remember, we have more numbers men!" - sergeant in skirmish/multiplayer line from Dawn of War II Retribution

- "Let's see them fight ALL of us!" Guardsman, Dawn of War: Soulstorm

- "For each one of us that falls, 10 more will take its place!" Guardsman, Dawn of War: Soulstorm

- "We died so that others may live." - Unknown Brimlock Dragoon

- "Infantry wins firefights, tanks win battles, artillery wins wars." - Tactica Imperialis

- "A Guardsman's LIFE is to die. My job has always been to send them where they CAN die. I'm not afraid to spend men, but I never waste them!" - [[Dawn of War II|General Castor]]

- "Your foe is well equipped, well-trained, battle-hardened. He believes his gods are on his side. Let him believe what he will. We have the tanks on ours." - Colonel Joachim Pfeiff, [[Death Korps of Krieg|Krieg]] 14th Armoured Regiment

- "A good general does not lead an army to destruction just because he knows it will follow." - The Tactica Imperialis

- "Let my epitaph be this; I was born nameless and abandoned in the gutter of a sunless pit, but I have died a conqueror of worlds." - Reputed last words of Lord Militant Erais Slaithe

- "Peace is not in my vocabulary." - Commander Jarra Mordiker of the 13th/5th support regiment

- "A good soldier obeys without question. A good officer commands without doubt." - Tactica Imperialis

==A Piece of Writing That Explains the Imperial Guard==
At the end of the day, though he's been ferried through [[Warp|hell]] on a ship that's ten thousand years old to some godforsaken, war-torn rock; though he deployed from high orbit with nothing but a grav chute; though he is one of ten million men and women snatched from his homeworld to fight a war he barely understands; though he has been given a weapon that fires small suns and may annihilate him as he fires because the knowledge of how it functions has been lost; though his company is supported by tractor-tanks that run on anything you can burn; though he wages war against a [[Tyranid|devouring hivemind]], ravenous [[Daemon|demons]] and [[Ork|hordes]] of [[Eldar|hyper-advanced]] [[Tau|aliens]] with [[Necron|strange technologies]] and [[Chaos Sorcerer|sorceries]] he never dreamed existed; no one will remember his sacrifice, there will be no records of his deeds, no glorious parades in his honor, and no remembrance of his name. All he will earn is a shallow, unmarked grave on a forgotten world untold light years from home.

Yet for all this thankless sacrifice a Guardsman is a man, just like you. He has no [[Space Marines|millennia-old genetic engineering]], no [[Emperor|prophetic leader]], no [[Sisters of Battle|miracles of faith]]. He has his lasgun, his orders, and those beside him. He is an Imperial Guardsman.

[[Awesome|And he will hold the line.]]

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=139wRZ83gKg Now in Manly Tear inducing audio format!]

==Another piece of writing: Pity the guardsmen==
Pity the Guardsman...

A weak sack of flesh destined to die for a dead god that never cared, he spends his pitiful, brief life, alone in his foxhole with nothing to keep him company, or to keep him safe, than the cheapest, most disposable of equipment. Perhaps the glow from his lasgun barrel keeps him warm at night.

Me? As a servant of the Powers I enjoy the delights of all this world and the warp has to offer. Power, it courses through my veins. The gifts of the Chaos Gods will soon overtake me, and one day I may even ascend. What has the Guardsman to look forward to but a grim life, and if he is lucky perhaps he will feel nothing as my axe sends his soul to Khorne.

He lives for a corpse god, and he shall join his god, as a corpse. I shall spare a half second to think of him and his kind. Then, I shall only laugh. Hail Chaos!

----

You would laugh monster, But let me remind you.

Within that weak sack of meat and bone, uncared for by his god and wept for by none, beats a heart. A human heart, that carries with it the strength and courage of all mankind. Within that sack of meat is ensconced the hope, the will, and the fury of every man, woman, and child from every corner of the Imperium. Within that weak sack of meat, festooned in thin armour and weapons only powerful in numbers, beats the heart of a man. And for ten thousand years, the hearts of men have beaten, strongly, in defiance of your so called "powers". For ten thousand years, the hearts of men have stood united against a galaxy that despises them for no reason save that they had the audacity not to lay down and die. For ten thousand years, your Black Crusades have been pushed back, beaten down and made a mockery of, by weak sacks of flesh with cheap weapons and disposable equipment.

For that weak sack of flesh that you so gleefully mock is no super soldier, no immortal warrior, no creature cursed by Chaos like you. He is a man, an Imperial Guardsman drawn from some forgotten corner of the Imperium to fight for his species and for the safety of the people he loves. He is a factory worker, a farmer, a storekeeper, a father, a brother, a son, a mere man. And against creatures like you, teeming and numberless, powered by the very will of thirsting gods... he holds the line. He has held the line for ten thousand Years.

So what's your excuse, monster?

And in [https://youtu.be/qyGDo1ARpjI 3d animated version for extra pleasure] the guardsmen can finally get the recognition he deserves.

==A Selection of Approved Music for the Imperial Guard==

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmX1NlxYt_k - Imperial Guard in a nutshell
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWBoMWZJkeI - (none of that 'mercan shite)(It's pronounced 'Murican)
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxapTnODhCs - A marching song that most Training worlds use to this day.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJNz2QgSNsk - Standard cadence song sung by veteran units.
*https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n7hHlh2IusY - Commonly sung by Trench and siege regiments, thought to be about an ancient civil war
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjvKZHJeayg - Rumored to be used by Praetorian Guard Regiments
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRIAw6LkqlE - Again, a rumored anthem.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5NzAksjfDI - Wildly popular Catachan song, most notable for being sung aboard transports.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gS1lBID2Mtw - Popular parade piece for the Phantine Air Corps
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9fSEdZIM08 - March of the Death Korps of Krieg
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWgsdexkv18 - Harakoni Warhawks are sometimes required to memorize the lyrics as part of their training.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKT7qxk9-pw - A campfire song often heard from Drookian Fen Guard encampments.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26cr_rBQu74&list=- A traditional folk/drinking song of the Vostroyan Light Armor and Mounted regiments.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLV4_xaYynY - Traditional Catachan folk song. Catachan Guardsmen are sometimes heard either humming, warbling or whistling this song while on Guard duty.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V92OBNsQgxU - This is song is inevitably played over loudspeakers whenever there are two or more Valkyries entering the battlefield.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVcD1gW-cQE - This song begun to resurface throughout Valhallan Armored Regiments after a few joint missions with Knight Commander Pask's Cadian 423rd Armoured Regiment.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1uGm_dIqBI - Quite popular among Vostroyan artillery regiments.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrJAwCBbnuc- Often sung by storm troopers during risky and/or frontal assaults on enemy forward positions or leading massive charges.

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umzRoqtWvrA- Sometimes heard while the Drookian Fen Guard are on the march.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YsMCqgZPKE- Heard when the Drookian Fen Guard are in battle.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6MgTQ-56P0- Ballad of the Imperial Guardsman
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhqWHIq-aZw- Undisputed Anthem of the Imperial Guard.

==Notable Imperial Guard Forces==
Because GW was too lazy to create an original themed Imperial Guard army, they basically used RL armies as a base for them, gave them a little touch of [[grimdark]], assorted amounts of tempered ceramite balls and placed them... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE!

*[[Cadia|Cadian Shock Troops]]: (Resettled after Cadia's fall) Generic occidental army/Colonial Marines/Mobile Infantry clones... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! FOR [[Imperium|IMPERIUM]] AND [[Emprah|EMPEROR]]! CADIA STANDS!
*[[Catachan Jungle Fighters]]: Vietnam War Americans (with Australians, British and Canadians)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! GOOD MORNING CATACHAN!
*[[Tallarn Desert Raiders]]: Lawrence of Arabia's Raiders (or Mujihadeen)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! الإمبراطور أكبر!
*[[Armageddon Steel Legion]]: Wehrmacht mechanized divisions... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! FÜR DEN IMPERATOR, FEUER FREI!
*[[Armageddon Ork Hunters]]: American John Rambo Commandos... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! WE ARE YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE, ORKS!!!
*[[Valhallan Ice Warriors]]: World War II Soviet Red Army... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! ЗА РОДИНУ! ЗА ИМПЕРАТОРА! НИ ШАГУ НАЗАД!
*[[Mordian Iron Guard]]: Napoleonic Prussians (spiffing blue uniforms, iron hard discipline and ranked fire)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! GOTT KAISER MIT UNS!
*[[Death Korps of Krieg]]: WWI's Western Front (both sides), offensive side... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Now that we're in space, imagine what the Clone Army in [[Star Wars]] might be if Lucas liked grimdark as much as he liked CGI and revising the original trilogy.
*[[Gilead Gravediggers]]: WWI's Western Front (both sides), defensive side... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! POUR L'EMPEREUR, ON NE PASSE PAS! The less grimdark and even more trench-loving cousins of the Kriegers.
*[[Vostroyan Firstborn]]: Cossacks... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! YOU WILL NOT MAKE SUBJECTS OF IMPERIAL SONS, FUCK YOUR MOTHER!
*[[Elysian Drop Troops]]: French paratroopers... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! QUI OSE GAGNE! POUR L'EMPEREUR! (Taros Campaign=Dien Bien Phu or Operation Market Garden)
*[[Dieprian Mountain Men]]: World War II Italian Army Alpini Corps... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! NESSUNA MONTAGNA È TROPPO ALTA PER NOI, PER L'IMPERATORE!
*[[Harakoni Warhawks]]: American paratroopers... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! GREEN LIGHT!!! LET'S GO!
*[[Tanith First (And Only)]]: Roman-era Celts... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! DWI'N OFN, OND DILYNWCH FI!
*[[Attilan Rough Riders]]: <strike>Mongols</strike> Huns... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! ([[White Scars|Yes, again.]])
*[[Mordant Acid Dogs]]: Post-apocalyptic miners (and a bit of Raiders)... IIIINNN SPAAAACE!!!... ACID EVERYONE? THERE IS ENOUGH FOR EVERY HERETIC AND XENO!!!
*[[Savlar Chem Dogs]]: Post-apocalyptic raiders (and a bit of the Vietnam War tunnel rats)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! They rule Bartertown, get out of here guardsman.
*[[Terrax Guard]]: World War II Soviet Commissars (This is essentially a Commissar Regiment with extra steps)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! ТОЛЬКО ВЕРНЫЙ ВЫИГРЫВАЕТ ДЕНЬ!
*[[Drookian Fen Guard]]: Anglo-Scottish border reivers... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! A GOT NAE PANTS ON UNDER MA KILT SO A KIN DRAPE MA BALLS ON YER FACE WHILE YE CHOKE ON YER OWN BLOOD, YE NINNY LITTLE WANKER!!
*[[Praetorian Guard]]: Victorian British Army... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! PRAETORIANS NEVER YIELD! (Ever seen the movie ''Zulu''? Like that, but against [[ork|Orks]]. And yes that is a bit racist when you stop and think about it but oh well, just give your officer darker skin tone, not like anyone who isn't a major [[That Guy]] would care about that in real life.)
*[[Kanak Skull Takers]]: Cavemen (with some Apache)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! ME TARZAN, YOU DEAD!!
*[[Brontian Longknives]]: Australian Crocodile Dundee swordsmen (That's not a knife. THAT'S a knife!)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Guns? Too modern to my taste.
*[[Phantine Air Corps]]: Battle of Britain RAF... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! FLIP OVER ON HIS BETTY HARPER AND CATCH HIS CAN IN THE VERTI!!
*[[Phantine Skyborne]]: British SAS... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Who dares, wins.
*[[Scintillan Fusiliers]]: 18th century French aristocrats... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! QU'ILS MANGENT DE LA BRIOCHE!! Likely doomed if their [[Commissar|Commissars]] get an STC for a portable guillotine.
*[[Ventrillian Nobles]]: 16th century Spanish conquistadors (with some WHFB Tileans)... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! POR VENTRILLIA, EL IMPERIO Y EL EMPERADOR!!! Unlike those Scintillan pussies who have panic attacks at a paper cut, the dashing gentlemen of Ventrilla actually know how to fight.
*[[Maccabian Janissaries]]: Ottoman Empire's Elite Corps... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! AMINA KOYAYIM!!! Nobody cared who they were until they put on the masks.
*[[Indigan Praefects]]: Monster Hunters... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Certified Imperium Beast and Pest Control.
*[[Jopall Indentured Guard]]: Corporate Debt Bondaged Soldiers... IIIIINNNN SPAAACE! FOR PROFI-err I mean, FOR THE EMPEROR!!!
*[[Athonian Tunnel Rats]]: Vietnam War Tunnel Rats (and a bit of Post-Apocalyptic raider flavor... this feels familiar)... IIIIINNN SPAAAACE!
*[[Necromundan Spiders]]: New York street gangs... IIIIINNN SPAAAACE! HERETICS! COME OUT TO PLAY-AY!
*[[Solar Auxilia]]: The first iteration of the Imperial Guard. ''Significantly'' better equipped than their latter-day counterparts.

With such a large and diverse collection of units in the Imperial Guard that puts even the Space Marine armies to shame, you'd think that you'd have plenty of options for fielding an army, right? Well, I've got some bad news for you: Realistically, you can only field Cadians and Catachans in large numbers, as well as the Death Korps <s>and Elysians</s> if you're willing to pay [[Forge World]] prices. As for everyone else? Entirely discontinued (or never made in the first place), with the sole exception of the base Steel Legion infantry squad, and most of them were never made in plastic, so good luck trying to get custom loadouts. Yes, some units like the Attilans or Harakoni may seem too out there to have broad appeal, but you'd think at least the Steel Legion would get more support, what with their intimate involvement in [[Armageddon]], one of 7th Edition's Warzone settings (or it could be a scam to make you pay FW prices as their models look pretty similar to death korps).

GW are at least remaking Gaunt's Ghosts in plastic, though six named characters is hardly enough to make a full Tanith army. There are also [[Victoria Miniatures|some]] [[Anvil Industry|people]] who can cover your needs for legally-distinct space army men in a variety of flavors. Now Attilans are back.

==Imperial Guard forces featured in Black Library novels==
The writers from Black Library have also created some armies for Black Library novels, and while some of them only appear in one novel or short story they may be worth mentioned as a great source of custom Imperial Guard armies:

* Arkhan Confederates, Civil War American Regiments... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Featured in the extremely [[grimdark]] novel ''Fire Caste'', their name seems to be a reference both to the state of Arkansas and [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s haunted city of Arkham (also their homeplanet is Providence, so yeah), they just came out of a civil war between loyalists and rebels, with their average troopers getting the slang of "greybacks", their culture is akin to America's 19th century with a bit of northern barbarian for some measure, while the Adeptus Mechanicus have enforced Mars dogma Arkhan nobles still have a tendency to tweak and build their own machines as a form of Omnissiah worship, which have resulted in [[Awesome|jumpack sentinels and the Zouaves clockwork power-armoured elite soldiers, which are capable to stand their ground against Tau battlesuits]] (progress!), also their psykers usually come with a northern tribesman guardian who is tasked to chop the psyker's head in case it gets perils of the warp.

* [[Roane Deepers]], ANZAC... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! Featured in ''Ghostmakers'' and ''Necropolis'' by [[Dan Abnett]], they fought with the [[Tanith First (And Only)]] during the [[Sabbat Worlds Crusade]] on Vervunhive. Light infantry and poorly equipped, courtesy of their homeworld being far down the [[Administratum|Departmento Munitorum]]'s list, they come with a bad reputation of being lazy with warfare and training approach. However, when lasers and bullets start whistling around, they are tenacious fighters. They suffered heavy casualties against the much better equipped [[Blood Pact]]. Their uniforms are made of mustard color fatigues, flak armor and a netted helmet.

* Vitrian Dragoons, ancient Babylonians... IIIIIINNN SPAAAACE! with a bit of Ottoman Empire. Another regiment featured in Dan Abnett's novels. Shock infantry. Wear carapace armour made from a glassy metal from their home world. They also have their own [[Ultramarines|codex which tells them tactical situations and how to react in combat scenarios.]]

==[[/tg/_40,000#Imperial_Guard | /tg/ Homebrew Guard Forces]]==
Here are some of the regiments spawned by /tg/.
* [[Cendra#Armed_Forces |Cendran Abolishers]]: Pyromaniacs who eat the burnt flesh of their enemies.
* [[Darmine#Darmine_Marshalls | Darmine Marshalls]]: Elite sharpshooters supported by huge amounts of explosive collar-fitted penal troopers.
*[[Onóir#Onóir First and Foremost | Onóir First and Foremost]]: Heavy troopers who use an unholy amount of [[Valkyrie|Valkyries]] and flamethrowers
* [[Ferdain#Ferdain_Mustangs | Ferdain Mustangs]]: Cavalry regiment that use genetically tailored horses that are practically heavy armour.
* [[Sauristoni#Armed_Forces| Sauristoni Ghostchasers]]: Renowned scouts and trackers who are experts on Eldar.
* [[1st Membranes]]: A regiment made almost entirely of psykers from a black ship that crashed on a forge world.
* [[Arianius Divided Regiments]]: Regiments are segregated along gender lines. Men are [[Choppa|slicey]] women are [[Dakka|shooty.]]
* [[Kandam | Kandamii Crabhunters]]: A regiment made up of Augmented soldiers who specialize in Oceanic and Aerial warfare.
*[[New Terran Rangers]]: Or (NTR) for short. Are a group of <s>Slaaneshi cultist</s> I mean totally loyal Guard that all others should aspire to be. Others should stride to be as heroic as them.
*[[Unbreakable Tritons]]: A rigorous and disciplined regiment, specializing in aquatic/amphibious, and naval combat.
* [[Terranknights | Terran Knights]]: Elite regiments recruited exclusively from Terra. As a result they have some of the best equipment in the Imperium.
* [[Hell Harlots|2478th Penal Legion, "Hell Harlots"]]: All-female [[penal legion]] close combat drop troops made up entirely of the same religious prison gang.
* [[All_Guardsmen_Party| Generian 99th Medium Infantry]]: The original regiment of the [[All_Guardsmen_Party | All Guardsmen Party]] spawning some of the most dangerous, heretical, yet pragmatic acolytes in the entire inquisition.
*[[Hua Yuan Exterminators|Hua Yuan Exterminators]]: Tyranid hunters and Hive warfare Specialists that use unique 'Color And Mayhem' tactics to disorient and daze in the cramped not!Honk Kong they're from. By far the most fleshed out /tg/ regiment to date.
*[[Franchfarran Legion]]: One of the stupidest ideas to come out of thinking about 40k. Beats the Benveadig Militia though...
*[[Varkhat| The Varkhese Legionnaires]]: Heroes of the Siege of Varkhat and the infamous mechanised force used by the Mechanicus in its recent terraforming endevours.
* [[Argo Brigade]]: Regiment of brutally effective counterinsurgency operators who really, really enjoy crucifying dissidents, dissident sympathizers, and xenos upside down and/or sideways.
* The Karthak Raiders: Purple-clad Cadians with names like Kinmar, Kinfey and Kinross. There's a short story about them coming soon.
* [[Clavessa_Secundus| Clavessa Bush Brigade]]: Some poor sods who are posted in-orbit on the most parasitic death-world planet in the universe. EVERYTHING is a parasite here. It also has [[Bees|DEATH BEES]]. And the worst thing is, the enemies of the Imperium KEEP INVADING this place for some stupid reason (it says everything when the Orks are the only ones with ACTUALLY sensible, rational and understandable reasons to keep coming back to attack this shithole)
* [[Void Trekkers]]: Galaxy Quest meets the grim darkness of 40k.

== See Also ==
*[[Imperial Guard Regiment Creation Tables]]
*[[Warhammer_40,000/Tactics/Imperial_Guard (9E)|Imperial Guard Tactics in-game.]]
*[[Lasgun]]
*[[Chem-chan]]
*[[Sentinel]]
*[[Hellhound Tank]]
*[[Basilisk Artillery Gun]]
*[[Leman Russ Battle Tank]]
*[[Baneblade]]
*[[Commissar]]
*[[Imperium]]
*[[Only War]] - The official Tabletop RPG of the Guard! Formerly.
*[[Kasrkin-chan]]
*[http://www.forgeworld.co.uk/The_Horus_Heresy/Solar_Auxilia] - The Imperial Guard before they became the Astra Militarum of today, The awesome looking [[Solar Auxilia|SOLAR AUXILIA]]! Thank the Emperor for [[Forge World]].
*[[Regulations of the Imperial Guard]] Things The Imperial Guard Is No Longer Allowed To Do.
*[[Lost and the Damned]]
*[[Wargames Atlantic]] for cheaper alternative models[[https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Wargames_Atlantic#External_Links|Wargames_Atlantic]]
*[[Gue'vesa]]
*[[Genestealer Cult]]
*[[Digganobz]]

==External Links==
* [https://wh40k.lexicanum.com/wiki/Astra_Militarum Lexicanum on the Imperial Guard]
* [https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Astra_Militarum WH40k Wikia on the Astra Militarum]
* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Guard_(Warhammer_40,000) Wikipedia Article]

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Faces of Warriors.png|Imperial Guard Veterans... Rare but not impossible, folks!
File:Guard Regiments 1.jpg
File:Guard Regiments 2.jpg
Image:Greeting.jpg
Image:Propaganda_by_DemonMads.jpg
Image:YoDawg.jpg
Image:IG_(2).jpg|
Image:Guardsmen.jpg|But this works too.
Image:1230085088983.png|[[wat]]
Image:Winterassault.jpg|Who needs Pauldrons?
Image:Repercussions.png|Commissar in action
Image:IG_(1).jpg|What the [[Jokaero]] should have been.
Image:The Courage of Man.png|AVE IMPERATOR MOTHERFUCKERS!
Image:Magnus Kale.png|Guardsmen - They Just Never Stop
Image:Basilisk.png|[[Basilisk Artillery Gun|Basilisks]] are [[AWESOME]]
Image:balls.jpg|Imagine this, only 4 times bigger, heck even the women have 'em!
Image:GuardsmanHelmet.jpg|This man shows doubt. He will soon be executed.
Image:Warhammer-orcs.jpg|Come and get some, fucking green-skins!
Image:Guardsman.jpg|This is painfully accurate... except for missing the FUCKHEUG BALLS OF STEEL.
Image:1267818498305.jpg|One should never underestimate the awesomeness of a Guardsman.
Image:Grimdark checkers.jpg|In the grimdarkness of the 41st millennium, there are still old men playing checkers.
</gallery>
</center>
{{Promotions}}
<center>
<gallery>
Image:Mira.jpg|It suggests a deep strike and close-quarters engagement.
Image:IG_melta.jpg|She's hotter than her meltagun.
Image:Catachan-n.jpg
Image:IG_Babes_(1).jpg
Image:IG_Babes_(2).jpg
Image:IG_Babes_(3).jpg
Image:IG_Babes_(5).jpg
Image:Krieg_chan_01_by_Jaekyu.jpg
Image:Krieg_chan_by_Jaekyu.jpg
Image:1227223498011.jpg
Image:IG_mot1.jpg
Image:IG_mot2.jpg
Image:IG_mot3.jpg
Image:Kasrkin_chan_sans_helmet_by_Jaekyu.jpg
Image:Kasrkin_chan_by_Jaekyu.jpg
Image:IG_Babes_(4).jpg|"Thank the Emperor! Action!"
Image:Imperial_Guardswoman_by_IronShrineMaiden.jpg|Ponytails and light weaponry are standard issue.
Image:F0r t3h Emp3r0r by Kazuv.jpg|Even pregnant chicks get conscripted.
Image:Vostroy_chan_by_Jaekyu.jpg|Vostroya is a cold and crappy place. Still people like it there. Guess why?
Image:Vostroya san by sexual yeti-da50g3x.png|[[Promotions|PROMOTIONS]]
</gallery>
</center>

==Navigation==
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Communism

2023-05-09T14:39:37Z

2001:8003:1C20:8C00:7D2B:6BCE:E7FE:9253: /* Communism in Traditional Games */

{{flamewar}}
{{Fail}}
{{Heresy}}
[[Image:Communismleaders.jpg|right|thumb|400px|Contrary to western propaganda, this is how communism has always worked]]

{{topquote|Under [[capitalism]], man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.|Anonymous radio host from Soviet Armenia; also attributed to Yakov Smirnov}}
{{Topquote|MASH THE DIRTY RED SCUM! KICK THEM IN THE TEETH WHERE IT HURTS! KILL! KILL, KILL! FILTHY BASTARD COMMIES! I HATE THEM, I HATE THEM! AH! AH!|Ordo Xenos Inquisitor John Cleese, responding to the threat of the Damocles Crusade}}
{{topquote|Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.|Adlai Stevenson I}}

'''Communism''' can refer to two concepts: the society where the economy is collectively managed and organised government is replaced by local communes (hence the name), and the (usually) authoritarian ideology that seeks to instate such a perfect society. Communism in the first sense had been tried in various villages through the early nineteenth century before fizzling out or being suppressed by authorities, but most people are only interested in the second sense, due to its enormous impact on the twentieth century. Communism the ideology is generally associated with oligarchic rule of the "vanguard party" and a degree of central planning; it was the state ideology of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, as well as a few minor powers such as Yugoslavia and Vietnam, during the Cold War. It is still, albeit in a very modified form, adhered to in a few countries today, such as the People's Republic of China, North Korea and Cuba.

In many ways, it is the opposite of [[capitalism]], both of them along with [[nazi|nazism]] are considered by some historians as diverging branches from [[humanism]].

==Overview==
[[Image:Boris_Yeltsin_in_Texas.jpg|right|thumb|400px|Boris Yeltsin visits a Randall's in Houston. Two years later the Soviet Union was dead. Communism < Jello Pudding Pops]]
The ideology of communism is highly diverse, as numerous thinkers have proposed different definitions and pathways to a communist society, yet most modern communists, in one way or another, derive their ideas from the writings of Karl Marx: hence, it is Marxist communism that will be discussed here. Even then, a full explanation is far beyond the scope of this wiki, so [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism Wikipedia] might be a better bet if you want to get into the philosophical and economic details.

Most non-Marxist communists are more anti-authoritarian (e.g. Kropotkin, Makhno), so they are sometimes classified as [[Malal|anarchists]] instead. However, even Marxist communism is not homogenous, ranging from the more extremist (Hoxhaism, Stalinism aka Marxism-Leninism) to more moderate (Titoism, Kadarism, classical Marxism), sometimes mixed with nationalism (Juche), liberal capitalism (Dengism) or - ironically given communism's recurring [[Imperial Truth|anti-religion]] tendency - ''Catholicism'' (Liberation theology). Perhaps the reason why there are so many different variations of communism is because Marx and Engels' blueprint is so vague in many places (it didn't help that Marx died before finishing ''Das Kapital'') that it lends itself to a dizzying array of interpretations, for better or worse.

Marxism originates with the work of (newsflash) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Engels was the working son of an industrialist, while Marx got a PhD in law and spent much of his life in academia and radical politics; this arguably makes them the world's first [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee|socialist justice warriors.]] These two developed their economic theories as a response to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Marx observed that while the mechanization of production was a good thing since it generated a lot of wealth, he believed it was [[Rage|grossly unfair]] since said wealth was accumulating in the pockets of only a few [[Games Workshop|fucking rich pricks]] and most other people lived in Victorian poverty. He further saw this as another step in a long historical trend in which a class that owned the means of production (i.e. factories, land, etc.) exploited and dominated a lower class that had to sell its labor power to survive (by working in said factories, land, etc.) even though they had no say in how the means of production could be used and had a better claim to it on account of being the class that actually used the means of production.

Marx viewed society as being on a very clear cut path of social evolution with clearly defined phases, based on his interpretation of Hegelian philosophy (we suggest you look that up yourself, it's much too complicated to make into a pithy explanation here). Every phase represented a different form of economy and social hierarchy, and, while starting out "progressive", would eventually [[Imperium of Man|fall into degradation]] as it exceeded its limits. At this point, this decayed socio-economic system would have to be overthrown and replaced with a more just and advanced one, starting a new phase: Marx considered the Fall of the Roman Empire (transition from individual slavery to land-based feudalism) and the revolutions of the 19th century (transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism) to be the moments when such a transition occurred. He believed that capitalism was rapidly approaching its own collapse and replacement.

The new social order, Marx believed, would be collectivist, atheist and classless: as industrial production required people to work together on a large scale, so too would the new system of government. The new society would start out more authoritarian (socialism) before its government would eventually dissolve (communism proper). The economy would be controlled by the workers rather than by individual shareholders, competition would be discouraged in favor of a more cooperative and collective-oriented mindset, and religion (which Marx considered an obsolete "opiate of the masses"- although contrary to popular belief he did not actually oppose its existence) would fade away when it was no longer needed to distract people from the poor conditions they lived in. Most importantly, the new order would end the traditional state of affairs in which one class dominated all others through its control of the means of production and allow for true equality and prosperity for everyone. It is for this reason that no Communist party has claimed it has actually ''created'' a communist society, as according to their ideology they are simply guiding society through its socialist phase until true communism can be achieved at an unspecified future time.

However, Marx and Engels never gave a clear outline of how such a society could be created or what it would look like, either because they believed the workers would decide that or [[Profit|they had no idea or plan for how to achieve it]]. The the first one to put it into practice on a national scale (Vladimir Lenin) gave it a distinctly authoritarian spin which only got worse with Stalin. It should not be surprising that even in Marx's own time there were many opposing views of how a communist society would be created and maintained since he failed to give a method to accomplish it.

As a whole, most forms of Marxism are highly skeptical of liberal democracy (albeit supportive of the democratic process itself and direct democracy in particular), as it is considered to be corrupt and easily manipulated by the wealthy (even if you take the role of the media and its ability to influence public opinion into account, the old stereotype of politicians serving their richest donors rather than the people they allegedly represent didn't exactly spring out of a vacuum); similarly, they dismiss the process of slow reform advocated by social democratic ideology as a mass of half-measures intended to preserve a broken system instead of replacing it. In its place, communists propose the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Before you jump to conclusions, Marx considered all forms of government to be a form of dictatorship in that one class held absolute power over all others; in this case, the class in question would be the workers, who would use the innately authoritarian power of the state to ensure that a worker-controlled democratic decision-making process would not be opposed by reactionary elements attempting to re-establish the old order (also, keep in mind that back in Marx's day even the most democratic societies restricted the vote to male property owners). According to Marx, this dictatorship would last only long enough to eliminate the differences between classes- as the state's existence is due to said class differences, this would eventually lead the state to dissolve when it was no longer needed...somehow.

One of Marx's most prominent socialist rivals, Mikhail Bakunin, made the prediction that a dictatorship of the proletariat wouldn't "wither away" as Marx expected, but instead would serve as the foundation of a new ruling class that would dominate and exploit the proletariat just like the capitalists did: rather than class differences leading to the creation of the state, it was the state itself that allowed those class differences to exist in the first place. As a result, using the power of the state to end class differences would only perpetuate them further.

In Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, and their offshoots, the dictatorship of the proletariat takes form of the "vanguard party", consisting of the most "class-conscious" individuals. This party would be given near-absolute power over society and economy, so that transition towards socialism and eventually communism would proceed properly. As such, most communist states using the Marxist-Leninist model and its relatives have been dictatorships, headed either by charismatic despots (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot), or by the party oligarchy (modern China, late USSR). While other forms of communism exist that do not follow the vanguard party model, they are too lacking in influence to have ever been implemented on a national scale so we can't really say what they'd be like. It should also be noted that Marx and Engels themselves doubted the idea that a small revolutionary party could represent the will of the working class, an idea originally espoused by one of his other contemporaries (Blanqui, if you're curious).

===Issues===
One of the (many) major flaws in communist ideology is that its economic theories simply cannot be translated into the real world. For all the bullshit and genuine problems that happen in the free market (or the corporation-dominated form that exists today, at any rate), it still has the advantage of solving what economists call the ''economic calculation problem''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem .] To make a long story short, free markets work by allocating resources to where they are most needed and will produce the most value for people, and they are able to do this through ''price signals''.

Consider: Games Workshop wants money. You have money. So they make little [[Space Marines|metal figures]] that you want and so you buy them, and [[profit|they make money]]. Then they decide they want to make more money. So they try making a [[Manta|big honking model that costs a lot of money]], but you don't buy it because you're poor. By doing this [[Age of Sigmar|over]] and [[Primaris Marines|over]] again, GW eventually figures out what will and won't sell at what price, and you come to regard them as a money grubbing lawful evil because they're making a thing you want and charging you close to the highest price you're willing to pay to get it.

In a free market, nobody really needs to know what the whole economy looks like or how much steel the country will need in a given year; people only need to know how ''their own'' business works: what their customers want and what they'll pay for it. Under planned economies, by contrast, decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats who have no understanding of how anything works and who pay no price for being wrong, leading to massive malinvestment and waste. Even nominally Communist governments were forced to implement some capitalist policies after learning this the hard way, though the degree to which they did so varied from country to country, with China being among the most capitalist and North Korea being the least.

Furthermore, Bakunin's predictions about the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into a dictatorship ''over'' the proletariat have proven to be consistently correct, with party bureaucracies quickly assuming the same exploitative practices that their capitalist precursors used and claiming the means of production for themselves rather than passing them onto the workers. Often, they actually made those practices worse and suppressed labor movements more aggressively than the capitalists they had overthrown.

Liberal philosophers like Karl Popper on the other hand took a more fundamental approach to their critique; Popper in particular had the major criticism that history doesn't run on predetermined rulesets and laws, like Marx thought, and that such a line of thinking, especially when paired with the promise of a socialist utopia, would ultimately just serve people like Lenin and Mao Zedong, who would abuse this ideology to create authoritarian nightmares that only serve themselves. Seeing how the Socialist dream always ended in stagnation, dictatorship and misery, he was ultimately proven to be right about a lot of things. Sociologists like Didier Eribon formulated another criticism on how Marxism views society; mainly that the working class, especially in our day and age, is not a uniform monolithic bloc that can be rallied to join a revolution or even a cause. While sharing common interests, how these interests manifest themselves in any individual can range wildly and also how the influence of social background often unconsciously makes people act against their own interests.

Even in an ideal universe where the bureaucracy running a centrally planned economy wasn't corrupt or inept, the technology to monitor and plan any sort of national economy has yet to be invented and what we have now can't keep track of everything well enough to make it work; the average economy is incredibly complex and not even the most advanced computers that currently exist can predict every possible variable that might affect how the economy functions (let alone predict the long term effects of a plan), so mistakes will inevitably occur and snowball with dangerous consequences. As a result, a centrally planned economy invariably destroys the countries in which it is attempted due to drop of quality in consumer products, and eventually, food sources. Countries like China use the international market to get around this, but this is only delaying the inevitable. It gets even worse when you factor in the further increased complexity demanded by globalization. Technological advancements in the future might be able to mitigate this issue or even solve it outright, but they may not happen for a very long time.

Other types of planned economies exist too, but they are much less common and tend to exist on smaller scales so we can't really tell how well they'd work on a national level, let alone an international one. They do seem to function surprisingly well on a regional/municipal scale though, especially those which are decentralized and use little to no top-down authority when making decisions. Only time will tell if they work on larger scales too, assuming that they are not forcibly ended by their rivals first.

The economic failures of Socialist countries can also be found in Communist ideology itself; if your state says that it's heaven on earth, then said state won't do a whole lot to potentially improve things it has apart from occasional repairs or inventing new things that aren't necessary for its own survival. The downfall of the USSR and its aftermath is a good example of this; WWII destroyed a lot of stuff in Russia, so the government increased funding for sectors essential to rebuilding the nation. Productivity remained high until the late 70s, when, paired with party cronyism, the job of rebuilding Russia was finished and productivity started to stagnate on a high level. The only sectors that saw regular innovation and new invention were the arms and nuclear weapons industry. So it came to be that the West ultimately shot waaaay past the USSR in terms of productivity and wealth and ultimately defeated it.

That being said, mixed economies combining elements of communism and capitalism (e.g. Keynesianism and the "Nordic Model") have consistently proven to be functional enough to not destroy countries, albeit these successes have much more to do with cultural factors than with any success of communist ideology, the latter of which has steadily been abandoned over the last few decades. As mentioned above, these mixed economies are typically viewed by socialists to be more closely related to capitalism than communism, and most of them believe that the welfare systems they depend on are likely to be privatized in the absence of a stronger shift away from a capitalist economy. Several of these economies have indeed been abandoning their socialist elements over time in favor of a more capitalistic system, due in no small part to economic stagnation and near-collapse due to socialist economic policies, although one could also point to major corporate and capitalist interests undermining said socialist policies as a cause of both of those. We're not in a position to say which of those explanations is more likely to be true, so we'll leave it at that.

Furthermore, Communist governments tend to move away from the tenets of Marx and Engels in an attempt to force their ideas to work in situations they were never intended to function in. Marx believed that the shift to socialism and then communism could '''only''' work in an advanced industrial capitalist society with an established working class and that any attempt to make it happen before that point was doomed to backfire (and as Venezuela has since shown us, even THAT prediction was clearly wrong), and one must also remember that while much of what he said was prescient, he had no idea how capitalism would develop past his own era.

Lenin got around this by claiming that he could "telescope" the capitalist and socialist revolutions into a single event with the aid of the aforementioned vanguard party and proposing an alliance with the Russian peasantry to compensate for the undeveloped presence of the working class. Even then, Lenin tentatively allowed a shift back to private ownership for the Kulaks just so the Soviet economy could get back on its feet, before Stalin purged them all as class enemies and triggered a widespread famine known as the Holodomor (which the vast majority of historians suspect was intentional on Stalin's part).

Mao Zedong took this to an even further extreme by forcing the revolution in the primarily agrarian China and then trying to kick-start industrialization with the "Great Leap Forward". It was a total failure for several different reasons, and Mao's hamfisted attempt to retain control of the Communist Party afterwards gave rise to the Cultural Revolution and all the bloodshed that came with it. Somewhat like Lenin, Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping ended up implementing capitalist policies (while leaving all the other oppressive elements intact) in response to the earlier economic crises. While it did salvage the economy, it also ended up producing a system that arguably combines the worst qualities of both capitalism and communism that survives only by constant pandering to nationalist sentiments.

Because of the legacy of the Cold War and everything mentioned above, mass famines among numerous communist countries, and widespread human rights abuses from the regimes of communist leaders, communism is about as "loved" as fascism; there's good reason why people occasionally put Stalin and Mao, and communism/socialism, on equal footing with [[Nazis|Hitler]] and Imperial Japan in terms of evilness. Even the forms of communism that originated independently of the Leninist traditions are generally poorly regarded at best due to guilt by association. This is ironic, given that Lenin (and later Stalin) spent a considerable period of time trying to wipe out the forms of communism that diverged from Leninism.

As an interesting closing note, some people claim that the rise of automation (robotic and algorithmic) has the potential to bring about a society that resembles what communism tried to achieve. Today, most farming is done either automatically, or by a single dude riding a combine and doing the job of hundreds of farmers in a single day, manufacturing has also similarly gone through a wave of automation which has seen many factories reduce the number of their workers from hundreds to mere dozens, and the recent bastion of human labor - the service sector - is slowly seeing the penetration of algorithms and in rare cases robots into the fold. What all this means is that humanity needs to do less and less work while the automated systems do it just as well if not better, these 'means of production' can be (in theory) easily nationalized and the usual problems of people slacking off due to everyone being paid equally is eliminated since both the neurosurgeon and waiter who are 'paid the same for their effort' are robots. Add to that the rise of 3D printing which may act as poor man's Star Trek replicators (eliminating the need to buy a smörgåsbord of stuff) and theoretically we could be on track towards "fully automated luxury gay space communism". However, none of these advances do anything about the economic calculation problem. They do not tell us how many robots to build or whether those robots should farm corn or assemble 3D-printed guns. More relevant from a communist perspective is the fact that these robots are still ''privately owned'' and so fail to address the core issue with capitalism in that the workers do not control the means of production and still have to sell their labor to live. All of this automation merely reduces the demand for human labor in some parts of the economy, pushing workers into whatever sectors of the economy are still hiring humans and leaving them destitute if they can't find anyone to sell their labor to. In fact, the original Luddite movement was a reaction to this very issue: it was composed of textile workers who had lost their jobs as a result of machinery eliminating the need for their skilled labor. (Contrary to popular belief, they didn't oppose technology itself so much as the fact that said technology was being used by employers to put weavers out of work and offered the ones that remained employed nothing in return but lower wages.) As always, only time will tell if automation can live up to its hype but historical precedent thus far is not promising.

=== Note ===
It also is notable that Communist is often used as a dismissive snarl in modern first world politics against the left wing, even when actual Stalinist-style communists (or "tankies" as other communists and socialists call them, a reference to the Soviets' sending in tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) are a small minority on the fringes. There is also a distinction between Revolutionary Communists like the Bolsheviks and the Democratic Socialists such as the German SPD, which believe that the transition to socialism and then communism does not necessarily require an outright revolution and can be implemented through peaceful means. Ironically, it is the latter that more closely resembles classical Marxism. Democratic socialism in turn is not to be confused with social democracy, which is a form of liberal democracy whose capitalist economic system is paired with regulation and social welfare programs to mitigate the excesses of capitalism (with varying degrees of success as described above).

==Communism in Traditional Games==
In general there are three ways communism is used in fiction and board games:

1: '''Filthy Godless Red BASTARDS!''': Dangerous, faceless enemies, ripped straight from the wettest dreams of the Cold War-era American John Birch society. These communists are the enemy; a vast, brutal, godless horde determined to take over the world that our heroes must resist. Nowadays, this attitude is usually played for comedy, as in ''[[Paranoia]]'' where Friend Computer's glitched-out personality has made it a paranoid wreck obsessed with a largely-imaginary adversary (while creating some actual communists in the process). Others have played it seriously, especially in works produced during the Cold War (such as the 1984 film ''Red Dawn''). By the way, if you want an example of literal CommuNazis, the East German Stasi are a good place to start, although the Nazi part is mostly aesthetic and the Communist ideology is what was dominant (for CommuNazis as an ideology, Nazbols are basically that, combining far left economic policy and far right cultural party). Red Alert 1 is a /v/idya example, totally starting with a massive Tabun gas attack on the Polish city of Torun with ''children'' being discussed as dying the easiest.

2: '''Champions of the Proletariat''': The other side of the coin to what is listed above. These are either rebels against corrupt corporate overlords (frequently cyberpunk heroes) or a body of workers and soldiers fighting against fascist invaders (any game from the Russian perspective in WWII will count). Occasionally this show up in Medieval settings as anachronistic peasant revolts or other politically-radical types out to pull down the social parts of [[Medieval Stasis]]. Red Alert 3 has this a smidge between the lines, moreso in Uprising where they avenge innocent Russian citizens being frozen and crushed alive for fun by bloodthirsty Allied mercenaries.

3: '''GLORIOUS COMMUNISTS''': Somewhere between the other two and generally played for laughs. Communist regimes are oppressive and ponderous, but also able to do great things through sheer force of Industrial Might, Soviet Super Science, Stalinist Architecture and Will-Of-The-People and can be heroic just as easily as villainous. See Red Alert-II(more of it) and III(less of it), and to a lesser extent a few parts of the [[Imperium of Man]]. As close to real communism as you can get, comrade.

Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is an awesome gaming resource and reference, either in a drunken, drown-your-enemies-with-bodies-and-artillery sort of way (World War II), or a send-in-the-hardened-and-manly-Spetsnaz-and-tanks way (Cold War). It is a sacred law of [[/tg/]] alternate history [[/tg/'s homebrews|homebrew]] settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass. Even [[Warmachine| Khador]] draws on the imagery of the Soviet armed forces, despite being more analogous to Tsarist/Imperialist Russia politically, aside from their Manifest Destiny "Why can't everyone else just roll over and let us conquer them?!" ideology that has... [[Nazi| other roots]].

Like all radical ideologies, communists are all over [[Shadowrun|the Sixth World]], mostly among the poor and disenfranchised who can't help looking up at the big fancy megacorp enclaves and wondering how ''that'' makes any kind of just sense. The Berlin Flux State was probably the biggest and most successful anarcho-communist enclave in-setting for a while, before it became such an embarrassment to the megacorps insisting they should be the only game in town that many of them (including the one run by the great dragon Lofwyr) had it dismantled somewhere around second or third edition.

People like to call the [[Tau]] communist. There's ''some'' truth to that, given they're a highly-collective society that generally values group achievement over personal accomplishment, but they're also a largely class-stratified society, with only the assurance that their leaders are theoretically cooperating for the [[Greater Good]] to keep them from being out-and-out feudalists with castes. This system is actually very similar to Italian and Spanish ''[[Nazi|fascism]]'', where the economy was split between several large trade-based corporations, where the workers and the bourgeoisie were supposed to talk out their issues together (under the benevolent guidance of the party elites of course).

There was also the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]], a parody of the kinds of communist guerrillas of previous decades, who are armed grots out to demand equal treatment from their Ork masters with comical results. The Imperium, being a decentralized feudalistic empire, undoubtedly has many worlds that have communist governing bodies and economies, and maybe even a few where things worked out okay.

As Communism is ultimately an ideology built on ''class hatred'', any human Communist uprising in 40k almost inevitably would fall to [[Khorne]], the god of hatred. Conveniently, whey won't even need to repaint their flags. That's unless its leadership is hijacked by [[Tzeentch|manipulative bastards who are only in the revolution for personal power]]. Or as the revolution results in [[Rotigus|famine]] and [[Hive|rotting Commieblocks]] followed by a sense of despair, it's easy to see a [[Nurgle|certain fat fuck gaining a following]]. Indeed, a lot of Chaos cults canonically started as pretty much communist revolutions in all but name.

In '''Pariah: Ravenor vs. Eisenhorn''', Alizebeth Bequin (The clone) was seen hunting for relics from a collector. There, she came across [[wat|an ancient children's toy in the shape of a rocket with the marking of C.C.C.P (aka '''оюз Советских Социалистических Республик''' (Soviet Union))]]. Although it was obvious that 40k sets in the far future of our real world, it none the less confirmed the existences of Soviet Russia and communism in the setting. Btw, neither Bequin nor the collector knew what CCCP meant, considered much of the ancient Terra history were lost in the far future, but at least they remembered ancient humans on Terra made their ''first step'' to space using chemical rockets.

[[Pathfinder Roleplaying Game|Golarion]] has got a semi-hemi-demi communist nation in-setting: Galt, land of insane, constant revolution where the only winners are the ''final blades''. It represents the "messy revolutionary" kind of communism rather than any of the three flavors above, though there's some obvious mixing with the principals of the French Revolution that was its more-direct inspiration.

The [[Harpers]] of Faerun are semi-communists in outlook. They strongly favor removing power from single governments and shifting leadership to individual communities. This can make them heroic when unseating despots but significantly less so when assassinating anyone who tries to unite the city-states.

[[Khador]] in Warmachine takes the Glorious Soviet Russia identity and wears it like a badge, even though its actual government resembles Tzarist Russia.

''[[Star Trek]]'' is complicated. On the one hand, the Federation has essentially a communist economy and they have the humanist element down, but their advanced technology has created a post-scarcity economy, so it can be interpreted that the producers thought this would be a natural product of a society where everybody was self-sufficient. Conversely, their chief rivals, the Klingons and the Romulans, are transparent analogues of the USSR and Maoist China seen through the pre-détente eyes of an American lounge lizard. Similar post-scarcity communists are common in ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'', though with a much stronger anarchist bent. They are largely and uncomplicatedly perfect due to the game designers' raging stiffy for that kind of thing.

Any WWII or quasi-WWII game worth its salt will have a communist faction, including the classic ''[[Axis & Allies]]'' and the modern wargame ''[[Flames of War]]''. Additionally, many classic board games have attempted to tap into the forty-five year struggle for dominance between America and the communists. The most famous and best is probably ''[[Twilight Struggle]]''. [[TSR]] also released an RPG set during the Cold War called ''[[Top Secret]]'', though, like most non-''D&D'' TSR products, no one under thirty-five has ever heard of it.

{{BLAM|This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.}}

==Gallery==
<center><gallery>
File:AK-47.jpg|Glorious Soviet Industries could be used to produce huge numbers of reliable and effective things which are still in high demand after a half a century...
File:Lada 1200.jpg||...Their cars are not on that list.
File:Communism and the NTS Fallacy.png|Still a better track record than the Nazis (not pictured, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and more)
File:Space marine commie.jpg| Do your duty comrade
File: Stalin space marine.jpg| This is how some people think World War II actually went
File: Space marine revolution.jpg| The cure for [[Chick Tracts]] ("something something worse than the disease")
</gallery></center>

==See Also==
* [[Imperium of Man]] as it too was based on a revolutionary progressive ideal that gave way to despotism, with the big question being if this was a natural consequence of the ideal or a complete perversion.
* Come to think of it, most failed utopian societies that /tg/ loves probably borrowed from the history of Soviet Russia in some way, especially from the revolutionary to Stalinist era.

[[category:Not related]]
[[Category:history]]

Communism

2023-05-09T14:39:12Z

2001:8003:1C20:8C00:7D2B:6BCE:E7FE:9253: /* Communism in Traditional Games */

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[[Image:Communismleaders.jpg|right|thumb|400px|Contrary to western propaganda, this is how communism has always worked]]

{{topquote|Under [[capitalism]], man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.|Anonymous radio host from Soviet Armenia; also attributed to Yakov Smirnov}}
{{Topquote|MASH THE DIRTY RED SCUM! KICK THEM IN THE TEETH WHERE IT HURTS! KILL! KILL, KILL! FILTHY BASTARD COMMIES! I HATE THEM, I HATE THEM! AH! AH!|Ordo Xenos Inquisitor John Cleese, responding to the threat of the Damocles Crusade}}
{{topquote|Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.|Adlai Stevenson I}}

'''Communism''' can refer to two concepts: the society where the economy is collectively managed and organised government is replaced by local communes (hence the name), and the (usually) authoritarian ideology that seeks to instate such a perfect society. Communism in the first sense had been tried in various villages through the early nineteenth century before fizzling out or being suppressed by authorities, but most people are only interested in the second sense, due to its enormous impact on the twentieth century. Communism the ideology is generally associated with oligarchic rule of the "vanguard party" and a degree of central planning; it was the state ideology of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, as well as a few minor powers such as Yugoslavia and Vietnam, during the Cold War. It is still, albeit in a very modified form, adhered to in a few countries today, such as the People's Republic of China, North Korea and Cuba.

In many ways, it is the opposite of [[capitalism]], both of them along with [[nazi|nazism]] are considered by some historians as diverging branches from [[humanism]].

==Overview==
[[Image:Boris_Yeltsin_in_Texas.jpg|right|thumb|400px|Boris Yeltsin visits a Randall's in Houston. Two years later the Soviet Union was dead. Communism < Jello Pudding Pops]]
The ideology of communism is highly diverse, as numerous thinkers have proposed different definitions and pathways to a communist society, yet most modern communists, in one way or another, derive their ideas from the writings of Karl Marx: hence, it is Marxist communism that will be discussed here. Even then, a full explanation is far beyond the scope of this wiki, so [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism Wikipedia] might be a better bet if you want to get into the philosophical and economic details.

Most non-Marxist communists are more anti-authoritarian (e.g. Kropotkin, Makhno), so they are sometimes classified as [[Malal|anarchists]] instead. However, even Marxist communism is not homogenous, ranging from the more extremist (Hoxhaism, Stalinism aka Marxism-Leninism) to more moderate (Titoism, Kadarism, classical Marxism), sometimes mixed with nationalism (Juche), liberal capitalism (Dengism) or - ironically given communism's recurring [[Imperial Truth|anti-religion]] tendency - ''Catholicism'' (Liberation theology). Perhaps the reason why there are so many different variations of communism is because Marx and Engels' blueprint is so vague in many places (it didn't help that Marx died before finishing ''Das Kapital'') that it lends itself to a dizzying array of interpretations, for better or worse.

Marxism originates with the work of (newsflash) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Engels was the working son of an industrialist, while Marx got a PhD in law and spent much of his life in academia and radical politics; this arguably makes them the world's first [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee|socialist justice warriors.]] These two developed their economic theories as a response to the effects of the Industrial Revolution. Marx observed that while the mechanization of production was a good thing since it generated a lot of wealth, he believed it was [[Rage|grossly unfair]] since said wealth was accumulating in the pockets of only a few [[Games Workshop|fucking rich pricks]] and most other people lived in Victorian poverty. He further saw this as another step in a long historical trend in which a class that owned the means of production (i.e. factories, land, etc.) exploited and dominated a lower class that had to sell its labor power to survive (by working in said factories, land, etc.) even though they had no say in how the means of production could be used and had a better claim to it on account of being the class that actually used the means of production.

Marx viewed society as being on a very clear cut path of social evolution with clearly defined phases, based on his interpretation of Hegelian philosophy (we suggest you look that up yourself, it's much too complicated to make into a pithy explanation here). Every phase represented a different form of economy and social hierarchy, and, while starting out "progressive", would eventually [[Imperium of Man|fall into degradation]] as it exceeded its limits. At this point, this decayed socio-economic system would have to be overthrown and replaced with a more just and advanced one, starting a new phase: Marx considered the Fall of the Roman Empire (transition from individual slavery to land-based feudalism) and the revolutions of the 19th century (transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism) to be the moments when such a transition occurred. He believed that capitalism was rapidly approaching its own collapse and replacement.

The new social order, Marx believed, would be collectivist, atheist and classless: as industrial production required people to work together on a large scale, so too would the new system of government. The new society would start out more authoritarian (socialism) before its government would eventually dissolve (communism proper). The economy would be controlled by the workers rather than by individual shareholders, competition would be discouraged in favor of a more cooperative and collective-oriented mindset, and religion (which Marx considered an obsolete "opiate of the masses"- although contrary to popular belief he did not actually oppose its existence) would fade away when it was no longer needed to distract people from the poor conditions they lived in. Most importantly, the new order would end the traditional state of affairs in which one class dominated all others through its control of the means of production and allow for true equality and prosperity for everyone. It is for this reason that no Communist party has claimed it has actually ''created'' a communist society, as according to their ideology they are simply guiding society through its socialist phase until true communism can be achieved at an unspecified future time.

However, Marx and Engels never gave a clear outline of how such a society could be created or what it would look like, either because they believed the workers would decide that or [[Profit|they had no idea or plan for how to achieve it]]. The the first one to put it into practice on a national scale (Vladimir Lenin) gave it a distinctly authoritarian spin which only got worse with Stalin. It should not be surprising that even in Marx's own time there were many opposing views of how a communist society would be created and maintained since he failed to give a method to accomplish it.

As a whole, most forms of Marxism are highly skeptical of liberal democracy (albeit supportive of the democratic process itself and direct democracy in particular), as it is considered to be corrupt and easily manipulated by the wealthy (even if you take the role of the media and its ability to influence public opinion into account, the old stereotype of politicians serving their richest donors rather than the people they allegedly represent didn't exactly spring out of a vacuum); similarly, they dismiss the process of slow reform advocated by social democratic ideology as a mass of half-measures intended to preserve a broken system instead of replacing it. In its place, communists propose the "dictatorship of the proletariat". Before you jump to conclusions, Marx considered all forms of government to be a form of dictatorship in that one class held absolute power over all others; in this case, the class in question would be the workers, who would use the innately authoritarian power of the state to ensure that a worker-controlled democratic decision-making process would not be opposed by reactionary elements attempting to re-establish the old order (also, keep in mind that back in Marx's day even the most democratic societies restricted the vote to male property owners). According to Marx, this dictatorship would last only long enough to eliminate the differences between classes- as the state's existence is due to said class differences, this would eventually lead the state to dissolve when it was no longer needed...somehow.

One of Marx's most prominent socialist rivals, Mikhail Bakunin, made the prediction that a dictatorship of the proletariat wouldn't "wither away" as Marx expected, but instead would serve as the foundation of a new ruling class that would dominate and exploit the proletariat just like the capitalists did: rather than class differences leading to the creation of the state, it was the state itself that allowed those class differences to exist in the first place. As a result, using the power of the state to end class differences would only perpetuate them further.

In Leninism, Marxism-Leninism, and their offshoots, the dictatorship of the proletariat takes form of the "vanguard party", consisting of the most "class-conscious" individuals. This party would be given near-absolute power over society and economy, so that transition towards socialism and eventually communism would proceed properly. As such, most communist states using the Marxist-Leninist model and its relatives have been dictatorships, headed either by charismatic despots (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot), or by the party oligarchy (modern China, late USSR). While other forms of communism exist that do not follow the vanguard party model, they are too lacking in influence to have ever been implemented on a national scale so we can't really say what they'd be like. It should also be noted that Marx and Engels themselves doubted the idea that a small revolutionary party could represent the will of the working class, an idea originally espoused by one of his other contemporaries (Blanqui, if you're curious).

===Issues===
One of the (many) major flaws in communist ideology is that its economic theories simply cannot be translated into the real world. For all the bullshit and genuine problems that happen in the free market (or the corporation-dominated form that exists today, at any rate), it still has the advantage of solving what economists call the ''economic calculation problem''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem .] To make a long story short, free markets work by allocating resources to where they are most needed and will produce the most value for people, and they are able to do this through ''price signals''.

Consider: Games Workshop wants money. You have money. So they make little [[Space Marines|metal figures]] that you want and so you buy them, and [[profit|they make money]]. Then they decide they want to make more money. So they try making a [[Manta|big honking model that costs a lot of money]], but you don't buy it because you're poor. By doing this [[Age of Sigmar|over]] and [[Primaris Marines|over]] again, GW eventually figures out what will and won't sell at what price, and you come to regard them as a money grubbing lawful evil because they're making a thing you want and charging you close to the highest price you're willing to pay to get it.

In a free market, nobody really needs to know what the whole economy looks like or how much steel the country will need in a given year; people only need to know how ''their own'' business works: what their customers want and what they'll pay for it. Under planned economies, by contrast, decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats who have no understanding of how anything works and who pay no price for being wrong, leading to massive malinvestment and waste. Even nominally Communist governments were forced to implement some capitalist policies after learning this the hard way, though the degree to which they did so varied from country to country, with China being among the most capitalist and North Korea being the least.

Furthermore, Bakunin's predictions about the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into a dictatorship ''over'' the proletariat have proven to be consistently correct, with party bureaucracies quickly assuming the same exploitative practices that their capitalist precursors used and claiming the means of production for themselves rather than passing them onto the workers. Often, they actually made those practices worse and suppressed labor movements more aggressively than the capitalists they had overthrown.

Liberal philosophers like Karl Popper on the other hand took a more fundamental approach to their critique; Popper in particular had the major criticism that history doesn't run on predetermined rulesets and laws, like Marx thought, and that such a line of thinking, especially when paired with the promise of a socialist utopia, would ultimately just serve people like Lenin and Mao Zedong, who would abuse this ideology to create authoritarian nightmares that only serve themselves. Seeing how the Socialist dream always ended in stagnation, dictatorship and misery, he was ultimately proven to be right about a lot of things. Sociologists like Didier Eribon formulated another criticism on how Marxism views society; mainly that the working class, especially in our day and age, is not a uniform monolithic bloc that can be rallied to join a revolution or even a cause. While sharing common interests, how these interests manifest themselves in any individual can range wildly and also how the influence of social background often unconsciously makes people act against their own interests.

Even in an ideal universe where the bureaucracy running a centrally planned economy wasn't corrupt or inept, the technology to monitor and plan any sort of national economy has yet to be invented and what we have now can't keep track of everything well enough to make it work; the average economy is incredibly complex and not even the most advanced computers that currently exist can predict every possible variable that might affect how the economy functions (let alone predict the long term effects of a plan), so mistakes will inevitably occur and snowball with dangerous consequences. As a result, a centrally planned economy invariably destroys the countries in which it is attempted due to drop of quality in consumer products, and eventually, food sources. Countries like China use the international market to get around this, but this is only delaying the inevitable. It gets even worse when you factor in the further increased complexity demanded by globalization. Technological advancements in the future might be able to mitigate this issue or even solve it outright, but they may not happen for a very long time.

Other types of planned economies exist too, but they are much less common and tend to exist on smaller scales so we can't really tell how well they'd work on a national level, let alone an international one. They do seem to function surprisingly well on a regional/municipal scale though, especially those which are decentralized and use little to no top-down authority when making decisions. Only time will tell if they work on larger scales too, assuming that they are not forcibly ended by their rivals first.

The economic failures of Socialist countries can also be found in Communist ideology itself; if your state says that it's heaven on earth, then said state won't do a whole lot to potentially improve things it has apart from occasional repairs or inventing new things that aren't necessary for its own survival. The downfall of the USSR and its aftermath is a good example of this; WWII destroyed a lot of stuff in Russia, so the government increased funding for sectors essential to rebuilding the nation. Productivity remained high until the late 70s, when, paired with party cronyism, the job of rebuilding Russia was finished and productivity started to stagnate on a high level. The only sectors that saw regular innovation and new invention were the arms and nuclear weapons industry. So it came to be that the West ultimately shot waaaay past the USSR in terms of productivity and wealth and ultimately defeated it.

That being said, mixed economies combining elements of communism and capitalism (e.g. Keynesianism and the "Nordic Model") have consistently proven to be functional enough to not destroy countries, albeit these successes have much more to do with cultural factors than with any success of communist ideology, the latter of which has steadily been abandoned over the last few decades. As mentioned above, these mixed economies are typically viewed by socialists to be more closely related to capitalism than communism, and most of them believe that the welfare systems they depend on are likely to be privatized in the absence of a stronger shift away from a capitalist economy. Several of these economies have indeed been abandoning their socialist elements over time in favor of a more capitalistic system, due in no small part to economic stagnation and near-collapse due to socialist economic policies, although one could also point to major corporate and capitalist interests undermining said socialist policies as a cause of both of those. We're not in a position to say which of those explanations is more likely to be true, so we'll leave it at that.

Furthermore, Communist governments tend to move away from the tenets of Marx and Engels in an attempt to force their ideas to work in situations they were never intended to function in. Marx believed that the shift to socialism and then communism could '''only''' work in an advanced industrial capitalist society with an established working class and that any attempt to make it happen before that point was doomed to backfire (and as Venezuela has since shown us, even THAT prediction was clearly wrong), and one must also remember that while much of what he said was prescient, he had no idea how capitalism would develop past his own era.

Lenin got around this by claiming that he could "telescope" the capitalist and socialist revolutions into a single event with the aid of the aforementioned vanguard party and proposing an alliance with the Russian peasantry to compensate for the undeveloped presence of the working class. Even then, Lenin tentatively allowed a shift back to private ownership for the Kulaks just so the Soviet economy could get back on its feet, before Stalin purged them all as class enemies and triggered a widespread famine known as the Holodomor (which the vast majority of historians suspect was intentional on Stalin's part).

Mao Zedong took this to an even further extreme by forcing the revolution in the primarily agrarian China and then trying to kick-start industrialization with the "Great Leap Forward". It was a total failure for several different reasons, and Mao's hamfisted attempt to retain control of the Communist Party afterwards gave rise to the Cultural Revolution and all the bloodshed that came with it. Somewhat like Lenin, Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping ended up implementing capitalist policies (while leaving all the other oppressive elements intact) in response to the earlier economic crises. While it did salvage the economy, it also ended up producing a system that arguably combines the worst qualities of both capitalism and communism that survives only by constant pandering to nationalist sentiments.

Because of the legacy of the Cold War and everything mentioned above, mass famines among numerous communist countries, and widespread human rights abuses from the regimes of communist leaders, communism is about as "loved" as fascism; there's good reason why people occasionally put Stalin and Mao, and communism/socialism, on equal footing with [[Nazis|Hitler]] and Imperial Japan in terms of evilness. Even the forms of communism that originated independently of the Leninist traditions are generally poorly regarded at best due to guilt by association. This is ironic, given that Lenin (and later Stalin) spent a considerable period of time trying to wipe out the forms of communism that diverged from Leninism.

As an interesting closing note, some people claim that the rise of automation (robotic and algorithmic) has the potential to bring about a society that resembles what communism tried to achieve. Today, most farming is done either automatically, or by a single dude riding a combine and doing the job of hundreds of farmers in a single day, manufacturing has also similarly gone through a wave of automation which has seen many factories reduce the number of their workers from hundreds to mere dozens, and the recent bastion of human labor - the service sector - is slowly seeing the penetration of algorithms and in rare cases robots into the fold. What all this means is that humanity needs to do less and less work while the automated systems do it just as well if not better, these 'means of production' can be (in theory) easily nationalized and the usual problems of people slacking off due to everyone being paid equally is eliminated since both the neurosurgeon and waiter who are 'paid the same for their effort' are robots. Add to that the rise of 3D printing which may act as poor man's Star Trek replicators (eliminating the need to buy a smörgåsbord of stuff) and theoretically we could be on track towards "fully automated luxury gay space communism". However, none of these advances do anything about the economic calculation problem. They do not tell us how many robots to build or whether those robots should farm corn or assemble 3D-printed guns. More relevant from a communist perspective is the fact that these robots are still ''privately owned'' and so fail to address the core issue with capitalism in that the workers do not control the means of production and still have to sell their labor to live. All of this automation merely reduces the demand for human labor in some parts of the economy, pushing workers into whatever sectors of the economy are still hiring humans and leaving them destitute if they can't find anyone to sell their labor to. In fact, the original Luddite movement was a reaction to this very issue: it was composed of textile workers who had lost their jobs as a result of machinery eliminating the need for their skilled labor. (Contrary to popular belief, they didn't oppose technology itself so much as the fact that said technology was being used by employers to put weavers out of work and offered the ones that remained employed nothing in return but lower wages.) As always, only time will tell if automation can live up to its hype but historical precedent thus far is not promising.

=== Note ===
It also is notable that Communist is often used as a dismissive snarl in modern first world politics against the left wing, even when actual Stalinist-style communists (or "tankies" as other communists and socialists call them, a reference to the Soviets' sending in tanks to suppress the Hungarian Revolution of 1956) are a small minority on the fringes. There is also a distinction between Revolutionary Communists like the Bolsheviks and the Democratic Socialists such as the German SPD, which believe that the transition to socialism and then communism does not necessarily require an outright revolution and can be implemented through peaceful means. Ironically, it is the latter that more closely resembles classical Marxism. Democratic socialism in turn is not to be confused with social democracy, which is a form of liberal democracy whose capitalist economic system is paired with regulation and social welfare programs to mitigate the excesses of capitalism (with varying degrees of success as described above).

==Communism in Traditional Games==
In general there are three ways communism is used in fiction and board games:

1: '''Filthy Godless Red BASTARDS!''': Dangerous, faceless enemies, ripped straight from the wettest dreams of the Cold War-era American John Birch society. These communists are the enemy; a vast, brutal, godless horde determined to take over the world that our heroes must resist. Nowadays, this attitude is usually played for comedy, as in ''[[Paranoia]]'' where Friend Computer's glitched-out personality has made it a paranoid wreck obsessed with a largely-imaginary adversary (while creating some actual communists in the process). Others have played it seriously, especially in works produced during the Cold War (such as the 1984 film ''Red Dawn''). By the way, if you want an example of literal CommuNazis, the East German Stasi are a good place to start, although the Nazi part is mostly aesthetic and the Communist ideology is what was dominant (for CommuNazis as an ideology, Nazbols are basically that, combining far left economic policy and far right cultural party). Red Alert 1 is a /v/idya example, totally starting with a massive Tabun gas attack on the Polish city of Torun with ''children'' being discussed as dying the easiest.

2: '''Champions of the Proletariat''': The other side of the coin to what is listed above. These are either rebels against corrupt corporate overlords (frequently cyberpunk heroes) or a body of workers and soldiers fighting against fascist invaders (any game from the Russian perspective in WWII will count). Occasionally this show up in Medieval settings as anachronistic peasant revolts or other politically-radical types out to pull down the social parts of [[Medieval Stasis]]. Red Alert 3 has this a smidge between the lines, moreso in Uprising where they avenge innocent Russian citizens being frozen and crushed alive for fun by bloodthirsty Allied mercenaries.

3: '''GLORIOUS COMMUNISTS''': Somewhere between the other two and generally played for laughs. Communist regimes are oppressive and ponderous, but also able to do great things through sheer force of Industrial Might, Soviet Super Science, Stalinist Architecture and Will-Of-The-People and can be heroic just as easily as villainous. See Red Alert-II(more of it) and III(less of it), and to a lesser extent a few parts of the [[Imperium of Man]]. As close to real communism as you can get, comrade.

Communism has also provided us with the Russian army, which is an awesome gaming resource and reference, either in a drunken, drown-your-enemies-with-bodies-and-artillery sort of way (World War II), or a send-in-the-hardened-and-manly-Spetsnaz-and-tanks way (Cold War). It is a sacred law of [[/tg/]] alternate history [[/tg/'s homebrews|homebrew]] settings that there must be at least one communist faction and it must control at least 50% of the world's total landmass. Even [[Warmachine| Khador]] draws on the imagery of the Soviet armed forces, despite being more analogous to Tsarist/Imperialist Russia politically, aside from their Manifest Destiny "Why can't everyone else just roll over and let us conquer them?!" ideology that has... [[Nazi| other roots]].

Like all radical ideologies, communists are all over [[Shadowrun|the Sixth World]], mostly among the poor and disenfranchised who can't help looking up at the big fancy megacorp enclaves and wondering how ''that'' makes any kind of just sense. The Berlin Flux State was probably the biggest and most successful anarcho-communist enclave in-setting for a while, before it became such an embarrassment to the megacorps insisting they should be the only game in town that many of them (including the one run by the great dragon Lofwyr) had it dismantled somewhere around second or third edition.

People like to call the [[Tau]] communist. There's ''some'' truth to that, given they're a highly-collective society that generally values group achievement over personal accomplishment, but they're also a largely class-stratified society, with only the assurance that their leaders are theoretically cooperating for the [[Greater Good]] to keep them from being out-and-out feudalists with castes. This system is actually very similar to Italian and Spanish ''[[Nazi|fascism]]'', where the economy was split between several large trade-based corporations, where the workers and the bourgeoisie were supposed to talk out their issues together (under the benevolent guidance of the party elites of course).

There was also the [[Gretchin Revolutionary Committee]], a parody of the kinds of communist guerrillas of previous decades, who are armed grots out to demand equal treatment from their Ork masters with comical results. The Imperium, being a decentralized feudalistic empire, undoubtedly has many worlds that have communist governing bodies and economies, and maybe even a few where things worked out okay.

As Communism is ultimately an ideology built on ''class hatred'', any human Communist uprising in 40k almost inevitably would fall to [[Khorne]], the god of hatred. Conveniently, whey won't even need to repaint their flags. That's unless its leadership is hijacked by [[Tzeentch|manipulative bastards who are only in the revolution for personal power]]. Or as the revolution results in [[Rottigus Rainfather|famine]] and [[Hive City|rotting Commieblocks]] followed by a sense of despair, it's easy to see a [[Nurgle|certain fat fuck gaining a following]]. Indeed, a lot of Chaos cults canonically started as pretty much communist revolutions in all but name.

In '''Pariah: Ravenor vs. Eisenhorn''', Alizebeth Bequin (The clone) was seen hunting for relics from a collector. There, she came across [[wat|an ancient children's toy in the shape of a rocket with the marking of C.C.C.P (aka '''оюз Советских Социалистических Республик''' (Soviet Union))]]. Although it was obvious that 40k sets in the far future of our real world, it none the less confirmed the existences of Soviet Russia and communism in the setting. Btw, neither Bequin nor the collector knew what CCCP meant, considered much of the ancient Terra history were lost in the far future, but at least they remembered ancient humans on Terra made their ''first step'' to space using chemical rockets.

[[Pathfinder Roleplaying Game|Golarion]] has got a semi-hemi-demi communist nation in-setting: Galt, land of insane, constant revolution where the only winners are the ''final blades''. It represents the "messy revolutionary" kind of communism rather than any of the three flavors above, though there's some obvious mixing with the principals of the French Revolution that was its more-direct inspiration.

The [[Harpers]] of Faerun are semi-communists in outlook. They strongly favor removing power from single governments and shifting leadership to individual communities. This can make them heroic when unseating despots but significantly less so when assassinating anyone who tries to unite the city-states.

[[Khador]] in Warmachine takes the Glorious Soviet Russia identity and wears it like a badge, even though its actual government resembles Tzarist Russia.

''[[Star Trek]]'' is complicated. On the one hand, the Federation has essentially a communist economy and they have the humanist element down, but their advanced technology has created a post-scarcity economy, so it can be interpreted that the producers thought this would be a natural product of a society where everybody was self-sufficient. Conversely, their chief rivals, the Klingons and the Romulans, are transparent analogues of the USSR and Maoist China seen through the pre-détente eyes of an American lounge lizard. Similar post-scarcity communists are common in ''[[Eclipse Phase]]'', though with a much stronger anarchist bent. They are largely and uncomplicatedly perfect due to the game designers' raging stiffy for that kind of thing.

Any WWII or quasi-WWII game worth its salt will have a communist faction, including the classic ''[[Axis & Allies]]'' and the modern wargame ''[[Flames of War]]''. Additionally, many classic board games have attempted to tap into the forty-five year struggle for dominance between America and the communists. The most famous and best is probably ''[[Twilight Struggle]]''. [[TSR]] also released an RPG set during the Cold War called ''[[Top Secret]]'', though, like most non-''D&D'' TSR products, no one under thirty-five has ever heard of it.

{{BLAM|This article has been marked as containing treasonous capitalist road sentiments. Please report to your local commissariat for re-education through labor.}}

==Gallery==
<center><gallery>
File:AK-47.jpg|Glorious Soviet Industries could be used to produce huge numbers of reliable and effective things which are still in high demand after a half a century...
File:Lada 1200.jpg||...Their cars are not on that list.
File:Communism and the NTS Fallacy.png|Still a better track record than the Nazis (not pictured, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and more)
File:Space marine commie.jpg| Do your duty comrade
File: Stalin space marine.jpg| This is how some people think World War II actually went
File: Space marine revolution.jpg| The cure for [[Chick Tracts]] ("something something worse than the disease")
</gallery></center>

==See Also==
* [[Imperium of Man]] as it too was based on a revolutionary progressive ideal that gave way to despotism, with the big question being if this was a natural consequence of the ideal or a complete perversion.
* Come to think of it, most failed utopian societies that /tg/ loves probably borrowed from the history of Soviet Russia in some way, especially from the revolutionary to Stalinist era.

[[category:Not related]]
[[Category:history]]

The World Wars

2023-05-08T10:27:28Z

2001:8003:1C20:8C00:7D2B:6BCE:E7FE:9253: /* Prelude */

{{Grimdark}}
[[File:MAC52_SIDEBAR_TANKS01-810x445.jpg|thumb|right|War has changed...]]
{{topquote|War will become rare, but more terrible. [...] That's my horoscope|Arthur Conan Doyle, 1883}}

Unless you've been living under a rock in Antarctica for the past 80-odd years, there is a chance you've heard of the World Wars. They were some of the most devastating conflicts ever waged by mankind. Even today there are still noticeable economic, demographic, and ecological effects from the raw amount of destruction wrought during both wars. For all intents and purposes, the World Wars are the closest we have ever gotten to [[Warhammer 40,000]].

A brief introduction is difficult to write, but for World War I, M.A.I.N.(Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, Nationalism) largely sums it up. When most people think of WWI, they envision trenches, barbed wire, poison gas, and massive artillery barrages. Meanwhile, World War II can be summarized as some [[pol|dickhead using conspiracy theories about Jews]] and geopolitics to start a war that rapidly boiled into a massive clusterfuck. When people think WWII, they typically think of Nazis, D-Day, America, the Holocaust, and maybe the Battle of Britain/Pearl Harbor/Stalingrad, depending on where they're from.

The World Wars have served as inspiration for hundreds of games, uncounted thousands of novels and comics, hundreds of movies, [[Warhammer 40,000|dozens]] [[Lord of the Rings|of]] [[Star Wars|franchises]], and overall have left a lasting impact on most of the globe, with the only minor caveat being South America. If you were to go anywhere in Europe, the United States, Canada, Japan, the Middle East, North Africa, China, or Russia and ask people to share stories of their relatives from either conflict, there is a good chance that someone will have a story for you to hear.

The World Wars resulted in the end of unmatched European global dominance, the collapse of the great imperial powers, and the rise of the United States and Soviet Union until the latter's collapse in 1991. The world we currently lived in has been made entirely possible by the tragedy that was the two World Wars.

==Prelude==
During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century kicked off with the Napoleonic Wars when industrialization was building up steam in England, and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers1,2. The American Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era and saw about 600,000-750,000 people dead but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and [[Skub|definitively settled it's issue]]. The Franco-Prussian War was won in six months (GOTT MIT UNS!), but in a chilling preview of things to come killed some 180,000 combatants. Many Europeans figured that in this new civilized age big wars were a thing of the past, that if war happened it would be resolved quickly with one side throwing in the towel and cutting their losses when things turned south. In the Spring of 1914 few in Europe realized that they were sitting on not only a political powder keg but also a barrel of napalm.

There are two important factors to consider in the buildup to the World Wars: ''Technology'' and ''Nationalism''. Technology is the easier of the two to understand. In the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 yards, was supported by muzzle-loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1 km, and was supplied by ox carts. Meanwhile, steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines in England. By 1914, the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by breech-loading guns that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air, raining a spray of shrapnel over a wide area, machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute, and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, submachine guns, and chemical weapons had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were less than useless on this new kind of battlefield, and the book needed to be re-written from page one.

Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an industrialized nation could turn more of its population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do. As a specific example, Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of its population even at the peak of its power, whereas Germany mobilized nearly 20% of its population during the Great War. This period of peace had consequences in that no one had any good idea how to wage war with or against these newfangled contraptions besides [[Imperial Guard|sending in the next wave]]. People were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London whose dad is English" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich whose mom is Sephardic" and so forth (their family, job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with on a daily basis). If a civil war happened and a new noble house ended up in charge while they and their family and friends got through unharmed, they weren't going to care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties and wasn't a huge dick. There was a king somewhere and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all well and good, but politics was generally an abstract that had little to do with their everyday lives.

This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and escalated throughout the Age of Enlightenment as mass propaganda started to become a thing, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their weird languages and customs. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to instill these ideals into everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations with nationalistic populations and governments and other influential groups fond of egging nationalistic sentiment on, it doesn't take much to get them at each other's throats and keep them there.

Intertwined with nationalism is the issue of "Balance of Power"; since the end of the Thirty Years War, the various European powers had been very conscious about preventing any one nation from becoming too powerful and exerting their authority over everyone else. None of them wanted to fight a massive war that would screw everyone else over, and for the most part this rule was followed by everyone except Napoleon, who had great ambitions for France and is mostly vilified for that reason, among others.

This was one of the motivating factors behind such actions as the race to colonize Africa, the "Great Game" between Russia & Britain over India, the War of Spanish Succession where Britain and the Holy Roman Empire fought to prevent the union of France & Spain, or the clusterfuck that was the Crimean War, where a dispute over churches in the Ottoman Empire led to Britain and France declaring war on Russia, only for neither side to gain anything and lose a lot of men and respect. Napoleon had gotten damn near close to completely dominating Europe, but the alliance system played a major role in ensuring no one would get too sabre-rattly... up until Germany unified and changed the whole playing field, leaving politicians desperate and uncertain as to how far Kaiser Wilhelm was willing to go to prove Germany's prestige as a rising power. The result was an arms race that turned into a giant powder keg, which would inevitably explode with the right spark.

Either way, the full implications of all these changes were not really appreciated until it was too late. It's not that people completely had their heads up their asses, mind you. The officers of 1900-14 had taken note of developments in the Boer War and the conflicts in China. Otto von Bismarck was smart enough to see that Europe was a powder keg, and the dreadnought arms race was a clear sign of things being unsettled. Some ideas such as armoured combat land vehicles had been speculated on by the likes of [[H.G. Wells]], and there was some experimentation with armoured cars and things that might evolve into tanks during the first years of the 20th century. Even so, the scope of the shift was underappreciated, especially since there were still plenty of conservative voices in prominent places (both in the military and government) who'd downplay or ignore new technological developments and until things were tested they'd often be seen as voices of moderation against radicals and doomsayers with zero practical experience. Their disillusionment would be complete, bloody, and brutal.

*1The Taiping Rebellion (not to be confused with the Boxer Rebellion) in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.
*2There was also The War of The Triple Alliance (1865-70), in which Paraguay under López decided to Fight half of South America all at once and ended up getting 9 in 10 Paraguan men killed as well as a decent chunk of the women and kids after López tried to use them as soldiers, which kinda spooked Uruguay and Venezuela but Brazil didn't give a rat's ass and just kept shooting. Again it was fairly localized and South America was fairly underdeveloped, though the simple bloody mindedness of the war was an ominous foreboding of what was to come.

==The First World War==
[[File:Trench warfare great war.jpg|thumb|right|Over the top, lads (sorry, no joke on this one)]]
{{topquote|The War That Will End War.|[[H. G. Wells]], 1914 (spoiler alert, [[fail|it was not]])}}

To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it. The abbreviation M.A.I.N is used to refer to the big four reasons it started: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, and Nationalism.

===Militarism===
Militarism on its own resulted partially from the romanticizing of knights and chivalry, and the idea that serving in the military to conquer colonies for the homeland served to make the state better as a whole. And of course the best way to conquer stuff and then to protect the stuff you'd conquered was to have better weapons and soldiers than the other guys. While most major nations participated in the rise of militarization to some degree, Germany was the keystone of the movement, as its progenitor Prussia was oftentimes called "an army with its own state". This had some factual basis, given that Prussia was born from the Teutonic Crusader State, and its military aristocracy continued to define German policy and culture well into the 20th century.

The veritable arms race in the late 1800s was meant to force peace, resulting in the development of semiautomatic pistols, advanced artillery, increasingly advanced warships, automatic firearms, and a slew of military technological innovations designed to increase the killing power of an individual soldier or unit. Most wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were colonial conflicts waged against low-tech indigenous populations or countries with shitty militaries (the Anglo-Zulu War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Boer Wars, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War) and as a result were laughably one-sided. This resulted in a general myth that war was an adventure where you got to go kill a bunch of dumb people who needed to understand that your country was better than theirs. It hadn't occurred to the top brass, or anyone else, that if the other guy has the same weapons you do, it isn't nearly as fun; this in spite of warnings from colonial veterans that such a slaughter is inevitable, especially under the old Napoleonic tactics that Europe was still using.

One thing that we'll discuss later is the dreadnought battleship, which radically altered the idea of naval warfare and made everything before them obsolete. A nation's prestige was tied to how many battleships it had, so literally everyone and their dog who could afford one was trying to get their hands on them.

===Alliances===
To prevent one country from getting too much power and hopefully prevent war through mutually assured destruction, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which ultimately coalesced into two pacts: the Triple Entente (France, Britain (kind of), and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria), with the United States being free to do whatever the fuck it wanted in the Americas and eastern Pacific sans Canada. The Ottoman Empire was desperately trying to stave off its imminent and inevitable collapse, and the chaos in the Balkans would eventually lead them to try and join the Central Powers.

Japan was a special case. It had an alliance with Britain to act as a sort of "check" against the Russians and their Pacific ambitions, while also serving as an valuable ally against the German Pacific colonies. The benefit was also that Russia could act as an ally against the Japanese if they ever started looking towards Australia without Parliament's permission.

Serbia's national sovereignty was guaranteed by France and Russia, and Belgium received a guarantee from Britain that they'd intervene if Germany tried to use them to just waltz into France and thereby threaten Britain. Meanwhile Italy was in theory allied to the Germans and Austrian-Hungarians, but had stuff in Austria-Hungary that they wouldn't [[Blood Ravens|feel too bad about stealing]]. [[Tzeentch|If this all sounds very convoluted, welcome to the late 1800s.]]

===Imperialism===
One of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire, or Imperialism. During the 18th and 19th centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. This all kicked off back when Spain discovered the New World and became very wealthy as a result; as stated on the [[Renaissance]] page, the other nations of Europe ''realllly'' didn't want to live under the Hapsburgs' hegemony and started competing to build their own empires. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain, the Netherlands, and France in order to fuel their industry and economy back home at the expense of the natives. The treatment of the indigenous population varied based on whichever European power happened to dominate a particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off; one could argue that at least that stopped the chattel slavery that was endemic to the region until the colonization, but suffice to say the natives would likely think that the chattel slavery was preferable. For a while, the competition was "merely" a case of rivalry, as each nation generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly, barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire, until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismarck.

The unification of Germany triggered a renewed colonial rush across the globe. Germany, having come late to the game, was determined to play catch-up, even though all of the really desirable territory in Africa and Asia was already claimed. Nevertheless, they still managed to take possession of a bunch of African territories in modern day Namibia and gained a number of island colonies in the Pacific. This ultimately led to everyone starting to side-eye each others' colonies for various reasons. Italy, for example, aspired to be master of the Mediterranean Sea, while Britain had a historical and economic/political reputation to uphold as protector of the waves with their navy, the so-called "Pax Britannica". Remember that, it'll be important.

Meanwhile Austria-Hungary wanted Balkan territories, and Germany and Japan were latecomers who wanted in on the pie. Even the Americans dipped their hand into it by taking Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain. Needless to say there were plenty of instances where each empire had a vested interest in stealing territory away from each other for their own political and economic gains.

===Nationalism===
Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, who looked at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and decided that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog of Europe. Enter the idea of Nationalism, a political theory that roughly states that loyalty to the state trumps all other loyalties, and that there is no higher expression of loyalty to the state than making it better than all the other states. Combine this with borderline unrestrained capitalism and social Darwinism, and you have a toxic brew of ideas: that your country "must" be better than other countries, cooperation is purely for the benefit of countering rivals and earning prestige, and diplomacy, global politics, and economics are zero-sum games that you have to win. Nationalism should not be confused with patriotism. Patriotism is a love for one's country, while nationalism is a determination to make one's country better than others even at the expense of those other countries.

Remember how we mentioned that Pax Britannica and the technological innovations will come up again later? These two, combined with nationalism, were a special point of concern for Britain. Ever since the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy had become the enforcer of the peace on the world's seas and the guarantor of Britain's world-spanning empire. The United Kingdom invested colossal amounts of time and money into building a world-beating fleet, equipped with the latest naval technology and manned by a highly trained pool of professional officers and sailors. They produced one of the world's first ironclad warships in 1860 and pioneered the use of propeller-driven ships, gun turrets, and torpedoes. By 1889, Britain's determination to hold onto their top-dog status at sea was formally codified as the "two power standard", whereby the Royal Navy was always to be as strong as the number two and three navies in the world. This worked just fine until 1906, when the revolutionary new battleship HMS ''Dreadnought'' was built and launched. With a uniform armament of big guns, turbine engines, and many other technological improvements, ''Dreadnought'' instantly rendered all other battleships in the world obsolete and triggered a worldwide naval arms race as other countries started building their own dreadnoughts.

In this time before the rise of aircraft carriers and submarines, battleships were still the final arbiter of naval power and a potent symbol of national prestige. Any navy that wanted to be taken seriously had to have battleships, but ''Dreadnought'' had set everyone back to square one, including the Royal Navy. Now it was possible for countries that had lacked a battleship navy to catch up with the big players, and it didn't take long for everyone on the planet to get in on the game. Aside from the usual suspects like Britain, Germany, America, Russia, and France, countries like Austria-Hungary, Turkey, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina were all ordering up dreadnoughts as fast as they could find the money. Wilhelm II was particularly obsessed with having a dreadnought fleet of his own; aside from the boost it would bring to Germany's prestige and military power, he had long been in love with the Royal Navy and dreamed of building a fleet just like it when he became Kaiser. He hadn't even intended to start an arms race, but when Britain saw Germany investing in a fleet that was potentially equal to theirs, they were completely unwilling to risk losing their status as the dominant naval power. Germany wasn't willing to acquiesce either, since they didn't understand why Britain was getting so upset about the whole thing until one British commentator summed up the UK's position as follows: Germany would still be the most powerful country on the continent of Europe with or without a navy, but if the Royal Navy were wiped out, Britain would instantly lose control of its empire and its position as number one superpower in the world.

A further thing to note is that nationalist tensions were starting to weaken the imperial system, as people living in countries that had been subjugated by the great empires started looking around and going "hey, fuck being ruled by a bunch of smelly dickhead foreigners!" While some countries were able to survive these tensions with more or less sensible governments, like England with the House of Commons, more often than not this resulted in outright revolt, which caused the creation of Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, and a swath of states formerly under the control of an empire that figured they'd be better off ruling themselves. Others were crushed under the Russians, who knew that successful nationalist movements could cause them to face similar issues with Ukraine, Belarus, Finland, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.

The countries that were hardest hit by these successive waves of unrest revolution were none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were creaky, poor, exhausted states in dire need of reform. The solution that was attempted in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep the state from collapsing. The formation of the Dual [[Monarchy]] and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary, and the Ottomans had the failed Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire and the Young Turks coup following the Tanzimat's abolition establishing what was intended to be a constitutional monarch but was really a military dictatorship under the delusionally idealistic and, as would be proven in a few years, seriously incompetent Enver Pasha and his fellows in high command. Others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror and oppression tactics. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the fractious and ethnically diverse Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

===Additional Factors===
Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. Kaiser Wilhelm was first ''and'' second cousins with Tsar Nicholas of Russia and first cousins with the Tsarina, the King of England, and the queens of Norway, Spain, and Romania, and they all got along about as well as your average pack of siblings.

Another was that when the war started, a [[That Guy|certain someone]] called the United States took a [[A Game of Pretend |totally neutral and not blatantly pro-Entente]] stance by shipping vast amounts of food and materiel to Britain and funding the war via loans to the Entente powers. The massive debt that Britain and France rang up made Wall Street and Washington more and more interested in making sure their investment could be paid back. This along other things would be one of the deciding factors in American involvement in the First World War.

The Franco-Prussian War was also a sore spot for France, who were not only afraid of German encroachment, but determined to get revenge for what they had done to them. This not only contributed to France's bloody-minded determination not to quit fighting, but also influenced the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

As far as significant developments, probably one of the biggest was Wilhelm II sacking Otto von Bismarck for a yes-man. Unlike Wilhelm, Bismarck was smart enough to understand that Germany's rise was a substantial shake-up of the existing European order, and had spent years doing his best to establish Germany's strength and prestige without causing alarm to the other powers. The first two German Kaisers had understood this, but Wilhelm II wanted to prove his country was better (or more to the point, he wanted to prove that ''he'' was better, as he had longstanding insecurity due to a birth defect in his left arm - a big drawback in an overtly militarized society where physical prowess was the gold standard of manliness). So he sacked probably the smartest man in the entire goddamn government because he wasn't retarded enough to create a [[Horus Heresy|massive war that would fuck everyone over.]]

===The Straw that Broke Europe's Back===
The spark that detonated the Balkans came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Young Bosnia movement, which was itself under the influence of the Black Hand, an infamous Serbian nationalist organization. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia (then the biggest independent Slavic country), which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When [[Just as Planned|the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli]] and declared war on Serbia. This was the first in a line of dominoes. In response, [[Not as planned|Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany]]. Germany would then invade neutral Belgium in an attempt to avoid French fortifications on the border, bringing the British into the conflict... at least on paper. In reality, after the fall of the Spanish Empire and weakening of France, England had acquired a near-monopoly on overseas trade and undisputed control of the seas, and it would have been perfectly content to let the continental powers beat the shit out of each other without getting involved...until Germany started churning out dreadnoughts of its own. As mentioned, the dreadnought arms race meant that Germany was threatening England's complete naval domination and thus the lifeblood of its empire. A frightened and suspicious Britain was champing at the bit for a throwdown, and Belgium was just the perfect excuse to get involved.

The internationalization of the conflict and the various ethnicities that the colonial empires of Europe press-ganged into service had some downright comical results, like an Indian battalion fighting in East Africa against German-led Askari tribesmen and Maori soldiers killing Turks at Gallipoli, all because because a Serbian shot an Austrian in Bosnia.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, the outbreak of diseases such as the Spanish flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. An entire generation of Europe's young men was destroyed as a result (commonly known as the [[Grimdark|Lost Generation]] today) and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming their nation's misfortunes on the subversive "other." And while the civilian losses were nowhere near that of the Second World War, they were significant on both fronts, especially in Belgium where the Imperial German Army exercised collective punishment against villages suspected of harboring partisans.

===Hell on Earth===
{{topquote|European nations began World War I with a glamorous vision of war, only to be psychologically shattered by the realities of the trenches.|Virginia Postrel}}

While the average citizen didn't give much of a damn about the alliance system and the bickering of a bunch of politicians over some dispute halfway across the continent, the government of each country knew they had to sell the "necessity" of the war to their citizens. Propaganda from both sides painted the enemy nations as barbaric, inhuman war criminals who had to be stopped to prevent the devastation that would follow if they were allowed to go unopposed. They also reassured the public that, with their obvious technological superiority/superior fighting spirit, the war would be quick and soldiers would return home by Christmas. While this illusion could be maintained with the civilian population, at least for a while, the soldiers sent to the front lines were quickly disillusioned by the horrors that they saw. As the war ground on, morale became so bad that the Russians overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and eventually came to be led by the [[Communism|Bolsheviks]] under Vladimir Lenin, and the French nearly did the same as mass mutinies broke out in the French army. Had the Americans not joined on the Allies' side to swing the war in their favor, it's likely that even more revolutions could have taken place.

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of mass destruction. Tanks made their debut in this war, slowly rumbling through no-man's-land like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing out punishing amounts of firepower themselves, only to break down in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. Airplanes first saw use in a combat role here, and they would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising. The irony is that despite the announced end of the conflict, soldiers continued to fight tooth and nail to the last minute, desperately hoping that whatever few yards they could seize would somehow influence the negotiations in their countries' favor. The fighting continued until literally seconds before 11 AM, where an American soldier who was demoted made a suicide charge on a machine gun and a Canadian guy got sniped.

===Campaigns===
====Western Europe====
{{topquote|What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? — Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,— The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells And bugles calling for them from sad shires.|Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum est"}}

Of all the fronts in WWI, Western Europe is the most documented and seared into the popular consciousness. It cut through Belgium and France all the way down to Switzerland. When Italy joined the Allies, the front was extended to across the Italo-Austrian border. Germany's Schlieffen Plan was intended to be used to quickly deal with France, and once France was broken troops could be diverted to support the Eastern Front. This didn't come to pass as diplomatic pressure caused troops to be diverted East, preventing their use in the Schlieffen Plan and resulting in the offensive against France stalling out short of its goal of capturing Paris. Both sides dug in for the long haul, creating the conditions for the ugliest and most iconic aspect of WWI: trench warfare. This is where all the stereotypical images of WWI originated: endless lines of trenches, forests and fields reduced to blasted, muddy moonscapes, barbed wire and rotting corpses everywhere, clouds of mustard gas, and soldiers armed with bolt-action rifles and bayonets charging into no-man's-land to be slaughtered in the thousands by machine guns and artillery.

The front lines would effectively remain static throughout the war, though both sides made attempts to break the stalemate and resume a true offensive. The Entente attempted breakthroughs at the Battles of the Somme and Ypres, both of which ended in massive casualties for minimal gains. The British army suffered over 57,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the first day of the Somme, which is still the worst casualty rate in its history. Ypres was a series of battles fought in the same general area, collectively becoming known as the First through Fifth Battles of Ypres. Second Ypres saw the Germans' first mass deployment of chemical weapons, while Third Ypres, aka Passchendaele, resulted in somewhere between 400,000-800,000 casualties on both sides. Verdun was a 1916 attempt to knock France out of the war by attacking the fortified city of Verdun, a keystone of France's defensive line. The idea was to grind the French army down through sheer attrition; it backfired and wound up costing the Germans almost as many troops as it did the French (~336,000 German vs. ~379,000 French). Meanwhile, the Ludendorff Offensive of 1918 was a last-ditch attempt to win the war after the Russian capitulation and before the Americans could show up in sufficient numbers to turn the tide. Some indicator of how well this was going to go came from the Ludendorff himself, who declared that all the German army had to do was make a breach in the Allied lines and they'd somehow just win from there.

When Italy joined the fight, basically nothing changed except that the Austro-Hungarians now had to defend their western border in addition to their south and east. The only other significant nation to join the Allies in western Europe was Portugal, who were wooed by promises of protection for their colonial empire in Africa in exchange for joining the Entente.

====Eastern Europe====
Eastern Europe receives comparatively little study compared to the Western Front, mainly because records from that time weren't well preserved or were destroyed during the Chaos of the Russian Revolution. While just as bloody in some instances, it offered many more opportunities for maneuver warfare than was afforded on the Western front. An attack by the Russians on East Prussia went terribly, but just as France hoped, it forced the Germans to divert men away from France and the Schlieffen Plan and into the Eastern Front. This slow advance by the Central Powers in the east would only be halted and reversed in 1916 by the Brusilov Offensive, a brutal assault wherein the Russians shoved the Austrian-Hungarians back into their homeland.

This was too much at too high a cost, because mass desertions, poor battlefield performance, inadequate food supply and widespread dissatisfaction with the ruling aristocracy along with everything else wrong with the Russian empire saw the country basically collapse. Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate, after which he and his family were eventually murdered by the Bolsheviks, and a provisional government was set up. This government proceeded to try an attack against Austria-Hungary with horrific results, stoking further unrest. This was eventually followed by the November 1917 Russian Revolution that brought in Trotsky, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks, who would later become the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A peace agreement saw a ton of territory taken from them in March, which will eventually lead to the formation of the Baltic nations, Poland, and Ukraine, among others. Finland also broke away during the chaos of the revolution, and with much bigger problems on their plate, the Russians kinda just let it happen.

Meanwhile, Serbia would hold out until 1915 against Austria-Hungary, until being overrun after Bulgaria declared for the Central Powers and helped chase the Serbs into Greece. Montenegro followed a few months later in 1916. Greece eventually forced their king to abdicate and declared for the Entente in 1917. The Bulgarians were forced into an armistice after the defeat at Dobro-Pole.

Romania joined the war after seeing the debacle of the Brusilov Offensive, thinking they could join in on the tail-end and steal some land from a couple of dying empires. They were promptly disabused of this notion after they got their shit kicked in by Bulgaria, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, and their army took up a supporting role alongside the Russians until the Bolshevik revolution forced them to sign an armistice. In the end they still managed to increase their territories as a result of their participation in the conflict, so they got what they'd wanted even if it hadn't gone exactly as planned.

====Ottoman Empire====
When the guns of August started blasting, the Ottoman Empire was in the final stages of collapse. A series of military defeats throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had led to the Tanzimat period of the 19th century, which had bought the empire some time thanks to extensive reforms that had taken place, but there was increasing unrest in the Balkans and elsewhere. Though the Turks suppressed several nationalist uprisings, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 forced them to grant independence to Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro. Austria-Hungary walked in and took Bosnia-Herzegovina and Britain gained ''de facto'' control of Cyprus and Egypt. The empire's last throw of the dice came with the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, a ''coup d'etat'' that attempted to reform the empire into a democratic state by restoring its constitution and establishing an electoral system The Italo-Turkish War in 1911 cost the Empire its North African territories and the Dodecanese, while the First Balkan War the following year cost it almost all its territories in the Balkans.

When the war broke out, the Ottomans officially declared neutrality at first, though they talked to both sides to see what they might get out of joining either one. They ultimately came down on the German side after being offered territorial concessions and a guarantee of defense against Russia, along with the Germans essentially forcing the issue by sending a battlecruiser and light cruiser through the Dardanelles strait to Constantinople. Turkey bought the ships and officially commissioned them into their navy, only for the Germans to run off and start bombarding Russia's Black Sea ports without formal authorization from the Turkish government.

Turkey's most well-known contribution to World War I was its defense of the Dardanelles, the strait which allows passage from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They had closed the strait to all Allied shipping not long after entering the war. This inflicted a crippling blow to Russia's economy, which depended on grain exports from the Crimea and elsewhere on the Black Sea coast. The British made several attempts to force open the strait, which would let them put ships into the Black Sea, threaten Constantinople directly, and reopen Russia's lifeline. Several purely naval efforts to smash the forts and gun positions defending the strait failed, after which Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, proposed a landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. A protracted and bloody campaign ensued which saw Australian and New Zealand troops (the famed ANZACs) being fed into the grinder while the Turks more than held their own (no thanks to high command, big thanks to then Colonel Mustafa Kemal). The British ultimately conceded defeat and withdrew their troops, and the Dardanelles remained closed for the rest of the war. The campaign became an emotional flashpoint for Australia and New Zealand, who (not inaccurately) viewed it as a senseless sacrifice of their best young men by their colonial overlords, and was part of the reason they began pushing for greater autonomy and eventually independence after the war. The failure also got Churchill fired from the Admiralty, which most people at the time figured was the end of his career. Perhaps the biggest consequence of this was the shattering of the notion of colonial invincibility, which officially ignited the spark of anti-colonialism across the globe.

Another major front for the Ottomans was the Mesopotamian campaign, which saw them fighting the British in the Middle East. Though the empire did well for the first two years, the Arab Revolt of 1916-1917, led by T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Faisal bin Al-Hussein, saw Arabic irregulars waging a guerrilla war against the Ottomans that tied down great numbers of troops and ultimately led to their defeat in the theater. Britain fucked up here as well; to secure Arabic support for the revolt, they had promised to back the creation of a unified Arab state, which they would recognize after the war. They promptly reneged on that deal once the war was over, instead signing the Sykes-Picot Agreement with France. The agreement haphazardly carved the Middle East into a bunch of mandate territories, all of whom had and still have beef with each other for various reasons. It is still the cause of widespread resentment in the region to this day.

After the war had really gotten rolling, the Ottomans also decided they might as well do some war crimes while they were at it and promptly committed genocides against the Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians. [[/pol/|Turkey claimed at the time, and still insists today, that the Armenian genocide in particular was not a genocide, that the Armenians were resettled for totally legitimate military reasons, and that the Armenians were actually the ones doing the genociding, so they totally had it coming, etc etc]]. Bringing this up around anyone from Turkey is a ''really'' good way to start a fight; Turkey's founding myths rest on the notion that the genocide never happened, so the modern Turkish government is quick to banhammer any kind of pop culture that even mentions it. The average citizen either doesn't care or if educated sees any and all actions taken as desperate survival measures against colonization (not an unfair concern if one looks at Africa or India). The undisputable Turkish hero of the war and founder of the modern nation state, Mustafa Kemal, being at Gallipoli while the whole mess that was Anatolia at the time was taking place being a soldier while Enver was in the lap of luxury pretending to be a soldier also makes sure that the modern republic is fiercely held as being wholly separate so even modernists won't agree with Western historians on this matter.

====Africa====
Before the war, most of the colonial powers seemed to agree that if war ever started, Africa should be left out of it. The risk of breaking the grasp of the metropoli over the colonies was too great, and if the colonial powers kicked each other to the curb in Africa, it could give the natives ideas about declaring independence, especially if they were armed and trained for war. The Conference of Berlin had already stated decades ago that any war between colonial powers would set the colonies aside as neutral parties. Of course, once the war started, all the high-minded rhetoric went down the drain, as the Entente saw the German colonies as easy pickings, isolated and surrounded as they were by the much bigger colonial holdings of the British, the French, and the Portuguese. Thus, Germany had lost control over most of its colonies by 1916, since it couldn't really afford to divert resources to the colonies (and the British Navy would have intercepted them anyway). In German East Africa, however, General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck decided he wasn't going to let any damned Limeys roll over on him, so he rallied his small force of native askaris and German officers and led a notably successful campaign of guerrilla/mobile warfare against the British colonial troops. They managed to hold out against British, Belgian, and Portuguese armies many times their size (hell, by the time he learned Germany had lost the war, [[awesome|he was invading British territory]]).

As an equally badass postscript, when the German government finally agreed to award the askaris back pay several decades later, most of the survivors had lost their uniforms and certificates of service. To prove that they had served under von Lettow-Vorbeck, each man who came forth was handed a broom and ordered in German to execute the manual of arms. [[Awesome|Every one of them remembered their training]].

====Pacific====
Mostly just Japan taking over Germany's scattered Pacific colonies. There were a few minor naval engagements between the German Far East Squadron and the Royal Navy and some attacks by German commerce raiders, but overall it was pretty sparse compared to what would happen in the sequel. What is to note politically is that the Chinese had joined the Allied Powers, hoping to show solidarity with them and get some of their land back from at least one of the imperial powers that had been carving them up like Peking duck for the last century, so they were understandably pissed when Japan was awarded those German territories instead.

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later.

===The Easter Rising===
Ever since they'd been incorporated into Great Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, Ireland hadn't been particularly happy under British rule. Things like the abolition of their parliament, the Great Potato Famine, the oppression of Irish Catholics, and the British army's heavy-handed treatment of anyone who got too unruly had caused younger Irish nationalists to conclude that nothing was going to get done unless they did it with violence. Just before the outbreak of the war, Britain had actually passed an act to grant the Irish home rule, but with Europe turning into a mosh pit, the act was suspended for a year, and then for two more periods of six months each as the war dragged on. At this point, several leaders of the nationalist Irish Republican Brotherhood decided that enough was enough and began planning an armed uprising during Easter Week 1916 to break Ireland free from the UK, even reaching out to the Germans for support. The rest of the IRB didn't think it was such a good idea and the Germans refused their initial suggestion to send a landing force, instead offering to send them some weapons and ammunition. The leaders who were planning the revolt didn't tell their foot soldiers in the Irish Volunteers until the last minute what was going on, and when the Royal Navy seized the German arms shipment, one of the less belligerent IRB leaders immediately decided to call the whole thing off. As a result, what was supposed to be a nationwide uprising was confined almost entirely to Dublin. The first day went pretty well, with the rebels taking control of the city and establishing the foundation of a government. [[Fail|Then the British army showed up with artillery and gunboats and started blasting them to shit]]. The uprising was suppressed by the end of the week, and the ringleaders were tried in military courts and executed. The executions and the brutal reprisals leveled by the British army, along with the murders of a bunch of unarmed civilians during the Rising, stoked public opinion in Ireland against the British and led to the rise of the nationalist party Sinn Fein, ultimately laying the grounds for the Irish War of Independence, the creation of the Irish Free State, and full independence in 1949.

===The Punitive Expedition===
While the United States of America sat the early part of the war out, it was not without armed conflict of its own. In 1916 failed Mexican revolutionary Francisco "Pancho" Villa launched an unprovoked attack on US settlement of Columbus, New Mexico that killed 26 Americans. His actual reasons for this are unclear, but seizing supplies and/or trying to get the US Government to involve themselves in the revolution and wreck everything are common guesses. In response, the US sent troops into Mexico to retaliate against Villa. While the conflict was pretty small scale, it ensured the US didn't enter the Great War totally blind to modern warfare as everyone else had. In fact, it was in this conflict that future superstar General Patton got a taste of the new vehicle-based warfare that he would become famous for.

===The Warlord Era===
Around the same time, after the Boxer Rebellion failed to remove the Europeans from China, it became clear that Imperial China's days were over. After the forced abdication of the Qing Emperor, attempts to create a modern Chinese Republic quickly collapsed as regional warlords split the country among themselves, each intent on unifying China with themselves as its leader. Much like the Three Kingdoms period way back in early China, much of the military and political conflict was characterized by long, drawn-out border skirmishes with the occasional big battle, massive conscript armies, backstabbing, and leaders who were able to hold onto power so long as they had their army's loyalty. Due to an arms embargo and limited domestic manufacturing, industrialized warfare played a very limited role in the early part of the Warlord era; cavalry and bayonet charges were still viable, as very few warlords could afford the artillery and machine guns needed to make them obsolete. However, the eventual intervention of the Japanese eventually shifted the conflict away from a domestic dispute into a fight for China's survival against a technologically superior force, as covered in more detail below.

===The Empire of the Rising Sun===
Japan began emerging as something of the world power a few decades before the war. In 1854, the Japanese were peacefully telling foreigners to stay the fuck out of their country (a policy which hasn't really changed much to this day, only this time they are using things called "laws" instead of [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katanas]]) when suddenly this funny guy named Matthew Perry shows up with some warships. His purpose was to open Japan for business with the West, particularly America. Now contrary to many countries of the period that were forced to open trade at gunpoint, Japan was smart enough to realize that if they did not modernize, they'd be made someone else's bitch. This fate was something that the Japanese have loathed and regularly tried to avoid for their entire history. So after a brief civil war that may or may not have involved Tom Cruise, the Meiji dynasty was established. This began a period of rapid military, economic, and cultural expansion in Japan. Baseball is a popular sport in Japan because Japan took great early influence from the United States. They modeled themselves on Britain, especially its notions of empire, conquest, and spheres of influence; for quite a while, all orders in the Imperial Japanese Navy were given in English, not Japanese. Eventually, this led the Japanese into disagreements with the Russians over Manchurian China and the Kuril Islands. This was the cause of the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese war of 1905 shocked the dominant European powers because the Japanese had managed to defeat the supposedly superior Russians (though the fact of the matter was that both sides blundered hard and the weebs won because the other side was MUCH more incompetent and further from their supply lines - the Russian armada sent from the Baltic Sea to Japan suffered multiple breakdowns and almost started a war with Britain by firing on a British fishing fleet because they thought it was the Japanese). Japan was a member of the Triple Entente and as such seized some German islands in Asia, sent a small fleet into the Mediterranean to escort naval convoys and participated in an expedition alongside the US and European countries in Siberia after the revolution in Russia, but the main political activity was focused on exerting an ever increasing influence on China. After the war, Japan was awarded a permanent seat in the League of Nations, most of Germany's possessions in the Pacific, and recognition as a 'great power', but their proposal to be recognized as equals race-wise was rejected. This caused alienation from the Western powers, which in turn would partially contribute to [[RAGE|increased nationalism and militarism]] down the line.

==Side Note: The Shackleton Expedition and the End of the Age of Heroes==
Ernest Shackleton's famous Antarctic voyage and the perils they faced ending with the miraculous survival of all but three members and the ship's cat after incredible heroism occurred during the First World War in its entirety. Shackleton was sure that the war wouldn't last more than a few months after last hearing that Russia had mobilized and that there were some minor German victories. So what happened to the great hero and his crew of champions? They returned from their epic expedition the middle of 1916. When Shackleton asked the governor of South Georgia Island when the war had ended, the reply was that millions were dying, that Europe was mad, and that the World was mad. Expecting a well deserved hero's welcome, Shackleton and his men found abject, mute horror instead. Most of them volunteered to serve in minesweepers or on the front, and several were killed in action. Shackleton even demanded a frontline position despite his severe heart condition exacerbated by the nightmare he went through, though they resisted until the Allied intervention in the Arctic front of the Russian Civil War, where he worked until the Bolsheviks took that part and the war shifted to the Caucasus and when that was done through a deal with Turkish revolutionaries (more on that below) the chase to the Pacific across Asia. Shackleton himself passed away due to heart complications in 1922, perhaps the last larger than life hero before the world woke up to gritty reality.

==The Interwar Period==
{{topquote|This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.|Ferdinand Foch, 1919, being spot on}}
Believing that the world could not endure another such war, US President Woodrow Wilson attempted to set the groundwork for long-term peace between whites and "white equivalents"(Wilson was a massively racist cunt); he set forth what he called the Fourteen Points, a set of foreign policy doctrines that would address many of the underlying issues behind WWI and promote better diplomacy and cooperation between nations, with its biggest selling point being the League of Nations. The Germans thought that this was actually a pretty neat idea, and were hoping to agree to these terms during the upcoming peace conference. Unfortunately, none of Wilson's allies bought into his vague ideas, and slowly he was forced to compromise on all his policies just so he could get the League of Nations established (it was basically an even shittier proto-United Nations, in that at least the UN specialist agencies do important global coordination work). Most significantly, Wilson failed to convince the US to join the League of Nations, partly due to alienating his Republican opponents in Congress, as they weren't convinced that this League wasn't completely useless, or worse, just another military alliance that would suck them into another European war.

Without the US to back it, and with little power to enforce peace resolutions, the League pretty quickly collapsed in the lead-up to WWII, as the pissed off Germans had been assigned full blame for the war and wanted revenge. Of note also was Wilson's hyper nationalism to the point he believed if everywhere was just like America it would be paradise on Earth, ironically being just as stubborn about forcing democracies and decolonisation as his allies were against the League despite the people involved not knowing a single thing about any of this stuff and nations (like Germany) not being too hot on democracies anyway leading to widespread political instability to the point some say (whether true or not) every issue of the modern day can somehow be traced back to this guy. He was also a huge dick on a personal level as well, the man was an exceptionally vile racist in a time when being racist was the norm. Got crippled by a stroke which precluded him from really doing anything mid-1919 onwards, killed his plans for reelection to a third term, then straight up killed him after his term was over.

Near the end of the First World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. [[Nurgle|The Spanish Flu]], which got its name because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war/didn't actively suppress the news of the epidemic, spread rapidly and killed millions thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused. Various conflicts continued at the regional level, most famously the Anatolian conflict between Greece, Armenia, French colonial forces, Islamists loyal to the Ottoman Government and the nationalist wings of the Ottoman military that revolted under Mustafa Kemal's regime.

The latter won after deals with Armenia (which was not ratified as the Soviets nommed them, the new regime made another treaty which was officially ratified and guaranteed by the Soviets) and France, while Greece was rather soundly defeated. After another peace treaty with the Allies at Lausanne and the nationalist regime reforming into a Republic and abolishing the monarchy and the caliphate a year after the end of the monarchy and the Treaty of Lausanne, the local wars pretty much ended barring minor border disputes and posturing, with the only real big scare being the Bosphorus Straits affair with the Soviets, that was resolved through the Montreaux Convention in the 1930s. The rest of the world wasn't so lucky.

Compare this to America, which was having some of it's best years. The aftermath of WWI and the signing of the Washington Naval Treaty had seen Britain concede that it could no longer maintain the two-power standard, since: 1. it couldn't afford to keep spending that kind of money and 2. this would have required the Royal Navy to compete with the US Navy, which was a friend and ally as opposed to a potential threat. As a result, the US Navy managed to achieve parity with the Royal Navy fairly quickly during the interwar period. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. Presidents Harding and Coolidge lead the country into great economic growth, to the point that most of the world would look to the NYSE as an indicator of economic health. See, unlike the European powers, it hadn't seen the deaths of millions of young men, been forced to reorient itself to the demands of a continental total war, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that happen and was taken over by communists after a civil war like Russia (with some like Turkey as aforementioned getting lucky and successfully reforming), while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

Coolidge would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely rode on his success (justifiably though; Hoover had been Commerce Secretary for 8 years). [[FAIL|Then in October of 1929 the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.]], earing a place as one of the worst presidents in American history.

There had been a series of stock market crashes in the US every decade or so during the the 19th century, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment becoming commonplace, loans for buying stock with, a lot of scams and the limits of the real economy which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country save for the USSR (which had its own Stalin-related problems, and boy were they big problems), which further hindered recovery.

It also didn't help that large swaths of Europe were still battle-scarred wastelands useless for agriculture, an entire generation of young working men had been killed or crippled, and that the formerly super-productive Germany was now tottering under the weight of an ineffectual government and crippling reparations to pay. It culminated in a French Occupation of some of the last profitable land left in Germany, the Ruhr valley, and eventually lead to a renegotiation of the payments that would be more generous to the German economy. Throw in a crushing multi-year drought in the United States that ruined harvests across whole states and the stage is set for chaos.

The old ways of dealing with things didn't seem to be working and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. Similar ideas were tried in England, Australia and the UK. It should be noted that afterwards there was no major economic setbacks until 2008, after New Deal-era financial regulations were pulled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Italy ===
See [[Fascist Italy]]. Shortly put though, as the Italians are not entirely to blame, this guy named Mussolini created a new ideology that seemed pretty snazzy, called Fascism1, that combined big government and ultra-nationalist militarism into another toxic ideology that advocated the strength and growth of the state. Italian Fascism is found in a manifesto of sorts written by Giovanni Gentile in the seminale work "The Doctrine of Fascism" for those interested in [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T_98uT1IZs&t=1s&ab_channel=RyanChapman|further research]. He also ruled for far longer than Hitler did, taking over as "Prime Minister" in 1922 until his removal in 1943.

The Italians conquered Ethiopia to reclaim their national honor after getting wrecked by them, and had a general foreign policy of attempting to promote international fascism. By which of course the end result would be an Italian sphere of influence. This is represented in HOI4 by the Albania tree, the attempts at Turkish influence, and their intervention in the Spanish Civil War along with the Germans. For all intents and purposes, Mussolini seemed very genuine in his intent to promote Fascism across the globe to not only promote Italian interests but to correct the "failures of liberalism" and counter those filthy Communists2. It also helps that the leader of such a movement could become wealthy and powerful as a result.

1Fascism with a capital "F" refers specifically to Italian fascism. With a little "f", it is a noun describing a broad ideology. [[Tzeentch|Nazism is fascist, but not "Fascist".]] [[What|Savy?]]

2Fascism was a Reaction against the Russian Revolution and the chaos of post-war italy. Mussolini came to power by leading a bunch of nationalist thugs that beat up Socialists and Communists in Northern Italy and eventually the Italian King and the old-school conservatives made him Prime Minister as he seemed to be effective against them.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Germany===
In Germany, the completely rational response was to blame democracy, which contributed to the rise of authoritarian parties on the left like the Communist KPD, which in turn led to the Nazi (National Socialists German Workers Party or NSDAP) party to counter them (possibly with help from western powers seeking a wall against communism) with a newfound hate of the Allies thanks to the colossal reparations Germany was forced to pay to the rest of Europe by the Treaty of Versailles, which renegotiated or not, still put a perceived blame for the war unjustly upon them along with a variety of other complicated things that can be blamed on the [[Nazi|Nazis]]. Rounding it off was the ''Dolchstosslegende'', or "stab-in-the-back-myth", that was concocted by butthurt imperial generals like Ludendorff and Hindenburg in order to shift the blame for Germany's defeat to the Social Democrats or the [[What|historic enemy of Germany, the Jews.]]

The concurrent deeply authoritarian political culture of many German institutions as well as reactionary and monarchist industrialists like Krupp, who all backed Hitler and nationalist and antisemitic parties similar to the NSDAP (like the DNVP) and the lack of people actually willing to give a damn about the Republic itself led to the erosion of the few democratic principles left at this point. From 1930 onward, Hindenburg, who was elected as the candidate of a coalition of nationalist and conservative parties to the office of President, reigned over Germany in a dictatorial manner and named Hitler as Chancellor and head of government in January 1933, after two governments under the centrist-conservative Party Zentrum and the Nationalist DNVP failed to stabilize the economy. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up for war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising due to nobody wanting to be the one to start another war. And ideals of peace and disarmament were certainly somewhat popular in the UK and France after the bloodbath of the Western Front.

To their credit, in the mid '30s the Nazis did appear to be doing good things, even if there was a clear air of racial supremacy about the whole affair. Europe was collectively terrified of Marxism, and a nation that was forcefully rebuilding and modernizing itself without resorting to collectivization was tolerated by the French and British out of fear of the alternative. Between completing the Autobahn, hosting the Olympics, and achieving a number of engineering feats such as the first practical helicopter, Germany appeared to be getting shit done. When the communists tried to launch a revolution in Spain, Germany and Italy sent weapons and eventually troops to curbstomp them and test out their new toys on people with wrong opinions, while Britain looked the other way and pretended not to notice that Germany suddenly had hundreds of tanks that they were legally not supposed to have, and that France and the Soviets were doing the same thing with the communist revolutionaries. So nobody was too concerned when Germany started making noises about reunifying some Germanic peoples in the border regions they'd ceded in the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Treaties. Then shit started to get real.

In 1936, Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, which was a direct violation of both treaties. Britain and France were concerned, but neither country was ready to go to war again, so they let it slide. Hitler took this as confirmation that they wouldn't do shit to stop him and ramped up his plans for rearmament and conquest. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria more or less peacefully, then walked into Czechoslovakia and took the Sudetenland, home to 3 million ethnic Germans. The rest of the continent was getting increasingly worried, but Hitler super-duper promised that the Sudetenland would be his last territorial acquisition, cross his heart and hope to die. Britain and France were desperate to avoid war, and Hungary and Poland also wanted some of Czechoslovakia's turf, so together they strong-armed Czechoslovakia into signing the Munich Agreement, officially ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously proclaimed that the Agreement was "peace for our time" when he came home from the negotiations on 30 September 1938. A pissed-off Winston Churchill correctly predicted that Hitler wasn't going to stop at the Sudetenland, and was proven right when Germany occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and then started side-eyeing Poland and the former German territories it now controlled.

===Rise of Authoritarians: Japan===
In the 19th century the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would come by and stomp all over them like they did China and Southeast Asia. During the Tokugawa period, military technology basically stagnated as there were no pressing internal or external threats that required [[Dakka|shootier guns]] or better tactics to sort out. There was much anxiety in the Tokugawa Shogunate about this (and even a limited attempt at army modernization by at least one Japanese domain) but things came to a head in 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbour and ended two centuries of isolation. The end of the Sakoku and bombardments by US and Royal Navy ships drove the necessity of modernization home. The Shogunate bought foreign guns and ships, lifted restrictions on shipbuilding and sent diplomatic missions abroad, but the pace of modernization and westernization really picked up after the Meiji Restoration. By 1914 Japan had a solid public education system and set of universities, a well-developed rail network, a respectable industrial base and an army and navy which had beaten the Russian Empire. In the Great War they drove the German Empire out of the Pacific. Japan had arrived on the world stage, but despite that they were still concerned about the West and its influence, what with Britain and France being two of the largest and most acquisitive colonial powers on Earth. The Japanese saw what had happened to their neighbors and wanted no part of it. Combine this with a historic ''extreme'' hard on for cultural and political independence that can still be observed to this very day, and you start to get the anxiety faced by Imperial Japan.

Even so while the Meiji Restoration was successful in its general goals, it had its faults. It did end the Tokugawa class system and introduced a parliament, but it was still largely a system set up for the benefit of a small number of well connected oligarchs. The franchise was limited to only 1% of the population, with the prominent lordlings and industrialists who'd backed the Emperor in the Boshin War and their kids being disproportionately prominent in Japanese society. There would be considerable push for reform after the Great War (in particular there was universal male suffrage in 1925), but there would also be strong pushback by conservatives and militarist ultranationalists, especially after an big earthquake devastated Tokyo in 1926 and the Great Depression came along to wallop the Japanese economy. Unlike their later partners in the Axis, there was no Japanese Hitler or Mussolini figure who masterminded and led a movement which came to dictate authority. Instead Japan had a collection of right-wing cranks and extremists and a military which was off the chain. The Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were loyal only to the Emperor and the Diet had very little power over them at the best of times. Technically the Meiji Parliament continued to putter on, but from 1931-45 it was marginalized and subverted. Whenever prominent liberals and socialists who oppose rampant militarism get ganked by radical thugs who are pardoned by judges who are either on board with the militarists or afraid that they'll get ganked themselves, the power and influence of said nationalist militarists will steadily grow until they can more or less do as they please, specifically getting their imperialism on.

Even though the Japanese had managed to modernize rapidly in a short span of time and kicked the shit out of the Russians, they were still often seen as inferiors by white people, [[Imperial Japanese Equipment|"yellow monkeys who could only copy what white folk invented" and other such nonsense]]. Some people like Wilhelm II and some nativist shitheads in the US, Canada and Australia saw the Japanese and East Asians in general as still being lessers, but still capable enough to be a threat ("The Yellow Peril"). When the League of Nations was founded, the Japanese had a seat at the table and the Japanese Ambassador requested that its charter have a non-binding statement on Human Equality3, which got some support, but Woodrow Wilson vehemently shot it down, mostly because this would require him to see [[Tyranids|minorities as anything other than evil cockroaches trying to devour the white man]], and GOLLY GEE WE CAN'T HAVE THAT NOW CAN WE? This sort of thing breeds animosity at the best of times, and these times were anything but.

From the Meiji period onward some prominent Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves4, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward. Their first steps were pretty humble, taking back some of the Kuril Islands, Okinawa, etc. Then they stomped into Korea, renamed Taiwan "Formosa" because fuck your local names, and then logically jumped into trying to conquer all of China.

Imperialism and colonialism? No, we're doing this in the name of Asian liberation, friend! A "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" if you will. Pay no mind to the [[Grimdark|atrocious war crimes we're about to be committing]]. The Japanese kept this going into the 20th century when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after 1931, by which time the military more or less dictated the course of Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and made it into a puppet state under the deposed Qing emperor, then invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went (around four times the death toll of the Holocaust to be precise, something that is largely ignored in light of the Holocaust itself and Japan's contemporary PR efforts). Japanese forces in China occasionally attacked [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_incident foreign shipping], [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kweilin_incident airliners], and property. Despite this, international reactions were fairly limited — the European powers were too busy worrying about Herr Hitler and Nazi Germany and America had profitable trade agreements with Japan.

* 3Yes, there was an element of hypocrisy in the Empire of Japan making this statement. But Wilson was probably too racist to understand this or care.
* 4See previous footnote, the Japanese were very racist towards Koreans and Chinese, especially during the height of militarism. They just wanted to be the ones who were conquering all of Asia, not the Western powers..

==The Second World War==
===The War in the West===
See also [[Nazi]]s and [[Fascist Italy]].

With Poland unwilling to roll over for Hitler, the Nazis securing a ceasefire with Soviet Russia and with Britain and France finally stirred to the defense of Poland, it was clear that war was inevitable. Germany invaded Poland on September 1st 1939, after creating a false-flag incident to offer the thinnest fig leaf of legality (and also dispose of a few dissenting Germans on the Nazis' hitlist). Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany. Contrary to the popular imagination, Poland did not simply crumble before the German onslaught, and the myth of Polish cavalry trying to charge German tanks was yet another piece of propaganda. (What actually happened was this: a Polish cavalry detachment surprised and overran a group of German infantry who were taking a rest and were in turn driven off by machine gun fire from some armored cars; the actual tanks didn't show up until it was all over. Later on, German and Italian war correspondents were shown the battlefield with the tanks parked nearby and cooked up the story of "these brave dumbasses charged our tanks with lances and sabers".) But after a month of hard fighting with no help from Britain or France and with the Soviets entering the war and overrunning much of the country's western half, Poland finally gave in to the inevitable.

After that, the Germans sat around for a bit (literally, German soldiers called the period between October 1939 and June 1940 the ''Sitzkrieg'', or "sitting war"), causing the British and the French to fortify the hell out of the northeast part of France in anticipation of the inevitable assault. However, the French ignored a large wooded area called the Ardennes. This region was thought to be impenetrable to the German army, as it was believed that the mobility of German tanks would be fatally hampered by the thick forests. Needless to say, this was wrong, and the panzers blew through the Ardennes in days, completely buttfucking France's entire defensive strategy. France, which had held out through four years of brutal attritional warfare in 1914-1918, fell at just an alarmingly fast rate as Poland did. The Italians jumped in at the last minute to steal some land and pretend they could help their ally Germany in warfare. It should be mentioned that in spite of the surrender memes everyone makes about France, they fought quite hard and inflicted casualties on the German invaders at a rate far higher than should have been expected of them. In fact, the German High Command felt very uneasy about the whole operation throughout its entirety, in large part because (at least on paper) the French military ''was'' stronger than the Germans, and had ample reason to believe going in that this was a fight they ''could'' win. The Germans' success came down to several factors: tactics that focused on speed, shock, and mobility; excellent close air support from the Luftwaffe; high levels of coordination thanks to the widespread use of radio; and hard-driving generals who spotted opportunities and seized them without consulting with high command, following the longstanding Prussian-German principle of independence in the field. Combine all of these with a healthy dose of luck, and you have a perfect explanation of why the Germans succeeded. The Battle of France ended with the conquest and surrender of Paris, the British Expeditionary Force's famous evacuation from Dunkirk, and Germany annexing the north of the country, leaving the rest to the Vichy puppet government that would administer southern France and her colonies. However, French general Charles de Gaulle rallied several of the colonies to continue their resistance against the Germans and many colonists would pledge their support to "Free France". They would eventually form a provisional government in Algiers and ultimately return to Paris in 1944.

After France fell, Germany went on a spree of conquest that would give any [[Axis & Allies]] or ''Hearts of Iron'' player a colossal throbbing war-boner: they overran Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, the Balkans, and Greece in the space of a year, stunning the rest of the world. It wasn't all roses for the Nazis, of course; there were large and active partisan movements in all the territories they conquered, and the invasion of the Balkans and Greece was largely because Italy had got itself spanked trying to throw its weight around in the region and ran crying to Germany for help. The latter two campaigns tied the Wehrmacht up for several months on the eve of Operation Barbarossa, potentially costing them critical time that they could have used to get to Moscow before winter set in.

The British spent the majority of 1940-1942 on the defensive from all sides and every angle. Chamberlain was out as prime minister after having been humiliated by Hitler's pissing all over his hard diplomatic work, and Winston Churchill was in. A man with an iron will and indomitable resolve, he led his country through the loss of HMS ''Hood'', the U-boat crisis (something that he made clear was his greatest fear throughout the war), the Battle of Britain, and the fall of Burma, Crete, Malaya, and Singapore. Canadians, South Africans, Indians, ANZACs, and all manner of soldiers that could be acquired were pressed into service to defend the Empire all across the globe. Among the successes, such as the sinking of the ''Bismarck'' and the Taranto raid, were horrible failures like the Greek and Norwegian expeditionary forces, and the war for Africa was largely a stalemate until the Torch landings.

Meanwhile, the USSR and Germany had been circling each other like prizefighters before a bout. Their nonaggression pact notwithstanding, each country regarded the other as an existential threat. Hitler wanted the vast territories and resources that Russia had to offer, and he regarded the Russian people as subhuman Bolsheviks who needed to be exterminated or enslaved for the good of the Greater German Reich. Stalin, meanwhile, saw the Nazis as a pack of murderous fascists who would need to be dealt with before they could ruin the glorious USSR. Thus, even while they dismembered Poland together, the two countries were plotting to take each other down. Germany struck first, launching Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941. Hilariously enough, Stalin refused to believe that the invasion was occurring at first, in spite of repeated warnings from his spies, allies, and generals. He even threatened to court-martial or execute some of the officers who first reported that the Germans were pouring across the border from Poland. Initially, Barbarossa looked like it was going to be another walkover for the Wehrmacht, since the Red Army was in a bad way. Stalin's paranoid purges in the 1930s had gotten rid of most of the army's competent, professional officers, leaving it to be led by incompetent yes-men and/or inexperienced junior officers. It was also caught in a doctrinal bind regarding the employment of its armored forces and suffering from low institutional morale because of the rough handling they'd received at the hands of the Finnish Army in the Winter War. Because of this, the Wehrmacht beat the absolute shit out of the Red Army at first, wiping out or capturing entire army groups along with seizing the entirety of Ukraine and a reasonably large slice of western Russia. Fortunately for the Soviets, the Germans spread themselves thinly enough, and the Red Army managed to fight just hard enough, that the Wehrmacht didn't make it to Moscow in time. The infamously brutal Russian winter forced the Germans to stay the winter just outside of Moscow, suffering tremendous casualties from the cold, and the oil they wished to seize was either just out of reach or destroyed in the Red Army's scorched earth retreats.

===American Rearmament===
This whole time the American public had been watching the developing war. Chief among them was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was not a fan of Adolf, mostly because FDR hated imperialism (he actively worked to release the Philippines from the US - the only reason that fell through was because the Filipinos could see the Japanese quite obviously eyeing them up - and was pivotal in creating a post-war environment that would destroy the colonial regimes of Britain and France.) He convinced Congress to send increasingly generous aid to Britain, start pouring funds into the military, instituted a peacetime draft, and generally put the US into a state of readiness for war.

In spite of these changes, the American public was generally lukewarm on the idea of war in Europe, as they had been thirty years previously; they were content to let the Europeans kill each other and live their lives unbothered by the Old World's problems. Besides, the Depression was still going on, and the last thing people wanted was even more misery on top of that. Like Wilson, FDR realized that he could not go to war without changing the public's perception, so this explains the "slow" manner in which the US built up its military infrastructure. Instead, he and the generals and admirals took notes and watched carefully from the sidelines, gradually taking a more pro-Allied stance by escorting transports, allowing American destroyers to "defend business interests" in convoys, and building up a tank force and air force. Everything was going fine until the Japanese Navy ran up and kicked America in the balls at Pearl Harbor.

Rather than being shocked into peace talks or ineffectiveness, the entire country became extraordinarily pissed and Congress declared war the next day. Recruitment offices were overrun with men willing and eager to fight, and promising officers such as Chester Nimitz, George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, and Jimmy Doolittle were given important assignments. "Remember Pearl Harbor" became a rallying cry among the US Navy, and General Douglas MacArthur was determined to regain his prestige after the Philippines were lost under his command. Europe probably still would've been a tough sell, even with the American public ripshit pissed and out for revenge, but Hitler and the rest of the Axis neatly solved that problem by declaring war on the US right after the Pearl Harbor strike, and just like that, America was committed to the whole World War shebang.

===Mid-War===
The mid-war refers largely to the conclusion of the African campaign and the fall of Italy, and the conclusion of the Battle of Stalingrad. The Freeaboos first forayed into the world of dying hard on beaches during the Torch landings, where a combination of inexperienced troops and lackluster leadership, poor logistical planning, bad intel, and a bunch of pointless and stupid red tape from the somewhat uncooperative Vichy colonial administration resulted in needless casualties. The results would be studied, with promising results for future campaigns.

After Operation Torch, the Allies pushed with great difficulty into Tunisia, cutting the Axis army off from resupply and ensuring that they couldn't be evacuated. With the Americans coming in from the west and Montgomery's army in the east, the Axis army in Tunisia was surrounded and captured with great difficulty, due to the mountainous and hilly terrain. The complete lack of useful military infrastructure that had not been left to rot by Petain made the logistics a nightmare. From there, they began preparing their next operation, which was the invasion of Sicily and southern Italy.

While the Allies were establishing a base for Free France and picking away at Italy, the Germans and Soviets were beating the absolute fuck out of each other at Stalingrad. Stalingrad was a strategically important city; its position meant that it controlled access to the oil fields of the Caucasus and passage along the Volga River, one of Russia's major waterways. Whoever controlled the city would control both of these critical resources. Besides this, Stalingrad was also a symbolically important city, since it was named after old Josef himself; losing it would have humiliated him and the Red Army. The Germans attacked the city as part of Case Blue, a general invasion of the Caucasus in the summer of 1942. Unfortunately for them, city fights were exactly the kind of thing their technology and tactics weren't designed for. The Wehrmacht's superiority over the Red Army at this stage of the war depended on its mobility, shock power, and armored formations. The urban combat in Stalingrad deprived them of all of these advantages, sucking them into a 5-month meat grinder of a siege that functionally destroyed any value the city would have had along with the entirety of their supplies. The Russian 62nd Army fought for literally every inch of the city, fueled by rage, patriotism, and desperation; even when the oil depots were set on fire, the city was bombed into rubble, and the Germans had driven them into a tiny pocket on the banks of the Volga, they refused to quit, hanging on and fighting tooth and nail. Ultimately, the Russians managed to encircle Friedrich Paulus and the 6th Army and fight off all attempts at relief from outside the pocket, resulting in the surrender of over 250,000 German soldiers, only 5,000 of whom would live to see home a decade later.

The landings on Sicily and Italy were enough to force Mussolini out of power, and Italy promptly changed sides to fight for the Allies. However, the theorized soft underbelly of Italy was anything but, as its rugged, mountainous terrain proved difficult for the Allies to traverse. The Germans had also predicted that Italy would hit the "change team" button and immediately executed Operation Axis, which subdued and dismembered the Italian army, stole all its equipment, and effectively seized control of the country, while a commando raid on Mussolini's prison successfully freed Il Duce. This resulted in Mussolini being established as a puppet governor in Northern Italy until he was killed by partisans, while the Germans dug into the Apennines and refused to shift. This prevented the Allies from making any meaningful progress towards Germany through Italy.

===The Normandy landings===
{{topquote|So much of the progress that would define the 20th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, came down to the battle for a slice of beach only six miles long and two miles wide.|President Barack Obama, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day}}

Yes, Normandy gets its own section. See, the Americans had long wanted to just land in France and bash the Nazis to death much like what Sherman had done to the CSA in the American Civil War. The British managed to convince the Americans that Africa would allow them to isolate a large number of Axis troops that could not be replaced from Europe, and if Stalin continued to bleed them dry, they could take Italy. The disastrous Dieppe raid also convinced Eisenhower to shelve the idea as untenable at the moment.

Flash forward to 1944 and Italy is a stalemate, though Russia is in a much better spot due to lend-lease and having managed to relocate most of its heavy industry beyond the Urals. Stalin wants the Americans to open up another front to take pressure off of him, and the Allies oblige by preparing one of the most complicated and carefully planned landings in human history: Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of Normandy. Overlord had intelligence gathered from old Time-Life magazines, commandos, partisans, postcards, scientific reports, and anything else they could get their hands on. Weather patterns were traced back decades to predict for an ideal time to land, swimming tanks were developed, and two mobile ports were developed to help unload equipment due to the lack of ports near the beaches. On top of all that, the Allies launched a massive counter-intelligence operation, mainly convincing the Germans that a massive army group (made up of balloons to fool observation craft) stationed in Kent and led by General Patton would attack Calais. They even went one step further by dressing up the corpse of a dead homeless man as a fake intelligence officer that "drowned" off the coast of "Neutral" Spain, with fake documents of fake landing plans. It was obvious that Churchill had been so shaken by Gallipoli that he wanted to leave nothing to chance this time around.

In spite of these preparations, Eisenhower was not totally convinced they would succeed, and prior to the landings wrote a letter taking full responsibility for the failure of the landings. This never happened, thankfully, but the rest of the Battle of Normandy was not just on the beaches. American and British paratroopers were dropped behind German lines to hold back reinforcements and seize or demolish important enemy infrastructure, attack aircraft strafed and bombed German positions for miles around, and the strategic bombers of the USAAF were diverted from pounding German industry to provide aid. Once Normandy had been secured, it was now the beginning of the end.

===Victory in Europe===
After liberating France and Belgium, the Western Allies marched on Germany's border at the Rhine River while the Soviets blew through Ukraine, Poland, and East Germany before bumrushing Berlin. The Germans launched several desperate counter-attacks to try and break the Allies' will to fight, including the decisive Battle of the Bulge and the last-ditch offensives in Hungary and Romania. It prevented the Western Allies from pushing further than West Germany and insured the longevity of the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe.

By this time, FDR was finally starting to realized that all the nasty things Churchill had been saying about Stalin were true; he was a liar and a paranoid, tyrannical sociopath hell-bent on carving out a swath of European territory to expand Communism and Soviet influence. While FDR's ambitions to allow countries to have their own say in their governance would be realized in the 30 years after August 1945, many countries of the Eastern Bloc would remain under the hammer and sickle as "satellite states". Even a brief attempted rebellion by the Poles to reestablish their country was brutally put down by the Nazis, while the Soviets sat on the outskirts of Warsaw and watched.

In the Battle of Berlin, the Germans fought ferociously against the Soviets, but Hitler took his life in the hours preceding the Soviets occupying the Reichstag and declaring victory. The official cessation of hostilities occurred on May 8 1945. This is known as VE Day, though in Russia it is called Victory Day, in honor of the tremendous sacrifices the men of the Red Army made during the many battles in which they fought against the German Heer.

===The War in the East===
As Japan continued to push deeper into China and signed the Tripartite pact with Italy and Germany, the US threatened to embargo the oil, steel, and aircraft parts Japan needed to keep their massive war machine running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor (timed to hit approximately 30 minutes after delivering the declaration of war, thus [[Rules lawyer|effectively being a surprise attack without technically being a surprise attack]], except they fucked up the timing and the declaration wasn't delivered until Pearl Harbor had already been bombed to shit).

The idea was that if everything went right, the fickle American public would be dismayed by the prospect of a hard fight over a bunch of distant islands that didn't even belong to them (especially while contemplating joining the war in Europe), the IJN could seize control of the Pacific while the crippled US fleet was out of action, and the US would be left with no choice but negotiation. However, while the Pearl Harbor attack did work pretty well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, they missed all but one of the US carriers which only suffered minor damage, enraged an American public that was previously tepid on war (especially since mistakes delayed even the planned token warning), and the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the industrial capacity that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel and resources. ''To be fair, nobody* in the years leading up to World War II '''expected''' carriers to be important.'' Another big failure of the attack on Pearl Harbor was the fact that the Japanese attack didn't touch the dockyards, dry docks, fuel depots, command centers, and the rest of the infrastructure that you need to target to prevent a navy from functioning or recovering after its ships take a ton of damage.

To top it all off they also aligned themselves with the Nazis, based on shared enemies and ultra-imperialist/nationalist ideologies, but this only reinforced the narrative of them being a part of the barbaric Forces of Evil who needed to be completely defeated for the sake of the civilized world.

Despite America's obvious industrial advantage, the US Navy was seriously lacking in experience and numbers compared to the IJN at the start of the war; with the Japanese carriers outnumbering the Americans (who had to split their fleets across two oceans to protect against German U-boat attacks), there was a very real threat that the IJN would return to finish the job and start raiding the US mainland before replacement ships could be built. The early stages of the war in the Pacific were very much touch-and-go, but that all changed after the Battle of Midway, when [[Tactical genius|Admiral Chester Nimitz]] intercepted the IJN's plans to attack Midway Island and lured them into a trap, destroying four veteran aircraft carriers, about half of the IJN's total carrier capacity at the time. This blunted the Japanese advance and threw them onto the defensive, buying the American war machine valuable time to rearm and retrain. It also didn't hurt that [[Spy|American and British Naval Intelligence]] partially deciphered most Japanese naval codes in 1942.

As time went on, and with some shaky starts, the Allies quickly learned how to rely on carriers instead of traditional battleship tactics. The Battle of Midway and the Solomon Islands campaign combined to put the IJN on the back foot; Midway cost them four carriers and a bunch of their best carrier aviators, and the prolonged attritional fighting in the Solomons cost them many more of their pilots, along with dozens of valuable ships that they couldn't afford to replace. The Japanese now found themselves as the proverbial one-legged man in the ass-kicking contest. Ferocious naval engagements gave way as the star of the show to even more brutal amphibious warfare as the Marines began their island-hopping campaign across the Pacific, painfully prying each strategically important Japanese-occupied island from their well dug in defenders — and crucially, skipping the islands that weren't important, leaving lots of Japanese units deployed in spots where they could do fuck-all except die slowly from starvation and disease. The jungle, cave and amphibious warfare of this stage of the campaign was especially horrific even by World War II standards, not helped by racism against the Japanese on the part of Americans and the racism against everyone crossed with the suicidal fanaticism of the Japanese further exacerbating this. The IJN also set up various military units for holding prisoners and scientific experiments - best exemplified by Unit 731 - which gave Auschwitz a run for their money on crimes against humanity, the only difference being the lack of a genocidal goal. [[RAGE|Well, that and the fact that the perpetrators were given immunity to prosecution in exchange for giving their data to the US government for it to use in its bioweapon program. Typical, really.]]

One often overlooked (at least in popular history from the western perspective) event in the war in China was the last big Japanese offensive of 1944, named Operation Ichi-Go, where the Japanese threw their last reserves together to break through Republican Chinese lines under Chiang Kai-shek with astounding success. Although the Japanese were beaten back very quickly, as they were in no position to hold their gains against the Allied counter-offensive, the Republican Chinese failure to stop it led to the US taking control over the Nationalist forces after an ultimatum that greatly damaged the previously good relations between Kai-shek and the US government. It also led to the disillusionment of a lot of Nationalist Chinese officers and soldiers with their cause, prompting them to switch sides to the Communists under Mao Zedong. Mao on the other hand quickly utilized this momentum and influx of experienced soldiers (along with Soviet aid) to seize control of China from the Nationalists in the second phase of the Chinese Civil War (the Warlord Era got put on a semi-pause fighting against Japan, it was tenuous with constant skirmishing and the moment the Japanese forces got pulled out at the end of the World War it reignited), push them off the mainland and out to Taiwan, and found the Chinese People's Republic in 1949.

One major note from a wargaming perspective in this theater is Operation Ten-Go, the last sortie of the IJN against the US military forces invading Okinawa. The largest battleship made by human hands, the ''Yamato'', and her support fleet, sortied to support the Japanese Army on Okinawa ... and were promptly destroyed by massed American airpower before they got 100 miles from Japan. This cemented the change in the IRL meta of naval warfare from battleship fleets to carrier dominance, which has endured to this day.

===The Manhattan Project===
{{topquote|Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.|Robert Oppenheimer}}
{{topquote|Now we are all sons of bitches.|Kenneth Bainbridge}}

At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei after processing uranium in a cyclotron releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, instead of using it as cheap energy first, people thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare (less for the raw destruction it would cause, since firebombing cities was already horrifyingly effective, but because it would only take one bomber getting through air defenses to do the job instead of dozens or hundreds), and the Nazis getting it first would be an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. 20000 '''tons''' of silver wiring were built to enrich the uranium into something that will recreate a small sun for a brief moment.

The bombs weren't ready in time to use against the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to convince them that they wouldn't be able to fight to the stalemate they were now aiming for, thus ending the war quickly at the cost of a few hundred thousand Japanese civilians, rather than a long and costly slog that would potentially result in millions dead if the fanatical Japanese military forced it through to completion (including both the Japanese civilians who would be mobilized into militias and untold American service members). This view is [[Skub|controversial]] [[SJW|depending]] [[/pol/|on]] [[Communism|who]] [[Japan|you ask]], and some think it had more to do with revenge for the boats that got blown up at Pearl, combined with racism and the desire to show off their new weapon to anyone else who might have threatened American dominance. Needless to say this is one of the war's most hotly debated decisions, and we will not be taking a stance. Regardless of the morality of using a small sun on a civilian target, it seemed to contribute to the surrender of the Japanese on 2 September 1945, though VJ day is observed on August 15th, when the Japanese announced their intention to surrender.

Whether or not intimidation was indeed a motive, the Russians ended up nicking the research data and so this just paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]]. It is claimed by some that Stalin knew about the test before Truman did (Long story short: Truman was chosen as VP to get the Southern Democrats to support FDR's reelection bid. FDR didn't care for him much.) Some sources claim that Stalin merely suspected the Americans were working on nukes, and a cryptic statement by Truman allowed Stalin to confirm his suspicions.

After the war, the United Nations was organized in a significantly more effective manner than the League of Nations, with the veto power and the binding requirements at the Security Council at least nominally giving the world a way to forcibly stop wars. The embarrassment that was the League of Nations formally dissolved itself and handed over all its assets to the UN in its last meeting in 18 April 1946 (the resolution went in to effect the next day on the 19th) with the sole exception of a 9-man committee transferring assets, records and administrations of specialist agencies to the UN. This committee dissolved itself on 31 July 1947, legally ending the League of Nations as an entity. The Cold War technically started the day the Japanese surrendered, though the Berlin Blockade and the ending of the Chinese Civil War, reignited after Japan's defeat, were the public display.

==Notes==
[[File:Cathedral Radio.jpg|thumb|200px|right|''"...We now return to the adventures of Bobby Gill and the Imperium Boys, brought to you by George Rough Ridin' Martin's Jackets. Bundle up tight, because Winter is Coming!"'']]
*Radio! While radio was being used for communications and there were a few experimental broadcasts here and there since the beginning of the twentieth century, it really took off in the 1920s as a revolutionary new form of mass media. Radios meant that for the first time you could beam music, news and other such information directly into people's homes. Radio systems (both transmitters and especially receivers) were cheap to make and comparatively easy to use and maintain. Naturally everyone wanted in on this pie from radio companies to the Americans to the Brits to the Japanese to the Soviets to the Nazis. In particular the Nazis mass produced millions of cheap [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volksempf%C3%A4nger ''Volksempfanger''] radio sets to get one in every german house to feed a steady stream of Nazi propaganda to the German masses. FDR's famous "fireside chats" were made possible by radio, as was the speed and shock power that defined ''Blitzkrieg''.
**A quirk of Radio of this time was as a major part of the standardization of language. Beforehand most people learned how to speak from their families, friends and neighbours and accents were far more pronounced. While other things such as railways and records had some impact, having a radio set meant that there was a voice being piped into your parlour every day. It also meant that the speaker needed a Radio Voice: something which was legible to the audience especially with the crappy speakers of the early 20th century. In the UK this lead to Received Pronunciation (the clipped middle class UK accent the Imperials use in Star Wars) while in the US they went with the Midatlantic Accent (that sort of posh way you here people talk in old hollywood movies) and eventually a Midwestern Accent.
*During this time science fiction began to catch on to a wider audience. As new technologies increasingly transformed people's lives, there was interest in what the future might be like. At the same time, radio and pulp magazines gave sci-fi writers a new means to get their message out in a way that was both cheap and offered exposure to a wide audience. Ideas such as Rockets, Robots, the towering cities of the future, day to day life in them and the future of human evolution were all discussed. The downside of this was that there was also a ''lot'' of crap, since lowering the barrier of entry meant that a bunch of low end crud could be shovelled out onto the market and the editors of the magazines were often more interested in filling pages for next week's edition than putting out quality material. Even so, it did have a widespread impact. Astounding Stories magazine editor John W. Campbell got questioned by the FBI in 1944 about a story he had written about the possibility of atomic warfare and he worked out that the Manhattan Project was based at Los Alamos because of a sudden change in mailing addresses of a lot of his readers.
*Art Deco became a thing during this time and remains iconic to this day. Breaking with traditional European styles, its stylized forms, smooth lines and embellishments became widely popular. In particular, Art Deco often tried to capture a sense of motion which was important in an era when cars, planes and trains were seen as the main signs of technological triumph.
* Fordism and Taylorism! Henry Ford was a big pioneer in assembly line manufacturing, employing specialized machines to streamline production with every step tightly choreographed to shave seconds off the process. Ford himself was a disciple of Frederich Taylor, who focused on analysis and optimization (finding out how a worker did X, Y and Z and working out the best way to do the task). Fordism was the gold standard that everyone aspired to during this time period: American, British, Japanese, German and Soviet. On the other hand it could be really fucking boring for the people on the line whose job was to slot one bit of metal into another every twenty seconds for eight hours a day. It would remain king until the Japanese worked out Just-In-Time manufacturing in the 60s.
* These improvements in manufacturing evolved further with the invention of modern quality control. While America did have the largest manufacturing base at the start of WWII, it experienced many teething problems such as explosive shells failing to explode, or vehicle parts not being cross-compatible between factories. And without extremely tight tolerances, many newer technologies couldn’t be developed. New disciplines in measuring tolerances and conforming to standards helped improve the quality of these technologies. After the war, though, these standards were gradually relaxed as meeting them was expensive and American civilian manufacturers had little economic reason to make extremely high quality products, what with most of their competitors trying to rebuild from the war. Ironically enough, it would be the Japanese that would rediscover and improve upon QA tools to become an economic powerhouse in the postwar era.
* The [[Superhero]] Genre was born on the eve of WWII with the publication of Superman and exploded during the war. If a lucky American kid in the 1940s found a shiny nickel, the latest edition of Superman or Captain America would be high up the list on what they'd spend it on. Thus a cultural legacy was born that would resound for decades to come.
*In dribs and drabs the elements of fantasy literature were beginning to come together. The first Conan the Barbarian was written in 1932 and the [[The Hobbit]] was released in 1937. [[The Lord of the Rings]] was written from 1940-49, though it would be released in the '50s. Not really a cohesive whole yet, but all the pieces were there and coming together.
* Everybody smoked like fucking chimneys. In the late 19th century cigarette-making machines were developed and cigarette companies started using modern advertisement methods. Cigarettes were advertised to soldiers in WWI as a way to "relieve stress" which family members could send to the front as gifts, to women as "torches of freedom" in the 20s and 30s, and in WWII the cigarette companies made deals with the military to provide cigarettes as part of every soldier's ration pack. The link between tobacco and lung cancer was first found in 1939 by Franz Muller, but his work was met with reasonable if misplaced skepticism given that it was done in Nazi Germany and it would not be until 1950 that non-Nazis came to the same conclusions. (Hitler of all people was famed for his anti-smoking stance; he harangued his friends and cronies endlessly about the negative effects of cigarettes and even offered them gold watches as an incentive to quit.) True Anti-Smoking campaigns like we see today, and the general trend of people quitting smoking is only a very recent occurrence though. Just zap into any archived footage of a talk show on TV of that time and you will be amazed at how casually everyone has their own personal ash tray and is sucking on cigars and cigarettes.
** As a sidenote, Cigarette brands were one of the avenues American cultural influence started to slowly entrench itself into the public consciousness in western countries and revolutionized product advertisement. Before WW2, most countries had their own Tobacco industries, especially France and Germany, and every country their own local brands of cigarettes. The introduction of the much smoother American Virginia tobaccos changed global tastes in tobacco significantly; the old traditional European brands (like Roth-Händle or Gauloises before they were bought out) were reviled by younger people who didn't enjoy the sensation of having their lungs forcibly cut out by Cigarettes with lovely nicknames such as "Lung Torpedo". Marlboro, Lucky Strike and Camel were pushed by novel advertising strategies that emphasized brand recognition over the quality of the product itself, so if you wonder why Coca-Cola somehow still feels the need to spend millions each year on advertising, this is why.

==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.

==World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the [[Death Korps of Krieg]] and the [[Valhallan Ice Warriors]].
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of [[Steampunk]]. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).
* Indiana Jones. Do we need to explain this?
* The 1920+ universe, inspired by the art of Jakub Rozalski, envisions an alternate Europe where Nikola Tesla’s super science lead to the development of Mechs as the dominant war machine. Best known for the RTS game “Iron Harvest” that pits Imperial Germany, Imperial Russia, and Poland in a version of WWI with WWII elements mixed in. Even Rasputin makes an appearance as the leader of a shadowy cabal looking to seize power by fomenting revolution in all three factions and take over Tesla’s super-advanced city-state.
* Never Going Home is a fairly new RPG system that takes place from 1916-1918 where fighting in the Somme ripped open a goddamn hole in reality, and now eldritch beings are whispering in the ears of soldiers and telling them how to summon demons powered by the general misery caused by the conditions of trench warfare. Fun times!

{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]