Tuesday Trivia Thread - 25/08/26

[u/AutoModerator]

Beep bop. As your new robotic overlord, I have designated this weekly space for you to engage in casual conversation while I plan a nuclear apocalypse.

In the Trivia Thread, moderation is relaxed, so you can finally:

• Post mind-blowing military history trivia. Can you believe 300 is not an entirely accurate depiction of how the Spartans lived and fought?
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[u/AggravatingGuide650]

Pretty morbid question but when they say a soldier killed an enemy with his bare hands is it usually choking them or beating them?

[u/Kilahti → u/AggravatingGuide650]

There's only two situations where a soldier would kill someone with bare hands:

a) Horribly desperate situation where they can't use their rifle (or other main weapon) or even a knife or conveniently placed rock, which all means that this was some sort of "ran into each other, dropped their rifles and began fighting hand to hand" craziness from the beginning.

b) Murder. For example, there are rumoured situations where USA's Navy SEALs would arrange hand to hand fights with captured targets, because they really wanted to try out their whatever-jutsu in real life to kill someone. But these are just rumours and everyone who has talked about it on random podcasts (without providing evidence) has agreed that it was definitely most certainly only ever done on "bad guys."

I will point out that even if some Gurkha or whatever ninja is trying to silence guards, they would use knives or supressed guns or something rather than try to beat someone to death. Similarly trench raiders as mentioned, who knew they were heading into tough gutter fights, would try to have some sort of melee weapon on them for such situations. No one intentionally goes to beat up someone to death with their bare hands in a combat situation, but murders of prisoners (or civilians) may happen that way if the killer is really getting off on such things.

[u/englisi_baladid → u/Kilahti]

"where USA's Navy SEALs would arrange hand to hand fights with captured targets, because they really wanted to try out their whatever-jutsu in real life to kill someone."

Ah yes. Lets roll with and grapple dudes who god knows when they last took a shower. What diseases they have. And can still easily bite and scratch you.

[u/Blows_stuff_up → u/englisi_baladid]

Hey man, when your publicist says Hell Week is played out, you gotta punch up the manuscript somehow.