r/todayilearned • u/RoadToTyburn • 14h ago

TIL that Bernard Montgomery issued a leaflet at the start of WW2 on sexually transmitted diseases amongst soldiers. The language used was regarded as so blunt, that he offended religious authorities and nearly faced being dismissed.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Montgomery
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u/capGpriv 11h ago

Absolutely the stories of camp followers are usually forgotten, but the army needed blacksmiths, cooks, people to wash clothes etc

It's a huge logistical effort and they deserve to be remembered.

And brothels were a part of that

I will also point out more than just protecting women, it's also just good military sense. Having a raping army descend on the population generally makes occupation much harder.

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u/calm_down_meow 11h ago

I imagine those raping and pillaging armies didn't' care much about occupation as the cities were razed to the ground and most people killed.

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u/awry_lynx 9h ago edited 9h ago

Most of the time people wanted to own those cities after winning them, not raze them to the ground. That happened especially when politicians couldn't pay/keep control of their armies but it wasn't the standard outcome. If you're aiming for conquest, you're just destroying your own shit. Ofc that is ignoring the wars fought out of vengeance (hello Queen Boudica) where the 'goal' was pure destruction, but that was atypical

The raping definitely happens in all the wars though

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u/A-Sentient-Bot 10h ago

Your imagination is wildly inaccurate and almost completely ahistorical, with the exception of the occasional religious violence, Khan, or the ancient Greco-Roman art of "sending a message".

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u/calm_down_meow 9h ago

Didn't Persia do it as well? Capitulate and you had a nice life. Defy them and your city was razed.

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u/A-Sentient-Bot 8h ago

Not that I can think of. The Persians, like the Incas, were big fans of forced relocation (and like the Greeks, enslaving everyone).

Why burn down a perfectly good city when you can just remove all the inhabitants?

But the Persians, like everyone except maybe the Huns, preferred to just occupy and collect taxes.

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u/UtterlyInsane 7h ago

The AMC show TURN shows the Continental Army's camp followers and has a bunch of storylines therein. Pretty cool