Today’s Suffocating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
During World War I, as the Austrians and Italians fought it out in the Tyrol Mountains, soldiers discovered the effectiveness of launching explosives onto the slopes above each other, bringing down avalanches that killed far more effectively than their weapons. Colin Fraser has estimated the loss of life from avalanches in the war to have been between 40,000 and 80,000. In one account of the Tyrolean campain, entitled Kampf über die Gletschern, (“Battle over the Glaciers”), and reported by Fraser, a soldier breathlessly exclaimed that “the White Death” had claimed countless victims in the mountains. “The snowy torrents are like the deep sea; they seldom return their victims alive. The bravest of the brave are covered by the heavy winding sheet of the avalanche. It is no glorious death at the hands of the enemy; I have seen the corpses. It is a pitiful way to die, a comfortless suffocation in an evil element.”
Culled from: The White Death
Which begs the question: what way to die during war is NOT a pitiful way to die?