Head Wounds and Steel Helmets

https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/185622315174/historicalfirearms-head-wounds-steel-helmets

by smacktoward • 7 years ago

35 21 7 years ago

GistNoesis• 7 years ago

It reminded me of this funny "paradox" : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IQE0uZUMys TLDW : In WW1, after being issued helmets, the number of head injuries for soldiers rose significantly.

taneq2• 7 years ago

It's like the old story about when airbags (or was it seatbelts?) became mandatory, serious injuries from car crashes became much more common - because many more people were surviving serious crashes and being counted as injured, not killed.

sdrothrock• 7 years ago

These both seem illogically logical, kind of like the other story about an engineer who figured out where to armor aircraft by looking at the ones that came back -- he armored the places that were never shot up.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Probably both but like anything else I think you could make the data look however your agenda wants if you monkey with the definitions of terms. A seat-belt is a great way to wind up seriously injured when you otherwise would have died and boring old frontal airbags tend to make serious injuries less severe and minor injuries more severe.

hef19898• 7 years ago

The perfect example why looking at only one metric is sure way to disaster. Should be part if every lecture covering KPIs, ideally more than once!

Merrill• 7 years ago

"The majority of the head wounds were believed to have been caused by shell and grenade fragments."

So two possibilities might be that bullet wounds to the head would be more often fatal or that most deaths and wounds come from artillery and grenades.

I think that the later is the case and that a soldier's probability of survival is mostly a combination of skill in maintaining cover and luck.

Raphmedia• 7 years ago

This is similar to the story about planes coming back with holes during WWII. They focused on adding armor on those spots but the number of planes that came back home didn't increase. It turns out that the planes with the holes were the ones hit in non vital spots. They should have up-armored everywhere BUT those spots.

It's a similar situation here. The helmet prevent death but increase the amount of injuries. Removing the helmets and adding more body armors would be problematic.

Edit: Wrote this out of memory but here's a source if you want to read more. https://medium.com/@penguinpress/an-excerpt-from-how-not-to-...

who-knows95• 7 years ago

this reminds me of ~~ https://www.napoleon.org/en/history-of-the-two-empires/objec...

mito88• 7 years ago

NOT FOUND

The URL you requested could not be found.

ElCapitanMarkla• 7 years ago

I got that too, seems to be working at https://www.historicalfirearms.info/post/185618493489/head-w...

Head Wounds and Steel Helmets

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