ELI5; Why was quicksand such a common film trope when it’s not a problem that people commonly run into in real life?
In: Other
I was listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History earlier. The episode series that covered WWI. There was a battle where either France or Britain (forget which) launched an offensive, and it ended up raining all but 3 days that month in an already swampy area. If troops veered from a safe path, they would slip pretty deep in the mud and get stuck. In WWI, offensives needed the troops to move fast before it turned into a stalemate/trench warfare and progress stalled. They didn’t have tanks yet and cavalry got slaughtered by machine guns, so infantry needed to move fast.
So people would slowly sink in the mud, and soldiers were ordered to keep moving forward and couldn’t stop to try to help someone out of the mud. Carlin called it quick sand. I’m not sure when the quicksand trope started, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the early 1900s and inspired by that battle to some extent.
Latest Answers