When countries decide that a war is over how do all of the soldiers in remote areas find out?
In: Technology
In this day and age I’d say something like that they check twitter or Facebook.
If I can see combat footage from the Ukraine war on YouTube I’m pretty sure that they are checking the news and such in the field
Interesting fact. Andrew Jackson fought the battle of New Orleans after the war of 1812 was officially over. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_New_Orleans)
I think OPs question is particularly interesting for wars that were distant from the government’s location and before telecommunications were created, like in the crusades or wars in European colonies during the 18 and 19 centuries.
Hiroo Onoda remained in the jungle on Lubang Island near Luzon, in the Philippines, until 1974 because he did not believe that World War 2 had ended. He was finally persuaded to emerge after his ageing former commanding officer was flown in to see him.
They know it the same way they know everything else that they are ordered to do – they are told by their superiors who were told by their superiors, etc?
Sounds like a pretty odd question unless I’m missing something very obvious.
In any event there are of course stories or isolated troops (solo or more) who didn’t know the war was over and kept on fighting and hiding, sometimes for decades. Japanese cases after WWII are notorious and easily googled.
Nowadays this would be passed down the chain of command and broadcast openly to everyone and people would be able to heard about in on radio and TV and on the internet. In the past it was a real issue that armies often didn’t know for some time when wars started and ended, because communication was so slow.
This is why in some cases armistices were agreed not to go into effect immediately, but at a certain date and time. The armistice that ended the fighting in WWI was famously designed to go into effect on the 11the hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918 and fighting continued up until that very point.
Several Japanese soldiers held out for years and decades after the WWII fighting what they thought was a continuing guerilla campaign.
Ancillary question: has “The war is over!” been commonly used as a battle tactic?
Like, I imagine some of the soldiers in the US Civil War, or WWII getting together to celebrate once they realized they no longer had to kill each other.
But, that could also be used in a very dirty way.
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