Before WWI & WWII: The Wars Men Nerded Out About

They look similar because the instinct is the same. You saw a dog walking behind a toy wagon and your brain jumped to an infantryman behind a Sherman tank. A century earlier, a boy might have watched horses in a field and imagined himself as Napoleon at Austerlitz. Two centuries earlier, a London apprentice might have swung a stick and pictured Agincourt.

Long before World War I and World War II became the default reference points for military geeks, people obsessed over other wars. They memorized battles, argued tactics in coffeehouses, collected prints of famous generals, and re-fought old campaigns on tabletops and in schoolyards.

By the end of this, you will see that “war nerds” are not a modern invention. The objects of obsession simply changed as technology, politics, and national myths shifted.

Which wars were the pre-World Wars obsession magnets?

If you asked a European military-obsessed teenager in 1900 what war he cared about, odds are he would not start with the American Civil War. He would talk about Napoleon.

Across the 19th century, three conflicts drew the kind of attention that World War II gets today, depending on where you lived:

1. The Napoleonic Wars (c. 1803–1815)
For much of Europe, this was the war. It had everything: a charismatic genius-villain in Napoleon, giant set-piece battles like Austerlitz (1805) and Waterloo (1815), sweeping campaigns from Spain to Russia, and clear national stakes. British readers devoured accounts of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Russian readers obsessed over 1812. Prussians brooded over Jena and celebrated Leipzig.

Military officers across Europe studied Napoleon’s campaigns the way later generations pored over Rommel and Patton. Staff colleges dissected his marches, his use of corps, his artillery concentrations. War gaming in the 19th century often meant replaying Napoleonic battles on maps with blocks.

2. The American Civil War (1861–1865)
In the United States, the Civil War became the central military obsession almost as soon as it ended. Veterans wrote memoirs, newspapers serialized battle narratives, and veterans’ organizations held reunions where people argued over whose brigade had really saved the day.

By the late 19th century, American boys played “Gettysburg” the way later kids played “D-Day.” Toy companies sold miniature cannons and soldiers. Civil War histories filled shelves. Abroad, European officers studied the war for lessons about railroads, trenches, and industrial firepower.

3. The Wars of National Unification (mid-19th century)
In Germany and Italy, the big reference points were the wars that created their states. Germans obsessed over the wars of 1864, 1866, and 1870–71. The Franco-Prussian War in particular became a sort of prequel to World War I in German and French minds. Italians did the same with the Risorgimento campaigns against Austria and local rulers.

These wars became the go-to examples when people argued about strategy, patriotism, or the future of Europe. They were the “recent, relevant” conflicts, the way World War II is now.

So what? Before the world wars, people did not lack for military obsessions. They just had different “main events,” usually the wars that had recently reshaped their states or humiliated their enemies.

Where did these obsessions come from? (Origins)

Modern war nerd culture grows out of mass media, movies, and a world where almost everyone knows at least the outline of 1939–1945. Earlier obsessions came from different roots: national trauma, state-building, and the rise of mass literacy.

Napoleonic Wars: the birth of the modern superhero general
Napoleon’s rise from obscure Corsican artillery officer to emperor of much of Europe was catnip for 19th-century imaginations. He offered a simple, dramatic story: one man, through genius and will, reshaped the continent.

At the same time, the Napoleonic Wars coincided with expanding newspapers and cheap prints. People could follow campaigns almost in real time. Publishers sold portraits of generals, maps of battles, and “lives of Napoleon” to a growing reading public. Veterans’ memoirs poured out in the decades after 1815, feeding a cottage industry of Napoleonic lore.

For British readers, the war’s origin story was existential: a small island kingdom facing a continental tyrant. For French readers, it was the Revolution’s promise carried abroad. For everyone else, it was survival against a juggernaut. That kind of framing made it easy to obsess over.

American Civil War: a national trauma in a literate society
The Civil War’s origins were soaked in moral and political stakes: slavery, union, states’ rights, and the future of the republic. It was also the first large war fought inside a society with widespread literacy and a booming press.

Newspapers sent correspondents to the front. Photography brought images of dead soldiers into middle-class parlors. After 1865, veterans and politicians fought over the meaning of the war in print. That argument never really stopped.

The result was a war whose origin story every American schoolchild learned. That familiarity made it easy to nerd out about specific battles or generals. You did not have to explain why Gettysburg mattered. Everyone already knew the stakes.

Wars of unification: birth myths for new nations
In Germany and Italy, the 19th-century wars of unification became origin myths. Prussian victories at Königgrätz (1866) and Sedan (1870) were framed as proof that the new German Empire deserved its place in Europe. Italian campaigns with Garibaldi in his red shirt became patriotic legend.

States encouraged this. School textbooks, national holidays, and monuments all pointed back to these wars as the moment “we” became a real nation. That official framing gave young men a ready-made set of battles and heroes to obsess over.

So what? The wars that drew obsessive attention were the ones that could be turned into simple origin stories for nations or regimes, and that coincided with media able to spread those stories widely.

How did people nerd out about war? (Methods)

Modern war geeks have documentaries, video games, and online forums. Their 19th-century counterparts had different tools, but the behavior would look familiar: collecting, re-fighting, arguing, and reenacting.

Books, memoirs, and staff college manuals
Napoleonic campaigns and the American Civil War generated an ocean of print. Officers and serious amateurs read official histories and staff college texts. More casual readers devoured memoirs and popular histories.

In the 19th century, Prussian officers at the Kriegsakademie pored over Napoleon’s 1805 campaign the way modern staff officers study the 1940 fall of France. They used detailed maps and orders of battle, then walked the ground on staff rides, replaying decisions and arguing about alternatives.

In the United States, West Point cadets studied both Napoleonic warfare and Civil War campaigns. Dennis Hart Mahan, a key West Point professor, taught generations of officers using Napoleonic examples. Later, Civil War battles like Chancellorsville and Gettysburg joined the syllabus.

War games and map exercises
Long before tabletop miniatures and hex-and-counter games, officers and civilians played “Kriegsspiel,” a 19th-century Prussian war game using maps, blocks, and rules to simulate combat. Many of the scenarios were Napoleonic or based on the 1866 and 1870 wars.

These games were not just training tools. They were also entertainment for educated men who liked to argue about tactics. You can think of them as the ancestor of the guy who insists that if only the Germans had done X at Kursk, the war would have turned out differently.

Reenactment and public spectacle
Full-blown historical reenactment as we know it is mostly a 20th-century phenomenon, but there were earlier versions. Veterans’ parades, mock battles at fairs, and anniversary celebrations let people physically re-stage famous moments.

In Britain, Waterloo anniversaries featured veterans in uniform, speeches, and sometimes staged “sham fights.” In the United States, Gettysburg anniversaries drew veterans back to the field, where they walked the ground, argued about who had been where, and told stories to younger listeners.

Everyday analogies and boyhood play
Your Sherman tank analogy has older cousins. Victorian boys pointed sticks and shouted “Waterloo!” or “Balaclava!” in the street. American boys in the 1880s played “Grant and Lee” or “Yank and Reb,” mimicking bayonet charges and artillery.

Adults did the same thing in conversation. A tough political fight might be called “another Waterloo.” A risky charge in a colonial war might be described as “our own little Balaclava.” The wars people obsessed over supplied the metaphors for everyday life.

So what? The methods changed with technology, but the core behavior did not. Men used the media of their time to re-fight and re-argue the big wars of their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

What did they argue about? (Outcomes and meaning)

Modern war nerd debates often circle the same questions: Could the Allies have stopped Hitler earlier? Was the Schlieffen Plan doomed? Could the Confederacy have won? Earlier generations had their own recurring arguments.

Napoleonic debates: genius vs numbers
For much of the 19th century, military thinkers argued about whether Napoleon won because of personal genius or because of structural advantages like mass conscription and centralized administration.

Some saw Waterloo as proof that genius had limits and that coalition warfare and logistics mattered more. Others treated Austerlitz as the purest expression of battlefield brilliance. These debates shaped how officers thought about future wars. Should they look for the next Napoleon, or build systems that did not rely on one man?

Civil War debates: cause, competence, and inevitability
In the United States, arguments about the Civil War’s outcome started before the shooting stopped. Was Union victory inevitable because of industrial strength and manpower, or did it hinge on a few key decisions?

Lost Cause writers in the South turned Confederate generals into near-mythic figures, especially Robert E. Lee, and blamed defeat on overwhelming Northern resources. Others pointed to Union command failures and missteps to argue that the outcome was far from preordained.

These arguments were not abstract. They fed into live political issues: race, federal power, and how the war should be remembered. Nerdy debates about whether Pickett’s Charge could have succeeded sat on top of much heavier questions about what the war had been for.

Franco-Prussian and unification war debates: the next war
German and French officers obsessed over the 1870–71 war. Germans saw it as proof that their system of conscription, rail mobilization, and general staff planning worked. French reformers dissected their defeat and argued about how to fix the army.

These debates fed directly into planning for the next big conflict. The Schlieffen Plan, Germany’s pre-1914 blueprint for a quick victory over France, grew out of lessons drawn from 1870. French plans for offensive spirit and quick counterattacks also leaned heavily on how they chose to remember earlier wars.

So what? Obsessing over outcomes was not just a hobby. The way people interpreted past wars shaped military doctrine, national myths, and even the causes of the next wars.

How did these obsessions shape later wars? (Legacy)

Here is where the comparison with World War I and II becomes clearest. Just as modern officers and armchair historians live in the shadow of 1914–1945, pre-1914 Europe lived in the shadow of Napoleon and 1870, and the United States lived in the shadow of the Civil War.

Napoleon in the trenches
On the eve of World War I, many European officers still thought in Napoleonic terms: decisive battles, bold offensives, and the power of morale. They had updated the technology but kept the mental model.

That helped produce the early-war disasters of 1914. French doctrine of the offensive, with bright uniforms and bayonet charges, owed more to romanticized readings of earlier wars than to sober analysis of machine guns and artillery. German faith in a sweeping right hook through Belgium was shaped by memories of 1866 and 1870, when rapid offensives had worked.

In that sense, 19th-century war nerd culture fed directly into the overconfidence and miscalculations that made World War I so bloody.

The Civil War as warning and template
The American Civil War offered a preview of industrialized slaughter: trenches, railroads, telegraphs, and mass conscript armies. Some European observers saw the warning. Others cherry-picked what they wanted.

Prussian officers studied the Civil War for lessons on rail logistics and mobilization. Fewer paid attention to how defensive firepower made frontal assaults suicidal. The parts of the war that fit their existing beliefs got more attention than the parts that challenged them.

In the United States, Civil War memory shaped later conflicts too. Generals in 1898 and 1917 grew up on stories of Grant and Lee. They brought those mental models with them, for better and worse.

National myths harden
By the late 19th century, the wars people obsessed over had hardened into national myths. French children learned about heroic last stands in 1870. German children learned about Sedan and the crowning of the Kaiser at Versailles. American children learned about Lincoln, Appomattox, and “brother against brother.”

These myths made compromise harder in future crises. If your national story says you are destined to win the next war because you did before, it is easier to roll the dice. If your story says you were humiliated and must avenge yourself, it is easier to support risky policies.

So what? Pre-World War obsessions did not just fill evenings in officers’ messes. They shaped how societies understood war, which in turn influenced how they fought and justified the next round of conflicts.

So were people “less nerdy” before WWI and WWII?

The short answer is no. The long answer is that the nerdiness took different forms and focused on different wars.

In 1850, a British military geek might have shelves full of Napoleonic campaign histories and a model of the battle of Waterloo on his desk. In 1880, an American counterpart might argue for hours about whether Stonewall Jackson could have saved the Confederacy if he had not been shot. In 1900, a German officer might spend late nights replaying 1870 on a map with colored blocks.

What changed in the 20th century was the scale of the wars and the reach of mass media. World War I and especially World War II involved more people, more countries, and more technology, and they were filmed, photographed, and later dramatized on an industrial scale. That made them the default reference points for almost everyone.

The instinct behind your Sherman tank analogy, though, is very old. For two centuries at least, people have watched everyday scenes and mentally turned them into famous battles. The only thing that changes is whether the imagined infantryman is behind a Sherman, a Napoleonic battery, or a line of blue and gray.

So what? The history of war nerd culture shows that our fascination with conflict is not new. It just keeps reattaching itself to the last big, meaningful war that shaped how we think about ourselves.