any nation in history has ever run out of ppl to recruit?

[Lonkut]

I'm curious as of all history articles I've read I've never come across any mention that a nation lost a war because it had no ppl around to recruit. Has this ever happened? Have money but no able bodied men to recruit?

 

[vogtmurr]

well I don't know about having any money, but Paraguay in 1862-68 must have pretty much bled dry - there were no able bodied men left

 

[Dachs]

Sparta was pretty close in the mid-third century BC. Usually if you're low on manpower you hire mercs, then default on the payments if you haven't got the dough.

 

[vogtmurr]

Sparta was pretty close in the mid-third century BC. Usually if you're low on manpower you hire mercs, then default on the payments if you haven't got the dough.

yes Carthage tried that too.

 

[Dachs]

yes Carthage tried that too.

Yeah, except they weren't really low on manpower. Plenty of Punic citizens left, as the subsequent Mercenaries' War demonstrated. And it wasn't really a question of "not having" the money...

 

[plarq]

If you have no men and money left, you're doomed.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

Realistically, waging a war requires a civilian infrastructure to supply food, equipment and cash to pay the troops with. You can dip into the civilian infrastructure if necessary ie. by introducing or extending conscription, but after a certain point you would have a situation where putting more troops in the field would destroy your ability to produce essential war supplies and thus actually weaken your army.

Fighting until there is nobody left in your society could never realistically happen because once your *real* army is gone, continuing to fight the war would simply be a mass-suicide. And getting people to agree to mass-suicide is harder than it looks, as the Japanese discovered in 1945.

Only if there was absolutely no option of peace (ie. a genocide) could an army fight until it had completely exhausted its entire pool of potential recruits.

 

[dutchfire]

Didn't Germany in WW2 have to resort to children to defend Berlin against the Russians?

 

[Agent327]

Sparta, the South in the US Civil War, Germany in WW II are indeed classic examples of running out of able-bodied men to defend the nation. (The case of Sparta however was a matter of Spartan citizenship being quite limited; unlike the other Greek poleis Sparta founded but one famous colony: Taras/Tarentum.)

 

[TheLastOne36]

Didn't Germany in WW2 have to resort to children to defend Berlin against the Russians?

So did Poland, we have a giant statue in Warsaw commemorating child soldiers.

 

[Fr8monkey]

One of the reasons Ancient Rome collapsed was the empire got too big to maintain and they had to hire mercenaries to guard the outlying regions. The mercs. were basicly the tribes that the Romans tried to conquer but were too strong. The tribes then got greedy an d attacked Rome and took over larger territories.

 

[Azale]

Sparta was pretty close in the mid-third century BC. Usually if you're low on manpower you hire mercs, then default on the payments if you haven't got the dough.

well I don't know about having any money, but Paraguay in 1862-68 must have pretty much bled dry - there were no able bodied men left

These are the first two that came to mind. Paraguay in particular lost something like 2/3 of it's entire population through war, so you can imagine how that affected the male population especially.

 

[say1988]

Didn't Germany in WW2 have to resort to children to defend Berlin against the Russians?

I expect you will find that manpower was non-existent in many of these last stand type battles. Germany was defeated not by lack of manpower, but by lack of industry and resources.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

These are the first two that came to mind. Paraguay in particular lost something like 2/3 of it's entire population through war, so you can imagine how that affected the male population especially.

The estimate is that 8 in 10 males were dead.

 

[BananaLee]

These are the first two that came to mind. Paraguay in particular lost something like 2/3 of it's entire population through war, so you can imagine how that affected the male population especially.

According to the almighty Wiki, Paraguay's pre-war population of 500,000+ went down to just above 200,000 by the end of the Triple Alliance War, of which 28,000 (that's right, twenty eight thousand) were men. It cited Encyclopedia Britannica as the source.

If someone can be bothered, they can check it up but it is a fascinating collection of numbers.

 

[TheLastOne36]

Those man were mighty lucky it seems. So much hot latin women, to little time...

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Except that even more of the population continued to die off from disease after the war (there were even several reports of jaguars entering unguarded villages and preying on the women and children left!), and their country has never recovered, economically or politically, from that war.

Which makes their victory over Bolivia in the 30s all the more unbelievable.

 

[aronnax]

Except that even more of the population continued to die off from disease after the war (there were even several reports of jaguars entering unguarded villages and preying on the women and children left!), and their country has never recovered, economically or politically, from that war.

Which makes their victory over Bolivia in the 30s all the more unbelievable.

What is more unbelievable is that the population gender ratio reestablished.

0-14 years: 37.2% (male 1,262,408/female 1,220,809)
15-64 years: 57.7% (male 1,933,559/female 1,915,033)
65 years and over: 5.1% (male 155,660/female 181,617)

From Wiki

 

[TheLastOne36]

the generation came and past, and it's not like the babies born into the next generation kept the female/male ratio

 

[Gooblah]

Athens during the Peloponnesian War was forced to man their navy with slaves IIRC (at some point).