Talk:Trench raiding club

Dubious

I just tagged the "trench maul" claim dubious, for the following reasons:

1. I have had an interest in the history of melee weaponry for many years, have an extensive collection of serious books on the subject, and despite numerous examples of trench clubs have never before heard of a "trench maul";
2. A great deal of writing on melee weapons and armour is badly contaminated by rules from fantasy games. In particular, every single example I have come across that refers to a "maul" as some sort of weapon, has turned out to be based on games. These games feel the need to have vast libraries of fantastic weapons for players to acquire, and so they set their writers to work expanding the realm of history with fantasy. During this process, someone seems to have decided that because the word "maul" sounds rather aggressive, it would make a fine name for a weapon. In fact real mauls were tools that are completely unsuited as weapons -- you would be better off fighting with a hoe -- and no-one before the modern fantasy gaming era seems to have associated the word with weaponry;
3. Finally, googling the term comes up with a microscopic number of hits -- a mere twelve -- of which all are either references to the fantasy game Warhammer 40,000, 2 pages apparently based on this article (aargh, it's already spreading the disinformation, stop it!), and several pages of incomprehensible gibberish (a couple are obviously spider traps, and one seems to be a badly OCRed scan of a 1909 newspaper article in which "trench maul" is the mutilation of the name of a nationality.) -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 00:25, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, worse and worse: I just tried to track down the user who added the text, in order to ask for his source. That user is Jordogbeton, and it was the same user who uploaded the image. This user spent less than 3 weeks as a Wikipedia editor, was involved almost exclusively in creating / editing two articles about left wing youth riots in Copenhagen, and hasn't edited for two years. During the three weeks he was an editor, he received quite a number of copyvio complaints for uploaded images and to be frank I don't think they caught them all, several of the other images he uploaded for the riot articles look suspiciously as if they have been culled from newspapers or magazines.

Which led me to look closer at the "maul" photograph. On closer inspection, there is a lot about it that is quite dubious. It is not taken in a museum display, but on a wooden table, sitting on a sheet of paper towel next to a "Sharpie" type marker pen. So this article seems to be privately owned which casts some doubt on its provenance. Also, unless that sheet of paper towel is enormously larger than normal ones, this "larger version" is no more than 5 inches long, and far from being larger than a normal trench club it is actually far too small to use as a weapon! Also the leather thong is quite obviously brand new. I strongly suspect someone threw this together in his garage from old junk, but whatever the heck this is, it certainly isn't what its caption claims. As such, instead of sticking with the dubious tag I have removed the picture from the article altogether. I leave its link here in case anyone else wants to investigate further. In particular, since the other club image was uploaded by the same user, it would be nice if someone could find the time to investigate its authenticity and copyright status. -- 202.63.39.58 (talk) 00:53, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

• 
  Larger versions of the trench clubs were called trench mauls. Here a British WWI example

improvised vs. mass produced.

Contrary to popular myth, these clubs were not produced by individuals. They were produced in mass by units in the field utilizing regimental carpenters and welders etc to produce large 

amounts of the same pattern of club(hence, identical "hobnailing" and all the clubs from the same time frame being nearly identical) That said,Ive only one book that references any production means at all and cant be certain. I'd best leave this to a more experienced editor or until i get a handful of good web sources.

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