So, he decided to flood the area to prevent it from falling into German hands. “King Albert of Belgium refused to surrender, even when he only had about five percent of Belgium left to command. And you want a heavy metal song title? It doesn’t get much better.” But these guys were there for six months-that’s just brutal. Obviously, people were in World War I for a long time, but you’d rotate in and out of the front every week or two. They were the unit that served the longest at the frontline. Back in those days, the Americans wouldn’t really want to fight with them, so they were sort of handed off to the French, who called them the Men of Bronze. “The 369th regiment were The Harlem Hellfighters, the African American and Puerto Rican unit. So, this song is a tribute to the fallen that never came home.” I think, late last year, archaeologists found another site up there. So, we decided to dive into the events in the Alps on White Friday and how soldiers are still, to this day, frozen up there, not yet dug out because we don’t know where they are. We were sort of getting lost in the Red Baron and all the low-hanging fruit.
“On The Great War, we felt we didn’t represent the Southern Fronts so well. He’s one of the craziest people I’ve ever read about, so we decided to do something different for him. He was almost like a comic book character, this over-the-top super-soldier who just wouldn’t die no matter what the enemy threw at him. “Adrian Carton de Wiart was Belgian-born and fighting for the British in World War I but had also fought earlier in the Boer War and further back. The name of the ship says it all: fear nothing.” We usually write about the human side of warfare, but sometimes a piece of technology is such a game-changer, so we did a song about the Dreadnought battleship and the Battle of Jutland. The song sounds like it could have been done by Sabaton in 2005 or 2008 or now, but it’s not like a copy of anything else we’ve done, so it’s weird how it feels very Sabaton but very timeless at the same time. “This is one of my favourites on the album, both musically and the topic itself. This is the first proper song on the album, with a faster double kick drum start to get things going.” The Austro-Hungarian Empire had the Jägers, and the Italians were experimenting with the Arditi soldiers, but the stormtroopers are the classic example. “Many people have written us, ‘You should make a song about Star Wars,’ but in this case we are talking about German shock troops, or stormtroopers, and these smaller elite groups of soldiers that developed a faster form of warfare. So, we thought, ‘Hmm…maybe we should do another one.” Below, he tells the often incredible stories behind each song. Then, of course, the pandemic hit in the middle of the tour, when we’d only covered half the world. When we started touring the album, so many people got in touch, telling us about even more World War I stories we did not know about. “We wanted to cover them, but we didn’t have the right music at that time. “We felt there were several stories we were leaving behind on the last album, like the Christmas Truce and The Harlem Hellfighters,” vocalist and keyboardist Joakim Brodén tells Apple Music. Their 10th full-length, The War to End All Wars, is a sequel to their 2019 album, The Great War, which focused on World War I. Swedish power-metal champions Sabaton are known for writing many songs-and concept albums-about war.
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