Farting on the Front Lines: Playing with Flatulence during World War II

This paper by Jaakko Suominen and Elina Vaahensalo examines farting games played by Finnish soldiers during World War II, drawing on the "Dugout Tradition" archive, a collection of over 12,000 pages of veteran oral histories gathered in 1973 by the Finnish Literature Society. The authors' central argument is that these games, long overlooked in both game studies and military history, represent a form of self-organized, bodily and social play that flourished under the cramped conditions and wartime diet of the front lines, and that they offer insight into performative masculinity and the sensory history of smell.

The archival references fall into three categories: Thursday pea soup meals, which produced loud farting contests that sometimes escalated into hostility; "fart flames," in which a notable participant could ignite expelled gas; and timed or rhythmic competitions, including attempts to imitate machine gunfire, with the longevity of the "gunfire" deciding the winner. Informants generally treated fart humor as a coping mechanism for wartime hardship, placing it alongside other extreme pastimes such as heavy drinking and cold-weather races. Silent farts were disapproved of, and top performers were remembered long after the war.

The authors situate these practices within a broader cultural history in which odorlessness signals civility and smells surface when social order is threatened. They compare farting games with drinking games as similarly neglected practices that operate as both social and bodily play. The study acknowledges a methodological limitation: despite scholarly observations that such games were popular, they are sparsely documented in the archive, suggesting either embarrassment or perceived unimportance among veterans. The authors conclude that this gap points to broader challenges in oral history for recovering forms of play that participants chose not to recall.