History of children in the military

{{main|Military use of children in World War II}}

{{main|Military use of children in World War II}}

In [[World War II]], children under the age of 18 were widely used by all sides in formal and informal military roles. Children were readily indoctrinated into the prevailing ideology of the warring parties, quickly trained, and often sent to the front line; many were wounded or killed. The lack of a legal definition of a child, combined with the absence of a system for verifying the ages of prospective child recruits, contributed to the extensive use of children in the war.{{citation needed|date=June 2025}}

In [[World War II]], children under the age of 18 were widely used by all sides in formal and informal military roles.

The youngest known soldiers of World War II were [[Sergei Aleshkov]], who, at the age of 6, was discovered and taken in by Soviet Red Army scouts in August 1942 after his mother and elder brother were killed by the Germans during a raid, and [[Marin Lungu]] (born on 21 January 1935), who, at the age of 7, joined the [[Romanian Army]] in September 1942, after seeing his village get attacked and raided by [[Soviet partisans]] operating in Romania, and trained as a [[spy]] and participated in more than 30 succesful military operations behind Nazi German enemy lines in [[Romania]], [[Hungary]], [[Poland]], and [[Slovakia]] by 1944, while pretending to be a deaf and poor Slovak or Hungarian peasant boy to the Germans, and for his heroic actions he was even promoted to the rank of [[corporal]] at the age of 10, thus being the youngest soldier of World War II to be a corporal, before being captured and taken as a prisoner-of-war by the German SS officers in January 1945 and held in three [[Nazi concentration camp|Nazi concentration camps]] for 4 months until May 1945, when the Soviet Red Army arrived and liberated the camps; Marin Lungu was subsequently sent back to [[Romania]] after his release from the camps.

{{clear}}

{{clear}}

== After World War II: Historical examples by region ==

== After World War II: Historical examples by region ==

{{Further| topic = conflicts in this era |list of conflicts related to the Cold War}}

{{Further| topic = conflicts in this era |list of conflicts related to the Cold War}}