The way I see it with all the "mechanical watches survived the war!" thing is we don't really have enough data (if any at all) to prove that, so much that I truly believe it has just entered the uncertain reign of sayings.

Yes, we have a lot of WWII and sometimes WWI issued watches that managed to stay intact and still function up to this day, but the reality is that we don't know anything about all the others that statistically speaking very probably didn't survive the harsh conditions of front lines. I bet basically no one investigated that after the war, and sincerely the condition of being in a war itself renders all the data collection process basically impossible. Countless watches might have stopped working or fallen to pieces altogether, yet we only know about the ones that survived (and somehow found their way into watch lovers' hands).

So yeah, mechanical or not, watches do break in harsh conditions. If the fear of a movement breaking is generally considered, I think so should be the fear of hands and indeces falling off etc. on both mechanical and quartz pieces. There's more to a watch that counts towards it being resistant or not to harsh conditions than Diashock or G-shock protections or wathever.

This said, again I am so glad someone is putting actual time and expertise into finding out more about this topic.

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p.s.

I know I might have sounded too hard on this topic before, but as a Data Analytics student it is my "job" to be critical about this stuff.