The new addition to weaponry had a vital position in the outcome of World War One. This is especially so in the introduction and heightened use of artillery. Heavy bombardment and constant exposure to machine gun fire were responsible for the vast majority of deaths in the conflict, especially at the beginning when generals were still using rather old tactics. Machine guns and artillery bombardment made success nigh impossible for the enemy when they would attack. Though, at the start of the war weapons of artillery weren’t yet advanced enough as often they would fire on not only the enemy’s soldiers but their own as well. World War One is known as one of the first wars where artillery was been widely used. For example, in the earlier Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, the use of Artillery contributed only a small ten percent of casualties. Thus, being that soldiers were simply getting slaughtered over and over again, army leaders were forced into finding ways to conduct the war avoiding these ever-constant deaths.
The solution that armies came up with was the use of trenches. Originally trenches were used as shelters but then, the realisation came that they could be developed, and were, into a series of what seemed like endless chains. Though, what the commanders didn’t know was that this would contribute unimaginably to the “drawn out nature of the conflict” by causing the track of the confrontation to veer on a course of attritional warfare. When the use of trenches first started to evolve they were supposed to be well organised and solidly built but as the war wore on they started to resemble muddy pits infested with rats and diseases causing many diseases such as cholera and bacterial infections like “trench foot.”
Another development of World War One was the invention of chemical weaponry by the Germans in 1915. To many who though that the war should be fought with manpower, the use of poison gas seemed almost cowardly. Though, the release of poison gas may just have been a tool of attritional warfare where the aim wasn’t to push the enemy back in order to gain ground, but to disable them or wear them down. Though, the efficiency of this new development proved to be somewhat low; only 3000 British troops died as a cause of poison gas, widely helped by the creation of gas masks.
From investigating the different ways that new developments contributed to the almost everlasting and horrific track of WWI, the Great War is amongst the best of examples. It was a far larger and more powerful than any had ever seen with more armies being mobilised and thus, more deaths. Attrition was largely to blame for the mass number of deaths and also taking into consideration the weapons that forced this to come into play.
Chapter 5, Strategy: The Failure of the Plans, Stewart, Neil – The Changing Nature of Warfare; 1700-1945
Attrition Warfare – wikipedia.org,
Ben Walsh, GCSE Modern World History , London : , 2001, p. 23
Ben Walsh, GCSE Modern World History , London : , 2001, p. 21
Chapter 5, Strategy: The Failure of the Plans, Stewart, Neil – The Changing Nature of Warfare; 1700-1945
Ben Walsh, GCSE Modern World History , London : , 2001, p. 20
Trench Warfare - wikipedia.org, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_warfare
Ben Walsh, GCSE Modern World History , London : , 2001, p. 24
Chapter 5, Strategy: The Failure of the Plans, Stewart, Neil – The Changing Nature of Warfare; 1700-1945