By October Germany's resources were finished, and on 11 November Germany signed the treaty that marked the end of The First World War.
TRENCHES
TRENCH WARFARE:
Trench warfare was a form of fighting conducted from long, narrow ditches, in which troops stood, and were sheltered from the enemy's fire.
After the first battle of the Marne, many thousands of miles of parallel trenches were dug along the Western Front, linked by intricate systems of communication trenches and protected by miles and miles of barbed wire. With such trenches stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland neither side could attack and so various new weapons were introduced, such as hand-grenades, poison gas, trench mortars and artillery barrages.
This meant that nearly all large infantry attacks ended in disaster and the number of deaths began to increase even quicker than before! It was not possible to advance across the trenches until 1918 using an improved version of the tank, which was originally invented in 1915. World War II by contrast was a war of movement with no comparable trench fighting.
BUILDING TRENCHES:
Trenches were built wherever the enemy was found, no matter what was in the way. A trench was usually at least 2 metres wide and 2 metres deep. It was dug in a zig-zag so that the blast from an exploding shell would be confined to only a small section of the trench.
There were normally three lines of trenches on each side of ‘no-man’s land’ that divided the enemy armies. In the front line, trenches were built with firing steps and elbow rests to help the soldiers shoot over the top. Behind these were the support trenches and behind those were the reserve trenches. Connecting the three lines were communication trenches. There were also ‘blind alleys’ to confuse the enemy in case of a successful attack, and ‘saps’ which were shallow trenches leading
to look-out posts or machine-gun nests.
LIFE IN THE TRENCHES:
What soldiers feared most was ‘going over the top’. This meant climbing over the parapet and charging the enemy trenches in an attempt to capture them. A young German wrote:
‘At noon we went over the top. After less than a hundred yards we ran up against an almost concrete wall of whistling and whining machine gun bullets. My company commander had his face shot away; another man yelling and whimpering held his hands to his belly and through his fingers, his stomach protruded. A young boy cried for his mother, bright red blood spurting from his face.’
A British soldier sergeant wrote about the effects of shelling:
‘It was on May 2nd that . . . this single high explosive shell killed 7 and wounded 18 – yet the day before 400 shells came over and dropped behind the trench and no one was hurt. The trench after the dead and wounded were removed presented a ghastly sight, it was red with blood like a room papered in crimson.’
The very noise of shells exploding gave many men ‘shell shock’. This is how a young British soldier from Wiltshire was effected:
‘His steel hat was at the back of his head and his mouth slobbered, and two comrades could not hold him still. These badly shell-shocked boys clawed their mouths ceaselessly. Others sat in the field hospitals in a state of coma, dazed as though deaf, and actually dumb.’
When they were not fighting or being bombarded, soldiers in the trench lived a miserable life. When it rained they often spent days knee-deep in water or mud which could lead to ‘trench foot’. A young British soldier wrote about the effects of ‘trench foot’:
‘Your feet swell up two or three times their normal size and go completely dead. You could stick a bayonet into them and not feel anything at all. If you were fortunate not to lose your feet and the swelling begins to go down, it is then that the . . . agony begins. I have heard men cry and even scream with the pain and many had to have their feet and legs amputated.’
Then there were the rats and lice. A pair of rats can produce 880 offspring in a year, and even dry, clean trenches swarmed with them. A British officer wrote:
‘There are millions! Some are huge fellows, nearly as big as cats. Several of our men were awakened to find a rat snuggling down under the blanket alongside them.’
Most soldiers got lice because they often had to go without washing or changing their clothes for weeks at a time. This is what happened to George Coppard:
‘The things that lay in the seams of trousers, in the deep furrows of . . . wooly pants. A lighted candle applied where they were the thickest made them pop like Chinese crackers. After a session of this, my face would be covered with small blood spots, from extra big fellows, which had popped too vigorously.
FOOD
In theory, soldiers in the trenches had plenty to eat. Here is a list made by a British soldier in his notebook:
List of army rations: 1 man per Diem (day)
Bread (or biscuits) 1 ¼lb [567g] Meat (bully beef) 1lb [453g]
Potatoes ¾lb [340g]
Bacon ¼lb [113g]
Sugar 2oz [56g]
Jam 2oz [56g]
Salt 1oz [28g]
Cheese 1oz [28g]
Butter ¾oz [21g]
Tea ½oz [14g]
Mustard 1/20oz [1.4g]
Pepper 1/36oz [0.7g]
But cooking in the trenches was difficult. A soldier from Hull describes a typical meal:
‘ Bully beef [corned beef] and biscuits, and plum and apple jam and biscuits, washed down with tea flavered from the last meal. Cooked in the same container as the water was boiled, onion being predominant.’
At the end of his day in the trench, a soldier might be able to get a few hours sleep in his dug-out. If he was not exhausted, perhaps he might dream that the next day he might catch a ‘blighty one’. This was a wound that would not kill or maim him, but serious for him to be sent back to ‘Blighty’ (Britain).
METHODS OF ATTACK
HEAVY ARTILLARY:
The weapon that most generals liked best was heavy artillery, the big guns. Both sides bombarded each other with explosive shells before starting an attack. The big guns, which fired the shells, had enormous power. The new howitzers could fire shells, which exploded into metal splinters called shrapnel over a distance of 13 kilometres. Soldiers in the front line could tell what kind of shell was coming by the noise it made. For example, the British called the German 77-millimetre shells ‘whizz-bangs’.
The big guns fired huge numbers of shells. In 1915 over 400,000 were used every month on the Western Front. The noise made by the constant bombardment was shattering. It damaged men’s brains and made their ears bleed, it also gave them shell shock. The shells also churned up the land into a sea of muddy craters, which made attacks on enemy trenches even more difficult. Some of the big guns are: Skoda 30.5, British Howitzer, British Mark I Howitzer and Big Bertha.
CAVALRY:
The First World War saw the end of cavalry as a weapon of the modern army. Before 1914 all sides saw the cavalry, highly trained soldiers on horseback, as the key to any military campaign. In theory the speed and mobility of the horses enabled the cavalry to break through enemy lines or to outflank troops.
In the last war involving Britain, the Boer War, the cavalry had been extremely important in defeating badly equipped opponents on the dry open plains of South Africa. Cavalry did play an important part in the early months of the war, but once stalemate was established horses were simply too vulnerable to artillery and machine-guns. In one charge only three out of 400 horses survived. The churned-up land and the barbed wire made cavalry charges impossible.
However, horses continued to serve an important role throughout the war, transporting equipment and supplies.
INFANTRY:
The infantry or foot soldier was the main part of the army. Before the war the theory was that an attack on the enemy would be lead by a cavalry charge.
The infantry’s job was to follow the cavalry and take charge of the captured positions. They then had to defend them against attacks. Infantry tactics soon changed to adapt to trench warfare. This meant that infantry, rather than cavalry lead the attacks.
The infantry had standard equipment. This was a gas mask, Lee Enfield rifle and cooking equipment. Steel helmets giving some protection against shrapnel from enemy shells only became standard equipment in 1916. Troop also improvised their own weapons for the conditions of trench warfare. The infantry would make occasional raids on enemy trenches, to capture prisoners or particular positions. Sometimes there would also be a major assault.
A major assault would go something like this. First the attacking side’s artillery bombarded the front-line trenches of the enemy. This was called a ‘barrage’. Second, as soon as the barrage stopped, attacking troops would go ‘over the top’, this meant climbing out of their trenched. It was now a race between them and the defenders, who had to emerge from their shelters and set up their machine guns before the attackers got over the barbed wire of ‘no-man’s land’.
The defenders usually had the advantage. They swept the advancing attackers with machine gun fire, sometimes setting up a cross-fire. If the attackers did capture forward positions they then had to hold them. This generally proved virtually impossible.
The machine gun was devastatingly effective against such attacks. It could fire eight bullets a second or more, and each trench would have a number of machine guns. During an infantry charge it could cut down a whole brigade in minutes. The machine gun made it unavoidable that any charge on an enemy trench would cost many lives.
However, the basic tactic remained the same throughout the war. Enough soldiers had to charge to ensure that however many were killed on the way there would still be enough to capture the machine guns in the enemy trenches.
NEW WEAPONS
MACHINE-GUNS:
At the start of the war many of the Allied generals did not think the machine-gun would be an important weapon during the war. To them it was still a recent and untested invention. However, the Germans could see its usefulness right from the start. A water-cooled machine-gun like the Vickers gun fired 600 bullets a minute. Soldiers on the attack could be mown down in minutes by a hail of lead. Other machine-guns used were the Gardner Gun, the Vickers Machine Gun, the Maxim Machine Gun, the Lewis Gun and the Maschinengewehr.
TANKS:
The tank was a British invention. It was an armour-plated machine, which moved at 6 kilometres an hour. It was armed with both cannons and machine-guns. For security reasons it was code-named ‘the tank’.
Early in the war inventors came to the army leaders with the idea but the army rejected it as impractical. However, Winston Churchill, head of the navy, thought the idea had potential and his department funded its development.
Two years later the tanks were used for the first time at the battle of Somme. They advanced ahead of the infantry, crushing barbed-wire defenses and spraying the enemy with machine-gun fire. They caused alarm among the Germans and lifted the moral of the British troops.
However these machines only moved at a walking pace and they were very unreliable. More than half of them broke down before they reached the German trenches. It was until November 1917 at Cambrai that tanks actually achieved any great success. Unfortunately they were too successful. They blasted through enemy lines so quickly that the infantry could not keep up!
POISON GAS:
The first Poison gas attack was made in April 1915. The Germans released chlorine, which wafted on the wind across no-man’s land. In the trenches there was panic as the soldiers coughed, retched and struggled to breathe.
From that time gas attacks by both sides became a regular feature of the war. To start with, the aim of gas attacks was to disable enemy troops so that your own infantry charge would be successful. Later scientists on both sides began to perfect new and more lethal gases such as mustard gas, which had a perfumed smell but which burned, blinded or slowly killed the victims over four to five weeks. Its effects did not show for hours after the gas attack. Then it began to rot the body. The victim’s skin blistered and his eyes bulged out. The lining of the lungs stripped raw.
The pain was so great that many victims had to be strapped to their beds. However, scientists also developed very effective gas masks. Soldiers in the trenches would carry their gas masks with them all the time.
At the alert they would put them on. As a result only 3,000 British troops died from gas in the whole war. The main significance of gas was therefore its psychological impact. Soldier who could bear a long bombardment by artillery often lived in fear of a gas attack.
GRENADES:
Grenades were used for close-range fighting, soldiers were trained to use bayonets which were long knives fixed to the end of their rifles, but it was difficult to use these in attacks on trenches. By 1915 many soldiers preferred to use hand grenades instead. To be effective, soldiers had to be able to throw them over 100 feet. The tall, strong soldiers selected for this task became known as grenadiers. Several people became involved in producing a grenade that was safe to use but caused the maximum damage to the enemy. By 1915 the Mills Bomb was the most popular grenade used by British troops. The bomb had a central spring-loaded firing-pin and a spring-loaded lever locked by a pin. Once the grenade was in the air, the lever flew up and released the striker, which ignited a four-second time fuse, allowing the thrower to take cover before it exploded. When the grenade went off the cast-iron casing shattered producing a shower of metal fragments. The Germans used stick-shaped grenades known as ‘potato mashers’.
HAND HELD GUNS:
In addition to machine-guns soldiers also carried their own guns. These included the Luger Pistol, the Mauser Gewehr, the Lee Enfield, the Springfield M1903, the Bolt action rifle, the Webley MkIV, the Mannlicher-Carcano and the French Lebel 1886.
METHODS OF TRANSPORT:
In the early 1900’s the British Army began considering the ways that motor transport could be used during a war. It was recognised that motor transport would enable the British Army to move troops very quickly. An annual fee of £15 was to be paid for each lorry regestered with the British Army. By 1914 this fee had been increased to £110.
When war was declared in August 1914 a total of 1,200 lorries were acquired by the Army. One of the most successful lorries used by the British Army was the Dennis 3-Ton Lorry. The four-cylinder engine enabled the lorry to reach 55 mph. Over 7,000 Dennis 3-Ton Lorries were built and used during the First World War.
At the beginning of the war, Commercial Cars of Luton began producing Commer First Aid lorries. These were used to carry medical stores and stretchers to the first aid post.
At the beginning of the First World War Henry Ford refused to let his cars be used in combat conditions. Eventually Ford changed his mind and the Model T was used as a patrol car. The British purchased about 19,000 of these cars during the war.
Bibliography
1. Encarta
2. Oxford Encyclopedia
3. World Book
4. Britannica
5. Spartacus Schoolnet
6. Modern World History In Focus
by Ben Walsh
7. Longman The Great War
by Josh Brooman
8. The 20th Century World
CONTENTS
How it all began 1
A Quick History Of World War One 3
War On The Western Front 5
Trenches
Trench Warfare 7 Building Trenches 8
Life In The Trenches 11
Food
What They Ate 14
Methods Of Attack
Artillery 16 Cavalry 19 Infantry 20
New Weapons
Machine-Guns 23 Tanks 26 Poison Gas 29 Grenades 30 Hand Held Guns 32
Transport
Methods Of Transport 34
Bibliography 38
