To clarify the meaning of the question, the fundamentals of the point of discussion must be made clear before considering the subject further. It is immediately obvious that the main casualties in the war were caused by the commanders to some degree- their role in the army was to give orders to the soldiers; these orders caused many soldiers to sacrifice their lives regardless of the tactics utilised. Therefore the basis of the question is whether the central cause of Allied casualties was the choices and actions of commanders, or the multiple additional factors including trench life, modern weaponry and the newfound use of airborne military units.
Because of the global spread of industrialism, mass production of weapons and ammunition, warships and alternate transport vehicles could be more easily achieved at an unparalleled rate in both the Triple Entente and the Central Powers. This meant that high quality weapons could be produced at a relatively low cost and provided for each soldier; therefore it was possible for both sides to have roughly the same amount and type of military equipment during a battle. However, this did not mean that they had equal amounts of similar military apparatus due to differing tactical approaches; for instance Edmund “The Bull” Allenby was a field marshal who believed that the use of cavalry was appropriate even against the Ottoman’s machine guns when he fought in the Third Battle of Gaza. The weather conditions in Palestine, where the battle was fought meant that the horses could charge towards the machine guns at high speeds and the battle was successful. However, this was arguably the last time cavalry was used effectively during the World Wars.
An example of one of the most successful weapons of WWI is the machine gun. It was well known for its ability to rapidly dispatch multiple enemies and had soon earned a fearsome reputation for inflicting heavy casualties. The standard machine gun used by the British was the Vickers’ machine gun, an improvement on the revolutionary Maxim Gun, a gun that used the recoil force of the previous shot to reload. This had first been used during the Matabele War of 1893-94, in which four were used by fifty British soldiers to defeat five thousand Matabele warriors. Machine gun operators were commonly protected from fire inside concrete ‘pillboxes’ (dug-in guard posts with firing loopholes). Their main disadvantage was that each gun took six to eight men to operate and they were very heavy. They had an inbuilt water cooling system; however, the guns occasionally overheated after only two minutes of firing and therefore were used in intermittent bursts rather than continuous streams of fire.*Germans appreciated the use of machine guns.
However, machine guns did not in fact contribute to the casualty count of the British soldiers at a level remotely comparable with the immense damage caused by artillery. These caused on average an estimated three quarters of all combat deaths. They were used in many different ways; they could be used to fire fragmentation, gas and even incendiary shells. Fragmentation shells were designed to release as much shrapnel as possible upon impact (explosion) and incendiary shells were used to set fire to the surrounding environment.
By Sam Reine-Harris
