How They Fought

1. How They Fought Weapons of WWI

2. Remember the rules of external jus in bello: 1. Obey all international laws on weapons prohibition 2. Discrimination and Non-Combatant Immunity 3. Proportionality 4. Benevolent quarantine for prisoners of war (POWs) 5. No Means Mala in Se 6. No reprisals Keep these in mind as we survey the weapons of WWI.

3. During WWI, several new military technologies were introduced that added to the war’s carnage and changed the shape of future conflicts. Some of these weapons, such as machine guns and artillery, predated WWI but appeared in new and deadlier forms. A number of radically new weapons saw their first significant use in combat in WWI, including airplanes, tanks, submarines, and poison gas. Though none of these were decisive in the war, the first three would be indispensable to future armies and the last, as the predecessor of modern chemical weapons, would haunt arms negotiators to the present day.

4. Paul Fussell, University of Pennsylvania "Except for the American Civil War, which contained most of the disillusions that the Great War revealed, war still had a heroic and noble connotation. And to discover that it was not heroic and noble was an immense cultural shock, not just to those who fought, but to those who watched them fight from various home countries. "Heroism doesn't matter when you're not fighting hand-to-hand. An illustration I'm fond of using is that the artillery shell doesn't know whether you are brave or cowardly when it hits you, so it doesn't matter anymore whether you're brave or cowardly. The whole concept of heroism disappears, because you can easily be killed whether you're a coward or a hero. "During the Great War, most of the time, the armies were separated by a mile or two. That's just industrial murder. Eventually everybody finally caught on to that. And that made the whole proceeding something to which words like 'glorious' and 'gallantry' and 'heroic' could no longer be applied. And that, of course, generated this immense post-war literature of disillusion, including military memoirs and things like T.S. Eliot's Wasteland and James Joyce's Ulysses, and the whole package of 1920s and 1930s culture and art."

5. Airplane World War I planes were typically woodframed biplanes or triplanes with, respectively, two or three cloth-covered wings braced with piano wire. At first they were used to deliver bombs and for spying work but became fighter aircraft armed with machine guns, bombs and some times cannons. Fights between two planes in the sky became known as 'dogfights' The Red Baron Dogfights

6. Guns The main weapon used by British soldiers in the trenches was the bolt-action rifle. 15 rounds could be fired in a minute and a person 1,400 meters away could be killed. Machine guns needed 4-6 men to work them and had to be on a flat surface. They had the fire-power of 100 guns. Large field guns had a long range and could deliver devastating blows to the enemy but needed up to 12 men to work them. They fired shells which exploded on impact.

7. Tank Tanks were used for the first time in the First World War at the Battle of the Somme. They were developed to cope with the conditions on the Western Front. The first tank was called 'Little Willie' and needed a crew of 3. Its maximum speed was 3mph and it could not cross trenches The more modern tank was not developed until just before the end of the war. It could carry 10 men, had a revolving turret and could reach 4mph. WWI Tanks in Action

8. Submarines Though small submarines capable of brief periods of submersion existed since the 17th century, the modern submarine emerged in the late 1890s through the work of American inventors John Holland and Simon Lake. German engineers contributed to its development in the early 20th century. First combat action: 1914—Submarines were possessed by both sides from the beginning of the war. German submarines, called U-boats, were used extensively against Allied warships and merchant vessels. Depth charges, underwater explosive devices, were developed during the war to combat submarines. Submarine Attack

9. Zeppelin The German Zeppelins were the ultimate terror weapon of their day. Silent behemoths, they prowled the night skies seemingly impervious to attack by plane or antiaircraft fire. Just the mention of the name "Zeppelin" was enough to send cold chills up and down the spines of their intended victims. The first bombing raid on London was made during the night of May 31, 1915 by a single ship. Other raids followed, with as many as 16 Zeppelins attacking in a single night. Initially, defenders were powerless as the Zeppelins flew at altitudes too high for defending aircraft or artillery to reach. Mother Nature was the Zeppelin's primary enemy as the unwieldy craft were easily thrown off course by high winds. Additionally, the darkness of their night raids made it difficult for crews to find their targets. Zeppelin attack Great Britain

10. Although the actual material damage inflicted by the Zeppelins was minimal, their psychological impact on the British population was significant. Precious air and ground units were diverted from the war front to the home front to counter this threat from the sky. As the war progressed, technological advances that allowed defending aircraft to reach or exceed the Zeppelin's altitude and the introduction of incendiary bullets, turned the advantage to the defenders. By the end of the war, the Zeppelin had been withdrawn from combat. Russian Detective-WWI-Zeppelin Episode

11. Poison Gas A toxic airborne chemical agent that can incapacitate or kill. Poison gases used in World War I included tear gas, chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas. First combat action: August 1914—The French were the first to use grenades filled with tear gas, to little effect. The first effective poison gas use came on April 22, 1915, at Ypres, when the Germans released chlorine gas against the French. Improvements during the war included shells to release gas upon impact (an advance on using wind to carry gas) and gas masks to protect against the other side’s gas attack. Poison Gas in WWI

12. Jay Winter, Cambridge University Total War – Everyone’s a Target "In some ways, you might be able to argue that the First World War started on the 22nd of April 1915. Up to that point, what had occurred was a series of well-known 19th Century encounters that had gone wrong. But on the 22nd of April, not far from the city of Ypres, the Germans did something new. They opened cylinders of poison gas to try to break through the defensive strength of the allies on the other side. French and Canadian troops were hit by this gas, or chlorine gas, and were terrified. These are men without really any protection against this because it never happened before. These weren't shells, these were cylinders that had been lined up, and when the German troops thought that the wind was blowing the right way, the cloud opened – it looked very much like a green cloud – and the people who didn't escape from it would have their lungs burned out and die an awful death.

13. "Now, that moment is very important in understanding how the war that so many people joined up to fight turned into something much worse. It's important for a whole series of reasons. “One, is that gas warfare is another level of brutality, another level of violence that until that point, had not been available to either side. And once it became available to one side, it was used by both. "But it also required a huge industrial backup to produce. By 1918, one in every four shells on the Western Front was a gas shell. That meant huge factories producing weapons of war of a kind, which lowered the obstacles to brutality, because if you couldn't get out of a trench, if you couldn't flee, if you couldn't surrender, then there is a different nature to battle and confrontation. That is extermination, not combat, because a soldier cannot surrender. "If he has no protection against the gas, he will simply suffocate and die miserably.

14. "The nature of that kind of war opens up the whole issue of whether this conflict began in a 19th Century fashion with a degree of understanding about what the limits of violence were, and, slowly but surely – 1915 is a critical moment – those limits were pushed and pushed and pushed until they didn't exist anymore. So that by the end of 1915, you could say that everyone in each combatant country was at risk. No one was safe. Everyone was a target. "The first of those steps was the bombardment of civilian populations through zeppelins. This is something that brought home to the civilian population that they, too, were on the firing line. A kindergarten in the east of London was not what the zeppelins aimed at, but given the state of the art at the time, it's not surprising that they killed children. "It is in 1915, that this kind of war was born, and the best way to understand it and its horrifying character, is to call it total war."

15. Remember the story of Prometheus? Maybe Zeus was right!