World War One:A New Style of War

Schlieffen Plan

• Germany wanted to sweep down through Belgium and take France quickly

• Massed forces on western front for quick victory, then shift focus to the east

• Germans were stopped and stalemate ensued

Stalemate on the Western Front

• Unable to break through the French lines, the Germans dig trenches to hold their position

• Allies dig trenches as well

• Stretched from the North Sea to Switzerland and did not move much

Trench Warfare

• There were several lines of trenches:– Fire trenches– Support trenches– Reserve trenches– Communication

trenches

• Trenches were approximately 7 ft deep and 6 ft wide

No Man’s Land

• Between enemy trenches was called “no man’s land”, a waste land of barbed wire and land mines.

• As small as 7 yards, as large as over 500, usually around 250.

• Attacking across No Man’s Land was extremely difficult due to barbed wire and shell craters

“Life in the trenches was hell on earth. Lice, rats, trench foot, trench mouth, where the gums rot and you lose your teeth. And of course dead bodies everywhere.”

Life in the Trenches

• Trenches were often waterlogged and full of disease

“ The trenches were wet and cold and at this time some of them did not have duckboards or dug-outs. The battalion lived in mud and water.”

Trench Foot

• Infection of the foot caused by cold, wet, and unsanitary conditions

• During the winter of 1914-15 over 20,000 men in the British army were treated for trench foot.

• Soldiers were required to change socks multiple times a day as well as grease their feet with whale oil

Trench Foot & AmputeesYour feet swell to two or three times their normal size and go completely dead. You could stick a bayonet into them and not feel a thing. If you are fortunate enough not to lose your feet and the swelling begins to go down. It is then that the intolerable, indescribable agony begins. I have heard men cry and even scream with the pain and many had to have their feet and legs amputated.

Trench Rats

• “The outstanding feature of the trenches was the extraordinary number of rats. The area was infested with them. It was impossible to keep them out of the dugouts. They grew fat on the food that they pilfered from us, and anything they could pick up in or around the trenches; they were bloated and loathsome to look at. Some were nearly as big as cats.”

Trench Rats

• Rats came up from the canal, fed on the plentiful corpses, and multiplied exceedingly. While I stayed here with the Welch. a new officer joined the company and, in token of welcome, was given a dug-out containing a spring-bed. When he turned in that night he heard a scuffling, shone his torch on the bed, and found two rats on his blanket tussling for the possession of a severed hand.

Trench Rats

• a pair of rats were capable of producing some 800 offspring within a single year.

• Soldiers would often hunt rats to pass the time by attracting them with food and then attacking them with bayonets or rifles

Trench Rats

Lice in the Trenches

Over the Top

• An offensive consisted of days of shelling the enemy’s defenses followed by an order to go “Over the Top” and into No Man’s Land

• Offensives were very ineffective and resulted in huge losses of life

• About 800,000 at Verdun alone

Mechanization and New Weapons

• WWI was an industrialized war that mass produced new weapons.

• These new weapons were more efficient and more deadly

• Military tactics and strategies had not developed with the new weapons lead to a tremendous amount of deaths

Machine Gun

• Hiram Maxim invented world’s first automatic portable machine gun

• fifty Rhodesian police fought off 5,000 Matabele warriors with just four Maxim guns

• Rapid fire mowed down waves of soldiers as they raced across no man’s land

Chlorine Gas• The effects are these - a splitting headache and terrific

thirst (to drink water is instant death), a knife edge of pain in the lungs and the coughing up of a greenish froth off the stomach and the lungs, ending finally in insensibility and death. The colour of the skin from white turns a greenish black and yellow, the colour protrudes and the eyes assume a glassy stare. It is a fiendish death to die.

Mustard Gas

• "Great mustard-coloured blisters, blind eyes, all sticky and stuck together, always fighting for breath, with voices a mere whisper, saying that their throats are closing and they know they will choke."

Tanks

• Tanks were first used during WWI• They were able to cross the trenches, across

broken ground and barbed wire while facing heavy machine gun fire

Artillery

• Used to weaken enemy fortifications before offensives

“Big Bertha”

U-Boat

• Unterseebooten – Germans were first to develop submarines. Waged unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic.

Aircraft

• Planes were first used for reconnaisance missions• Pilots then engaged in small battles in the air where

they would shoot at each other with pistols• Later in the war, planes began to drop bombs and

engage in dogfights with mounted machine guns.

Zeppelins

• Blimps that Germans used to drop bombs• Use for only 2 yrs as they were easily shot down

by enemy soldiers and planes

THE

HUMAN

COST

The Aftermath of an Artillery Raid

A Man With a “Broken Face””

39 million Casualties

CountriesTotal

Mobilized Killed

& Died Wounded

Prisone

rs&

Missing

TotalCasualties

Casualties % of Mobilized

Allied Powers            Russia 12,000,000 1,700,000 4,950,000 2,500,000 9,150,000 76.3

France 8,410,000 1,357,800 4,266,000 537,000 6,160,800 76.3

British Empire 8,904,467 908,371 2,090,212 191,652 3,190,235 35.8

Italy 5,615,000 650,000 947,000 600,000 2,197,000 39.1

United States 4,355,000 126,000 234,300 4,500 364,800 8.2

Japan 800,000 300 907 3 1,210 0.2

Romania 750,000 335,706 120,000 80,000 535,706 71.4

Serbia 707,343 45,000 133,148 152,958 331,106 46.8

Belgium 267,000 13,716 44,686 34,659 93,061 34.9

Greece 230,000 5,000 21,000 1,000 17,000 11.7

Portugal 100,000 7,222 13,751 12,318 33,291 33.3

Montenegro 50,000 3,000 10,000 7,000 20,000 40.0

Total 42,188,810 5,152,115 12,831,004 4,121,090 22,104,209 52.3

Central Powers            Germany 11,000,000 1,773,700 4,216,058 1,152,800 7,142,558 64.9

Austria-Hungary 7,800,000 1,200,000 3,620,000 2,200,000 7,020,000 90.0

Turkey 2,850,000 325,000 400,000 250,000 975,000 34.2

Bulgaria 1,200,000 87,500 152,390 27,029 266,919 22.2

Total 22,850,000 3,386,200 8,388,448 3,629,829 15,404,477 67.4

Grand Total 65,038,810 8,538,315 21,219,452 7,750,919 37,508,686 57.6