World War One
Topic 2:
World War One brought extreme technological advancement to the battlefield, the new and malicious weaponry painted a new image of modern warfare. At the beginning of WWI, mounted troops were still considered the main style of offensive war. Mounties were usually equipped with a sword, rifle and sometimes a lance. However, with the invention machine guns, aircraft and tanks, Cavalry warfare became obsolete.
Advancing technology and the industrial revolution led to new ideas and inventions on the battlefront. One of the most important inventions was the machine gun. The first machine guns weighed around 30 to 60 kilograms and required a crew of four to six operators. To make things worse, the first machine guns would get jammed and overheat quickly; this often made them useless for a valuable amount of time without cooling mechanisms. But still the machine guns greatly increased the amount of kills—estimated to be worth as many as 60 to 100 rifles per one machine gun—and new and improved styles were constantly being made.
At the start of World War One Aircraft had just been recently invented so the planes were very basic and cheap. But by the end of the war aircraft had become much more advanced. The first war planes were sent to scope out the enemy territory and at that time were of little help. One British General even remarked that “the airplane is useless for purposes of war”. As the war progressed the military believed that aircraft had much more value than just photography of the enemy’s territory. Soon airplanes were used for dropping bombs—which rarely landed anywhere close to the original target—and on some occasions, air combat. Air combat quickly became a deadly business, machine guns became mounted on planes instead of having a co-pilot fire and new machine guns and inventions were examined—and usually copied or modified according to what failed—every time an enemy plane was shot down. This “shoot down, copy, modify” method kept aerial combat evolving towards a modern era of war.
The German U-boats were perhaps the most important advancement in the German Navy. In Britain, the British Navy was and always had been the strongest in the world and had been Britain's pride and joy for centuries. With the Germans looking for a way to defeat this powerful force, it needed a new tactic. The U-boat. On September 22, 1914, the “U-9” German submarine sank four British ships within one hour. This and other catastrophic events led to proclamations and acts to ban the use of U-boats. On May 17, 1915, the RMS Lusitania was sunk by the German submarine “SM U-20” claiming 1,198 lives, 128 of them Americans. to counter the outraged Americans, Germany issued the “Sussex pledge” which reinforced previous restrictions on U-boats. This resulted in a regained British control of the sea, causing the German Navy pressing for an all out U-boat war beginning on February first, 1917. The U-boats were a very controversial topic during WWI and although the British navy found a way to detect and destroy German U-boats (using ASDIC sonar) the use of Submarine as a war vessel continued on into WWII.
The forever evolving tactics of war will never stop. The inventions of the first World War completely changed the image of war through new inventions and advancements in Science. Tanks, poison gas and the flamethrower were also very important new and frightening weapons used for the first time in WWI. The previous Cavalry warfare quickly became obsolete with the new mass destruction inventions like machine guns. WWI painted a bloody picture of modern warfare and what advancing technology was now and forever capable of.
