Photo Source: Library of Congress
Germans in their trenches

It was the ‘Big War', ‘The War To End All Wars', the only World War that would ever be fought, but it turned out to be the ‘Trench War' and the prelude to an even fiercer war 21 years later. World War I was fought using new ‘Flying Machines', tanks and big guns. It also used men, a lot of men, who were wasted in battle after battle for a few inches of land. The European powers had watched our Civil War and learned well the slaughter of massive amounts of men. All sides had huge loses and there had been miscalculations everywhere. Britain had thought it could conquer Turkey and enter Germany from that direction, but it suffered severe loses at Gallipoli. Germany had thought it could win the war in a few months but got bogged down in a no win trench war. France wasted men without regard for them. This was due to some of the Generals who were political and inept. The war would drag on for four years, not the months the Germans had thought.

Photo Source: My Camera
WW I Plane

In the beginning the new flying machines were used only for spotting. They had shown their ability to be much more useful than balloons, in this regard, because they were powered and could easily fly anywhere they wanted to in a much shorter period of time. These craft were actually attaining speeds of 60 miles per hour. The planes became faster and faster and it was inevitable that someone would figure out that these vehicles would make a good killing platform. It started when someone brought along a gun to shoot at the other fellow's airplane. Someone noticed that planes were handy for dropping grenades on enemy troops and it wasn't long before bombs were manufactured for this purpose. How wonderful this new machine was. In the four years of the war the plane advanced at a rapid pace. By war's end we had specialized machines. One type was used to carry large loads of bombs and it was much larger than the standard plane which was now equipped with machine guns that fired through the propeller thanks to a German invention that synchronized the spaces between the prop and the firing of the gun, thus allowing the gun to fire without shooting off the prop. This was certainly better than the previous method of armoring the prop so when bullets hit it, it wouldn't fall apart. I also have to wonder if any of those bullets ever came back into the cockpit?

Picture Source: Library of Congress
British Tank

With all these trenches around it was almost impossible to launch a charge and succeed because the enemy would hide in their trenches and just shoot you to pieces. This happened many times to both sides and that's why the positions were so static. At the end of the war the allies were very surprised to find how comfortable the German trenches were. They were built up much better than the allied trenches and had rooms that were reinforced for protection. The British just couldn't accept this stalemate and worked on a contraption that would be able to go from trench to trench and yet protect its occupants with a reasonable degree of safety. The tank was born. It didn't move very fast and it was full of fumes from the engine. It was extremely noisy and when bullets hit it, they made a terrible racket, but it was better than charging up to a trench with the infantry. Its treads allowed it to cross over obstacles including trenches. It was just what the doctor ordered. But there was also a big problem with it, it was pretty undependable mechanically.

The use of big guns in the American Civil War was not wasted on the Europeans, especially the Germans. But the Germans were not the only soldiers to use big guns. The French Army had the Schneider 520mm howitzer. It fired a 24 inch shell that weighed 3,100 pounds. It had a special fuse that didn't set the shell off until it penetrated the target, but this gun certainly was not the most famous. The most famous of all World War I large guns was the Paris Gun. It could fire a shell 70 miles and it would reach its target in under 3 minutes. But this gun was more hype than anything else because its shell only carried 15 pounds of explosives and you couldn't aim the gun at that distance. The reason it was called the Paris gun was you could aim it at Paris and they did, but that was the best you could do. It was strictly a terror weapon. Some of the big guns the Germans used had to be set into cement before they could be fired because of their massive recoils. The Paris gun had another interesting problem. It could only be fired a little over 60 times, then it had to be rebored. It was not a practical weapon. Everybody brought their large guns to the western front. Many of these guns were naval cannons adopted to the task. There was the Big Bertha, a huge German gun, the Schlanke Emma, a large Austrian gun, American railroad artillery and naval guns on wheels and British heavy artillery, just to mention a few. I like the way some of the German and Austrian guns had names.

Photo Source: Clipart.com
Flame throwers

The Germans were always looking for new weapons and discovered that a flame thrower type of weapon would be useful. They created this weapon by placing a large fuel on the back of a soldier. He held a hose type apparatus with a trigger and igniter. He could fire flames with this about 59 feet. Both sides quickly adopted this weapon. Different forms of flame throwers had been used as far back as the 5th century B.C. The Germans had also developed a large model that took several people to transport but had twice the range and could sustain flames for over 40 seconds. You wouldn't have wanted to be a soldier using this device. First of all, the gas cylinder could explode, second, you were the main target of the enemy and were to be brought down first, and lastly, no mercy was given to you if you were captured. It was not a good job.

Photo Source: Clipart.com
Poison Gas Training

Poison gas had been around before World War I. It was not the Germans who used it first as popularly believed, it was the French. It was considered an uncivilized weapon before World War I but the French used it because of the stalemate caused by trench warfare. The French had only used tear gas but the Germans developed chemical weapons on a much larger scale. As strange as this sounds, one of the first types of gas used by the Germans was sneezing gas. They eventually worked their way up to poison gas in 1915 when they used chlorine gas against the French and Algerians. The British then retaliated a few months later and the gas war was on.

World War I seemed to have been so terrible that no one would ever think about war again. But this is not the way of the human race. There are always countries that are unhappy, for different political and territorial reason, dictators that have grand ambitions and religious zealots that want to destroy anyone that doesn't believe the way they do and thus World War II came soon after.