Trenches ran from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier and the ensuing stalemate ensured ecological upheaval. Millions of soldiers and billions of shells transformed fields and forests within the relatively narrow war zone into a wasteland. Military strategy dictated devastation. Belgian troops flooded portions of the lowlands in the hopes of stalling the German advance during the Battle of Yser in In the heat of battle, artillery units fired several hundred rounds an hour.
Although their range rarely extended beyond twenty kilometers, the guns obliterated nearly everything within reach. Chemical weapons added to ecological turmoil. Chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gases asphyxiated animals and humans alike.
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The deformed landscape trapped the deadly vapors in shell holes and the seams of trenches. Burnt earth, rotting corpses, and craters like cauldrons with a horrid brew of mud, gore, and the green-yellow mists of stale gas struck the troops as the very image of hell.
Literate, educated soldiers on both sides depicted the war-torn landscape through a common set of tropes. These were not new sentiments. When Barbusse remarked that the sights and smells of the Western Front reminded him of a factory, he tapped into 19 th -century critiques of industrial development.
Writing in the early s, Engels saw squalor and ruin all around. Degradation on Western Front represented those developments in their most violent, concentrated form. Industrialization in the s shaped views of nature that later informed perceptions of environmental destruction during the war.
When belching factories made western European countries into economic behemoths, but turned cities dark with soot and grime, social commentators invoked nature as the antithesis of dismal urban spaces. A particular image of an Arcadian landscape circulated among certain classes — a genuine, fecund place as opposed to the bleak metropolis.
Propaganda machines later crafted enlistment campaigns around this romantic view of nature. A more accurate generalization was that the war heightened the awareness of human impacts on the natural world, particularly among those who labored little in it. Only later did these soldiers begin using mechanical tropes and images from mines and factories to convey their experiences.
Forests and fields on the Western Front had been managed and cultivated for generations. The idea of untouched wilderness was a myth in the minds of romantically inclined soldiers. Enlisted farmers and field hands held a different view of the natural world. Their rural obligations left little room for romantic musings. The pleasantries that university-educated soldiers attached to the natural world equated to toil and hardship for those who worked the land.
Although rural soldiers bemoaned environmental devastation, they saw ravaged fields not as a loss of innocence but of livelihood. Ruined agriculture offered a fearful glimpse into what might befall farmlands back home. Only they were not.
Writing in , a British company commander saw beauty all around him:. Wild flowers of a sort that generally make only an occasional appearance in grain fields, dominate the scene. Most impressive to him was how untroubled the little songbirds were by the shelling. Some recalled eating ripe berries in the early summer, which tasted all the sweeter for the bullets whizzing through the air. The landscape appeared simultaneously gruesome, scarred with splintered trees and churned-up meadows meddled with human gore, but also pleasant, covered in bright green grass and full of colorful flowers and thriving wildlife.
For soldiers, the experience could be both jarring and comforting. The same was true for being on leave. In little time, troops found themselves transported away from the strains of battle to a leisurely country idyll. Indeed, agriculture was a much larger agent of environmental change than war. But carefully cultivated fields conformed to peaceful pastoral aesthetics, unlike the distorted nature of industrialized battlegrounds.
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Perhaps the most shocking incongruity for soldiers was how quickly devastated lands appeared to recover after the war. In , Corinna Haven Smith , an American humanitarian, toured the former front lines and assessed the damage done mostly to towns and factories, as well as farmland. Smith and her husband had volunteered with the Franco-American Committee for the Protection of Children of the Frontier during the war.
They lived in Paris, provided aid to families, and often assisted Red Cross relief efforts; Smith was familiar with privation. At the request of one of her French contacts, she joined a team from the Bureau for the Reconstruction of Industry, visited over factories, and published her findings later that year in Rising above the Ruins of France. She frequently noted how farmers had already begun plowing and planting the fields. Her interviews with locals revealed the rapid return to productivity:. When driving on the Menin Road to Ypres, a track that the war-artist Paul Nash had made famous with his surreal paintings of twisted landscapes, Smith remarked with surprise: It does not seem possible.
Men are working in the fields. Grass has grown over the shell holes and sheep and goats are grazing among abandoned tanks. Only the trees have kept their record of suffering. Some veterans found that nature acted too soon. During the s, several veteran organizations complained to the French government that dense shrubbery prevented them from touring their former posts. A better approach is to examine the degree to which the Great War transformed the environment. From that perspective, changes along the Western Front were significant, but nature was not permanently damaged.
Ecosystems evolve and change on their own. War often makes that change more drastic, sudden, and might direct natural succession in unexpected ways. Combat on the Western Front altered the makeup of forests and the composition of soil. Immediately following the armistice, foresters took stock of timber reserves and detailed the amount of lumber lost to the war. Some estimates ranged as high as 2. With funds from German reparations, the French government soon instituted a reforestation program.
Authorities planted the obliterated sections with Austrian Pine and Scotch Pine seedlings, fast-growing coniferous species that tolerated nutrient-poor soil. Foresters later reintroduced European Beech. Still, what were once diverse forest ecosystems became near monoculture, which made the woods more susceptible to disease and pest. Managers had attempted to increase diversity, but the size and cost of the project stymied efforts.
Although a changed environment with a different character, forests returned to the war-torn regions. Less visible were changes to soil composition. Natural events, such as earthquakes and windstorms, are typical sources of major soil disturbance. The advent of industrial warfare made combat a powerful agent of geomorphic change. The geographer Joseph Hupy has conducted extensive research around Verdun and has shown that the battle turned stable soil ecosystems into loose, unconsolidated sediment.
The same pattern of upheaval exists all along the Western Front, where countless artillery craters have altered surface hydrology, water table characteristics, and soil development rates. He defines bombturbation as a category of pedoturbation, a term synonymous with soil mixing that geologists use.
Unlike other forms of pedoturbation for example: When the bedrock was broken, organic matter accumulated in the cracks, complicating recovery by introducing humification and microbial activity to the seam. Deep breaches might expose shallow water tables, which indirectly impacted vegetation growth and reforestation. Cratering might also accelerate weathering, leaching, and erosion, particularly at the bottom of the basins. Shells used in the First World War were especially injurious because they detonated upon impact unlike bombs in World War Two that used proximity timers and therefore directed most of their blast downward into the ground.
Tunneling and the use of mines also jumbled soil horizons. Explosions sent debris flying into the air and buried topsoil underneath layers of gravel ejecta. However, Hupy has found that over the years, industrious earthworms and other agents have assimilated those materials into the soil profile.
Even today in sections where ordnance remains embedded in the earth and soils have developed along new pathways, flora and fauna thrive. Combat did transform the natural world, but only within the limits of its reach. Today, only a trained eye might spot the spectral traces of trenches and battlements. But the war made itself felt in other ways and places besides artillery barrages in France and Belgium. The massive shift of natural resources to the war effort changed the land, transformed state infrastructure, and reoriented economies.
Demand for raw materials led countries to control natural resources to an unparalleled degree. Government agencies now dictated the supply, price, and distribution of items such as timber, metal ore, fossil fuels, and food. These hybrid institutional frameworks fostered massive collusion between the government and private industry, setting an important precedent for subsequent wars.
The need for timber taxed forest reserves around the world. Armies relied on lumber in countless ways. Timber beams kept trenches from collapsing. Wood planks saved soldiers from wallowing or drowning in mud. Trees provided the basic building material for wharves where soldiers disembarked, warehouses for munitions, barracks, railroad ties, telephone poles, and key airplane parts. Pit timber for coalmines, fuel wood, and pulp for paper supplies also aided the war effort. Ottoman forces leveled cedar forests in Lebanon. Before , Britain imported most of its lumber from Scandinavia, Russia, and Canada.
Indian timber, however, usually served military needs in the Middle East. Attempts to import lumber from colonies in Africa yielded little, due in large part to the British system of indirect rule, but did put in place infrastructure for future extraction. Desperate requests from London, along with major capital investment, expanded logging operations in Western Canada, in spite of German submarines. The opening of the Panama Canal in lowered the costs of imports from Vancouver. French and German timber stands fared better because of long-standing, institutionalized forestry practices.
Moreover, with manpower diverted to the army, logging rates in those departments soon fell below pre-war levels. Only with the arrival of American forestry troops, the 10 th Engineering and the 20 th Engineering Corps, did forests in western France sustain heavy cutting. Troops did receive detailed instructions for obtaining lumber. They were to first use trees that had already fallen or were stripped of bark. To avert erosion, directives warned not to remove trees along the banks of streams. Orders expressly forbade soldiers in the Alps from felling trees along the timberline, which was a protected zone.
Since lumber should not be substituted for firewood, officers were expected to familiarize themselves with the trees in their sector and know the appropriate uses for each species. Despite their efforts, troops on the frontlines leveled forests anyway to prevent ambush and have unobstructed lines of fires. Although the United States did not enter the war until , American logging companies responded to rising lumber prices and massive government subsidies much earlier.
Timber firms invested heavily in new technologies and equipment to meet European demand. Mechanized labor hastened vast clear cutting efforts that had begun in the s. Forests were so expansive that logging companies showed little concern for protecting timber stands, investing in reforestation programs, or practicing selective cutting. Woodlands in the southeastern United States suffered the most. Sandy soil along the coast and red clay on the interior experienced heavy erosion.
Only German submarines saved the landscape from even greater destruction. The high risks of trans-Atlantic shipping caused the total export sales of U. Yet when the Americans did enter the conflict, outfitting and housing the new American Expeditionary Force alone required an estimated million board feet of lumber.
And so on for companies and platoons. The lower down the structure this division of duty proceeded, the more frequently the units would rotate from front-line duty to support or reserve. During the day, snipers and artillery observers in balloons made movement perilous, so the trenches were mostly quiet. Consequently, trenches were busiest at night, when cover of darkness allowed the movement of troops and supplies, the maintenance and expansion of the barbed wire and trench system, and reconnaissance of the enemy's defences.
Sentries in listening posts out in no man's land would try to detect enemy patrols and working parties or indications that an attack was being prepared. Pioneered by the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in February , [34] trench raids were carried out in order to capture prisoners and "booty"—letters and other documents to provide intelligence about the unit occupying the opposing trenches.
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As the war progressed, raiding became part of the general British policy, the intention being to maintain the fighting spirit of the troops and to deny no man's land to the Germans. As well, they were intended to compel the enemy to reinforce, which exposed his troops to artillery fire. Such dominance was achieved at a high cost when the enemy replied with his own artillery, [34] and a post-war British analysis concluded the benefits were probably not worth the cost.
Early in the war, surprise raids would be mounted, particularly by the Canadians, but increased vigilance made achieving surprise difficult as the war progressed. By , raids were carefully planned exercises in combined arms and involved close co-operation of infantry and artillery. A raid would begin with an intense artillery bombardment designed to drive off or kill the front-trench garrison and cut the barbed wire. Then the bombardment would shift to form a "box barrage", or cordon, around a section of the front line to prevent a counter-attack intercepting the raid.
However, the bombardment also had the effect of notifying the enemy of the location of the planned attack, thus allowing reinforcements to be called in from wider sectors. For British and Dominion troops serving on the Western Front, the proportion of troops killed was Medical services were fairly primitive and antibiotics had not yet been discovered.
Relatively minor injuries could prove fatal through onset of infection and gangrene. A wound resulting from a shell fragment was usually more traumatic than a gunshot wound. A shell fragment would often introduce debris, making it more likely that the wound would become infected. These factors meant a soldier was three times more likely to die from a shell wound to the chest than from a gunshot wound. The blast from shell explosions could also kill by concussion.
In addition to the physical effects of shell fire, there was the psychological damage. Men who had to endure prolonged bombardment would often suffer debilitating shell shock , a condition not well understood at the time. Although World War I was the first war in which disease caused fewer deaths than combat, [ citation needed ] sanitary conditions in the trenches were quite poor, and common infections included dysentery , typhus , and cholera.
Many soldiers suffered from parasites and related infections. Poor hygiene also led to fungal conditions, such as trench mouth and trench foot. Another common killer was exposure, since the temperature within a trench in the winter could easily fall below freezing. Burial of the dead was usually a luxury that neither side could easily afford. The bodies would lie in no man's land until the front line moved, by which time the bodies were often unidentifiable.
On some battlefields, such as at the Nek in Gallipoli, the bodies were not buried until after the war. On the Western Front, bodies continue to be found as fields are ploughed and building foundations dug. At various times during the war—particularly early on—official truces were organised so that the wounded could be recovered from no man's land and the dead could be buried.
Generally, senior commands disapproved of any slackening of the offensive for humanitarian reasons and so ordered their troops not to permit enemy stretcher-bearers to operate in no man's land. However, this order was almost invariably ignored by the soldiers in the trenches, who knew that it was to the mutual benefit of the fighting men of both sides to allow the wounded to be retrieved.
So, as soon as hostilities ceased, parties of stretcher bearers, marked with Red Cross flags, would go out to recover the wounded, sometimes swapping enemy wounded for their own. German soldiers began singing Christmas carols and soon soldiers left their trenches.
The soldiers exchanged gifts and stories, and played several games of football. Roughly , British and German troops were involved in the unofficial cessations of hostility along the Western Front. The British responded by singing carols of their own. The two sides continued by shouting Christmas greetings to each other.
Soon thereafter, there were excursions across No Man's Land, where small gifts were exchanged, such as food, tobacco and alcohol, and souvenirs such as buttons and hats. The artillery in the region fell silent. The truce also allowed a breathing spell where recently killed soldiers could be brought back behind their lines by burial parties; joint services were held. In many sectors, the truce lasted through Christmas night, continuing until New Year's Day in others. In the Decembers of and , German overtures to the British for truces were recorded without any success.
At the start of the First World War, the standard infantry soldier's primary weapons were the rifle and bayonet ; other weapons got less attention. Especially for the British, what hand grenades were issued tended to be few in numbers and less effective. This emphasis began to shift as soon as trench warfare began; militaries rushed improved grenades into mass production, including rifle grenades.
The hand grenade came to be one of the primary infantry weapons of trench warfare. Both sides were quick to raise specialist grenadier groups. The grenade enabled a soldier to engage the enemy without exposing himself to fire, and it did not require precise accuracy to kill or maim. Another benefit was that if a soldier could get close enough to the trenches, enemies hiding in trenches could be attacked. The Germans and Turks were well equipped with grenades from the start of the war, but the British, who had ceased using grenadiers in the s and did not anticipate a siege war, entered the conflict with virtually none, so soldiers had to improvise bombs with whatever was available see Jam Tin Grenade.
By late , the British Mills bomb had entered wide circulation, and by the end of the war 75 million had been used. Since the troops were often not adequately equipped for trench warfare, improvised weapons were common in the first encounters, such as short wooden clubs and metal maces , as well as trench knives and brass knuckles. According to the semi-biographical war novel All Quiet on the Western Front , many soldiers preferred to use a sharpened spade as an improvised melee weapon instead of the bayonet, as the bayonet tended to get "stuck" in stabbed opponents, rendering it useless in heated battle.
The shorter length also made them easier to use in the confined quarters of the trenches. These tools could then be used to dig in after they had taken a trench. As the war progressed, better equipment was issued, and improvised arms were discarded. They cleared surviving enemy personnel from recently overrun trenches and made clandestine raids into enemy trenches to gather intelligence.
Volunteers for this dangerous work were often exempted from participation in frontal assaults over open ground and from routine work like filling sandbags, draining trenches, and repairing barbed wire in no-man's land. When allowed to choose their own weapons, many selected grenades, knives and pistols. FN M pistols were highly regarded for this work, but never available in adequate quantities. Various mechanical devices were invented for throwing hand grenades into enemy trenches. By , catapult weapons were largely replaced by rifle grenades and mortars.
The Germans employed Flammenwerfer flamethrowers during the war for the first time against the French on 25 June , then against the British 30 July in Hooge. The technology was in its infancy, and use was not very common until the end of when portability and reliability were improved. It was used in more than documented battles.
Used by American soldiers in the Western front, the pump action shotgun was a formidable weapon in short range combat, enough so that Germany lodged a formal protest against their use on 14 September , stating "every prisoner found to have in his possession such guns or ammunition belonging thereto forfeits his life", though this threat was apparently never carried out. Anzac and some British soldiers were also known to use sawn-off shotguns in trench raids, because of their portability, effectiveness at close range, and ease of use in the confines of a trench.
This practice was not officially sanctioned, and the shotguns used were invariably modified sporting guns. The use of lines of barbed wire , razor wire, and other wire obstacles is effective in stalling infantry traveling across the battlefield. Although the barbs or razors might cause minor injuries, the purpose was to entangle the limbs of enemy soldiers, forcing them to stop and methodically pull or work the wire off, likely taking several seconds, or even longer. This is deadly when the wire is emplaced at points of maximum exposure to concentrated enemy firepower, in plain sight of enemy fire bays and machine guns.
The combination of wire and firepower was the cause of most failed attacks in trench warfare and their very high casualties. Liddell Hart identified barbed wire and the machine gun as the elements that had to be broken to regain a mobile battlefield. A basic wire line could be created by draping several strands of barbed wire between wooden posts driven into the ground. Loose lines of wire can be more effective in entangling than tight ones, and it was common to use the coils of barbed wire as delivered only partially stretched out, called concertina wire.
Placing and repairing wire in no man's land relied on stealth, usually done at night by special wiring parties , who could also be tasked with secretly sabotaging enemy wires. The screw picket , invented by the Germans and later adopted by the Allies during the war, was quieter than driving stakes. Methods to defeat it are rudimentary. Prolonged artillery bombardment could damage them, but not reliably. The first soldier meeting the wire could jump onto the top of it, hopefully depressing it enough for those that followed to get over him; this still took at least one soldier out of action for each line of wire.
In World War I, British and Commonwealth forces relied on wire cutters , which proved unable to cope with the heavier gauge German wire. The Germans embraced the machine gun from the outset—in , sixteen units were equipped with the 'Maschinengewehr'—and the machine gun crews were the elite infantry units; these units were attached to Jaeger light infantry battalions.
By , British infantry units were armed with two Vickers machine guns per battalion; the Germans had six per battalion, and the Russians eight. At Gallipoli and in Palestine the Turks provided the infantry, but it was usually Germans who manned the machine guns. The British High Command were less enthusiastic about machine guns, supposedly considering the weapon too "unsporting" and encouraging defensive fighting; and they lagged behind the Germans in adopting it. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig is quoted as saying in , "The machine gun is a much overrated weapon; two per battalion is more than sufficient".
It was the Canadians that made the best practice, pioneering area denial and indirect fire soon adopted by all Allied armies under the guidance of former French Army Reserve officer Major General Raymond Brutinel. Minutes before the attack on Vimy Ridge the Canadians thickened the artillery barrage by aiming machine guns indirectly to deliver plunging fire on the Germans.
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They also significantly increased the number of machine guns per battalion. To match demand, production of the Vickers machine gun was contracted to firms in the United States. By , every company in the British forces were also equipped with four Lewis light machine guns , which significantly enhanced their firepower. The heavy machine gun was a specialist weapon, and in a static trench system was employed in a scientific manner, with carefully calculated fields of fire, so that at a moment's notice an accurate burst could be fired at the enemy's parapet or a break in the wire.
Equally it could be used as light artillery in bombarding distant trenches. Heavy machine guns required teams of up to eight men to move them, maintain them, and keep them supplied with ammunition. This made them impractical for offensive manoeuvres, contributing to the stalemate on the Western Front. One machine gun nest was theoretically able to mow down hundreds of enemies charging in the open through no man's land.
However, while WWI machine guns were able to shoot hundreds of rounds per minute in theory, they were still prone to overheating and jamming, which often necessitated firing in short bursts. Artillery dominated the battlefields of trench warfare. An infantry attack was rarely successful if it advanced beyond the range of its supporting artillery. In addition to bombarding the enemy infantry in the trenches, the artillery could be used to precede infantry advances with a creeping barrage , or engage in counter-battery duels to try to destroy the enemy's guns.
Artillery mainly fired fragmentation , high-explosive , shrapnel or, later in the war, gas shells. The British experimented with firing thermite incendiary shells, to set trees and ruins alight. However, all armies experienced shell shortages during the first year or two of World War I, due to underestimating their usage in intensive combat. This knowledge had been gained by the combatant nations in the Russo-Japanese War , when daily artillery fire consumed ten times more than daily factory output, but had not been applied. Artillery pieces were of two types: Guns fired high-velocity shells over a flat trajectory and were often used to deliver fragmentation and to cut barbed wire.
Howitzers lofted the shell over a high trajectory so it plunged into the ground. The largest calibers were usually howitzers. A critical feature of period artillery pieces was the hydraulic recoil mechanism , which meant the gun did not need to be re-aimed after each shot, permitting a tremendous increase in rate of fire. Initially each gun would need to register its aim on a known target, in view of an observer, in order to fire with precision during a battle.
The process of gun registration would often alert the enemy an attack was being planned. Towards the end of , artillery techniques were developed enabling fire to be delivered accurately without registration on the battlefield—the gun registration was done behind the lines then the pre-registered guns were brought up to the front for a surprise attack. Mortars , which lobbed a shell in a high arc over a relatively short distance, were widely used in trench fighting for harassing the forward trenches, for cutting wire in preparation for a raid or attack, and for destroying dugouts, saps and other entrenchments.
In , the British fired a total of mortar shells; in , they fired over 6,, Similarly, howitzers, which fire on a more direct arc than mortars, raised in number from over 1, shells in , to over 4,, in The smaller numerical difference in mortar rounds, as opposed to howitzer rounds, is presumed by many to be related to the expanded costs of manufacturing the larger and more resource intensive howitzer rounds. The main British mortar was the Stokes , a precursor of the modern mortar.
It was a light mortar, simple in operation, and capable of a rapid rate of fire by virtue of the propellant cartridge being attached to the base shell. To fire the Stokes mortar, the round was simply dropped into the tube, where the percussion cartridge was detonated when it struck the firing pin at the bottom of the barrel, thus being launched.
The Germans used a range of mortars. The smallest were grenade-throwers 'Granatenwerfer' which fired the stick grenades which were commonly used. Their medium trench-mortars were called mine-throwers ' Minenwerfer '. The flight of the missile was so slow and leisurely that men on the receiving end could make some attempt to seek shelter. Mortars had certain advantages over artillery such as being much more portable and the ability to fire without leaving the relative safety of trenches.
Moreover, Mortar were able to fire directly into the trenches, which was hard to do with artillery. During the first year of the First World War, none of the combatant nations equipped their troops with steel helmets. Soldiers went into battle wearing simple cloth or leather caps that offered virtually no protection from the damage caused by modern weapons. German troops were wearing the traditional leather Pickelhaube spiked helmet , with a covering of cloth to protect the leather from the splattering of mud.
Once the war entered the static phase of trench warfare, the number of lethal head wounds that troops were receiving from fragmentation increased dramatically. The French were the first to see a need for greater protection and began to introduce steel helmets in the summer of The Adrian helmet replaced the traditional French kepi and was later adopted by the Belgian, Italian and many other armies.
At about the same time the British were developing their own helmets. The French design was rejected as not strong enough and too difficult to mass-produce. The design that was eventually approved by the British was the Brodie helmet. This had a wide brim to protect the wearer from falling objects, but offered less protection to the wearer's neck.
When the Americans entered the war, this was the helmet they chose, though some units used the French Adrian helmet. The traditional German 'pickelhaube' was replaced by the Stahlhelm or "steel helmet" in Some elite Italian units used a helmet derived from ancient Roman designs. None of these standard helmets could protect the face or eyes, however. Special face-covers were designed to be used by machine gunners, and the Belgians tried out goggles made of louvres to protect the eyes.
Additionally, tank crews were issued with or fashioned makeshift face masks to protect against the hot metal fragments that ricocheted around the compartment when the exterior of the tank was hit with machinegun fire. Landmines were widely used in WWI trench and tunnel warfare to destroy or disrupt enemy's trench lines.
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World War I saw large-scale use of poison gasses. At the start of the war, the gas agents used were relatively weak and delivery unreliable, but by mid-war advances in this chemical warfare reached horrifying levels. The first methods of employing gas was by releasing it from a cylinder when the wind was favourable. This was prone to miscarry if the direction of the wind was misjudged. Also, the cylinders needed to be positioned in the front trenches where they were likely to be ruptured by enemy bombardment.
Later, gas was delivered directly to enemy trenches by artillery or mortar shell, reducing friendly casualties significantly. Lingering agents could still affect friendly troops that advanced to enemy trenches following its use. Early on, soldiers made improvised gas masks by urinating on a handkerchief and putting it over their nose and mouth so the urea would disable the poison.
Armies rushed to issue regulation gas masks as regular equipment for front line troops. Anti-gas equipment and procedures improved significantly during the war, to the point that gas attacks had become less devastating at the war's end. Several different gas agents were used. Tear gas was first employed in August by the French, but this could only temporarily disable the enemy.
Exposure to a large dose could kill, and those not killed could suffer permanent lung damage. But the gas was easy to detect by scent and sight. Phosgene , first used in December , was the most lethal killing gas of World War I; it was 18 times more powerful than chlorine and much more difficult to detect. However, the most effective gas was mustard gas , introduced by Germany in July Mustard gas was not as fatal as phosgene, but it was hard to detect and lingered on the surface of the battlefield, so could inflict casualties over a long period.
Even if not inhaled, it could slowly burn the skin , but quickly burned via the eyes or any wounds, causing blindness and intense suffering. Mustard gas also had the property of being heavier than air, causing it to sink down hills and therefore down into trenches.
The added burden of long-term care of casualties from mustard gas actually increased its overall effectiveness compared to more immediately lethal gas agents. The fundamental purpose of the aircraft in trench warfare was reconnaissance and artillery observation. Aerial reconnaissance was so significant in exposing movements, it has been said the trench stalemate was a product of it. This involved achieving air superiority over the battlefield by destroying the enemy's fighters as well.
Spotter aircraft would monitor the fall of shells during registration of the artillery. Reconnaissance aircraft would map trench lines, first with hand-drawn diagrams, later with photography , monitor enemy troop movements, and locate enemy artillery batteries so that they could be destroyed with counter-battery fire. In and , new types of weapons were fielded.
They changed the face of warfare tactics and were later employed during World War II. The French introduced the CSRG Chauchat during Spring around the concept of " walking fire ", employed in when , weapons were fielded. More than 80, of the best shooters received the semi-automatic RSC rifle, allowing them to rapid fire at waves of attacking soldiers. Firing ports were installed in the newly arrived Renault FT tanks. Gas attacks Soldiers in the front line trenches had to guard against gas attacks.
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