HOW IMPORTANT WERE THE CHANGES IN TECHNOLOGY OVER THE COURSE OF WORLD WAR ONE?

At the end of WORLD WAR 1 it was clear for all to see that this war had been the most deadly war in history. This was primarily due to the use of nineteenth-century military tactics with twentieth-century technology. At the beginning of the war, there was still the tradition to have cavalry as the main branch of the military service, and the commanders such as Sir Douglas Haig believed this war would be like the last big European fight, the Franco-Prussian War. Which had been fought in the same way that the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century were, where it was taught to commanders that the offense army could still outmanoeuvre an enemy on the defence.
THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR had shown that this was not always true; the combination of more accurate guns, more powerful artillery and the mobility of railroads made the defenders far stronger than attackers in many battles. European observers scoffed at these lessons, however, and believed that a similar situation would never occur in more civilized Europe. They were to be proved very, very wrong, at the cost of millions of lives.
WHEN ATTACKS WERE ORDERED, allied soldiers went ‘over the top’, climbing out of their trenches and crossing no man’s-land to reach the enemy trenches. They had to cut through belts of barbed wire before they could use rifles, bayonets, pistols, and hand grenades to capture enemy positions. A victory usually meant they had seized only a few hundred yards of shell-torn earth at a terrible cost in lives. Wounded men often lay helpless in the open until they died. Those lucky enough to be rescued still faced horrible sanitary conditions before they could be taken to proper medical facilities.
WORLD WAR 1 introduced for the first time widespread use of machine guns, modern artillery and airplanes to the battlefield. Railroads made the supply of vast, stationary armies possible, and even the taxi cabs of Paris were employed to bring men to the front in 1914. Horses were removed from the battlefield except as beasts of burden, and tanks entered service in 1916. But the most destructive weapon of World War 1 was invented in DeKalb, Illinois in 1874 to help cattle farmers keep control of their flocks. Farmer Joseph Glidden invented a useable form of barbed wire after seeing an example at a county fair. Initially used to fence large sections of the American West, during World War I barbed wire was strung by the mile in front of the opposing trenches. As soldiers from one army charged across the shell-cratered hell of No Man's Land, they would become tangled in the wire, easy pickings for the machine gunners in the opposing trench. The massive artillery bombardments commanded by Haig that characterized the first years of the war were aimed primarily at cutting the enemy's wire, a job at which they failed utterly.
BEFORE WORLD WAR 1, there were no machine guns. Instead, hand-cranked Gatling guns could fire hundreds of rounds quickly, and riflemen had to reload after every shot. By 1914, however, gas-driven, water-cooled machine guns had been perfected. Now a two-man team could fire hundreds of rounds per minute. Carefully placed machine guns could command the entire front of a trench line, and when combined with barbed wire to slow or stop attacking troops, machine guns ruled the battlefield.
AEROPLANES were also used for the first time in battle. World War I started only eleven years after the Wright brothers had flown the first power-driven aeroplane at Kitty Hawk, yet aviation had made great strides during that time. Aeroplanes were initially used only for observation of the front line, in replacement for the hot air balloon. Quickly each side sent their own planes to deny the enemy any advantage through the air, and thus the air battle was invented. The most famous pilot of the war was Manfred von Richthofen, better known as the "Red Baron." Famously parodied in the Charlie Brown cartoons, Richthofen's record of 80 planes shot down was no laughing matter to the Allies.
THE MOST FEARED WEAPON of the war was poison gas. First used by the Germans at the Battle of Ypres on 22 April 1915, chlorine, mustard and other gases were used to try to break the stalemate of trench warfare. The effects of gas were horrific; chlorine caused the lungs to break down and choke a victim to death; mustard gas blinded its victims, and other forms of gas caused the skin to burn and nerves to seize. The most famous of the many poems to come from the trenches, Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, speaks of the horror of watching a friend fail to get his gas mask on in time. The full saying at the end of the poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and right to die for your country. In other words, it is a wonderful and great honour to fight and die for your country. Gas never managed to create a decisive advantage for either side, and its use diminished after 1916 as each side adapted technologies to negate the impact with gas masks.
ANOTHER TECHNOLOGY aimed at breaking the brutal stalemate on the Western Front involved yet another twentieth-century invention: the tank. Desperate to break through German wire, the Allies built the first primitive tanks in 1915 and 1916, but their use did not become widespread until 1917. There were some successes and many failures and the tank was not the decisive weapon its backers thought it would be. More tanks actually broke down than were ever damaged by enemy fire. However, during the Allied summer offensive of 1918, which eventually won the war, the tank played an increasingly large role and was instrumental in breaching the German lines.
THE ARMIES AND AIR FORCE were not the only branches of service to undergo technological development prior and during World War I. The naval race before World War 1 was one of the factors that meant World War I occurred in the first place. This was due to a new class of Battleship the British had designed in 1906, the first ship in its class being the HMS Dreadnaught, the largest battleship ever to that date. It was a huge advancement in naval ships and meant Britains original superior naval force was now at threat as Germany began to build the new class of ships also. Submarines were also perfected before and during the war, and they played a major role by bringing the United States into the war when Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. By 1917, the war was not going well for Germany on the western front. Unrestricted submarine warfare was a result of desperation and the belief that the ferocity of such a tactic might just keep America out of the war if the results were spectacular and shocking enough. However, the effect it had was the exact opposite as by March 21st, seven American merchant ships had been sunk by the Germans. As a result Woodrow Wilson summoned congress and on April 6th 1917, America entered the war.
OTHER TECHNOLOGIES that had a major impact on World War I were wireless telegraphy, invented by Italian Guglielmo Marconi in 1910, that allowed communication with ships at sea; radio and telephone that allowed communications over land; effective battlefield medicine that cut death rates markedly from previous wars; and powerful artillery guns, one of which—the famous German Big Bertha—was moved on railroads and could fire a shell the size of a VW Bug over 70 miles. None of these weapons proved decisive, and all of them managed to increase the death toll to unheard-of levels. During World War I, the world learned the high price of too much firepower and not enough mobility.