What Were The Effects Of Weapons (Ww1)

Various dangerous and unique were weapons were used in WW1 which made the battlefield very brutal and many soldiers didn’t know how to react when coming across tanks or even heavy artillery and aircrafts that soared the sky’s raining havoc across miles of terrains and trenches. The effects were severe with many soldiers coming home with lost limbs and even emotional shock like ‘shell shock’ which affected the men’s brains making them hear horrors like screams of agony and the sound of gunshots and explosions.(Weebly,2010)
The most common weapons used in WW1 by foot soldiers were machine guns. Most of these machine guns were based on the Hiram Maxim’s 1884 design which could fire around 450-600 rounds per minute which was deadly in the hands
The most common effect was loss of lives. In WW1 there were “approximately 37 million casualties including civilians and military personnel”. (History on the net, 2000). Effects weren’t always physical but sometimes emotionally, like shell-shock, which was triggered from things they had seen, heard or even done on the battlefield. This often would cause soldiers to feel depressed, lonely or stressed. Trauma was also another emotional effect on soldiers. It was caused by the “soldier’s experience from the screams of others in agony and pain and the thought of their own death”. (Weebly, 2010). These things not only effected the soldiers but also their families. As most soldiers had gone to fight in the war, women had to replace men in the workforce. This put a lot of pressure upon the older children in the family as they had to take care of the household duties and any younger children. The soldiers were tormented to talk about their experiences and often it would take them a long time to recover from the trauma of WW1. This meant that some women became responsible for supporting the entire family. The children were often scared of their Dad’s and didn’t know how to communicate with them because of the effects. (Experiences on the Western Front,
Practically no one, from the ordinary civilian, to the heads of government and military generals, imagined or could begin to imagine how brutal and long this war would be. Everyone had little awareness of the terrible effects of the weapons or the fact that this would result in a long war resulting in 37 million casualties even though many “books and articles refereed to negative impacts of this conflict”. (Jean-Jacques Baker, 2009) Chemical warfare was by far the most feared among the public. Things such as mustard and poison gas were considered some of the crudest weapons to use as poison gas was indiscriminate and could be used on the trenches even when no attack was going on. A poison gas attack meant soldiers having to put on crude gas masks and if these were unsuccessful, “an attack could leave a victim in agony for days and weeks before he finally succumbed to his injuries.” (C N Trueman,