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In the meantime, enjoy this video. A war of numbers. Men, ammunition, guns, ships, aircraft.
Quantity is the difference between victory and defeat. And for the first time in history, everything is recorded in exacting detail. A billion artillery shells. A million machine guns. 50 billion bullets.
65 million men at war who die at a rate of 6,000 a day. A war of numbers, fought by calculating generals for whom no cost is too high. In the decades leading up to the First World War, Europe has been transformed.
A world of peasant farmers, craft workshops and horse-drawn carts has turned into a world of factories, mills and railways. Industrialisation has revolutionised production and changed society. And it's now about to transform the nature of war.
October 1914. Within just weeks of war commencing, the shocking nature of industrial warfare will become clear. The Germans are trying to outflank the French and the British. The Allies need to stop them. The two sides confront each other in the Belgian region of Flanders, at the strategically important town of Ypres. This is to be one of the most famous battles in the history of warfare.
The Battle of Ypres was vital because it represented Germany's last gasp effort to try and win the war in the West before the end of 1940. Holding Ypres means just as much to the British. The reason that the fighting for the British seems to focus particularly around the town of Ypres is because it's the nodal point of highways that lead to the Channel ports. If the British can hold this northern nodal town, they are in a position to bring in reinforcements in the future to continue to support their Belgian allies and indeed their French partners. At the First Battle of Ypres, the weapon that causes most heartache in Germany is the rifle, which had been used in war for more than half a century. But by 1914, British engineers have improved the design.
As several thousand German student volunteers advance towards the British lines, they are met with a devastating hail of bullets. Every British infantryman has been issued with a Lee Enfield SMLE Mark 3 rifle. Four million of them will soon be in the hands of British soldiers. This is the short magazine Lee Enfield. The short refers to the length of the barrel, not the size of the magazine.
It was adopted by the British Army in 1908, and on the outbreak of war, the soldiers of the BEF go off to war with it. weapon. It operates in a very simple system.
We take off the safety catch, we open up the bolts and we take five bullets. The army called them rounds. We push them in the charger bridge and load them into the magazine.
We then do the same again, another five. That now gives me ten rounds loaded into the magazine. The German Mauser rifle only takes five rounds, so a soldier armed with this can fire far more frequently and more effectively than his German opponents. Fifteen rounds a minute is regarded as minimum.
The highest number of rounds recorded by one soldier is 37 in one minute, including 22 bullseyes at 300 yards. The German Mauser rifle only takes five rounds, so a soldier armed with this can fire far more effectively than his German opponents. it's deadly with this weapon you can do a lot of damage at even a range of 2,000 yards with not many soldiers because they can fire ...so frequently.
At Ypres, the Germans experience the shocking nature of industrial war. Young, wide-eyed students are the victims. The result was pretty much inevitable. German flesh and blood being thrown against British lines, thinly held that they were, the result was that large numbers of German students and young soldiers were killed, such that even today it's still known as the Kindermord, the massacre of the innocents.
3,000 of Germany's brightest young men now lie in the German student cemetery at Langemarck. But the body count does not deter the German generals. They simply send more and more men towards the British lines. Between October the 19th and November the 22nd, the German army sacrifices 80,000 men.
The British army holds its ground, but its losses too are shocking. 54 of the men who leave Britain to fight at the outbreak of war, within a matter of weeks, more than a third are lost. You could argue that the BEF had pretty much ceased to exist by the end of November 1914. But the BEF had been in the air for a long time.
Both sides are exhausted. But the battle is a stalemate, and the slaughter is only the beginning. Each army needs shelter from the other's weapons.
So they decide to dig trenches, ever more of them. stretching ever further for thousands upon thousands of miles. Warfare's changed radically.
Now we have rifles and machine guns that can engage at 1,000 yards or more. Artillery can rain down shrapnel and high explosive. Infantry simply cannot survive in the open.
The only way it can protect itself is to dig in. By war's end, the trench labyrinth on the Western Front totals an astonishing 25,000 miles. Enough to encircle the planet.
February 1915. After months of killing at Ypres, the British decide to connect their smaller, isolated trenches into a long line. When soldiers dig into the wet, cold mud, the full scale of the trench is lost. of the slaughter becomes apparent.
It was impossible to dig more than a foot without uncovering a dead body from the earlier battle. Trenches are a response to firepower. The only way to stay alive on the battlefield is to get into the ground itself.
All of this material comes into use. We get sandbags, never full of sand, here actually full of chalk. And then the arrival of these things, called trench mats, sometimes called duck boards.
These things get your feet out of the mud and here using inverted A-frames, we're actually able to have water running underneath if it's raining heavily. Both sides, we've got corrugated iron. But in the Flanders winter, the duckboard flooring and the corrugated iron walls are too feeble to keep the elements at bay. For British soldiers, it's a living nightmare. There's a famous quote from one British observer that says, you imagine hell to be fire, but it isn't.
Hell is mud. British trenches were in a terrible state. There were insufficient trench stores, such as wooden planks and sandbags. to make them habitable, and they were continuously flooded in the wet weather. As the rains fell, bodies floated in the water, which was often knee-deep on the soldiers and sometimes even waist-deep.
The flooded state of British Trench were a nightmare for the soldiers'health. They were suffering from trench foot, hypothermia, bronchitis, and much more besides. Disease and infection is so devastating, it accounts for one third of military deaths.
That's over three million people. The cold, you have the mud, you have rats everywhere. One of the things that a lot of troops wrote about was the lice, infested with lice. In fact, getting rid of your lice became almost a full-time job unto itself. German trench systems are far better built and maintained than the British.
They had deeply dug concrete bunkers, very well organized. The Germans were digging in for the long haul, whereas the British and French expected to use their trenches as jumping off points for an offensive. The Germans were preparing to stay there for years if necessary.
The Germans are right. New weapons pitted against vast armies hiding in their trenches will cause a bloody stalemate and casualties on a scale never seen before. Just a few months into the war, there are trench systems stretching almost 500 miles from the Channel Coast to the Swiss border.
There are frontline trenches, support trenches, reserve trenches, and linking them all, communications trenches. And spread across the killing fields above, a new terrifying weapon of war. Barbed wire.
Barbed wire was an agricultural invention of the late 1800s. The American army had weaponised it during the Spanish-American war of the late 1890s and the British army had used it in a similar fashion during the Boer War in South Africa. Barbed wire is invented in the mid-19th century as a cheap way to control cattle.
Now it will be used to control and kill humans. Attacking soldiers avoiding the barbed wire are funneled towards machine guns, like cattle to the slaughter. Those who try to clamber over the barbed wire are snagged, easy prey for riflemen.
Barbed wire is so terrifyingly efficient that over the course of the war, three million miles of it is produced, enough to wrap around the planet 120 times. Barbed wire entrenches are the physical symbols of the stalemate reached at the start of 1915. In an effort to break that stalemate, the British Army turns to another recent invention. It's 12 years since the Wright brothers stunned the world with the first powered flight. It doesn't take long for the generals to see the potential use of aircraft in war. Commander of Royal Flying Corps First Wing is Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Trenchard.
Trenshaw has many ideas about how the Royal Flying Corps could contribute to the coming offensive, but the one which Haig seized upon is the use of aircraft to carry out reconnaissance flights over German lines. The tool of reconnaissance for the RFC is the camera. In January 1915, the RFC is supplied with A-cameras, designed to take aerial photographs of German lines and their hidden artillery batteries.
The planes will be put to devastating use against the Germans at the French town of Neuve-Chapelle. This will be a military assault of a new kind. Britain's Royal Flying Corps will send its planes over German positions to photograph them.
This was the first time that the British Army had aerial reconnaissance carried out on a large scale, and the Royal Flying Corps did its work remarkably well. In previous wars and battles, reconnaissance had mainly been carried out by the cavalry. But in the First World War, where you had this line of trenches, it was very difficult for anyone, let alone the cavalry, to get beyond the enemy lines. But what was new was the aeroplane. You could send aeroplanes up to a considerable height and the observers inside could either sketch what was underneath or could take photographs.
And these photographs could then be placed together and... to create a mosaic map of the enemy lines. To carry out an effective bombardment that hits all aspects of the enemy's defensive system, you need more than just men on the ground with binoculars. You need to take to the skies.
You need aerial observation. This novel use of planes gives the British a huge tactical advantage. From now on, for all sides, aerial reconnaissance would be indispensable.
The number of RFC aerial reconnaissance photographs printed in 1915 total 80,000. By 1918, the cameras they use have been improved, and there are thousands more aircraft to fly them above enemy lines. As a result, the number of pictures they take increases massively to almost 6 million. The British have proved how important planes are, and yet, at the start of the war, they find they have far too few of them.
In 1914, the British only have 193 planes. The French have 541. Austria had 64. The Germans have more planes than any other combatant, with 694. But it's a testament to the strength of British manufacturing at the time that they are quickly able to turn the tables. The manufacturing infrastructure required to build so many planes is absolutely enormous. You just have to look to 1914 and 1918, the number of French aircraft workers rose from 12,500 to 185,000.
And by the end of the war, Britain's aircraft industry is easily the largest in the world and employs 347,000 workers. Over the course of the war, the Allies make 120,000 aircraft, outproducing Germany by practically two-thirds. But in August 1915, the use of the airplane takes a new, even more deadly turn.
The Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker developed a mechanism that would allow to fire machine guns through the air. the rotating propeller of a plane and that gave the nascent German Air Force round about eight months of superiority. Anthony Fokker's interrupter gear links the firing mechanism of a mounted machine gun with the crankshaft of an aircraft's propeller.
This allows German pilots to fire through a propeller without destroying its blades. Fokker's invention turns the agile and speedy German Eindecker into the world's first fighter aircraft. Royal Flying Corps reconnaissance planes now find themselves under fire from German fighter pilots and are soon being shot out of the sky at an alarming rate of 60 per month. This revolution in aerial warfare becomes known as the Fokker Scourge. The Fokker Scourge is significant for battles being fought on the ground because the infantry and the artillery are now heavily reliant on what aeroplanes can do for them.
The average life expectancy of British Army pilots becomes just 11 days. The Royal Flying Corps gets a nickname, the Suicide Club. But its reconnaissance missions are claiming even more German lives on the ground. Aerial photographs taken over Neuve Chapelle are being used to devastating effect by the British. Never before has an artillery attack been so well targeted and so terrifyingly effective.
342 British guns fire thousands of shells with deadly accuracy. What's more, for weight of shells fired per yard of enemy front, it is the heaviest bombardment of the war so far. The artillery blasts a hole in the German lines, which is quickly filled by 60,000 men of the British First Army.
Victory should be theirs. But now, things go wrong for the British. Although the ground beyond the German front line is there for the taking, the infantry have to wait. British artillery is still shelling the empty area in front of the troops. German forces were in complete disarray long before the artillery barrage ended.
The British have yet to master another modern weapon of war, which is being used for the first time, telecommunications. German shells cut telephone lines, interference blocked wireless transmissions, and messengers carrying precious orders and reports disappeared into the smoke of battle and were never seen again. In this brutal war, the art of communication has not kept pace with the art of killing. British and Indian soldiers will pay with their lives. March 1915. At Neuve Chapelle, in a fatal lack of communication, the British infantry advance has been blocked by its own artillery shelling.
The delay highlights the growing importance of a powerful new instrument of war. The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. It was used first by post offices, railway stations, stock exchanges and wealthy insurgents. ...individuals.
Now it will be used by generals to communicate with their frontline troops. What I've got here is the D3 phone, the standard phone of early in the war. We've got here a watch set which allows me to put this on my ear and have it on my head so I can listen in in case a message comes in.
I've then got the standard telephone handset. which I can flip open and use in the normal way. But next to the batteries, I've then got a Morse code set, which means that if my other station is fairly close, we use this.
If the signal's weak, we put it away. we use Morse code and we listen in to the message and note it down. The problem is to make this work you have to have telephone cables and if you go too far forward or the enemy shelling cuts the telephone cable this thing is utterly useless and at Neuve Chapelle as the infantry advance communications break down the gunners don't know where the infantry are the infantry can't get the gunner support the battle really grinds to a halt because of the limitations of this new telephone system. At Neuve Chapelle, British telephone communication is still down.
And that pause gave the Germans enough time to reorganise their defences. By the time the British gunners are finally ordered to cease fire, the Germans are plugging the hole in their line with 90 infantrymen of the 11th Jäger Battalion. Advancing towards them are 9,000 men of the British First Army. Although outnumbered a hundred to one, the Jaegers have one overriding advantage.
They have brought with them a new kind of mechanized weapon, which will slaughter humans at a speed and on a scale that will shock the world. They brought with them machine guns. Machine guns are a great leveler in the First World War. Machine guns truly changed the mathematics of warfare, the reality of warfare. A Lee-Enfield rifle, for example, British troops were trained to fire 15 rounds a minute, which was pretty quick.
But machine guns could fire something like 600 rounds a minute. That's 40 times as many bullets. The story of the machine gun dates back to 1862, when American inventor Dr Richard Gatling patents the Gatling gun. Gatling hopes that the weapon's extraordinary power to kill will discourage war and save lives.
He is wrong. In the 1880s, American inventor Hiram Stevens Maxim improves the design. His gun fires an extraordinary 11 bullets a second.
In the battlefield conditions of World War I, machine guns are spewing out more than 600 rounds every single minute. One machine gunner has the firepower of 40 riflemen. At the Battle of the Somme, just 10 British machine guns were fired for 12 hours, sending out 1 million rounds. Between 1914 and 1918, 1.1 million are made in the factory.
of the great powers. By the start of 1915, Germany's arsenal of MG08 machine guns numbers 10,000. At Neuve Chapelle, the 90 infantrymen have just two machine guns against 9,000 British attackers.
But it's enough. The small unit are able to use just two Maxim machine guns, and that's sufficient to lay down a belt of fire of something like 24,000 rounds every 15 minutes. Crossing that open ground against that weight of fire means that the advantage is then conferred back on the defenders.
In the space of 90 minutes, they're able to inflict more than 1,000 casualties on the attacking British infantry.. In the end, the only thing that stops the Jaegers is the resumption of the British artillery barrage. By the end of the battle, 21,000 men have been killed or wounded. And all that's happened is the German line has moved by about a mile.
The pattern of the war on the Western Front is set. its entrenched stalemate, a war of bloody attrition. Generals order massive artillery bombardments to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible and then send thousands of their own men over the top to be cut down in often calamitous infantry advances.
To fight- Such a war, British generals will demand an endless supply of men, bullets and artillery shells. At the beginning of 1915, Britain is producing 7,000 big shells a day, which sounds an awful lot, but it is nowhere near enough. The British arrive at Neuve Chapelle with over 200,000 shells, which has taken British factories a month to produce. But the shells are spent in just four days.
By the end of the Great War, over a billion shells have been fired by all sides. That... It's an absolutely extraordinary number. The shell industry simply was not set up to produce the ammunition required by these guns. On 14 May, a headline in the Evening Telegraph proclaims, Scarcity of shells hinders British attacks.
The scandal topples Asquith's Liberal government. The Shell crisis gave the Conservatives an opportunity to force upon him the much-desired coalition government that they had been agitating for since August 1914. So serious is the Shell crisis that most British guns are reduced to firing just four times a day. But with enough shells, they could fire 300 times a day. To deal with the crisis, the government does something previously unthinkable.
The British government is going to have to structurally change its relationship to industry in a method that's going to be termed war communism. A level of involvement of government in production unimaginable before the war. With large parts of industry now under state control, the government prioritises the production of shells.
It faces two challenges. First, a shortage of manpower. And second, a shortage of a volatile liquid called acetone. It solves the first by recruiting a new industrial army, around a million strong, consisting mostly of women. The second is solved by a Manchester chemist called Chaim Weizmann, who invents a fermentation method to turn grain into acetone.
To do this, the government commandeers brewing and distillery equipment and sets up two new factories which will produce 90,000 gallons of acetone a year. As a result, by the end of 1915, British shell production rises to a whopping 16.4 million. And by 1917, the British Empire is supplying more than 15 million shells a year.
But in this new industrial war, Britain and Germany are too evenly matched. To break the stalemate, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill has an idea. Why not pit Britain's new industrial army against the primitive forces of the Ottoman Empire? If Britain captures Gallipoli in the...
The Bosphorus, it will open a sea route to Russia. The Allies try and open up a second front because their front in the west has become bogged down in the stalemate of trench warfare. They see this as a way of unblocking the war, achieving a link up with the Russians and winning a war in the east if the war in the west isn't working. They're able then to send an amphibious force to invade Gallipoli. But then when they do that they discover that the Ottoman forces equipped with modern German weapons are able to use these very effectively using the high ground to turn the landing beaches into a killing zone and then to simply engage them in the same sort of trench warfare as they had in the West, it becomes another stalemate.
It bogs down, no-one's going anywhere. Unfortunately for Britain's imperial forces, the Ottomans have been supplied with advanced German machine guns. Allied soldiers are mercilessly cut down.
Total casualties from the Gallipoli campaign reach a staggering 400,000, many of them from Britain's colonies. Conflict on the ground and in the air is being transformed by technology and mass production. And in 1915, they combine again to bring new and previously unimaginable levels of violence to war at sea.
The lines of what is right and wrong are absolutely blurred in this kind of warfare. There is a descent into inhumanity that the world hasn't seen before. But in this new war of numbers, there is one area in which Britain has a clear lead.
The British Royal Navy is the world's biggest, with more ships than the German Imperial Fleet. Britain rules the waves and now sets out to cut off supplies to Germany. The hunger blockade will starve the German people of food and German industry of raw materials.
The naval blockade was a really controversial strategy and the Germans protested that actually this wasn't hitting troops, this was hitting innocent civilians back on the home front. The German government puts its people on starvation rations of just 1,000 calories a day. Soon, Germans are suffering from malnutrition and associated diseases, scurvy, tuberculosis and dysentery. The Germans suffered an enormous shortage of not only raw materials, but fertiliser and foodstuffs such as grain, cereals, meat, potatoes. And this causes incredible disquiet and unrest throughout Germany, and even in Austria.
By war's end, deaths linked to malnutrition total almost 900,000. The USA is also unhappy with the blockade. For America's giant farms, industrial Germany is one of their biggest markets. At this point in the war, they're still trading with Germany, and this naval blockade means that none of their merchant ships can get through, they're not earning any foreign currency, and so, of course, it's bad for the American economy as well. To break the blockade, Germany turns to another innovative weapon.
A weapon that will change the nature of naval warfare. They call it the Unterseeboot, or undersea boat. It will become famous across the world as the U-boat. Germany is desperate to end the Royal Navy's sea blockade, starving its people of food and its industry of raw materials. But its fleet is massively outnumbered, so it turns to a new, terrifying weapon, the submarine.
The first military sub used in action was the Turtle. In 1776, the Americans tried to attach bombs to the hulls of British ships. By the First World War, German shipyards are building U-boats with an incredible range of 7,800 miles, armed with six torpedoes and a fearsome 88mm deck gun. They are killing machines, but for their crews, life on board is worse than grim. Conditions in submarines were awful.
They were dirty, smelly, cramped and pretty terrible. Terrifying. But what U-boat crews fear most are the odds of survival, which are roughly 50-50.
375 subs set sail from German ports, 202 from the US. are lost in action. U-boat cruise number 11,400.
Almost half will lose their lives. In February 1915, Germany declares the waters around the British Isles a war zone. U-boats are ordered to break so-called prize rules and sink on site any ship in British waters, even neutrals.
This, it turns out, is a bad idea. On May the 7th, U-20 is patrolling 18 kilometres off the coast of southern Ireland when it spots the Lusitania, an American passenger boat steaming toward Liverpool. Without warning, U-20 carries out her murderous orders.
We attacked it with torpedoes, scoring direct hits right on the central line of the ship itself. The ship sank very, very rapidly. It's unmitigated carnage. 1,960 passengers and crew are on board.
1,197 perish. 124 of them are American citizens. It's an act of barbarism for which the Germans will pay dearly. Ever since the reign of Henry VIII, if you wanted to sink an enemy ship, then you stop and you search for contraband and then you allow people to leave the ship and then you sink it. So if there was any humanity in naval warfare before then, it's definitely reduced by the onset of the submarine menace.
The loss of innocent lives. is a propaganda disaster for the Germans. Recruitment posters went up across London and other British cities demanding justice and revenge for the Lusitania. Riots broke out across London and went on for days. Millions of pounds of damage against German shops, German citizens, or even people with German-sounding names.
Worse still is the outrage in America. The USA is not even at war, but Germany is sinking American ships and killing its people. President Woodrow Wilson is pushed closer to joining a war he had hoped to avoid.
The Royal Navy's revenge for the attack is brutal. British sub-hunter HMS Barrelong is 70 miles northwest of Cornwall, posing as a merchant vessel, when it sneaks up on and sinks U-boat U-27. And the Brits do not play by the rules. There were a number of German sailors in the water, and instead of taking them prisoner, they shot them in the water.
And this caused outrage in Germany, and the Germans called it a war crime. Though war has always been bloody and brutal, Europe's old ruling classes had thought of it as a kind of game with codes of conduct and honour. But the horror of industrial war sweeps that away, and the Germans, who think themselves the most civilised people, now turn to what many consider the ugliest and cruelest weapons of war.
The Germans are outnumbered. They're well aware of it. The enemy, the Allies, have more men, they've got more guns, more everything. They cannot win by simply trying to match the enemy.
What they can do is reach for new technology. new technology is poison gas that may or may not be legal they're going to use it it's their war winning card. Gas warfare came as a surprise and there was no protection available to men in the trenches from it. Gas is a terrifying weapon that causes awful injuries. What it made you do is drown on dry land.
It would agonisingly damage your lungs so that they filled up with water and you couldn't breathe. You see photos of victims and their hands are in clawed positions where they've literally been trying to claw out their own throat.. All the great powers sign the 1899 Hague Convention, prohibiting chemical projectiles. But in this hellish war, conventions count for nothing. Every sector of German industry is dragged into service, and her chemical industry is the biggest of all the other great powers.
So large that it accounts for 40% of global chemical exports. Chemist Fritz Haber of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute builds their first chemical weapon using chlorine. On April 22nd at the Second Battle of Ypres, 6,000 gas cylinders are brought to the front line. The Germans really took their gloves off.
They opened up these huge cylinders, undid the valves, and out came this greenish-yellow gas and floated towards the French lines. The sickly fog, smelling slightly of pepper. and pineapple drifts across to the French trenches enveloping the soldiers.
At first, they are unsure what to make of it. What was really happening here? Was this a smoke screen?
And it's only as this thick yellowish fog reaches the Allied lines and the troops begin to suffocate that they realize the true horror of what's happening to them. They flee. Many of them suffocate. It's panic. This single release of gas Results in the gruesome death of 800 men.
The German generals are delighted, but the chemist Fritz Haber will soon regret his actions. Fritz Haber's wife Clara was so disturbed by the work that her husband was doing that she actually shot herself with his military weapon because she couldn't stand to think what her husband had done. Haber, who is Jewish, will later flee Nazi Germany.
The poisoned gas Germany subsequently develops will be used to exterminate harbours own people, Europe's Jews and other so-called non-humans. But in World War One, Britain quickly follows Germany and within six months has built its own chlorine chemical weapons. These are first used at the Battle of Loos, but for the British it's a disaster. The wind did not carry the gas to the Germans, but instead blew it back onto the British defenders. British General Hubert Gough aptly summed this up by commenting that gas was a boomerang alloy.
A captain in the Royal Engineers, William Livins, invents the so-called Livins projector, a mortar that fires gas-filled canisters. Over the course of the war, Livins projectors will fire 200,000 barrels of deadly gas. After chlorine comes phosgene, which also attacks the throat and lungs, but the effects are far worse.
Of all the gases used, by far the biggest killer... is fosgene. It accounts for 76,000 of the 90,000 gas deaths. Gas attacks prompt governments to order over 100 million gas masks. But before they arrive at the front, soldiers must somehow make their own.
The solution was simply using a moistened handkerchief or a sock over the mouth and nose. The best liquid to use actually was urine. But not fresh urine, it had to be stale, that allowed the ammonia to develop, which in some ways neutralized the gas.
However, very quickly, the army adopt this thing, which is the hypo helmet. A bag which goes over the head and once it goes over your head it's already soaked in photography fixative and what that does is it converts the chlorine gas into common salts. There are problems with it one of which you're going to tuck it in around your neck Next problem is you get build up of carbon dioxide inside it And if it's raining then the liquid runs down your face and into your eyes and people would tear these things off and try and get Out of the gas cloud but early in the war early in the use of gas the best thing available the hypo helmet But against chemicals, gas masks don't always work.
The next weapon devised in Germany is sulphur mustard, known to the terrified troops as mustard gas. This time, a mask cannot save you. Mustard gas is a uniquely awful chemical weapon. It burned your skin when it came in contact with it, leaving you with agonising blisters.
Those who died from mustard gas often endured a protracted and miserable death. It would take four or five years for mustard gas to be completely removed. weeks to finally pass away and those four or five weeks will be spent coughing up blood and slowly dying an agonizing death all the imperial generals in world war one are guilty of ordering the use of poison gas the british use 14 000 tons the french 26 000 tons but the biggest users by far are the germans who use 52 000 tons Poisonous gas is not 1915's only new and terrifying weapon. Another German invention is the Flammenwerfer, or flamethrower. A tank of pressurised gas is used to force flammable oil across an igniting wick and out of a steel nozzle.
The result is a 20-metre jet of intense fire and choking black smoke. On the battlefield, flamethrowers are used to drive men out of the trenches, where they can be mown down by machine guns. They are first used against the French in October 1914. The British encountered them during a German night raid on trenches at Hughe, Flanders, on July 30th, 1915. The first the British defenders know of their appearance is when the night sky is illuminated by a wave of liquid fire washing over the parapet and rolling through the British trenches igniting men and materials wherever it touches.
The silence of the evening is shattered by the screams of those caught by this dreadful attack. Not surprisingly, flamethrower operators become prime targets for enemy snipers. The life expectancy of flamethrower operators...
is often very short in the First World War. Over the course of the war, Germans make around 650 flamethrower attacks. If they achieve surprise, they are devastatingly effective, but if they're caught in the open, the flamethrower operators often pay a high price in lives. But neither gas, nor flame, nor artillery shell can break the deadlock in 1915. The new industrial weapons do not secure victory for any of the competing imperial powers.
they simply magnify the horrors of war.