Its popularity was due in part to an unexpected side-benefit: the flammable agent could ignite hydrogen, which made it perfect for “balloon-busting” the German zeppelins then terrorizing England. 303 SPG Mark VIIG, emitted a regular bright green-white trail and was a real hit (get it?). The first attempt, in 1915, wasn’t actually that useful, as the trail was “erratic” and limited to 100 meters, but the second tracer model developed in 1916, the. Night combat was made somewhat easier by the British invention of tracer bullets-rounds which emitted small amounts of flammable material that left a phosphorescent trail.
While the Great War involved a lot of futile activity, fighting at night was especially unproductive because there was no way to see where you were shooting. Before long, of course, the Allies were using poison gas too, and over the course of the war both sides resorted to increasingly insidious compounds to beat gas masks, another new invention thus the overall result was a huge increase in misery for not much change in the strategic situation (a recurring theme of the war). The defenders fled, but typically for the First World War, this didn’t yield a decisive result: the Germans were slow to follow up with infantry attacks, the gas dissipated, and the Allied defenses were restored.
The first successful use of chemical weapons occurred on April 22, 1915, near Ypres, when the Germans sprayed chlorine gas from large cylinders towards trenches held by French colonial troops. The Germans pioneered the large-scale use of chemical weapons with a gas attack on Russian positions on January 31, 1915, during the Battle of Bolimov, but low temperatures froze the poison (xylyl bromide) in the shells. Poison gas was used by both sides with devastating results (well, sometimes) during the Great War. The flamethrower was first used by German troops near Verdun in February 1915. burn alive) enemy soldiers in these confined spaces without inflicting structural damage (the bunkers might come in handy for the new residents). Unlike grenades, flamethrowers could “neutralize” (i.e. After a massed assault on enemy lines, it wasn’t uncommon for enemy soldiers to hole up in bunkers and dugouts hollowed into the side of the trenches. Their true potential was only realized during trench warfare, however. Culture Club/Getty ImagesĪlthough the Byzantines and Chinese used weapons that hurled flaming material in the medieval period, the first design for a modern flamethrower was submitted to the German Army by Richard Fiedler in 1901, and the devices were tested by the Germans with an experimental detachment in 1911. FlamethrowersĪ German soldier using a flamethrower during World War II. Despite their later prowess in tank combat in WWII, the Germans never got around to large-scale tank production in WWI, although they did produce 21 tanks in the unwieldy A7V model.
The French soon followed suit with the Renault FT, which established the classic tank look (turret on top). The first tank, the British Mark I, was designed in 1915 and first saw combat at the Somme in September 1916. Add some serious guns and replace the wheels with armored treads to handle rough terrain, and the tank was born. Powered by a small internal combustion engine burning diesel or gas, a heavily-armored vehicle could advance even in the face of overwhelming small arms fire. With machine guns reinforcing massed rifle fire from the defending trenches, attackers were mowed down by the thousands before they could even get to the other side of “no-man’s-land.”Ī solution presented itself, however, in the form of the automobile, which took the world by storm after 1900. In 1914, the “war of movement” expected by most European generals settled down into an unexpected, and seemingly unwinnable, war of trenches. But today he's here to discuss some inventions of The Great War. Erik Sass has been covering the events leading up to World War I exactly 100 years after they happened.