Modernising Warfare
The First World War ushered in a host of new and terrible advancements in both weaponry and tactical strategy that stretched beyond the battlefield to reach and distress both military and civilian populations. WWI marks the beginning of the modernisation of warfare in which airplanes and air raids, tanks, howitzers, flamethrowers, trench warfare, chemical weapons and direct attacks on large civilian populations became part of military armament and strategy.
Advancements to weaponry introduced tanks, howitzers, flamethrowers and improved artillery to battlefields during World War One. The advancements to and invention of weaponry aimed to break the stalemate of trench warfare resulted in a staggering loss of human life. Machine guns and heavy artillery were produced with limitless urgency, and countries spent great amounts of financial and human resources ensuring their side was never short of ammunition.
Tanks, named after Britain's habit of hiding them beneath water tanks to keep their development secret, were designed and developed in earnest during WWI. The first British tanks were used in battle on 15 September 1916 and by 1918, Britain had manufactured 2,600 tanks. The French also designed and produced tanks with a fully rotating turret that contained the vehicle's main armament, which would later become standard tank design.
Flight also changed warfare significantly. Air battles were waged aggressively high above land and sea, while flight also gave armies a way to track the movements of their enemies. Yet it was the shift in tactical strategy that flight provided that would have grave consequences throughout the war and the wars to come; flight brought air raids and attacks on large civilian populations. While German command maintained the Zeppelin-led air raids of London were designed to disrupt supply chains to the Fronts, the clumsy accuracy of aerial attacks resulted in civilian death and public outrage. The sentiment is captured in Raemaekers' political cartoon with the caption "-but Daddy, Mother didn't do anything wrong"!
Flight was not the only modernisation of warfare that would have lasting consequences; WWI was the first time chemical weapons were used on unsuspecting armies and unintended civilians. German chemist Fritz Haber, renown for the Haber-Bosch process which created synthetic nitrogen, was the first to suggest using chlorine gas to break the standoff between the trenches. This "poison gas" was released for the first time in Ypres, France in April 1915, killing thousands of soldiers, and marked the beginning of chemical attacks made by both sides of the conflict. While chemical warfare contributed only slightly to the First World War's death toll, the development and use of chemical weapons forever changed the way war was waged, resulting in terror that continues 100 years later.
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