World War I ("The war to end all wars.")

1914 to 1918 World War I.

Question: What do you get when your civilization goes to war and has A.) canned food that can keep anywhere you send it, B.) rail roads capable of shifting almost your entire population from one place to another fairly quickly, C.) scientific advances that give you rapid firing weapons that are highly damaging and highly accurate, and D.) a concept called "nationalism" that causes each member of your civilization to act like your whole civilization is a member of his or her immediate family?

If your enemy civilization has all of the above too, the answer is: the epic stalemate of trench warfare. On the western front, the contending armies were so large, there was no room for any of them to maneuver. It was one big giant rugby match. But with artillery, machine guns, gas, bayonets, flamethrowers, and barbed wire.

Comic strip that explains WW I in a few minutes. Click on the little strip to expand it. (Boingboing called my attention to it.)


Weapons used.

World War I and the line of battle.

Clip 1 and clip 2 from a recent movie version of All Quiet on the Western Front. View from the French side. Gas and flamethrower attack here.

The air war: Red Baron.

23 August - 30 August 1914. The Battle of Tannenberg. The German's Russian Front. One overview. Another one. And another one.

March 10, 1915. French attack (from Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory) which resulted in the incident of the four corporals of Souain, on which the novel was based.

31 May 1916 – 1 June 1916. The Battle of Jutland. Forces the Germany navy back into unrestricted submarine warfare - which will eventually bring the United States into the war. Winston Churchill said that the British commander, Jellicoe, was the only man who could have lost the war in a day.Documentary.

1 July–13 November 1916. The Battle of the Somme. Here is clip 1, and here is clip 2.

But here in the nasty battle of the Somme, the first counter to the trench line would be tested out. The tank. Basically an armored, tracked platform for either a cannon or a machine gun, whose job was to roll over the barbed wire and survive crossing No Man's Land long enough to deliver cannon and machine gun fire right into the opposing side's trench as the infantry surrounding it moved up and took ground. The early tanks were too mechanically unreliable to provide strategic breakthroughs, but the breakthroughs they did achieve made the generals sit up and take notice.

The first American officer in the newly formed United States Tank Corps will be one Capt. George Smith Patton.

31 July - 6 November 1917. The Battle of Battle of Passchendaele. Brutal. Clip 1.

September 26 – November 11, 1918. The Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Movie: The Lost Battalion. (American units trapped behind German lines. In real life, the commanding officer portrayed by Ricky Schroder committed suicide some time after he came home. Apparently because of what we now know to be Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Its not hard to see why.)

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