New weapons of the First World War

The First World War was the first great industrial war, in which machines and factories decided the fate of battles. Quick-firing artillery, machine guns and barbed-wire entanglements gave defenders so great an advantage that in the autumn of 1914 the Western Front froze in the trenches. Trying to get it moving again, both sides turned to weapons that were new or had never before been used on a large scale: poison gas, flamethrowers, tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, airships and submarines. None of them won the war on its own, but together they changed the way war was fought on land, in the air and at sea.

Artillery and the machine gun

The first fully automatic machine gun was built by Hiram Maxim in the mid-1880s, and in 1914 every army had versions of it or similar designs: the German MG 08, the Russian Maxim, the British Vickers. A heavy machine gun fired bursts of several hundred rounds a minute. Placed under cover, with interlocking fields of fire, it inflicted enormous losses on infantry advancing in the open and did much to drive soldiers into the trenches. After the Battle of the Marne and the Race to the Sea, an unbroken front about 700 kilometres long ran in the west from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. From then on, gains were measured in hundreds of metres.

The deadliest weapon of the Western Front, however, was artillery. In 1914 Krupp’s 420 mm mortars, known as Big Berthas, and Škoda’s Austro-Hungarian 305 mm mortars smashed the forts of Liège, Namur, Maubeuge and Antwerp. In trench warfare heavy guns became the main weapon for destroying the enemy’s trenches, dugouts and batteries. Great attacks were preceded by bombardments lasting many days: on the Somme in 1916 it lasted a week, and yet on the first day the British lost more than 57,000 killed, wounded and missing. Such a bombardment gave away the place of the attack, so gunners looked for other methods: a short hurricane bombardment, as at Neuve-Chapelle in 1915; a creeping barrage behind which the infantry advanced; and firing from the map without registration, which the German gunner Georg Bruchmüller perfected and used at Riga in 1917.

Chemical weapons

The Germans were the first to use gas on a large scale. On 31 January 1915 at Bolimów they fired about 18,000 shells filled with a tear agent at the Russian trenches on the Rawka, but in the frosty air the gas hardly evaporated. The chemist Fritz Haber proposed another method: release the gas straight from cylinders and let the wind carry it onto the enemy’s trenches. He chose chlorine, which, being heavier than air, would flow along the ground and pour down into the trenches. The use of gases was banned by the Hague Declaration of 1899, but in the end all the main belligerents resorted to them.

On 22 April 1915 at Ypres German engineers opened the valves of cylinders buried along a front about 6 kilometres long; according to the Canadian official history there were 5,730 of them. A cloud of chlorine drifted onto two French divisions that had no protection at all, and a gap several kilometres wide opened in the Allied front. Modern historians estimate that the gas killed 800–1,400 men that evening. The Germans, however, had no reserves to exploit their success, and two days later they struck the Canadians with chlorine at St. Julien. Throughout the Second Battle of Ypres they used gas several more times.

Gas quickly became an everyday weapon. On Polish soil the Germans used chlorine in May 1915 on the Rawka and Bzura and in August at Osowiec, while the British replied with gas at Loos in September 1915. Deadlier agents followed. On 19 December at Ypres the Germans for the first time on the Western Front added phosgene to chlorine: 1,069 British soldiers were gassed, of whom 120 died. Half a year later at Verdun they fired more than 100,000 shells filled with diphosgene and marked with a green cross at the French. From July 1917 mustard gas was used, called yperite in French and Polish after Ypres; it blistered the skin and lingered on the ground for a long time.

The defence came just as quickly. The day after the attack at Ypres soldiers were ordered to cover their mouths and noses with wet handkerchiefs, and soon the first makeshift masks were being sewn in haste. When the Germans struck with phosgene in December, the British already had impregnated hoods and beat off the attack. The attackers responded with irritants, such as the German “Blue Cross”, which penetrated masks and forced soldiers to take them off, and with new ways of delivering gas. The British fired whole drums of gas from Livens projectors, and at Caporetto German pioneers fired 894 projectors modelled on them and filled with phosgene a ravine in which Italian soldiers were sheltering.

According to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, about 124,200 tonnes of chlorine, mustard gas and other agents had been released by the end of the war. They killed more than 90,000 soldiers, and close to a million people left the battlefield blinded, disfigured or maimed. British and Dominion forces alone suffered more than 180,000 gas casualties. Yet gas rarely decided battles: it depended on the wind, and gas masks soon limited its effect.

Tanks

The tank was the British answer to trenches and barbed wire. From 1915 a committee set up by the Admiralty worked on a “landship”. To keep the secret, workers were told they were building water tanks, and that is where the English name tank comes from. On 15 September 1916 tanks went into battle for the first time, on the Somme: 36 Mark I machines lined up for the attack at Flers-Courcelette. Many got stuck or lost their way, but at Flers a tank drove down the village’s main street with cheering soldiers following it. The tank’s creators, led by Swinton, had warned against using a few dozen machines at once, but Douglas Haig was satisfied and immediately asked for a thousand more.

The first tanks were slow and unreliable. The French used theirs for the first time in April 1917, in the Nivelle offensive. On 28 July 1917 the British tank units became a separate arm, the Tank Corps. The breakthrough came at Cambrai: on 20 November 1917 General Julian Byng’s Third Army attacked the Hindenburg Line without the usual bombardment of many days, with 476 Mark IV tanks, 378 of them fighting tanks. Within a few hours it passed through the whole German defensive system. On the first day, however, 179 fighting tanks dropped out of action, and a German counter-attack took back most of the British gains.

In 1918 tanks, especially the light French Renault FT with its revolving turret, became a regular part of Allied attacks. The Germans built only about 20 tanks of their own, the A7V, and on 24 April 1918 at Villers-Bretonneux the first tank-against-tank duel in history took place. At Hamel on 4 July General John Monash’s Australians, with Mark V tanks, took their objective in about an hour and a half. On 18 July Mangin’s counter-offensive went in with hundreds of tanks, and on 8 August at Amiens tanks helped the Canadians and Australians break through the front. General Erich Ludendorff called it a “black day”.

Aircraft and airships

At the start of the war aircraft were used for reconnaissance and for directing artillery fire. In September 1914 Royal Flying Corps airmen over the Aisne directed artillery fire by wireless for the first time. Airmen shot at each other with pistols and rifles until aircraft were armed with weapons firing forwards. In the spring of 1915 the Frenchman Roland Garros fitted steel deflector wedges to his propeller, and in the summer the Germans introduced the Fokker monoplane with an interrupter gear. This gave them an advantage, known as the Fokker Scourge, which new Allied fighters and flying in formation took away from them in the spring of 1916.

From 1916 fighters were grouped into specialised squadrons, called Jagdstaffeln in Germany, formed with the help of Oswald Boelcke. Boelcke set down the rules of air combat, and when he was killed in an accident on 28 October 1916 he had 40 confirmed victories. Pilots with at least five victories were called aces. The most successful of them was Boelcke’s pupil Manfred von Richthofen, who was killed on 21 April 1918 over the Somme valley with 80 victories. In 1917 whole formations of several dozen aircraft were already fighting over the front, and towards the end of the war fighters also attacked troops on the ground.

Aviation carried the war over cities. On 19 January 1915 airships bombed England for the first time. More than 500 people were killed in about 50 raids, but the hydrogen-filled airships were very vulnerable to fire: after SL 11 was shot down in September 1916 the Army withdrew its airships from the raids, while the Navy kept them going until August 1918. In the last raid the head of the Navy’s airships, Peter Strasser, was killed. Aeroplanes took over the bombing of England. On 13 June 1917 fourteen Gotha bombers attacked London in broad daylight and killed 162 people. It was the deadliest single air raid on Britain of the whole war.

Air power was becoming a separate armed service. In the autumn of 1916 the Germans combined the air service, the Army airships, anti-aircraft artillery and home air defence into the Luftstreitkräfte under a single commander. In Britain, after the raids on London, General Jan Smuts recommended creating a separate air service. On 1 April 1918 the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service were merged into the Royal Air Force, independent of both the army and the navy. In June Hugh Trenchard took command of the British bombers near Nancy, from which the Independent Force was formed to raid industry, railways and airfields in western Germany.

Production shows the scale of the change. Depending on how the tallies count machines, France built between 52,000 and 67,987 aircraft during the war, Britain between 52,000 and 58,144, and Germany between 47,637 and 48,537. Italy produced up to 20,000 aircraft, and the United States, which fought for less than two years, about 15,000.

Submarines

The power of the submarine was shown on 22 September 1914 by the German U-9, which sank three British armoured cruisers in about an hour; almost 1,500 sailors were killed. In February 1915 Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, in which U-boats were to hunt merchant ships. The law of the sea required a warship to stop a merchant ship, search it and ensure the safety of the crew before sinking it, and a small submarine could not do this without risk. On 7 May 1915 U-20 torpedoed the liner Lusitania off the coast of Ireland: almost 1,200 people died, among them more than a hundred Americans. This and further incidents forced the Germans to restrict their attacks.

At the turn of 1916 and 1917 the Admiralty and the Supreme Army Command convinced the Kaiser that sinking about 600,000 tons a month would force Britain to make peace within half a year. From 1 February 1917 U-boats attacked without warning all ships in the zones around Britain, France and Italy and in the eastern Mediterranean. In April, depending on the tally, they sank between about 835,000 and 880,000 tons, the most of the whole war. The decision, however, helped bring the United States into the war on 6 April 1917.

Convoys proved to be the remedy. For a long time the Admiralty believed that a mass of ships would be an easy target and that there would not be enough escorts, but faced with record losses in the spring of 1917 it agreed to trials. On 14 June Admiral John Jellicoe approved the plan for regular convoys, and on 2 July the first of them left Hampton Roads. A submarine found it harder to locate a group than single ships, and when it attacked, it exposed itself to a counter-attack by the escort. U-boats were also lost to mines, depth charges and fights with Q-ships.

In 1914–1918, depending on how they are counted, between 351 and 375 submarines served in the German navy. It lost between 202 and 217 of them, 178 in action, and about 5,000 crew members were killed. The U-boats sank almost 5,000 merchant ships. After the Armistice Germany had to hand over to the Allies all submarines able to put to sea: on 20 November 1918 the first 20 surrendered off Harwich.

Other innovations

On 26 February 1915, in the Bois de Malancourt near Verdun, the Germans attacked French trenches with flamethrowers for the first time, and on 30 July 1915 flamethrowers took the British by surprise at Hooge. The weapon threw a jet of burning liquid over a distance of between a dozen and several dozen metres. It had a short range and worked only briefly, and its operators were an easy target, but it spread terror and drove defenders out of trenches and dugouts into the fire of the infantry.

Underground, a mine war was being fought: engineers dug tunnels under the enemy’s trenches and laid charges in them. On 7 June 1917 at Messines 19 great mines exploded under the German trenches, and General Herbert Plumer’s Second Army took the ridge. A completely new weapon was the Paris Gun, with which the Germans shelled Paris from 23 March 1918 from a distance of about 120 kilometres. It could not hit a specific target and was meant to frighten the inhabitants. The shelling went on, with breaks, until 9 August. According to the French historian Alain Huyon, 367 shells fell on Paris and its surroundings, killing 256 people.

The war also forced new ways of hiding. As early as 1915 the French began camouflaging equipment and positions on a large scale, and at Amiens they set up a camouflage section, led by the painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, the first such unit in history. Its men built, among other things, steel observation “trees”. At sea, from October 1917, British merchant ships were painted in contrasting patterns devised by the painter Norman Wilkinson. This camouflage, known as dazzle, did not hide a ship, but was meant to mislead the enemy about its course.

What came of it

None of the new weapons brought a breakthrough on its own. The deadlock in the west was broken only in 1918, by new methods: a short, carefully planned bombardment, stormtroop tactics, tanks and the cooperation of all arms. The Germans used their storm tactics in the Spring Offensive and made deep breaches, but not a decision. At Amiens, when the fog lifted, soldiers saw infantry, tanks, horse artillery, cavalry and armoured cars advancing together across the plateau, with aircraft circling overhead.

Many of these innovations outlived the war. The Royal Air Force is usually regarded as the world’s first air force independent of the army and the navy. In 1925 the Geneva Protocol banned the use of chemical and biological weapons in war. It did not, however, ban their production or possession.

Historians’ debates

The assessment of some of the new weapons is still disputed. The argument over whether the British wasted the secret of the tank by using it at Flers-Courcelette too early and in too small numbers went on for decades. Fritz Haber claimed after the war that if the gas attack at Ypres had been prepared on a large scale, Germany could have won the war. The Germans presented submarine warfare as a response to the British naval blockade, but it was submarine warfare that brought the United States into the war.