WW1 Tech

Throughout the course of history, advances in technology have vastly affected the way humans fight wars. One could name countless additions to the human war cabinet that have, over the years, changed the manner of war. With the progression of personal weaponry, armor, artillery, there are countless examples. Within World War One, automatic weapons elevated warfare to a previously unforeseen level. The introduction of automatic weapons, weapons that could sustain a high rate of fire, made all formally used war tactics obsolete. Normally, these tactics in earlier wars consisted of men lining up across from each other on an open field and firing upon the opposing line until one group retreated. Automatic weapons made these tactics outdated, as a group of 500 men lined up in such a manner could be taken down with a machine gun in a few seconds. Machine guns showed their revolutionary worth most notably in World War One when they made crossing open battlefields an inevitable death sentence.
Utilized heavily in World War One, machine guns brought full armies to a halt, causing them to dig in for defense. Trench warfare was the new tactic developed in response to the machine gun because combatants could not be in the open or else they would be shot down by a machine gun. Moving only a few yards in trench warfare could have cost hundreds of men’s lives because of the devastating power of the machine gun. Normally, tactics in the war consisted of a heavy artillery barrage of the enemy’s fortifications to break down any obstacles and barbed wire in the way and to throw the enemy into a state of panic. Next, the army who just fired the artillery would climb out of the trenches and run toward the enemy’s trenches hoping they could take control of them. However, this tactic was extremely ineffective because although the artillery could have taken out a few machine gunners, one machine gunner could hold hundreds of men at bay. This new weapon created the very indecisive nature of World War One because armies would rarely advance into enemy territories, and if they did, it would be at the cost of thousands of soldiers. The significance of the machine gun was that war would never be the same. No longer would armies be able to see each other as intimately as they would have in conflicts like the Civil and Revolutionary wars.