The generals had promised their nations a short, decisive war, one that would see their boys home by Christmas. They were catastrophically, horrifically wrong. The first months of the Great War produced casualties on a scale that shocked the world, with over three million soldiers falling in the opening clashes alone.
The technology of defensive warfare had advanced far beyond the tactics of the offense, and the result was a stalemate that would consume a generation.
Machine guns, combined with rapid-firing artillery, trenches, and barbed wire, gave a decided advantage to the defense. The British Expeditionary Force arrived in France with just two machine guns per battalion, but by 1918, they had 36. The Germans went from one gun for every 750 men to one for every 50.
These weapons, heavy and crew-served, were positioned in nests every 250 yards with interlocking fields of fire, creating a beaten zone of bullets that denied safe access to the battlefield.
The machine gun froze the war in place, but the weapon that did most of the actual killing was artillery. The French 75mm field gun revolutionized warfare with its hydro-pneumatic recoil system, allowing it to fire 15 to 30 rounds per minute. Pre-war ammunition stocks of about 1,000 rounds per gun were supposed to last six months, but they ran out in weeks.
Entire economies transformed to feed the guns, with women producing 80% of British weapons and shells by mid-war.
The Germans introduced the 420mm Big Bertha siege howitzer, firing shells weighing over 800 kilograms to a range of more than nine kilometers. Fortifications that had taken years to build crumbled in hours. The Paris gun, with a barrel length of 37 meters, achieved a range of 130 kilometers, reaching altitudes of over 42 kilometers.
The shells actually reached the stratosphere, where the Coriolis effect from Earth’s rotation had to be calculated into firing solutions.
The first use of chemical weapons came on April 22, 1915, when the Germans released chlorine gas from over 5,000 cylinders along a four-mile front. More than 1,000 men were killed outright, and over 4,000 were severely injured. The gas was heavier than air, hugging the ground and sliding into trenches and dugouts.
Chlorine reacts with moisture to form hydrochloric acid, filling the lungs with fluid and causing death by drowning.
Phosgene gas, six times deadlier than chlorine, was almost odorless and would not show immediate effects for hours. It became the main killing agent, responsible for about 80% of all gas casualties. Mustard gas, introduced later, was a blister agent that caused huge, painful blisters on the skin and eyes.
It lingered on the battlefield for days, and by the end of the war, gas shells made up about 30% of all artillery shells used by all major powers.
Tunnel warfare became a terrifying new dimension of the conflict. The British formed 30 tunneling companies with 21,000 tunnelers, using clay-kicking techniques to dig silently through the earth. They could dig an average of eight meters per day, while the Germans could only manage two.
Tunnels were about four feet high by two and a half feet wide, and shifts were between six and 12 hours in wet, cold, cramped conditions with constant risk of cave-ins and gas poisoning.
The pinnacle of tunnel warfare came in June 1917 at the Battle of Messines Ridge. After 18 months of secret preparation, 21 huge mines were planted beneath German positions, carrying around 450 tons of explosives. On June 7, 1917, at 3:10 a.
m. , 19 mines erupted along a line of nearly six miles. The whole ridge was lifted hundreds of feet into the air, and estimates range between 7,000 and 10,000 German soldiers were killed in the detonations alone.
Trench raiding became an art form, with the Canadians elevating it to a level of expertise. Raiders blackened their faces, wore thick rubber gloves, and carried clubs, knives, and sharpened shovels for close-quarters killing. They crawled through no man’s land at night, facing the constant threat of star shells that would light up the battlefield like midday sun.
The objectives were intelligence gathering, capturing prisoners, and destroying equipment, but the return journey was usually the most dangerous part.
The Germans developed stormtrooper units, elite soldiers recruited from volunteers under 25 with athletic backgrounds. They carried satchels full of grenades and were given priority for the new MP18 submachine gun. Instead of attacking the whole width of the front, they would attack key points only, bypassing strong points and seeping into the enemy’s rear to overrun artillery batteries and command posts.
The spring offensive of 1918 began with over 1 million shells fired in just five hours.
The stormtroopers achieved the deepest advances on the Western Front since 1914, pushing forward 40 miles in two weeks. But they moved faster than their own artillery could follow, and supply lines collapsed. The elite soldiers suffered disproportionately heavy casualties that could not be replaced.
The offensive eventually stalled, and by autumn, over 100,000 German prisoners had been taken. The armistice came on November 11, 1918, but the horrors of the war would never truly end.
An estimated 13 million chemical munitions remain unexploded in French and Belgian soil today. Around 16 million acres of France had to be restricted, and some areas are still heavily controlled. Every year, farmers plow up tons of unexploded shells and other remnants of the war.
About 630 French personnel clearing ordnance have been killed since 1946, and many civilians have been injured or killed. The gas inside those shells is still very much alive, waiting to harm someone.
