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The return of mobile warfare in World War II reduced the emphasis of trench warfare, as defenders commonly lacked the time to build up such battlefield defences before they were forced to redeploy, due to the more rapidly-changing strategic situation. But trench systems were still effective, wherever mobility was limited, the front lines were ...
The remaining fifteen 18-pounder field gun batteries, six 6-inch howitzer siege batteries and six QF 4.5-inch howitzer batteries, with sixty howitzers, fired on the German front-line trenches. The trenches were 3 ft (0.91 m) deep, with breastworks 4 ft (1.2 m) high but were unable to withstand a howitzer bombardment.
Western Front; Part of the European theatre of World War I: Clockwise from top left: Men of the Royal Irish Rifles, concentrated in the trench, right before going over the top on the First day on the Somme; British soldier carries a wounded comrade from the battlefield on the first day of the Somme; A young German soldier during the Battle of Ginchy; American infantry storming a German bunker ...
Tanks came about as means to break the stalemate of trench warfare.They were developed to break through barbed wire and destroy enemy machine gun posts. The British and the French were the major users of tanks during the war; tanks were a lower priority for Germany as it assumed a defensive strategy.
Despite the fact that World War I was the first conflict to be fought by mechanized means, trench raiding was very similar to medieval warfare insofar as it was fought face-to-face with crude weaponry. Trench raiders were lightly equipped for stealthy, unimpeded movement.
During World War I, the French Army was the first to employ tear gas, using 26 mm grenades filled with ethyl bromoacetate in August 1914. The small quantities of gas delivered, roughly 19 cm 3 (1.2 cu in) per cartridge, were not even detected by the Germans. The stocks were rapidly consumed and by November a new order was placed by the French ...
The scene could be 3,000 km (1,860 miles) away in Ukraine's Donbas region, but instead some 2,000 Ukrainian conscripts and veterans are training in the muddy fields of France's eastern Marne ...
In 1917, during the First World War, the armies on the Western Front continued to change their fighting methods, due to the consequences of increased firepower, more automatic weapons, decentralisation of authority and the integration of specialised branches, equipment and techniques into the traditional structures of infantry, artillery and cavalry.