Existing comment:
Industrialized Warfare
World War I was unlike any that had preceded it. At the war's outbreak, Europeans had expected the conflict to be short. However, combat soon bogged down into a stalemate. On the western front, both sides dug complex trench networks that stretched for hundreds of miles across Belgian Flanders and northern France. Industry mass-produced artillery, machine guns, and ammunition at extraordinary rates while railroads carried a continuous flow of munitions and soldiers to the front. At the same time, the combatants pursued technological means to break the stalemate. The results -- tanks, poison gas, and the military use of airplanes -- were too new to have dramatic effects on the outcome of the Great War, but they would transform future warfare. |