New Weapons In Ww1 Essay

There were an incredible amount of deaths on the western front during World War 1, almost one million lost lives for Britain. There are several possible reasons for this, such as the new weapons introduced at that time, the life for soldiers in the trenches and how this affected them, and the ways in which the generals worked at that time.

In 1914, at the time of the start of the war, many new weapons had been invented, such as tanks, aircrafts, machine guns and gas. By the early 1916s, the first tanks had been created by Lancelot de Mole and were ready to use in combat. These were first used in the Battle of Flers and were designed for front-line combat. Tanks were a very popular weapon during world war 1 as they increased the mobility on the Western Front and broke the stalemate of French Warfare. The

World War 1 was the first major conflict in which they were used as they only began to be developed as weapons in 1911. The early forms were typically unarmed and used in reconnaissance (when one side would try and locate the enemy or observe their strategies), and this gave an offensive advantage. From there, the machine gun was finally fixed to the sides of the aircrafts to create the 'fighter aeroplane'. But there were a few problems. Firstly, the aircrafts were very dangerous to fly and the average British pilot had a life expectancy of about 70 hours whilst flying above the western front. Additionally, the aircrafts were too small to carry parachutes and this meant that if the aircraft had a problem or was hit by the enemy, the pilot could not be saved. Lastly, aircrafts were very time-consuming to make, as each aircraft had more than 50,000 parts to assemble and make. This meant that the process took over 4,000 hours and, consequently, this meant that the British army could only procure a few as most aircrafts in that era cost around $7,000 or more to build (at the time when the company Model-T cost