Machine guns, bombs, and snipers blasting you to pieces! Chemical weapons that’d make you
vomit up the lining of your throat while you suffocate! U-boats full of scorching
heat and rampaging cockroach colonies! While later history would unfortunately
prove that World War One wasn't the war to end all wars, it's still remembered as one
of the most brutal conflicts in human history. On one side, the Central Powers- Germany, Austria,
and the Ottoman Empire, lost an estimated 4 million soldiers. On the other side,
the Allies- France, Britain, Russia, and America- lost about 6 million.
The civilian death toll, meanwhile, was by some estimates as high as 13 million.
All in all, the total death toll of the First World War reached approximately 15 to 22 million
people. That's more than the entire population of Los Angeles, tragically wiped out over the space
of four years. While artillery shelling, chemical warfare, and aerial strikes were
responsible for their fair share of deaths, many of these deaths were caused by diseases spread by
the squalid conditions of trench warfare. All of this is a roundabout way of saying that you
probably couldn't survive a day in World War One. To go into the gory details - and believe us,
they are indeed gory - about why, let's start with the most obvious way that you'd be likely
to die in the First World War: The Weapons. The early 20th century saw huge technological
advances in all aspects of life, and warfare was no exception. Even before the assassination of
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which officially started the conflict, smaller territorial
conflicts like the Boer War and the Italo-Turkish War, as well as a decade-long cold war between
England and Germany, encouraged the development of never-before-seen methods of destroying the enemy.
Let’s first look at the machine gun, a vital weapon for infantry combat in the First World War.
The first fully functional self-powered machine gun was invented in 1884 by Sir Hiram Maxim. In
contrast to the Gatling gun, the Maxim was much lighter, and instead of being hand-powered,
it was automatically reloaded using the recoil of the previous bullet it fired. It's no surprise
that the Maxim was an instant hit, and by the start of World War I, manufacturers on both
sides of the conflict were making gun designs using the technology pioneered by the Maxim.
Early machine guns were mounted on tripods or wheels and would be operated by soldiers
in fortified turrets along the trench lines. These were cumbersome beasts,
but what they lacked in portability, they made up for in sheer destructive power-
the Maxim could fire 600 rounds a minute, with its British-made counterpart, the Vickers Machine Gun,
able to fire up to 500 rounds a minute. If you, as a soldier, somehow managed to
avoid being turned into Swiss cheese by a machine gun turret, you would still need to avoid enemy
snipers. Rifles were the most common weapon on the battlefield in the First World War. By 1903,
most armies had adopted a new type of rifle with a manually operated locking mechanism and
a magazine that allowed soldiers to load three and ten bullets into the rifle before needing
to reload. The rifles used in the First World War had a far higher rate of fire than any other guns
available to the average infantryman in previous conflicts, with an experienced shooter being
able to fire up to 15 rounds a minute. They also used a new type of gunpowder-
nitrocellulose or 'smokeless powder.' The lack of visible smoke meant snipers could fire with
better visibility and were less likely to give away their position, which made them deadly in
long-range combat. It's said that while no battle in the war was decided by riflemen,
no battle could have been fought without them. Backing up the turrets and snipers were the
artillery. These guns, which were mounted on wheels and required whole teams of men to operate,
varied in size but were all incredibly deadly thanks to their high rate of fire and the adoption
of high explosive shells. Strategies varied between light and heavy artillery, most of them
involving the word 'barrage'- box barrage, Chinese barrage, creeping barrage, you get the idea.
Artillery was mainly used for support and defense, as it was the most reliable way to take out large
numbers of troops at once. Artillery was also used to damage defensive structures, and using
heavy artillery, explosives could be fired from deep behind the front lines into enemy trenches.
But by far the scariest new weapons to debut in the First World War were chemical weapons. Even
though the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions both categorized the use of asphyxiating gas on the
battlefield as a war crime, that didn't stop them from being widely used on both sides. The main
purpose of chemical weapons was to incapacitate and kill defensive troops inside trenches. In the
early days of the war, chemical weapons contained tear-inducing irritants in such small amounts that
they basically amounted to pepper spray. At the time, it was thought to be under the threshold
of what the Hague treaty counted as a gas attack. But after people noticed that these weaker gases
weren’t that effective, both the Germans and Brits started to really ramp up their use of
chemical bombs, starting in 1915. The first to be used was chlorine, a deadly gas that causes
tissue damage to the throat and lungs and can lead to death by asphyxiation. After being hit
with multiple chlorine bombs at the battle of Ypres, the British retaliated by creating their
own chemical weapons program. This was considered a cowardly but necessary move, as the stalemate
was so bad that the British were willing to try anything to gain a foothold in German territory.
Early tests weren't successful, however- in the Battle of Loos, an attempt to hit the Germans
with chlorine backfired when the wind suddenly changed direction and blew the chlorine back
towards the British trench lines. Other chlorine canisters didn't release their payload upon
impact and were actually saved by the German troops to be thrown back at the British later!
As the war went on and the technology was refined, even more deadly gasses were introduced
into the mix. There was phosgene, which, while colorless and less strong-smelling than chlorine,
took 24 hours to fully poison its victims. This meant that while phosgene had a higher fatality
rate than chlorine, its victims were still able to fight for hours after being exposed
to the deadly gas. Phosgene was typically mixed with chlorine into a deadly cocktail
called White Star, which was responsible for 85% of deaths from chemical weapons in the war.
Then, 1917 saw the introduction of mustard gas. Despite the name,
it was actually more of a spray that was released from artillery shells and settled on surfaces as
an oily liquid. While not nearly as deadly as chlorine or phosgene, contact with mustard gas
was very effective in incapacitating enemy soldiers as exposure to it caused vomiting,
irritation of mucous membranes, painful blisters, and, in severe cases, internal bleeding.
The worst thing about mustard gas was that once deployed, it would soak into the soil,
where it could remain active for days or even months, depending on weather conditions.
If you were an average soldier on the Western Front, that is to say,
fighting in Western Germany, France, Luxembourg, and Belgium, you would most likely be fighting
from trenches. A trench was normally about six feet deep and three and a half feet wide,
and was reinforced with barbed wire, sandbags, wooden planks, and sheet metal. This might
seem like a less-than-ideal place to house your troops in a battle, but there's a pretty clear
reason why trenches were the way to go. During the early battles of World War I,
offensive technology was advancing much faster than the technology needed to move troops from
place to place. The tank wouldn't be invented until the war was almost over, so the transport
of troops was still mainly limited to trains and horses. In short, you had a lot of people fighting
in big open spaces with extremely deadly weapons and no reliable way to get away. So, both the
Central Powers and Allies started digging trenches to provide cover for their front-line troops.
Trench warfare really came into its own in the Race to the Sea- when both sides unsuccessfully
tried to block each other off before their troops could reach the Belgian coastline.
By the end of 1914, both sides had uninterrupted lines of trenches stretching from the English
Channel all the way to the Swiss border. By this point, the Western Front was locked in a
stalemate. Traditional maneuvers were impossible without suffering massive amounts of casualties-
if either army tried to send troops across no man's land into enemy territory, they'd
be obliterated. This was especially true for the Allied troops, since the Germans had been able to
secure the higher ground early on in the conflict. A typical day of trench warfare went something
like this- troops would take four-day shifts on the firing line, then afterwards take shifts in
a support position in the trenches. If you were on the front line, you and your comrades would
try to move towards enemy territory. You would be spaced widely apart to make it harder for
the enemy to take you out all at once, and you would have to move in a zig-zag to make
yourself a harder target. Soldiers on the front line were in constant danger of being sniped,
gunned down, or blown up by artillery bombardment. Even if you weren't directly hit by an artillery
shell, the shock waves created by their explosions were powerful enough to give you a concussion,
and there was always the risk of catching a piece of shrapnel in one of your vital organs.
If you weren't in the firing line and stayed behind in the trenches, you still had to keep
your guard up. Other than the risk posed by constant heavy-duty artillery barrages,
both sides also had snipers placed at strategic locations waiting to shoot at anyone they saw
emerging from the top of the enemy trench. One allied soldier described an experience
that proves just how quick and deadly the German snipers were - "During the afternoon,
a chap looked over where the trench was shallow, and said, ‘Look! I can see the German line!’ But
that was the last thing he saw. He slumped down in the trench, shot through the brain."
If you were in their line of sight for even a second, you had a high chance of meeting your
end via a German bullet. Most of the time, you couldn't even go out to use the latrine.
The bombardment usually slowed down at night as the gunners and snipers lost visibility,
but that didn't mean you were completely safe. With nightfall came the risk of trench raiders.
Using the darkness as cover, teams of raiders would sneak across no man's land with their
faces darkened with soot for camouflage. Depending on the orders from the top,
sometimes they only raided a trench to gather intel or steal sensitive documents. Other times,
they just dropped live grenades into dugouts where enemy troops were sleeping or, worse,
pumped the trenches full of poison gas. Even if you could avoid getting hit in a
trench raid, you had a second, more insidious enemy down in the trenches- the elements.
In some ways, the trenches of the Western Front were preferable to the Asian and
North African battlefields as soldiers on the Western Front could take advantage of
lulls in enemy bombardment to visit nearby towns and stock up on supplies. In 1916,
France experienced its rainiest autumn in over 30 years, which dashed any positive opinions anybody
might have had on the Western Front. Since much of the plant life around the battlefields would
have been long destroyed by bombs and artillery shelling, the upturned soil of no man's land
quickly turned into an impassable muddy marsh. The trenches themselves were extremely susceptible
to flooding, and there was no reliable way to drain the water out. This also made these
trenches a breeding ground for diseases- that's what happens when you have a bunch
of men sleeping in the mud together within spitting distance of a bunch of dead bodies.
Rats were a constant problem, as were lice, and bites from both facilitated the spread of a nasty
condition called trench fever. Trench fever wasn't fatal, but it was extremely infectious,
with a long incubation period and a high rate of re-infection in those who had already had it.
The amount of stagnant, muddy water in the trenches didn't help things either. It made
injured soldiers susceptible to infections, and standing around in all that water led to
developing trench foot. Trench foot, which was also known as Jungle Rot in the Vietnam War, is
a type of severe tissue damage caused by having body parts submerged in water for extended periods
of time. It's very similar to frostbite, only wetter and about a thousand times more gross.
In extreme cases, the tissue would become so rotten and infected that sufferers would need
to have the infected foot amputated completely. If the Western front sounds a little grim for you,
maybe you'd rather take your chances in one of the other theatres of war. After all, you only
ever seem to hear about the Western Front, so the other fronts must not have been as bad, right?
Unfortunately, this isn't the case, as the battles of the Eastern Front were just as deadly,
if not more so. The conflict on the Eastern Front was fought mainly between Austria and Russia. Now,
Russia was already not doing so well when the war broke out. Though the allies put
their faith in Russia's superior manpower to defend the eastern front, the truth was that
Russia was the least technologically advanced of the great European powers.
They didn't have nearly enough infrastructure or manufacturing capabilities to transport and arm
their troops as quickly as Germany or the Ottomans did. Though the Russians were able to gather an
army of 5 million, they didn't have nearly enough rifles for everyone. Their military was woefully
underfunded and suffered from poorly organized leadership. Tsar Nicholas, Russia's supreme
emperor, had way more institutional power than he did military know-how, leading to Tsar and
his top commanders would often butt heads over strategy. This clash of personalities meant the
Russian soldiers were slow to receive orders. On top of that, their allies in France and
Britain struggled to send them supplies due to, of all things, differences in the way
Russian train tracks were laid. In pretty much every other country, the tracks are laid with
4 feet 8 inches of space between them, but in Russia, they have an even 5 feet between them.
This might not seem like a lot, but it's enough to cause serious delays in transporting rations,
medical supplies, ammunition, men, or basically anything between Russia and the rest of Europe.
This was bad news for Russia, since their army was hemorrhaging troops left and right,
and they really, really needed the support. Russia lost 5% of its male population over the
course of the war, which is a similar percentage to England, but considering how much bigger Russia
was, it added up to a staggering loss figure. The losses got so bad that in the later stages
of the war, Russia started enlisting women as well, in an effort to boost national morale.
As bad as the soldiers had it, prisoners of war on the Eastern Front had it worse. Germans
and Austrians captured behind enemy lines were forced to build canals and railroads
and were subject to malnutrition, scurvy, and exhaustion due to food shortages. Malaria was
also extremely common in the summer months. When the German and Austrian governments caught wind
of these horrific conditions, they complained to the Russians, who refused to acknowledge the
complaints at first. As with a lot of problems in Russia, the poor treatment of POWs was mostly
down to dwindling resources and bureaucratic infighting. It's really no wonder these guys
had a huge revolution towards the end of the war. The Eastern Front battles took place over much
more widespread areas, with more space for troops to maneuver, so trenches weren't as
common as they were in the West. You might be tempted to think that the less crowded, less wet
living spaces meant that disease was less of an issue on the Eastern front, but you'd be wrong.
Disease was actually worse on the Eastern Front, with malaria, cholera, dysentery, typhus,
and other illnesses accounting for around four times the number of deaths that were caused by
actual combat. This is because while the battles of the Western Front mainly took place in wide
open fields, a lot more fighting on the Eastern Front took place in the major cities of Poland,
Romania, Lithuania, and other countries bordering or within the Russian Empire.
Soldiers on the Eastern Front came in closer contact with civilians, meaning they had more
opportunities to catch diseases, which would then spread from city to city as refugees
fled from the carnage in large numbers. The deaths by disease got so bad that the German
army started a large-scale sanitation program in every city they occupied. They quarantined
neighborhoods with high rates of disease, started mandatory lice checks at military bathhouses,
and even established sanitation police to inspect the cleanliness of homes and businesses.
So, the fighting was brutal no matter what front you were on. But that's just the army. What did
naval battles look like in World War One? The two major players in the naval conflict
of World War I were Britain and Germany, who had been in a naval arms race for over
a decade before the war broke out. The main type of battleship that dominated
naval warfare in the early days of the war was the dreadnought. British dreadnoughts
were well-armed but deliberately lacked armor in order to increase speed. The idea was that they'd
be faster than any ship that was bigger than them and better armed than any ship that was smaller.
German dreadnoughts, in contrast, were slower but far more damage-resistant. However,
neither type of dreadnought was especially well equipped to deal with attacks from torpedo boats.
Submarines began to see use around this time as well, but they were imprecise, with limited range,
and were more effective at taking out supply ships rather than surface warships. That being said,
German U-boats did manage to take out a few smaller British ships.
The navy had it a bit easier than the army on both sides, as they saw comparatively little
combat. But even when they weren't engaged in battle, conditions were less than ideal.
One account from a German naval officer in 1914 describes life on a U-boat as incredibly
claustrophobic. The batteries which powered the sub's electricity were kept dangerously
close to the ventilation intake, and whenever the men wanted to load a torpedo into the tube,
all of the furniture had to be moved out of the commanding officer's quarters to make room for it.
It was so bad that some men on the sub started taking opium on longer missions
just to help them keep their cool. On the other side of the war,
British commander Arthur Bond's account of life on the HMAS Swan describes the experience as being
akin to living in an oven. Meat would spoil easily, ice melted immediately, and all the
drinking water was warm. Other officers on similar battleships described cockroach infestation,
and a pervasive layer of grime and soot over everything due to most of the British ships
still using coal power at this period of time. Another big danger for those serving in the
Navy was underwater mines. These were mainly placed along coastlines in order to stop boats
from getting close enough to conduct coastal bombardments or complete supply runs. The first
battleship sunk during the war, the HMS Audacious, was sunk by a naval mine on October 27, 1914.
In addition to the navy and army, World War I saw the introduction of a new element to
warfare- aerial attacks. The first people to make use of airships for war were the Italians,
back in the Italo-Turkish war of 1911. During Italy's assault on Libya, zeppelins
were used to bomb Turkish positions, marking the first-ever use of aerial bombardment in history.
Four years later, in 1915, the Germans used zeppelins to bomb both military and civilian
targets in London and Paris. Thankfully, the casualties were minimal, but later air raids
would be more destructive. One of the worst raids was one that occurred in 1915 when a single German
zeppelin killed 22 people and extensively damaged surrounding buildings. Zeppelins were highly
effective in stealth raids, as they made very little noise, but they were also slow and full
of highly explosive hydrogen gas, two facts that made them easy targets for anti-aircraft shelling.
Even outside of battles, the war caused thousands of indirect casualties in countries that were
nowhere near either front and really weren't all that involved in the war at all. Food shortages
hit hard during the war years, and as this was the age of colonialism, the imperial forces fighting
the wars would make up for those food shortages by redirecting supplies from their colonies.
In British-controlled East Africa, conscription of farm labor led to a famine in 1917, and German
soldiers in Africa frequently stole cattle from African civilians. African men were also recruited
as carriers for the colonial armies. By 1917, 1 million African subjects from the colonies had
been conscripted by the British, and as many as 95,000 had died. Exact numbers of African
civilian deaths are hard to get, as they were considered less important than European deaths.
One colonial office bureaucrat summed up the attitude of the time pretty succinctly when
he wrote, "Who cares about native carriers?" Even after the war was over, its effects were
felt for decades afterwards. Troops returning from the front brought the deadly Spanish flu
pandemic with them, which killed even more people in the coming years. Russia's Tsar was overthrown
by a population who saw his poor management of the war as the final straw. Germany's economy
and infrastructure were gutted by the Versailles treaty, leading to civil unrest that paved the
way for the Nazi party to gain power. Parts of Europe were rendered barren for decades afterwards
by shelling and chemical bombs. Even the people who survived were fundamentally changed in a way
that soldiers in previous wars hadn't been. So if you think you could survive all this,
well, we admire your confidence, and we’ll send flowers to your relatives.
Now watch “Why the Trenches Were the Most Dangerous Job
in WW1” Or check out this video instead!