From munitions workers to the poor souls stuck battling in chemical warfare, here are 10
of the most dangerous jobs from World War 1 that you won’t believe!
10: Munitions Workers One of the most dangerous and critical jobs
from World War One was being a munitions worker.
These brave people supplied troops who were battling on the front lines with equipment
and ammunition to take down the enemy.
During the First World War, a large portion of munitions workers were female, as this
freed up more men to be shipped to the battlefield.
By the end of the war, there were an estimated 700,000 female munition workers called munitionettes.
But it wasn't exactly a fun job.
These people worked incredibly long hours and in extremely dangerous conditions.
TNT poisoning was a serious hazard.
Because munitions workers were filling shells with dangerous chemicals, they would often
get too much exposure to TNT and it would turn their skin yellow.
When this happened, they would be called canaries.
Plus, the factories themselves were very dangerous.
Poor ventilation, asbestos, consistent exposure to harmful chemicals, and backbreaking labor.
9: Trench Warfare The men in the trenches battling throughout
World War One had what you might think of as the worst job in the entire world.
Not only in the war, but pretty much anywhere ever.
Trenches were dug as deep ditches mostly along the Western Front where German troops and
Allied forces battled to gain territory.
Trenches have been around in warfare for as long as time.
But before World War One, trenches were never actually used before to this extent in armed
combat.
World War One, also known as The Great War, saw a wide use of trenches being dug into
the ground by infantry soldiers who would live inside of them for weeks at a time, relatively
protected from the fire of machine guns and artillery attacks raining down from up above.
Trenches were hazardous for a few reasons.
First of all, chemical warfare and poisonous gas.
Gas would sometimes be wafted into trenches, filling them like fog rolling through city
streets.
There was also a lot of fighting.
Infantry units mounted their attacks from inside the trenches with rifles and bayonets,
charging headfirst into no man’s land, the area in the middle of the two opposing forces.
This often resulted in huge casualties.
And whichever force made it to the other side of no man's land and entered the enemy trenches,
then it became a brutal and bloody struggle.
To give you an idea of just how deadly trench warfare was, look at the Battle of Somme in
France.
According to History.com, British troops suffered a total of 60,000 deaths during the first
few hours of fighting on day one.
8: War Dogs This one kind of breaks our hearts.
In World War One, the dogs fought just as hard as the humans!
Dogs actually played an extremely critical role and had numerous duties throughout the
fighting.
One of the most important jobs was guard dog.
Just like your dog will guard your house today from intruders, dogs would be used by soldiers
on guard duty since they were often a little better at spotting intruders.
Secondly, German shepherds were used as casualty dogs during the war.
They were trained to find wounded soldiers on the battlefield.
They would have medical equipment strapped to their backs to help the soldiers heal themselves,
or to allow nearby soldiers to act as doctors.
But almost more important than carrying the medical supplies, these casualty dogs would
keep soldiers company while they lay in pain on the battlefield, often being their only
source of comfort in their final minutes alive.
Unfortunately for the dogs though, the enemy still saw them as enemy soldiers and would
often shoot them dead given the opportunity.
The dogs on the frontlines were in just as much danger as the men in the trenches.
How do you feel about dogs in battle?
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7: The Wiring Party Being a member of a wiring party in World
War One was often a death sentence.
These men would creep out of the trenches into no man’s land, the desolate space between
the allies and the Germans.
The job was one which obviously needed to be done in strict secrecy and silence.
They would do so under the cover of darkness to insert wiring posts ahead of the front
trench.
These posts were about 6 feet(1.8m) tall and had to be hammered into the ground with a
mallet or a giant, screw-like contraption.
Once the posts were placed, wire needed to be tied between them to create fences.
The wire fences would prevent enemies from throwing grenades directly into the trench
where the soldiers were.
This was a huge issue because if enemies could get close enough to the trenches, they could
just throw grenades in and blow apart all the soldiers.
But putting up the wire was very deadly work.
At night, the enemy would fire flares to illuminate the battlefield.
If any unfortunate soldiers were caught in the open, they would be cut down by machine
gun fire.
Where the distance between the enemy front lines was narrow, which was actually very
often the case on the trenches of the Western Front - it wasn’t unusual for wiring parties
of either side to encounter men from the opposing line doing the same job.
When this happened, hand-to-hand fighting would often ensue.
6: Aviators When the war broke out in 1914, aviation was
in its infant stages.
The First World War saw a significant advancement in aircraft warfare.
During the first months of the war, airplanes were mostly used by the British as reconnaissance.
But as technology advanced very rapidly, planes evolved to join the battle.
Pilots would drop bombs from their aircrafts and they would shoot down other enemy planes.
Because soldiers were fighting in trenches, it was almost impossible for them to see what
the enemy was doing.
This meant aircrafts were needed to fly over enemy territory and photograph the situation
behind enemy lines.
These pictures were critical for the commanders to make maps of what was going on.
But obviously, the enemy didn't like this.
Reconnaissance airplanes ended up being targeted by other reconnaissance airplanes and machine
guns on the ground.
This was definitely not an easy job.
Pilots began targeting one another and getting locked in what became known as dogfights.
Each plane tried to prevent the other from getting behind enemy lines and taking photographs.
There were huge casualties and it was one of the most dangerous jobs that a person could
do.
Remember these planes were open to the weather.
There were a lot of biplanes and other old vehicles used, which were dangerous enough
to fly without being under constant fire from enemy guns.
5: Battlefield Medics Battlefield medics haven't changed much in
thousands of years.
These brave medical officers rush into the dangerous battlefield to pick up wounded soldiers
and take them back to a field dressing station, usually positioned just out of range of the
enemy.
And while medics were often considered out of bounds – after all, soldiers were still
human on both sides and it was generally agreed that you didn't shoot doctors in the face
– yet they were still under constant threat while trying to evacuate injured people from
the battlefield.
In the heat of battle, medics could easily be mistaken for other soldiers.
This was the number one reason why it was so dangerous to be a medic.
World War One saw the advancement of battlefield medics.
By the end of the war, roughly 37 million troops had been killed.
Treating those who had been injured was a huge task.
So, there were three working zones for medics.
There was the collecting zone where the wounded would be taken from the battlefield, then
the evacuating zone at the rear of the battlefield where transport vehicles could collect bodies,
and finally the distributing zone, usually where the hospitals would be set up.
However, there would always be an aid post very close to the main fighting trenches where
the medical officers would be.
If a soldier was injured and unable to be moved, the medic would need to perform their
duties sometimes right in the middle of the fighting.
4: Tank Crews Tank crews in World War One had a pretty difficult
time too.
These tanks were primitive, often reaching a top speed of only 4 miles(6.4km) an hour.
Each tank had its own crew, usually consisting of three drivers and four gunners.
The interior conditions were horrendous.
It was hot, noisy, and tanks drove like garbage, meaning it was also extremely uncomfortable
as the tank rumbled across the uneven earth.
Plus, bullets were constantly smacking into the metal plating and tanks were targeted
by bombs.
The last thing a tank crew wanted was to be blown up inside a hot metal box.
While the movies may make tanks look fun, it was anything but.
Men were often sick from driving in the tanks.
The conditions were so bad inside that the tanks could only make small journeys.
The people inside were literally suffocating on fumes and becoming delirious from the intense
heat.
Communication was also tough and the tank officer often had to walk outside just to
see what was going on.
Between August and November of 1918, at least 2400 men in the Tank Crops were killed fighting.
3: Submarine Crews Submarines were even worse than tanks.
Being part of a submarine crew was often a death sentence.
It was also a miserable job.
According to Popular Mechanics, a typical submarine back then was about 88 feet(27m)
long and carried a crew of 23 people.
Submarines were armed with torpedoes and 88-millimeter(3.4in) deck guns.
But submarines were in constant danger.
There were underwater mines scattered almost everywhere during World War One, all throughout
the waters of Europe.
These were often undetectable by the submarines, and even a slight nudge would cause the sub
to blow apart and the whole crew to suffer unimaginable deaths.
One of the worst parts of being in a submarine, other than the claustrophobia, the intense
heat from all the machines, and the horrifying knowledge of being hundreds of feet under
the water, was that when something happened, everybody died.
There was no escape when a submarine was damaged, which they often were.
When the unthinkable happened, all the crew members went down with the ship.
2: Chemical Fighters Chemical fighting was the most terrifying
thing that happened during World War One.
The terror began on April 22, 1915.
German forces along the Western Front fired over 150 tons(300,000lbs) of devastating chlorine
gas at a pair of French divisions in Belgium.
It was the first major gas attack by the Germans and it killed just about every single Allied
soldier on the line.
The Allied soldiers had not been expecting an attack with gas.
They were actually waiting for the first wave of German troops and were beginning to get
worried when there was nothing but silence.
Then, a literal cloud of chlorine gas floated across no man’s land and into the trenches.
4 miles(6.4km) of soldiers were decimated by the gas.
It was so effective and killed soldiers so quickly that the Germans didn't even know
what to do.
They failed to take advantage of the attack and didn't push forward, allowing the Allies
to hold position.
Nobody could have imagined the truly devastating effects of using chemical warfare.
The second gas attack was on April 24, against a division of Canadian fighters.
It was immediately after this that France and Britain began developing their own chemical
weapons and supplying their soldiers with gas masks.
Still, anyone caught in chemical warfare usually died.
Roughly 500,000 troops were injured by toxic gas during the war, with around 30,000 deaths.
1: The Runners Being a runner was one of the most perilous
yet important jobs you could have during World War One.
As you can imagine, communication was a bit trickier in the early 1900s.
They didn't really have long-range methods of relaying messages between units.
The only option was to use a telegraph, a telephone, a colored flare, or mirrors to
reflect light in Morris code.
They also tried to use dogs and pigeons, but these weren't always the most reliable.
The best way to get a message from one place to another was to use a runner.
Human runners were usually low-ranking soldiers.
They were people chosen for their fitness level, along with their ability to read a
map and to memorize a message.
These people would be sent off in any kind of weather, through some of the most dangerous
areas of fighting, to deliver critical information from one group to another.
World War One veteran Lt. Allan L. Dexter was quoted in a 1931 news article saying,
“With a runner, it was merely a question of how long he would last before being wounded
or killed.”
And this was true.
Runners would often have to sprint over a mile through the trenches and then out into
the wilderness, and this was a dangerous thing because snipers and machine guns would try
to take them out as they were running.
Being a runner was basically like playing dodgeball with bullets.
Thanks for watching!
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