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The Advanced Technology Of World War I

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How did the advanced technology of World War I influence how war was fought?
Stacy Shaw
Word Count: Stacy Shaw
Historical Investigation Paper
2/26/17
For my research paper I have chosen to research how the advanced technology of WWI influenced how war was fought. In this paper I will analyze how wars were fought before WWI and how during the war, new advancements changed the future of warfare. Themes about WWI the paper will include are weapons, vehicles, aircraft, ships, the frontline and support. For my first source I used information from an online source. The article, “12 Technological Advancements of World War I” includes some weapons, vehicles and support used during WWI. It is relevant because it provides detailed …show more content…

The use of trench warfare, primarily along the Western Front, protected the soldiers from small arms fire and moderately from artillery. It introduced one of the most important weapons of the war, the machine gun. Before WWI, one of the most advanced weapons was the gating gun. It was hand-cranked and could deliver hundreds of rounds per minute. However, not every soldier was gifted this gun; it needed to be rolled around and required multiple riflemen to operate it. By the beginning of the war in 1914, practical machine guns were already in production since their invention by Hiram Maxim in 1884. The “Maxim gun,” was self-powered, using the recoil power of the previously fired shot to reload rather than being hand-powered. This enabled a much higher rate of fire and made the battlefield much more deadly. The machine gun was most commonly used in conjunction with poison gas, most commonly, mustard gas. World War I was the first war that saw the use of large-scale chemical weapons. There were many, different gases that had different reactions onto he body. Chlorine would cause the lungs to break down and choke its victim to death; mustard gas would blind its victims. This left the enemy open for machine gunners; the guns would be strategically mounted and provided the first defense against the enemy. Another tool used with the machine gun was barbed wire. Originally created for herding cattle, barbed wire ran for miles along the front of the

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