Trench Warfare: Hell on Earth Essay

Trenches were long, narrow ditches dug into the ground where soldiers lived day and night. There were many lines of German trenches on one side and many lines of the trenches on the allied side. In the middle there was no-man’s land, so called because it didn’t belong to either army. Soldiers crossed no- man’s land when they wanted to attack. Soldiers in the trenches did not get much sleep, but when they did it was in the afternoon during daylight and at night for only 1 hour at a time. They were woken up at different times, either to complete one of the daily chores or the go to fight. The system of trenches was employed because a German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, decided that his troops must at all costs hold onto those parts of France and Belgium that Germany still occupied. Falkenhayn ordered his men to dig trenches that would provide them with protection from the advancing French and British troops. The Allies soon realised that they could not break through this line and they also began to dig trenches.

In World War 1, there were many new tactics that war has never seen before. Trench warfare was one of the new tactics that they used in World War 1. They used the trenches for many things. In World War 1 and All Quiet on the Western Front. They are an accurate portrayal of each other because of the way they fought while in cover, built them, and the way they put all their resources in them.

They had great weapons added to it like machine guns. Trenches were also used a lot. They would dig mile long trenches were used to fire shoots at each other. On christmas of nineteen fifteen the armies came out of their trenches and came together. They had drinks, sang songs, and play soccer. The next day they went back into their trenches to become rivals again. When the time was right, one army would charge across no man’s land. Machine guns would sometimes prevent this by firing into the charging people. A machine gunner from the war wrote, “We didn’t have to aim. We just loaded and reloaded.”. They were not always effective. Chlorine gas by the Germans also was very effective. No one yet had seen such warfare. The British troops were charging

Trench warfare was adopted to maintain an area of land, to prevent the enemy from capturing that land. The importance of this investigation was to show the significance of trench warfare during the First World War and how effective it was on how it had prevented many full on, front lined, assaults. World War I could have had a great impact in history with the amount of war casualties, which would have been historically shocking, but instead it created the stalemate, which prevented such numbers of deaths from happening.

The grim reality of living in muddy, rat-infested trenches epitomizes the brutal and prolonged nature of this new form of combat. Soldiers endured constant peril from enemy fire, disease, malnutrition, and psychological trauma, locked in a deadly stalemate that exacted a heavy toll on both sides. In the document packet, document 4 talks about how trench warfare got very severe and how the introduction of new machinery changed warfare too when gasses were made and added into the fight. Its effect on the French was a violent nausea and faintness, followed by an utter collapse. It is believed that the Germans, who charged in behind the vapor, met no resistance at all, the French at their front being virtually paralyzed” This shows how trench warfare got extreme and soldiers were left injured in many ways if not

World War 1 also known as the Great War (1914-1918) started due to the assassination of the Hungary-Austria archduke Franz Ferdinand. The war was fought mainly on the “Western Front”. and was a war fought only by industrialized countries such as the UK and France. This war had a strong effect on technological advancement of the world as new inventions kept needing to be created to stop the stalemate between the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance. This essay will use source material to outline how the nature of trench warfare in particular affected these soldiers in a significant and long-term way.

Soon the machine gun became a defensive weapon rather than an offensive weapon, as it was used to stop offensive enemy troops across this no man’s land. Gas was used infinitely by both sides in an effort to triumph over the trenches. If any trench was taken by an opposing force, a succeeding trench was dug just meters behind the one taken, making advancements longstanding and difficult. In this process many troops lost their lives, more so than any other war.

Aspects of Trench Warfare 1. Trenches were built in an attempt to continue the war as both sides had reached a stalemate. There was a rush for the sea and then they found nothing else could happen so they dug in. The resulting trench system on the Western Front not only covered the equivalent of 25,000 miles (enough to encircle the world) but also stretched non-stop from Belgium to Switzerland.

World War I was known for its very slow-paced battle and the stage of stalemate. After advancing from Germany on France, battle turned into trench warfare. Trench Warfare is a defensive strategy in a field where the army stays in rows of trenches that were placed along the Western Front during the war. The use of trenches during the Great War was a very significant tactic during battle, by making soldiers hidden but exposed just enough to be able to attack the enemy. On a daily basis, life in the trenches was very scary and filled with horror. Death was upon the soldiers even if there was nobody attacking them. There was a continuous shell fire that would randomly take the lives of many. Some men died on their first day in the trenches, and very few were lucky to make it out unharmed. Shell fire was not the only issue in the trenches. There were plenty of diseases and infections spreading around like a wildfire. Many soldiers got infections and diseases that could not be treated such as Trench Foot or Trench Fever. Although trench warfare acts as a great defensive and offensive measure, it became very dangerous because of the many different causes of death including shell fire, diseases, and infections.

     In the first phase of World War II in Europe, Germany sought to avoid a long war. Germany's strategy was to defeat its opponents in a series of short campaigns. Germany quickly overran much of Europe and was victorious for more than two years by relying on a new military tactic called the "Blitzkrieg" (lightning war). Blitzkrieg tactics required the concentration of offensive weapons (such as tanks, planes, and artillery) along a narrow front. These forces would drive a breach in enemy defenses, permitting armored tank divisions to penetrate rapidly and roam freely behind enemy lines, causing shock and

Chemical warfare, while horrible, proved to be unwieldy and unpredictable, and relatively easy to counter. After some limited successes against unprepared opponents, the use of chemical gas had very little tactical benefit; the recognition of this limited utility is that after widespread use in 1915 - except for the short-lived effects of the introduction of mustard gas in 1917 - gas was abandoned by both sides as an effective tactic.

The intro to this paragraph evolves around the beginning of the technological advances of the Great war. Before and after WW1, Europe and the Americas experienced a tremendous boom with industry and technology. Weapons such as heavy machine guns made open field troop manoeuvres very disastrous, resulting in the new fighting called trench warfare; where the machine guns put favour on defence. Although trench warfare and military machinery was an awe for the war, It caused casualties exceeding many numbers over the past wars In the European and American world.

The First World War witnessed an appalling number of casualties. Due partly to this fact, some historians, developed the perception that commanders on both sides dependence on only one disastrous approach to breaking the stalemate. These historians attributed the loss of life to the reliance on soldiers charging across no-man’s land only to be mowed down by enemy machineguns. The accuracy of this, however, is fallacious since a variety of tactics existed on both sides. The main reason for battlefield success and eventual victory came from the transformation of battlefield tactics; nevertheless, moral played a major role by greatly affecting the development of new tactics and the final outcome of the war.

World War 1 is perhaps best known for being a war fought in trenches, ditches dug out of the ground to give troops protection from enemy artillery and machine-gun fire. The trenches spread from the East to the West. By the end of 1914, trenches stretched all along the 475 miles front between the Swiss border and the Channel coast.

The tactics used in World War II had to come from somewhere and that was the past. The main reason for this was because most high ranking officers only knew old tactics. One of the biggest strategies that most are familiar with is the use of trench warfare. The many problems both sides faced when using trenches was how vulnerable soldiers were inside them. They were prone to constant chemical attacks, artillery barrages, and tanks. Trench warfare was not a pretty fight but it was one of the most used tactics throughout the war. An offensive at Somme was a prime example of the use and tactical advantage tools of war gave a side. In the summer of 1916, General Douglas Haig ad ordered and eight day artillery bombardment to soften up the German