Essay on Trench Warfare

During World War I, trench warfare was very common. It was a newer technique in battles as in wars prior to the Great World War, fighting was less invasive and men merely marched at each other from opposite ends of fields and fought until only one side remained standing or a white flag was hung high in surrender. In fact in older wars, the fighting was far less dangerous to the point where battles were often times viewed by locals who watched from side lines with really no threat of getting hurt. In World War I however, the fighting had upscaled to the most sadistic type the world had ever experienced. With the industrialist wave that had overcome us in the late 1800s into

Starting with trench foot, trench foot was a condition caused by the water in the trenches. This happened because the poorly built trenches caused water to stay in the area.The water started to get muddy and since they had no bathroom, the area would just flood with muck. As you would walk back and forth through the water your feet could start to decompose and rot, it could cause hypothermia and many other medical conditions. Another danger was raids and gun fire, The raid would last for a long time . The soldiers would aim to kill the enemy, they would open fire and carry knives , they would try to kill as many on the opposing side as possible. This excerpt from ‘Neath a Foreign sky’ written by paul allen says “men are being evacuated with frostbite and exhaustion by the hundred. Today four men were dug out of the mud who had been unable to move for three days. The conditions were so bad that we were unable to see the actual trenches” this is showing the sickness and dangers of the trenches this shows how terrible the trenches were and how they caused sickness and cold greatly affected the way the soldiers

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.

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 diseases that most affected the soldiers,while they were fighting for a cause in the trenches were,Trench Foot,The Trench Influenza and Shell Shock.

One of the reasons the fighting was so horrible is that the British trenches were not as developed as the Germans. The British trench was more constructed to maintain readiness, rather than being prepared for different elements. Also, many toes were amputated because of being exposed to cold water. This is more commonly known as “trench foot”.

These endless zigzag trails were the soldiers’ home for as long as they were assigned duty to them. The trenches were often infested with “rats and lice… ‘There are millions! Some are huge fellows, nearly as big as cats…’ The soldiers often went weeks without washing or changing clothes, and most were infested with body lice” (Newman 141). Conditions were so wet and dirty and the men had to live with it. As a result of the wet and dirty conditions, many soldiers got ‘trench foot’. “Their feet swelled up to two or three times their normal size and went numb…but when the swelling went down, the pain was agonizing.

The Western Front was a series of trenches the Germans built that span through 700 Kilometres of land. These trenches ran from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border. Many battles were fought in this piece of land but in the end they reached a stalemate.

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 Four Weeks in the Trenches, Austrian soldiers Fritz Kreisler details how soldiers used trenches to protect themselves from bullets, shells, and shrapnel (Document 3). The use and development of trenches was a major change in warfare throughout WWI. The innovation and use of poison gas in WWI indicated the increasing willingness of nations in the early twentieth-century to achieve victory by killing as many of the enemy as possible. As rifle technology and artillery advancements made killing the enemy easier, nation-states sought further technological development in the art of slaughter. An anonymous account of French soldiers’ first encounter with poison gas while facing the Germans at Ypres, on the western front.

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.

The first reason Trench Warfare was an accurate portrayal of American history and All Quiet on the Western Front is because of the way they fought while in cover in them. In World War 1, they would use the walls of the trench as cover while they would shoot over the wall and hope that they would hit an enemy. In All Quiet on the Western Front, they did

Trench warfare was implemented to provide cover for soldiers during battle in WW1 seeing that most battlefields were open field & farms, so soldiers had little or no cover from rifle fire. After suffering thousands of casualties, soldiers began to dig into the ground creating cover. Over the months the trenches grew & evolved to hold barracks & equipment. Within a few months trenches were equipped with all essentials to ensure there was no need to leave them unnecessarily. Trenches were first dug by hand but soon soldiers would be equipped with shovels to increase productivity. Trenches were also mainly built at night to avoid detection by enemy troops.

The use of trenches in The Great War was to protect soldiers while they moved positions and to exchange fire across an empty zone labeled as No Man’s Land. However, as Jennifer D. Keene explains, no soldier ever spent the entire war in the trenches. Troops rotated between the trenches, reserve, or rest areas, which were located in the rear. Keene goes on to tell that the normal rotation duration for soldiers on the line was for three weeks and the duration for behind the line was for one week, however, that time could vary depending on whether a unit was in training or if there was not enough replacement troops at the time (“American Soldiers and Trench Warfare”). Troops, although not always on the front line, were never completely

This caused many men to have shell shock. The Germans in 2nd battle of Ypres first used the gas. Many men died from gas attacks, the gas would fill their lungs with fluid until they slowly drowned in the fluid. Over the top attacks were even worse soldiers would fix bayonets and wait for the whistle from officers, aware that minutes later they stood a good chance of being killed. At the whistle, they would climb over the trenches and advance into no-man's land facing a hail of machine gun fire and shells.