A study day at The National Army Museum: Great War technology Part One

On Tuesday our school visited The National Army Museum for a study day. After looking around the excellent galleries (our students particularly liked the exhibition looking at the experience of 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand Province. We had two lectures from the education staff. Below is the first part of a write up of the notes that I made.

The First World War is somewhat of a paradox. Whilst many of the problems facing military commanders at the time were medieval in nature the expression of the fighting was very much couched in the modern age.

A First World War general faced much the same problems as his counterparts in thirteenth century. In essence the Western Front, after the failure of the Schlieffen Plan and the solidification of the war of movement, had become a monumental siege. The German Army, happy to stay put on conquered land in Belgium and France, entrenched their position in with determination. Whilst the Allies were keen to foster the offensive spirit and deliberately constructed trenches as a temporary measure, the Germans excavated deep dug outs, reinforced with copious amounts of concrete and protected with belts of barbed wire. Much like the commanders of medieval times it was up to the British and French Generals to either starve the Germans out of their positions or, alternatively, effect a breach in their defensive wall. The problem for military leaders such as Sir John French, Joffre and Sir Douglas Haig was that this situation was new to them and there were not, at the outset of the war, the weapons nor the tactics in place suited to this kind of siege operation.

Technology
Technology would play a huge part in the fighting of the First World War. Traditionally, the ‘poster boys’ of the conflict have been the high explosive, machine guns, aircraft, tanks and gas. Less well known are the developments in what may be termed the ‘hidden’ technologies – preserved food, barbed wire, rifles, communications and the personal equipment that ordinary infantrymen carried into battle.

However, it is worth taking a look at developments in the better known areas of weaponry before turning to those technologies that had profound but less trumpeted impacts on the fighting of the war.

High explosive
Cordite was invented in the late nineteenth century and brought with it vast improvements in terms of the range and accuracy of artillery. Simply put, this development meant that armies could no longer survive in a static position without digging in and creating underground shelters.

Machine guns
Another innovation of the late nineteenth century the machine gun was to revolutionise the battlefield. However, the BEF of 1914 was ill-equipped and had far less machine guns than the German Army (this fact is typicallyused to condemn British generals as technophobes.) Nevertheless, this deficit was amde good and, with development of the Lewis Gun and the creation of the Machine Gun Corps the British were soon deploying the machine gun as a vital component of their tactical make-up. Later in the Germans made good use of the sub-machine gun as a useful weapon in close quarter fighting in the offensive of March 1918.

Mechanised transport
The invention of the internal combustion engine allowed the deployment of trucks, buses, armoured cars, motorcycles (some with machine guns mounted on sidecars) and tanks. Clearly these vehicles all played different roles but each either enabled more men to get to the battlefield more quickly, provided mobile fire support to attacking troops and also help to suppress enemy defenses.