World War I, 1914-18
2.5. Technology Takes Over
The prolongation of hostilities that enabled the belligerents to mobilize their economic and social systems also gave them the opportunity to experiment with new weapons and weapons systems.
Though military and technological innovation has a long history, before the nineteenth century true innovation was a relatively infrequent occurrence. It is certainly not easy to argue that the French, Prussian, Russian, Austrian, and British armies emerged from the Seven Years War (1756–63) considerably better armed than they were when they entered into that con ict. However, with the spread of the Industrial Revolution after 1815, new breakthroughs in technology, instead of appearing more or less accidentally and more or less at random, were now the products of systematic research and development.”6 Technological progress would accelerate to such a rate that weapons could be obsolete within a decade.
In August 1914, each of the principal belligerents possessed several hundred aircraft as well as a small but dynamic military- industrial establishment that produced them.47 After hostilities opened, aircraft were at once pressed into undertaking reconnaissance missions, or they were planned to do so before the war. Almost immediately, pilots began carrying pistols or carbines, taking potshots at one another in the air. As was inevitable at this early stage, here and there oddities appeared. Some pilots were even issued with incendiary darts in the hope of setting alight the canvas of which aircraft fuselages and wings, as well as balloons, were made.
By 1915, the favored weapon for air-to-air ghting had become the machine gun. Firing machine guns forward, however, risked hitting the propeller—which, being made of wood, would disintegrate as a result of the stream of bullets—and forced designers to experiment with all kinds of improvisations. Some entrusted the weapon to a separate crew member who would re to the side and rear; others mounted a gun on the top wing, where it
red by means of a rope tied to the trigger. By 1916 the problem was solved by adding a device that synchronized the gun or guns with the propeller, enabling the pilot to shoot straight forward and making it much easier to aim. Though the invention itself was Dutch, the rst to use it was Germany. Since aircraft of both sides were constantly being forced down over enemy territory, it was only a matter of weeks before it was copied.
Air-to-air combat was an entirely novel eld to be mastered by a process of trial and error. The objective was always to place one’s own aircraft in a position where one would be able to shoot at the enemy without that enemy being able to shoot back. Most of the time this meant coming in from behind, either from above or from below, and in such a way as to have the sun shining in the enemy’s eyes. To do this, pilots also had to master the opportunities that the weather provided, such as by darting out of clouds when the opportunity presented itself, or into them when danger threatened.
By 1916, most of the necessary maneuvers had been mastered, as is evident from the fact that, to this day, several of them are named for World War I pilots.
Fought far from the madding crowd, man against man, at enormous risk (the rst parachutes were only introduced late in the war), air-to-air combat was spectacular. Pilots tended to come from the well-to-do, and some, having shot down numerous opponents, were turned into popular heroes, being feted by the authorities from the kaiser down and getting countless o ers from women who wanted to sleep with them with or without marrying them rst.
Less spectacular, but equally important, were airpower’s other missions such as liaison, artillery observation, and stra ng ( ying low while ring their machine guns into enemy columns or trenches). The last was a particularly dangerous task; some aircraft were modi ed with light armor for protection.
Along with reconnaissance, the very rst days of the war saw the rst air bombardments, improvised a airs as pilots tried to hit targets by tossing grenades at them. Later, aircraft equipped with special apparatus for dropping bombs were developed, and clear
di erences began to appear between them and lighter, more agile types.
The rst “strategic” bombardments—strategic in the sense that the attacks were directed at targets far to the rear, rather than at the front— were carried out by the Germans in 1915, using lighter-than- air airships. Still, given the primitive state of technology, when used as bombers, aircraft could not be said to have played a decisive role in the war. As auxiliaries, however, they were becoming indispensable, and this was re ected in the fact that, taking Britain, France, and Germany together, the total number of aircraft produced between 1914 and 1918 was about 150,000.
Whereas a few aircraft had taken part in war even before 1914, the tank was an altogether new invention. This armored box capable of moving about on the battle eld only rst became practical in the early 1900s following the invention of the internal combustion engine on the one hand and of the caterpillar track on the other.
The rst experimental machines, designed to cross trenches while providing shelter to the soldiers who followed them, were built in Britain in 1915. Following somewhat di erent ideas as to what they should look like, the French began to build them at about the same time. Compared with the machines that were to follow during the interwar years, early tanks were large and heavily armed, with some carrying two six-pounder cannon, one on each side. They were, however, intended for action against enemy infantry rather than other tanks.
Tanks received their baptism of re at the Somme in 1916.
Underdeveloped, and su ering from teething problems, there were also too few of them to make a di erence. They did make a di erence at Cambrai in November 1917, when ve hundred of the monsters, preceded by a short but intensive bombardment from a thousand guns, helped tear open a section of the German Front.”8 As was almost always the case, the Germans were able to contain the breach by bringing up fresh troops and launching a counterattack.
Still, from this point on the importance of the tank grew until it became a rst-line weapon in every major French and British
o ensive launched in the remainder of the war. The Germans, partly because they failed to grasp the importance of tanks, partly because Ludendor did not think them worth the resources,49 built very few of them. Those they did build tended to be overmanned (with crews of up to eighteen soldiers), unstable, vulnerable, and ine ective, to the point that they preferred using captured Allied tanks to their own.50
The rst tanks to appear on the battle eld caused a panic among the defenders, yet countermeasures, in the form of ditches wide and deep enough to stop the machines, appeared almost immediately (and were in turn countered by tanks carrying fascines). So did special ri es provided with ammunition able to penetrate their armor and artillery ring over open sights.51 Other factors that prevented the rst tanks from turning into really decisive weapons were their short range, low speed, mechanical unreliability, and extreme discomfort. Besides su ering from noise and being bumped about in their unsprung vehicles, crews were always in danger of being asphyxiated by the exhaust gases from the tank’s engine. To these problems were added di culties in command and control of the vehicles. A small, spark-operated radio set was available, but this only worked as long as the tanks were stationary with their engines shut down, and then only to a range of two hundred yards.
Painted metal disks waved through portholes were even less reliable. As legend has it, crewmen as well as troops accompanying the tanks were sometimes provided with hammers, to the former to knock one another on the helmet and to the latter in order to do the same on the vehicles’ sides.
At the time the war ended, attempts to combine aircraft with tanks in joint operations capable of doing more than breaking through a line of trenches were still in their infancy. In his plans for 1919, Foch, the supreme Allied commander on the Western Front, looked forward to employing no fewer than ten thousand tanks, but whether his thought reached far beyond the front line is not clear.52 Way below him in the chain of command, the chief of sta of the
British Royal Tank Corps, Lieutenant Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, was developing some radical ideas on that subject.53 He called for a combination of heavy and medium tanks to be used not only for forcing a breakthrough but also for striking at command and communications targets in the rear, all to be followed by a pursuit
“of at least 20 miles per day for a period of ve to seven days.”
Whether the technical means of the time were really up to such an ambitious scheme is not clear. In spite of the fame it later acquired, Fuller’s “Plan 1919,” was more of a general declaration of principles than a detailed attempt to explain who should do what, how, in what order, and to whom at a speci c time and place. In the event, the transformation of siege engines into armored cavalry, their organization into divisions, and their coordination with airpower so as to make them capable of deep operations had to wait until the 1930s. When these changes nally came, it was the Germans and not the British who were in the lead.
In all of this, perhaps the most impressive thing was how fast armored technology developed. In the three years after they rst appeared, British tanks went through eight model changes, some of which came in several variations. They were already starting to fall into two basic types, heavies for breaking through trench systems and medium tanks for exploitation and pursuit. The experimental
“Tritton” of 1915 had an engine developing 105 horsepower and was capable of a speed of 3.7 miles an hour. Three years later, the Mark D had an engine three times as powerful and a speed of twenty miles an hour. Even the so-called funnies, special machines developed in World War II for a variety of purposes, already had their counterparts in 1917–18. Some tanks came with hooks for tearing up wire, whereas others dragged sledges loaded with supplies.
The evolution of aircraft was faster still. In 1914, a French observation aircraft such as the Bleriot XI weighed less than a ton. It was powered by an engine that developed 70 horsepower, had a ceiling of 3,300 feet, and ew at a maximum speed of 66 miles per
hour.54 Three years later, a Nieuport 28 ghter weighed slightly less but came with 160 horsepower, a ceiling of 17,000 feet, and a maximum speed of 122 miles per hour. The very rst specialized bombers were built in France in 1915; taking as our example the Voisin 5, it weighed just over a ton, had a single engine developing 150 horsepower, and was capable of carrying 130 pounds of bombs to a distance of about 100 miles before dropping them and returning to base. Four years later, the Italian Caproni Ca.46 weighed over ve tons, was propelled by four engines developing 300 horsepower each, and was capable of carrying almost a ton of bombs to a distance of almost 200 miles. By that time aircraft had reached the point where, in terms of both speed and load-carrying ability, they were superior to lighter-than-air machines. After a few years, almost the only remaining use of lighter than air devices was to hoist aloft cables for anti-aircraft work.
As always during periods of rapid innovation, designers, pressed to produce results quickly, sometimes cut corners. On other occasions, they failed to test their products properly. For example, the rst British tanks were equipped with glass-covered vision slits that splintered into crewmen’s eyes when they were hit. And far more projects were conceived on the drawing boards than ever left the factories. Among those that did leave the factories and reached the battle eld, quite a few proved to be stillbirths and had to be scrapped. Thus, the British toward the end of the war built a giant six-engined bomber, the Tarrant Tabor, which was so badly designed that it crashed during its rst test ight. The Germans built two monster tanks weighing 160 tons each, a performance they were to repeat during World War II. The Americans, unhappy with the available internal combustion engines, experimented with a steam-powered tank.
Even when designs were competent, quite often countermeasures emerged so quickly that a weapon’s net impact was practically zero.
Against the background of the ongoing slaughter, though, it was hardly noticed.