2. The Mechanization of War Mechanization: having things done by machinery Machines in factories mass-produced guns, shells, and bombs very quickly Machine guns changed the way wars were fought
5. New Weapons: machine guns poison gas airplanes Submarinestanks flame-throwers Human costs: 30 million soldiers and civilians were killed or injured Nearly 13 million of these were civilian casualties!
6. A Changed World World economies Many nations’ economies were devastated by WWI The U.S. economy grew very quickly Many people were forced to move Some were refugees who fled from war-torn areas Some were deported as conditions of peace treaties
8. Borders changed and new countries were created Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were broken up into smaller nations German and Russian empires lost land Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were created in Eastern Europe
Editor's Notes
Machine guns could fire 600 rounds a minute
In some battles 3 months of fighting = 5 miles gainedAt Verdun, they fought for four months and gained no ground.Artillery fire was used to “soften” the front before fighting began…”before [one] battle started 2,000 cannons carried on a shelling that was heard in London, 300 miles away.”In that same battle a soldier reported…”I see men arising and walking forward; and I go forward with them, in a glassy delirium wherein some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll over, and lie still…And I go on with aching feet, up and down like a huge ruined honeycomb, and my wave melts away, and the second wave comes up, and also melts away, and then the third wave merges into the remnants of the first and second, and after a while the fourth blunders into the remains of the others, and we begin to run forward to catch up with the barrage, gasping and sweating, in bunches, anyhow, every bit of the months of drill and rehearsal forgotten, for who could have imagined that the “Big Push” was going to be like this.”
No man’s land was a tangle of barbed wire, corpses, shattered trees, and craters.“From time to time the armies on both sides sacrificed their soldiers by the many thousands to advance the front a mile or two. Typically they used these methods: artillery would pound the other side and try to blow up its machine guns. Then the infantry would climb up from the trenches. Bearing about 65 pounds of equipment they would lumber toward their enemies, crossing “no-man’s land”…Enemy machine guns that had survived the shelling would fire six hundred rounds a minute at them. Poison gas might sicken and blind them. Their enemies would try to drive them back with rifles and bayonets. If all went well, they won some trenches and held them for a while.”
In 1914 ½ of all Frenchmen 22-32 were killed in battle
