Impact of technology on 20th century warfare

¶ … Technology of Modern Warfare

The Industrial Revolution changed human life for the better by making possible the mass production of consumer goods and food, by providing the electric power that lit cities, and by making possible the myriad other technological advances that make modern life so much easier and more pleasant than it ever was for all of the human generations before the 20th century. However, the modernization of society also radically changed the technology of warfare, forever increasing the brutality and the impersonal nature of war. Warfare had always been brutal, but before the age of mechanized warfare, most combat deaths occurred one soldier at a time or several soldiers at a time and at the hands of enemies who stood in front of one another, separated by a few hundred yards, at most. The watershed moment in the evolution of warfare to a highly impersonal form of mass slaughter was the First World War in which several significant new technologies made their combat debut. Weapons such as machine guns introduced mass slaughter in numbers that were absolutely obscene in comparison to previous casualty rates. Combat aircraft and long-range high-explosive artillery introduced the prospect of sudden death even miles behind enemy lines, and poison gas added a terrifying new type of agonizing death.

The literary works of the immediate period following the so-called "Great War" reflect the ways that mechanized warfare forever changed the way that young men romanticized war as a rite of passage into manhood. It provides a horrifying glimpse into the realities of trench warfare as well as the ways that wartime combat can change the very character of the human beings involved in it. In that regard, Erich Maria Remarque's classic work All Quiet on the Western Front illustrates the futility and the waste of life of warfare and the degree to which even those left intact physically suffered grievous psychological and emotional scars just from having witnessed the carnage and from enduring the constant threat of instantaneous annihilation. Isaac Babel's short story My First Goose illustrates the way that the stresses and impersonal nature of modern war socialize the individual to value camaraderie and acceptance of fellow soldiers so much that it overrides any ordinary sense of human decency or morality and perpetuates cruelty toward others.

The Mechanization of Warfare in the Early 20th Century

The Machine Gun

By the turn of the 20th century, the implements of warfare had already evolved sufficiently to cause grievous bodily injury from hundreds of yards away, mainly in the form of long-range canons and artillery and the rifled barrels of hand-held small arms. Still, the most common cause of death during the American Civil War (and other major military conflicts of that period) was infection of wounds that would have been survivable in and of themselves (Faragher, 2006). The Remington repeating rifle was partially credited with allowing the North American Settlers to conquer the Western territories in the last decades of the 19th century, but even several decades later, most national militaries still issued and relied on bolt-action rifles that fired only one shot at a time, limiting the amount of damage that could be done by any individual soldier to the enemy (O'Connell, 1989). The infamous Gatling Gun had also debuted before the turn of the 20th century; it also represented a tremendous advance in killing power, but it was so expensive to produce that only a few were ever produced and used in battle (O'Connell, 1989).

The most significant technological change introduced in World War I was the machine gun (O'Connell, 1989). It enabled a single soldier (assisted by another soldier loading continuous rounds) to decimate dozens and even hundreds of enemy soldiers in seconds. Battlefield commanders learned very quickly to deploy their machine gunners near the enemy's flank where the angle of engagement exposed much larger numbers of enemy troops than a frontal position directly opposing oncoming waves of enemy soldiers. Equally important was the use of barbed wire deployed in the so-called "no-man's land" in between enemy positions at the front lines. The barbed wire was originally invented for benign use by the cattlemen of the American West, but in conjunction with the deployment of machine guns in the World War I battlefields of France and Belgium (in particular), it increased tremendously the already murderous power of the machine gun (Esposito, 1964).

The Evolution of Trench Warfare

Together, it was the machine gun and the barbed wire that resulted in the evolution of front-line warfare that had characterized military conflicts for many centuries into the trench warfare memorialized by writers and historians in the post World War I era. Previously, opposing units of soldiers armed with single-shot rifles typically stood in lines and faced one another across a distance of a few hundred yards. After firing, the front line would retreat to reload as the next line of soldiers with loaded weapons stepped to the front to maintain continuous fire (O'Connell, 1989). The deployment of a single machine gun nest (consisting of a machine gunner and one or two loaders) decimated entire units of enemy soldiers deployed in that traditional configuration and the carnage was further magnified by strategic placement of dual machine gun nests as close to the flanks of the enemy as possible (O'Connell, 1989). As a result, the soldiers involved in first major battles of World War I in France and Belgium dug trenches that ran for miles across the infamous Western Front, living and dying in them for years in perpetual strategic stalemate attributable to the murderous power of the machine gun.

Tanks, Combat Aircraft, U-Boats, Poison Gas, and Trench Knives

One of the most top-secret developments in World War I-era weapons and armaments was the tank, first used by the British and French. In fact, the term tank that has been used ever since 1915 was originally part of the cover story used to conceal the nature of the massive equipment being transported to the war zone; the shipments were referred to as large water tanks necessary to provide water to soldiers (Nevins & Commager, 1992). The deployment of tanks eventually helped the British and French break the long stalemate of trench warfare by providing the means to overrun German trenches protected by machine gunners (Nevins & Commager, 1992). Unfortunately, by then, both sides had already experienced the loss of more than ten-thousand troops in single battles as wave after wave of soldiers on foot attempted to cross no-man's land to storm enemy troops using traditional combat tactics from the era of warfare prior to the mechanized machine gun (Esposito, 1964).

World War I also saw the first use of combat aircraft and submarines. Initially, aircraft were only used for aerial surveillance but enemy pilots began firing small arms at one another and by dropping bricks and then hand-held bombs on enemy positions (O'Connell, 1989). By the end of the war, state-of-the-art specialized combat aircraft were battling one another in aerial dogfights and the first bombers (including gas-filled dirigibles) actually accounted for approximately 1,500 civilian deaths from strategic bombing of enemy nations (O'Connell, 1989). More than any other new technology first used during World War I, the combat aircraft would undergo rapid development and evolve into the devastating weapons of mass destruction used by both sides two decades later in World War II. The Germans also pioneered the use of submarines, using their U-Boats effectively to decimate Atlantic shipping of arms and supplies to the Allies and, eventually, probably ensuring the involvement of the United States after the infamous sinking of the Lusitania (Goldfield, Abbot, Argersinger, et al., 2005).

Whereas the first tanks and combat aircraft may have been the most effective new technology introduced to the battlefield of World War I, the poison gas attacks were the most lethal. Both sides used artillery shells loaded with mustard gas and chlorine gas that kill by causing uncontrollable burning and fluid buildup in the lungs, and by causing suffocation identical to drowning (Esposito, 1964). The horrific carnage caused by poison gas inspired the immediate banning of their use by international consensus after the war (MacMillan, 2001). Individual soldiers also crafted deadly weapons for vicious hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches, such as the triple-edged trench knife (MacMillan, 2001). With a thick, triangle-shaped blade, this type of trench knife (i.e. any knife with more than two edges) was also prohibited by the Geneva Convention after the war because it resulted in injuries that made it virtually impossible to stop bleeding (Esposito, 1964). The rationale for the ban was simply that a soldier stabbed with a large knife in vital areas of the body would already be rendered completely incapacitated; but there was no purpose served by ensuring his death thereafter (MacMillan, 2001).