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May 20, 2021 · These machine guns all played a significant role in World War I and contributed to the massive death tolls and casualty numbers that the war is remembered for. It also gained mass use among most of the main nations involved in the events of World War I. For example, in 1912, the United States Army only issued four machine guns per regiment but ...
- Rifles
The bayonets were useful in close hand-to-hand combat, since...
- Tanks
The large number of casualties was the result, in part, of...
- Weapons of World War I
This was especially evident along the trenches of the...
- Airplanes
Pilots were tasked with taking photographs of the...
- Poison Gas
There were several different types of poison gases used on...
- Airships
Airships played a significant role in World War I alongside...
- Rifles
- WW1 Rifles
- WW1 Machine Guns
- WW1 Flamethrowers
- WW1 Mortars
- WW1 Artillery
- WW1 Poison Gas
- WW1 Tanks
- WW1 Aircraft
- WW1 Submarines
All nations used more than one type of firearm during the First World War. The rifles most commonly used by the major combatants were, among the Allies, the Lee-Enfield .303 (Britain and Commonwealth), Lebel and Berthier 8mm(France), Mannlicher–Carcano M1891, 6.5mm (Italy), Mosin–Nagant M1891 7.62 (Russia), and Springfield 1903 .30–06 (USA). The Ce...
Most machine guns of World War 1 were based on Hiram Maxim’s1884 design. They had a sustained fire of 450–600 rounds per minute, allowing defenders to cut down attacking waves of enemy troops like a scythe cutting wheat. There was some speculation that the machine gun would completely replace the rifle. Contrary to popular belief, machine guns were...
Reports of infantry using some sort of flame-throwing device can be found as far back as ancient China. During America’s Civil War some Southern newspapers claimed Abraham Lincoln had observed a test of such a weapon. But the first recorded use of hand-held flamethrowers in combat was on February 26, 1915, when the Germans deployed the weapon at Ma...
Mortars of World War I were far advanced beyond their earlier counterparts. The British introduced the Stokes mortar design in 1915, which had no moving parts and could fire up to 22 three-inch shells per minute, with a range of 1,200 yards. The Germans developed a mortar (minenwerfer, or “mine thrower”) that had a 10-inch barrel and fired shells l...
The 20th century’s most significant leap in traditional weapons technology was the increased lethality of artillery due to improvements in gun design, range and ammunition‚—a fact that was all too clear in the Great War, when artillery killed more people than any other weapon did. Some giant guns could hurl projectiles so far that crews had to take...
On April 22, 1915, German artillery fired cylinders containing chlorine gas in the Ypres area, the beginning of gas attacks in the First World War. Other nations raced to create their own battlefield gases, and both sides found ways to increase the severity and duration of the gases they fired on enemy troop concentrations. Chlorine gasattacked the...
Ideas for “land battleships” go back at least as far as the Medieval Era; plans for one are included among the drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. The long-sought weapon became reality during the First World War. “Tank” was the name the British used as they secretly developed the weapon, and it stuck, even though the French simultaneously developed the ...
The air war of World War I continues to fascinate as much as it did at the time. This amazing new technology proved far more useful than most military and political leaders anticipated. Initially used only for reconnaissance, before long planes were armed with machine guns. Once Anthony Fokker developed a method to synchronize a machine gun’s fire ...
Britain, France, Russia and the United States of America had all developed submarine forces before Germany began development of its Unterzeeboats (Undersea boats, or U-boats)in 1906, but during World War I submarines came to be particularly associated with the Imperial German Navy, which used them to try to bridge the gap in naval strength it suffe...
Firing several hundred bullets per minute, machine-guns were devastating weapons, especially when used against enemy troops on open ground. Early Doubts. Machine-guns pre-dated the First World War by half a century and were in widespread use by 1914, but doubts about their role and effectiveness limited the use of machine-guns in most pre-war ...
There were a meager 12,000 guns by the time the war broke out in 1914. That number, however, would explosively grow to become 100,000 guns in a very short time. By 1917, the Germans were reporting that the majority of their small arms ammunition, 90% to be exact, were going into the chambers of their machine guns. This was a sobering thought.
The 1914 machine gun, usually positioned on a flat tripod, would require a gun crew of four to six operators. In theory they could fire 400-600 small-calibre rounds per minute, a figure that was to more than double by the war's end, with rounds fed via a fabric belt or a metal strip. The reality however was that these early machine guns would ...
Between 1914 and 1918, the machine gun played an ever-increasing role on the battlefield. Today, even though artillery was responsible for the majority of deaths, the machine gun is the weapon most commonly associated with the First World War in the popular imagination. This overestimates its importance, but also fails to comprehend real advances made in the field of automatic weapons during ...
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May 26, 2024 · The Lewis Gun used by British and American forces weighed 13 kg and could be carried by a single soldier. The French Chauchat was even lighter at 9 kg. While less powerful than heavy machine guns, these weapons gave the infantry a crucial source of mobile automatic fire. *A British soldier with a Lewis gun in 1918.
