World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it. There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability. Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundreds of thousands. And the weapons themselves could fire farther and more rapidly, and more accurately than ever before.

Even though the technology of warfare had advanced dramatically, the strategy and tactics had not. We talked a bit about this in the episodes on the American civil war, but World War I took it to a whole new level. The real upshot of the changes in technology meant that an army that was well dug-in to a defensive position had a huge advantage over an army that was trying to attack them. Men in defensive positions were relatively safe, but men advancing over open fields to attack the defensive positions were incredibly vulnerable to artillery, machine guns, and even just plain rifle fire.

The military leaders of WWI knew this, but they didn’t really take it to heart until pretty late in the war. So we’re about to go into about 4 straight years of brutal trench warfare on the western front.

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