Crossing No Man’s Land: The Birth of Combined Arms

I'm really quiet hello everybody my name is chance McGinnis and I am a member of the Dole Institute Student Advisory Board the official student group here at the dole first of all welcome to the dole Institute politics and thank you for attending today's program presented by the department of military history at the command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth the DOE Institute would like to hear from you about today's program please let us know if you have any feedback by contacting us on social media or via email at the bill Institute at kegg you to view past programs visit our online archive at wwl institute org a video today's presentation will also be on our website soon we would like to encourage each of you to consider becoming Friends of the DOE Institute our friends program help you our program free and open and it supports archive research and our student activities please contact us if you are interested after the presentation we all have some time for the audience to ask questions if you have a question please raise your hand and a student worker will come to with a microphone will come to you please stand if you're able and ask just one brief question before we begin I'd like to remind you to please turn off your cell phones and now please join me in welcoming dr. Tom Hanson the director of the department of military history at the command College at Fort Leavenworth [Applause] good afternoon everybody and thank you for taking the time out of your afternoon to join us today I'd also like to thank the Dole Institute for continuing to be very gracious hosts for the history for the military mind lecture series this is our fifth year of producing this lecture series and your attendance is testament to its popularity so thank you very much it is my distinct pleasure to introduce dr. Sean Faulkner who is one of the country's preeminent historians of the First World War particularly the American experience he is a retired armored officer he's a graduate of that other University in Kansas that I won't mention but more importantly he's the author of two books on the American experience in World War one the first called the school of hard knocks which is about combat experience and the second which was just published by the University Press of Kansas is called Pershing's Crusaders which is a detailed examination of all things Doughboy in 1917 and 1918 and you're about to get a presentation on some of the challenges that those doughboys faced when they arrived in France in 1917 about how to get across that protected area so they could actually get to the enemy and force a decision so please join me in welcoming dr. Sean Faulkner [Applause] I'd like to think that dole Institute for inviting me out today to lecture and also their continued support of our Department lecture series with them now I do have to ask a question if there's anybody here who gets easily depressed this is probably not the briefing for you we're going to talk about some ugly things some ugly aspects of human history military history and if you look at it there's three things I want to accomplish today one is to explain why there is a trench stalemate on the Western Front world war one then we're going to examine the trials and tribulations is that different combatants tried to break this stalemate and lastly and the process of figuring out this devil's dilemma how the combatants inadvertently create modern warfare in other words the warfare the doctrine that we teach it for look worth today in many ways is just the grandchildren of what these people are learning with Blood Sweat toil and tears and World War one now when you look at the Great War does it have a great reputation when those people think about when they think about trench warfare when they think about trench warfare they think about utter futility sending hundreds of thousands of young men the best and the brightest to Europe for their death to accomplish nothing and there's some truth to this in fact there's a bunch of myths that start to arise and world war one and like all of us they have elements of truth and one of the ones that came in the 1960s is this one that these armies of World War one consisted of lions young veera patriotic young men who were led to their death by donkeys Lions led by donkeys and there's some truth to this I mean you feel like it Douglas Haig the commander of the British Army he's about a 2-1 bull okay he's a pretty dumb guy and World War one puts a puts a black eye on the military profession that we still never overcome in fact one of the words it comes out or when the terms is Chateau generalship that the generals like Douglas Haig stayed well behind the lines in Chateau drinking champagne and bounce of mademoiselle's on their days while their soldiers died in the front with the generals having no conception of what they're asking the soldiers to do and again there's some truth to this but as we look at some of the mists we'll see why Chateau generalship actually came about but what I'm gonna ask you to do tonight is to think about some of these myths and when I ask you to give a little sympathy for the devil these officers these generals are confronted with something between 1914 and 1918 that nothing in their previous education nothing in their experience and nothing in their training has prepared them for and they have to puzzle it out one of the biggest plays I have to deal with is this in the fifty years between the ending of the American Civil War and the beginning of world war one sees one of the most fundamental and revolutionary changes in military technology in human history in fact some would argue that there is more that happens and military technological change in those 50 years then it occurred in the previous three millennia of human existence and this just gives you an example of what's changing and the American Civil War rifleman was getting off three shots a minute if he was lucky he could hit a man-sized target at 400 meters thanks to the Frenchman named Paul BL he invents focus powder with the changes of this second Industrial Revolution you get all these new ideas you take smokeless powder you made it to a new weapon system the magazine bolt-action rifle so by the time you get to World War one the infantryman is getting off 15 to 20 shots a minute but there's more time to the Civil War the Canon was getting off maybe one one and a half shots a minute and the range was pretty limited at these shells that they were fired and were not effective but by the time you get to World War one you see a massive change in 1897 the French come out with a French 75 gun the world's first modern artillery base and what makes it modern is not only that it's a breech loader not only that it's firing fixed ammunition now but the most importantly underneath that barrel is a hydraulic recoil mechanism you follow the Civil War cannon goes rolling way back and you have to laborious ly move it back into position thanks to that French invention when you fired it it stays right there what that means is by the time of World War one the artilleryman we're getting off 15 to 20 shots a minute other words for a surge period of time a French art ornament could fire that cannon as rapidly as the infantrymen to fire the rival last but not least 1886 an American named Hiram Maxim invents the world's first true automatic weapon the maxim gun he uses physics each action has an equal but opposite reaction you put a big spring on the side of the boat when it fires the spring catches the bolt runs it back into battery when you automate fire that way you now to create a weapon that is able to fire five to six hundred rounds a minute now when you take bolt-action rifles when you take rapid-fire modern artillery and you take back some guns what that means is the battlefield is a much more deadly place than it was for the soldiers of Civil War now a bit is these silly generals had no idea that all this technological change was going to change warfare that's absolutely bunk they absolutely know that this is going to cause problems in fact if they didn't figure it out a Russian name you vonda block is also told of this in 1898 you vonda block writes a very influential book called the future of war where he says if you look at the amount of development in weapons and you look at the lethality that it's going to create and you look at how much now these societies are going to have to feed into war warfare has fundamentally changed and is it going to be devastating to your society he actually creates apocalyptic visions where the soldiers on the new battlefield will actually take and break build barricades if their dead comrades to hide from the fire now if you're a military guy and you really Devon the block he is just giving you a very ugly thing to think a long attritional war will destroy you in fact the block says that the amount of resources you're going to pour into this and Blood Sweat toil interiors needs it ultimately your societies are going to collapse into revolution they're not going to be able to keep doing this the generals take this to heart they have seen the effects of this firepower they've seen it in the Boer War they've seen it in the russo-japanese war and they've seen in the Balkan wars they are absolutely aware how deadly the battlefield is going to be the problem is they don't know what to do about it and if vonda block might be right so going into world war one you have a number of assumptions that all of the combatants are making first and most importantly is was inevitable it's going to happen now there's that argument that once you say it's going to happen you probably make it inevitable but that's neither here nor there they absolutely believe that it's going to be bloody but they also have convinced themselves that it's going to be short the side that mobilizes first decide that moves first decide that attacks first will be the one that achieves victory and while we will have monumental casualties it'll be in a short amount of time and then the war will be over they make their plans around a short order and we'll see how that's going to affect them when they get the word that they don't anticipate of course the German solution of this is the sleep implant what Winston Churchill calls the most important public document perhaps in human history this is the Germans attempt to make sure that Yvonne de block is wrong if we can mobilize a move before the French armies can get going we can knock the French army out of the war we can avoid all of that firepower because we're going to hit them on the flanks in the rear and then we can turn and deal with the Russians and I love that quote from Woody Allen if you want to make God laugh tell him your plans as we all know this plan goes off the rails and in a disastrous fashion in September of 1940 with a bottle of battle of the marne so by the time you have early October 1914 you have two armies glaring at each other north of Paris along the a river and the first thing they're trying to do is now find the flank of the other folks because then they can get the momentum back they can gain the initiative problem is the other guys thinking the same thing and so by the time you get to November of 1914 you now have nearly an unbroken line of trenches on line broken line of troops going 400 miles from the North Sea in Belgium all the way to Swiss border and these opening weeks of the war have been devastated in fact on one day the 22nd of August 1914 the French lose 27,000 dead just to put that into perspective in nearly seventeen years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq the US military has lost 6997 day and they don't have an answer to this the soldiers though have figured out something if you're going to live on this battlefield you had better dig deep because only by digging into mother earth are you going to escape the nasty bullets the nasty shells that are flying and in 1914 this is what those trenches look like they're pretty basic in fact that they're really just scrapes in the ground and at this point in time of the war all it would take is fresh troops heavy artillery and shells to dig them out that's the problem when you go into the war with a short war mentality if you don't plan for a long war that you don't plan for industrial mobilisation you don't plan for bringing it more reinforcements this is going to become as you are war and by the time that the nations of Europe slowly but painfully get those mobilization juices flowing those trenches go from this something that can easily be pierced to this and now you have a problem these donkeys leading the Lions are the first to figure this out Ferdinand sociable and the wars that Generalissimo of all the Allied army prior to the war had been an instructor at the French War College and so in the late fall of 1914 this is what he turns to his staff and tells them guys I was wrong forget what I trained you on and we're all going to have to learn together now here's the problem this is an actual British trench map from the Somme front of 1916 if you were to look at this trench map as a military professional prior to World War one you'd be lost there's new things on this map that weren't there before first of all the whole map is gridded off because the new killer on the battlefield is artillery and the gridding of this off will now allow you to better use the artillery if you will notice there you've got these little red squiggly lines those red lines are the German trenches and the way that you find out about the German trenches is setting you up for one of the other realities of world war one and no other human endeavor is necessity war the mother of invention and warfare if our children is going to be the big killer then you have to figure out what the enemy's trenches are where their concentration is a way to do that is you now take this new toy called the airplane you fly it over their lines and you take pictures are you going to adjust your artillery you fly the aircraft over the lines and have them spot where the artillery needs to fall but now what we see is this race the minute of both sides mutually find out that aviation the high ground is going to be one of the things is going to give them the advantage but on the battlefield you start to see this arms race and we'll see this come back time and time again in World War one the minute you think you've got something figured out the minute that you've got a cool new weapon system that gives you an advantage it tells the other guy that they had to better find another way to overcome it or find a way to go one more you see this in the development of aircraft you see that aircraft at the top that's the aircraft that the Germans start war one with at all because the wings look like a dub top is German for dove it's barely an improvement old through the Wright Flyer that had just flown 13 years before it's not armed it flies over makes its little notes comes back but now it's my advantage to find that table and shoot it down and to keep the Germans from doing that to me so we call this the challenge in response dynamic and in fact in 1915 you'll get the world's first spider climb and as soon as the Germans come out with this spider plane now the Allies have to match it you see how rapidly the development of these weapon systems is occurring over the space of the war today we have something called the f-35 fighter plane it's been developed for 30 years and we still can't get it to fly out gets opposed to the air fly air life of an aviation of an airplane world war one is measured in months not years because within a few months the other guy is coming up with something that'll go higher go faster go further have more weapons than what you have and now you've gotta up your game but now we're going to take this map and look at the devil's dilemma that is trench warfare when you look at the trenches it's not a single trench these trenches are actually laid out in depth and you see on our map here we have three lines of trenches three belts of trenches on the sole now just to have some fun forward of those belts of trenches are state they're barbed wire six to ten yards deep okay this is Herman Beauvoir I actually dug it up from right here okay now you know this is Kansas a nice agricultural state has he ever seen any barbed wire like that now that's that's German anal-retentive barbed wire right and you have that barbed wire of forward of you trenches for one major thing you're not gonna stop the attack but you want to hold the attackers in no-man's land that's faced between your trenches the enemy's trenches as long as you possibly can because that's where you're going to do the majority of the killer so let's look at our problem we have our three belts of trenches we'll take it step by step by step the first step is easy you've got to get up out of your trenches of the attacker and you've got across no-man's land simple Oh the minute you step out of your trench how much of you does the enemy see the full monty how much of him do you see about that much we've got an issue now something has to happen to keep the enemy's head down to kill him to wound them to make him scared to make him run away to give my guys a hope in hell a chance they're getting up out of their trenches and cross the no-man's land now you would think well you just bring your machine guns with you well but I didn't tell you the problem with that maxim gun that German maxim gun weighs 124 pounds that's just the gun then there's all the ammunition in the water because it's a water-cooled machine gun you know what you look like crossing no-man's land with 124 pound machine gun slow moving target please insert bullet here okay there's no problem so there's my first aluminum I've got to find a way to keep their heads down because then I will get to the second dilemma once I cross no man's land that the fun has just started now I have to clear the enemy out of the first line of trenches now crossing around no man's land you can probably assume that you have taken some pretty heavy casualties so I have to at that point of penetration when I jump in the enemy's trench I have better have or guys a lot more Muldoon's with me and they have defending okay so I've crossed no-man's land I have jumped into the first set of trenches but now I've got to rinse and repeat I've got to break through now the next belt the trenches and I've got to go on and get to the next belt the trenches after that now here's the problem if I am lucky enough to have captured the first set of trenches I'm spent I've lost too many officers of aust to many soldiers I'm short on ammunition you can't rely on those guys to continue the attack they're done so now to break through the subsequent miles of trenches I've got to bring out fresh troops and I've got to bring up more supplies oh here's the catch each one of those successive waves of troops coming to take out the next belts of trenches after cross no man's land and all of that nastiness in between once I capture a trench I know dang well that the Germans are going to counter-attack it's part of their doctor that means that I have to bring all the equipment with me so when I capture that trench I can now set it up for the defence that means at the battle some British soldiers are carrying 65 to 85 pounds of gear Crossing no-man's land and if your crop here in no-man's land eighty-five pounds of gear when you look like slow-moving target places are full here it would be good and they're doing that time and time again now then if you're successful you get to the good stuff you can go to challenge for I have crossed no-man's land I have broken into the first set of trenches I have broken through the subsequent trench sets of trenches and now I can break out into the open where the Germans now can't hide behind their trenches through the mud through the blood to the green green fields beyond it's official say simple well it's that's a little complication I like to put things into perspective folks can sort of relate to I love this man this is one of those maps created by guys flying over the enemy trenches this is a trench map that the the Anzac Corps the Australian New Zealand Corps developed in 1917 for the Battle of Ypres now sort of hard to see but each one of those little greenish greenish rectangles is a German infantry company and what we have here in a space that's only three miles deep by four miles across are three German divisions let's just say for sake of argument of a strength of about 14,000 men standard military doctrine that is that the attacker needs a three to one advantage to overcome the defence so now I'm from Lansing actually about love worth if you were to take and put this into perspective in that three mile by four mile area would be every man woman and child and Lansing and Leavenworth defending that area and to when the attacker is going to have to kill have to capture half the wound or have to make those guys run away if I'm going to break through here now at a three to one advantage hmm it would require every man woman and child in Kansas City Kansas to break through on a three mile by four mile front but here's the deal that technology that had been developed is giving most of the advantage to the defenders so really in World War one it's not a three to one advantage it's really a five to one advantage that you need to break through so that means to take out every man woman and child and Lance and Leavenworth I need the entire population of Kansas City Kansas and every man woman and child in Douglas County in Kansas to make it through but I still got to get back to just crossing no-man's land that if the good people of Douglas County and Kansas City Kansas want to live to get on the other side and they really want to kill as many people chip defenders in those trenches as they possibly can and the first thing they turn to is artillery and artillery is going to be the big killer on the battlefield 70 percent of the war specialties will be caused by shell fire so now we've got to figure out how to best use the artillery to get what we need to suppress the enemy to keep them down on the hole or kill them to give my attackers a hope and what you see here is the Allies trying to figure this out now before the lecture I actually paced off the area it's six yards across and if you look at this these are the pounds of shell that are falling within every yard of trench this is a World War one shell from a French 75 gun that it lays right around 15 pounds that's just an average shell so when the British finally gets success on the 14th of July the magic number they come up with is 660 pounds of shell falling for every organ now I'm a history guy so I'd have to take off my shoes to do the addition but you sort of see that there's a lot of shells just falling within this area but you'll notice even though they sort of figure that out they're still going back and forth how many guys are shocked by this uh this quote yeah for now folks again we go back to him he's if he's a good guy it's probably telling the truth though what you're seeing here is figuring it out that we had to have been a whole new science of artillery during the Great War you are inventing it as they go the same tactics the same procedures that the US Army uses today were figured out 1914 to 1918 the problem with 660 shells is that's a lot of people back home doing a lot of production the politicians are telling the generals you guys figure it out our society is under immense pressure and at the end of the day Banda block may be right I'm not so sure how we can push people before they crack generals I can't keep giving you 660 pounds of shell or yard a trench figure out what that sweet pot spot is to do it and so what foix is telling you is sadly the truth that in this Revolutionary period of warfare these generals have to learn the craft have to figure out the new realities something they've never been prepared for and sadly when you figure it out it's costing human lives to do it but there's a second problem when you start firing 660 pounds of shell per yard of trench you are literally changing the face of the earth I love these pictures little little farmhouse bouquet form on the sole that's what that looks like in June of 1916 and that's what that same farmhouse looks like less than three months later you see the same thing with a little Belgian town of Passchendaele you believe that you have to do this to allow your infantry to attack but you're creating huge amounts of problems first of all just for the attackers getting out of their trench and crossing no-man's land it's slowing down their movement forward but the biggest problem is even if you're successful now and capturing the first set of trenches maybe you've been the second and third set of trench you have so changed the surface of the earth you've created an impassable zone so you have made it damn near impossible to go to the fourth phase even if you wanted to because I don't have to bring my artillery across this my big stick my big killer I'm gonna have to bring fresh troops and we have to bring fresh supplies and to get them across this shell toward ground means I'm gonna have to have engineers working and digging and working and digging and the amount of time it actually takes to clear the path to fix this the Germans have dropped back 10 and dug in somewhere else hmm we also have another problem Wow weapons technology has continued to grow at a fast pace other technology specifically command and control technology signal technology has stagnated this is what you can use the most modern piece of equipment that most combat soldiers have for commanding control is the telephone and one of the reasons that you have Chateau generalship a troll or one guy's trying to direct the battle well behind the line is that's where the telephones come to and if you try to go forward as a general and to the front line you now aren't controlling and commanding anyone but the problem with that landline has anything to break it you do have that new technology in the lower right hand corner wireless telegraphy but that weighs 2,000 pounds and it's not going across no-man's land any time soon and because you cannot quickly communicate with the soldiers at the front not only is command and control a problem but your use of the big stick artillery is a problem this is another one of those battle maps from vivvy Ridge in April of 1917 all those little lines there are where the artillery is going to fall this is a creepy barrage my artillery guys are my infantry guys unlike today can't pick up the phone and call and get fired you have to pre and every artillery bombardment and you make the best that you can out of this I'm going to put all this line on the map I'm gonna drop the artillery right here and then at a pre time free agreed-upon time it will then move on to the next line and the hope is your infantry will stay right behind that creeping barrage right till they jump in the trench and take out the Germans but you saw what that terrain look like and the problem here since I don't have responsive communications is the artillery guys are gonna adhere to this plan at this time I'm doing this and I'm gonna stop move fifteen meters on and I'm gonna do it again and if the infantry is stopped the barrage keeps going and it's never coming back but as the Allies are figuring this out and venting this new science of artillery they're learning how to use this thing as a hammer and they can the Germans are under a British blockade they have a limited access to supplies the British and the French can rely upon a huge world-spanning empire and oh by the way the good people the United States to keep building them shells and over the course of the Battle of Verdun in 1916 and over the course of the battle to Seoul even though it is a disaster on the first day for the British Army by the time those battles close and November December of 1916 the Allies have slowly and painfully learned how to use artillery as a hammer I don't like this Brit Square it offends me make it go away and everything in it you'll notice here that the casualty rates between the British and the French and the Germans at the Battle of the Somme despite that disaster on the first day by the time the battle grinds to an are almost equal part of that is the Germans have to learn to their doctorate is flawed and they've got to figure it out as they go along the original German doctrine is if you lose a trench you counter-attack and take it back now after you do that a few times the Allies figure that out hey you know I know we caught this trench let's say the Germans are gonna counter-attack and once you figure that out you do things like oK we've captured the trench how about you start leading artillery right in front of the trenches to destroy any counter-attacks that come through but now we've seen that twitch the German doctrine isn't working so they changed it to so in late 1916 they changed their tactical doctrine they actually give up parts of France to go to better terrain when you're in somebody else's backyard you can do that and they create a defensive depth an elastic defense in depth you take and use terrain now you don't go on the front side of the hill you go on the back side of the hill so the Allied artillery is not as effective you don't rely on huge numbers of trenches that can be seen by the aircraft you now go with concrete pillboxes with machine guns with interlocking fields of fire so when the Allies attack your observation post pick them up drop the artillery on they get to the top of the hill their skyline and you start bringing in as much fire as you can the minute that the Allies go to the other side of the hill the officers and those chateaus have no idea where they are and now the Allies have to pick their way through these interlocking machine guns and as they're doing that they're getting at ridet their officers are getting lost they're short on supplies and then and only then the Germans launch their counter-attack so right when the Allies believed they figured it out the Germans change the game only one is also bringing in lots of high tech I've got to find something to give the guys an advantage as they're trying to to break through the trenches and restore mobility of the battlefield we have a the technologies that they're going to play with technologies that were some development we still see in the military today one of the first ones is you're going to start giving the infantryman a lot more firepower this is what a French infantry platoon and Brewer won a platoon is really the lowest tactical unit that you have that's what they look like in 1914 with their bright red breeches and their bright blue jackets the heaviest weapon that they have is the you put Truman's rifle this is the same Katoon by 1917 not only do the uniforms different but you have a lot fewer men you figured out if you're going to survive you would better get the soldiers a lot more training because you're gonna have to rely upon them and their leaders to use their own initiative and to make it easier for those junior officers and sergeants to command them you make them smaller but as you make them smaller it give them a lot more weapons interestingly this infantry platoon looks a lot like my son's infantry platoon in Alaska he's an infantry private so this wood looks familiar to him we've got some other high-tech in 1915 the Germans come up with the idea of using poison gas as a way of breaking through no-man's land crossing no man's land and breaking through and Frank Fritz Harbor who will later get a Nobel Prize for his work in nitrogen will be the one who comes up with this and it's a pretty brutally simple idea if you are coughing your guts out if you are dying or you were running away you're not shooting it my infantry as they're attacking and when the Germans first used this on the 22nd of April 1915 it works they actually knocked a whole the Allied lines seven miles across three and a half miles people so as we know the Germans didn't do stuff to Paris and in the war there are some problems poison gas works but when you were talking about using gas you are now reliant upon the weather and the Germans have to postpone this attack time and time again to get just the right weather conditions the problem of Germany is it's already short of manpower so they can't afford to have a lot of guys sitting behind the line waiting for an attack that might not come so by the time the weather conditions are right and they use poison gas the reserves that the German army had earmarked for that offensive have already been moved somewhere else there's also a human problem here think about how you would try to explain this to the German soldier hey Hans we got a cool new weapon they call it human raid we're gonna release it from big capsules and it's gonna float across no-man's land with a big green cloud of chlorine oh you got to do is follow the bouncing Greek club now for the German soldier you're told this you know what you say nein what are you crazy okay they're all from Missouri show me show me that this stuff works and so they sort of I'm coming dragging their feet and by the time they've actually realized how big of success they've had the Allies have counter attacked and closed off the salient now the problem with gas is the cats out of the bag and within days not within weeks not within months within days of the first use of poison gas you get the first gas masks pretty freakin basic right all that is the cotton wadding pad that has a basically a bicarbonate soda solution you keep it wet word over your nose your mouth and I just for cool you have some little steampunk goggles that do your glasses you come up with this and get them in the trenches within the first five days now what really shocked me and I've studied more for a while now it's maybe a deep dark cynic you know you study military history it'll make you a cynical person and you look at the amount of it I thought that's going into the weapons technology it'll depress you you know find a cure for cancer screw that find a way to kill off half the population you're up sign us up so the minute that chlorine gas doesn't work they don't say oh well that was a good idea they go with a better gas and so within a couple of months they come up with phosgene and Farzin is it's actually the biggest killer gas of World War one it's largely colorless and largely odorless just a real faint smell and it kills because the soldiers don't have an immediate response to it like chlorine so you Rin it you're sucking it in and you're actually getting a lethal dose without knowing it and so you die a couple of days later now that's horrible but the generals go that's nice but what have you done for me lately I don't want the guys to crack right now I need immediate results and of course as soon as you come out with chlorine our aggression phosgene you come out with a new gas mask and finally in 1917 of course you come out with a worst gas in the law mustard gas now mustard gas is what we call a blister agent so when it gets on your skin and raises these huge nasty pus-filled blisters that it tends to affect the moist areas of the body must be rolling your eyes your nose your mouth or our beds gentlemen other places and we get mustered to know those other places you don't feel like playing soldier anymore right now that's bad enough but of course if you breathe that mustard gas in now those nasty big pus-filled blisters are on your lungs and what happens is over time to continue to grow they pop they fill your lungs with fluid and you drowned but the minute that you come out with that the Allies of course come out with a new gas - this is the British small box respirator the Americans will basically bake their masks based upon this and it will protect you against mustard unlike a modern gas mask it's not airtight okay so there's kill me some of that mustard gas that gets in to make it work just to give you an idea how nasty this is you have to use this clip to keep your nose closed and you have to breathe in and out of this - yeah now anybody's been a snorkeler here I hate snorkeling after a couple minutes my jaw starts to hurt mustard is persistent so you will have this north but when your teeth for three to four hours it will severely restrict your vision but at least keep you from dying and until the end of the war basically now that you've had a defense against the gas it becomes more harassment a way of neutralizing some of the advantages of one side of the other but not something that's going to kill a lot of guys that'll change when the Americans come in will suffer a number of casualties of gas mostly because we are horribly trained and trained troops that know how to use the gas mask actually don't do too bad so we've tried poison gas that hasn't fixed the problem in September of 1916 we come up with something really cool now I was a tanker I like to ride around on tanks and this is my great-great-granddaddy a tank is a pretty simple idea mobile protective firepower I'm going to take something that can cross through all of that shell torn ground it's going to be able to crush that nasty German barbed wire it's got armor protection so the machine guns can't get it and some of the shells can't get in and it's going to have machine guns and cannons to destroy the German strong points to destroy the German machine guns now here's the problem you know how you get a tank in 1916 yeah out of the day but they look around the world and come up with some ideas in the United States there's something called a Holt agricultural tractor being used in farms around Lawrence for example pulling plows and other things it's on a caliper tractor this things that you need to go across nasty mud so the Brits take this American idea a hold agricultural drag tractor and they bolt on hillbilly armor now hold agricultural tractor is designed to do a lot of things putting a lot of big cannons and machine guns and armor plate on the outside is probably not one of them and you see this the first day that the tank is used on in September of 1916 you start the attack with 49 tanks and that's almost the entire number of tanks in the world at that time and a lot of them 17 of them don't even make it to the front they break down before they get there so you only begin the attack with 32 tanks and you see what happens from there good idea and it shows enough potential to get Douglas a this is one of his more lucid moments to go hey these tanks are pretty cool worth investing in good idea but the technology is still not there yet so by the time you get to August of 1988 you get the Battle of Amiens the black day of the German army where the British Army basically cracks through the German lines you still have this problem you start with 453 tanks but you see what happens by the end of the first day of battle you're down to 155 tanks a day after that 85 tanks anybody tell me what you think's gonna happen by the 12th of August you're not gonna have any tanks okay that's bad this is a good idea and you were developing these concepts of combine warfare in fact the Battle of Amiens the British are combining airpower aircraft strafing the Germans and also aircraft going deep to interdict their flow of supplies and reinforcements combined with artillery combined with tanks combined with infantry together they are seeing the way in fact the combined arms that we use today in the US Army is not a whole half a lot different than what they were doing here but the technology has still not developed enough to make it reliable now if we're the Germans you've got a problem you've been fighting a two-front war and 1917 is going to be a break here for them on the plus side the Russians go off in revolution and by early 1918 they will remove themselves from the war thus freeing you from a two-front war probably as the Germans do some goofy things that require the ability of a million men to get their ill-gotten gains in the Ukraine on the downside in April of 1917 the United States enters the war Germany is on the ropes their economy is on the ropes people at home are beginning to feel the effects of starvation because of the British blockade while the Allies are fielding tanks and more and more artillery pieces and shells the Germans can't match it they can't match you tank for tank in fact most of the tanks that the German army uses are actually captured from British the French they surely can't make enough artillery and they can't make enough sales to match it they can't fight the war that the Allies are fighting and they know if they don't find a solution to this war quickly and early 1918 they're going to lose it the Americans are coming and the Americans are coming pay the red line is the German rifle strength on the Western Front in April of 1918 the blue line is the allied rifle strength and they're gonna roll the dice in 1918 to see if they can win the war but you'll notice that their manpower advantage is still not that great now the Germans have also gone through those same changes at the lower levels that you saw with that French platoon this is what a German infantry battalion looks like in 1914 they don't even have their own machine guns that's kept up at the regiment this is that same battalion by 1917 so now I am giving the battalion commander and the company commanders a lot more weapons because I'm expecting them to do a lot more stuff on their own but the Germans are going to take this one step further because they have to if I can't match the Allies in technology and I can't match the Allies and output of shells the only solution the Germans have is to try to do things better so by 1918 they fielded both new artillery tactics to get the most effectiveness out of their shells but they also develop a new infantry tactic they'll call them the storm through tactics hey those guys in star wars in the white uniforms it can't hit anything these guys are actually pretty specialized troops you're going to take these infantryman and not do mass attacks like you see it s almond Verdun what you're gonna do is give these guys a lot of specialty training you're going to give them a lot of heavy weapons and you're going to send them out what I want you to do is go around the strong points of the enemy infiltrate through the Allied lines take out the machineguns from the rear but then I want you to keep driving deep I want you these little groups of soldiers highly trained specialists soldiers so then go deep against the enemy command post and I want you to go deep against the enemy's artillery because if you can take out the enemy's artillery and you can take out their command post you're going to break the ability of the Allies to do that technical magic that they've been doing with their artillery and you're even going to reorganize them again you saw what the infantry battalion looked like in 1917 this is what that stormtrooper battalion looks like you are specializing the units and you are giving them an unprecedented amount of light weapons so they could accomplish the mission you're giving them exercised their own initiative but here the Germans are stopped if you're going to get these specially trained soldiers who can exercise initiative and have the smarts to take advantage of opportunities that rise and fall in the battlefield they use a special type of soldier you're looking for they need to be young they need to be in very good shape and they need to be smarter than the average bear the problem is by 1918 those guys are dead so the Germans pull out some tricks to get these type of soldiers in these specialized units what they basically do is go through all the other regular infantry divisions and say okay here's our good guys I've taken all of these and I'm leaving you with of me all beat up guys okay and they're going to use these storm troopers and the Ludendorff offensive 21 March 1918 and again they're going to tactically do some wonderful stuff they attack the British on the Somme front and they push the British back to where they started the Battle of Somme in July of 1960 but the problem is when you have these elite troops it's the same problem we have today that elite specialist troops are exceptionally fragile and these stormtroopers doing wonderful things are taking inordinate lehigh casualties so these German pushes are running out of steam because the guys are just moving basically on their feet like infantry there's no mechanization like you see with the Allied armies and when the attack doesn't work here on the Somme they'll shift it to another location and they'll have some breakthroughs but then it runs out of steam and every time they do this those elite troops are being at written one after the other so finally by the summer of 1918 who you left with me okay and I'm thinking about going home I'm just saying in the process though we've seen all this back and forth the change in technology the change of techniques and doctrine in the process of this ugly bloody experimentation the Allies essentially create modern conventional wars we know it today I love this analogy there's once an argument that said if you were to take a British infantry battalion commander from the Battle of Waterloo 1815 put him in a time machine and move him to move into June of 1940 before war and begins give them a quick class on but nology he understands the battlefield that infantry still basically worked the way that infantry did in his time that our Tillery still worked in the way artillery work cavalry still work the way the cowboy work 99 years in the past but if you were to take an infantry battalion commander from 1914 put him in a time machine and move him three years to the future east of Boston the pieces parts no longer work the way they did just four years before but if you were to take that infantry battalion commander from Amiens in 1918 move him to the Persian Gulf War of 1991 he understands the battlefield the planes are moving faster the tanks are cooler that the tankers are cooler to to saying but the pieces parts work the way the pieces parts did at his time okay thank you for your attention we've covered a lot of area we've killed off the flower of European manhood what are your questions [Applause] we press away from Mike thank you I have to kind of narrow questions sure when when you talked about how the Germans reorganized their command structure and whatever it towards the end of the war I notice the musicians dropped out was that true the munition musicians even in 1914 at battle are your stretcher bearers Oh dual service yeah yeah okay and by 1917 they're a real luxury you know the only place the Kaiser headquarters oh yeah there were it just caught my attention and then another narrow question I guess when you said a second Battle of the Somme they pushed him back to where they were three three years earlier yes how far was that in meters or yards I believe it somewhere online of 30 miles yes so I mean it's a piece of monumental breakthrough and it forces the Allies to make their own changes and the most important frankly has nothing to do with technology or all this it's about command and control that prior to the shock of the German breakthrough the French did their thing the British did their thing the Belgians did their thing in the Americans did their thing and so Ferdinand push that I keep addressing here in the and the lecturer finally everybody agrees we need a say supreme Allied commander to orchestrate everything and Foix is the man since France is still contributing the majority of the troops and suffering the greatest casualties it's a Frenchman who's going to leave it a good question thank you yes sir what aircraft did the United States contributed the United States to have any advanced aircraft for this or the the United States is a basket case going into World War one we wait 17th and the world behind Romania Portugal and the size of our army on the world 19:14 when we enter the war in April I believe we have something around 50 odd pilots and roughly 40 operational aircraft most of them are Kurdish ginnis which will spend the war as training planes the Americans will make a big deal about creating the Liberty engine and will put it in the British dh4 fuselage and the pilots will call it flaming coffins so we are not quite the the aeronautics masters that we are today this in fact because we are so willfully prepared and unprepared for the war the majority of our artillery all of our tanks majority of our machine guns and aircraft come from the Allies so Rickenbacker I believe starts with the Newport it goes to us bad that's where he wins it's my little honor as do most of our fighter pilots yes sir I can you give us any that's a kind of really like a lot of the players well you know this is a hard lesson and it leaves an indelible mark on everyone who participates in it George Patton will command the first tank brigade of the American Expeditionary Force he will see action at Samael in September early September 1918 I will then command the brigade going into the battle of new Sargon on the 26th of September and will be severely wounded in the first day of fighting and then will spend the rest of war recuperating but he will play around with tanks Dwight d Eisenhower I will spend the war at Camp Colt Pennsylvania as a as the guide training tank crewman here in the States Erwin Rommel will basically be one of those through guys he will win his Allah married the the highest German decoration fighting against the Italians at Caporetto and November of 1917 basically doing that infiltration tactics and he learns the same thing that once you get the enemy on the run you keep the stair up and so he is a captain commanding of Italian which will grow to nearly a regiment and so a lot of the people who will go on to to see greatness later on will take away from us on the other side you get Bernard Law Montgomery of course will will be the British highest-ranking commander in World War two will fight through the psalm it'll be wounded it will fight through so he sees the ugliness of the trenches and that convinces yes Monty yeah the full monty yeah that that teaches him to be very very cautious and before you attack you do that set piece battle where all the artillery is in place everything else is in place to minimize the casualties so different less it's not a good question thank you as well you mentioned at one point that after the landscape was changed by all the shelling the need for for the engineers did engineering and looking at I think there's a bridge under that tank in this picture did engineering grow up or come of age in the First World War much not as much this is a this is old-style combat engineering in other words here's your shovel here's your pick go fill in the holes and so most of the most important engineer work for the Allies is actually done building the little railroads and the connectors and the roads behind the lines just to keep the supplies going in fact during the Battle of Verdun in 1916 there's something called the velocity a the sacred blade it's the one road where all the French reinforcements and artillery supplies comes through and to keep that road going French detail I believe something like I'll make this out of a huge number several tens of thousands of men just to keep it going every day and so that type of engineer works in forth when it comes to crossing no man's land like that the technology hasn't developed to the point where it's helping them out but good question that'll come in World War two a bit more yes family oops I'm sorry I'll go here first I was just wondering did all of the combatants use conscription in World War one all the major combatants did absolutely the British start without it and they quickly find out that by nineteen late 1915 they're not getting enough volunteers especially when you get a huge number of casualties now this is one of the places where the Americans learn so when we go into the war in April 1917 within two weeks of us entering Wilson's already decided that we're going to do conscription we're going to break with American tradition and raise the vast majority of our troops nearly 75% from draftees and when you think about having to feed this mob but they all come to this and that's the other problem when you you plan on a short war when you plan on stroke or you can script everybody but then when you figure out it's a long war all of the major combatants have to come to the same conclusion so in the winter of 1915 you see a scramble where you are releasing skilled workers that were in the ranks so they can go back to the factories to make the shells and the other stuff and it's a delicate balance this is mass total war and then a mass total war requires a mobilization of every element of your society you've got to balance agriculture with industrial production with administration things like doctors at the home front with the guys at the front and everybody scrambles to figure this out how so well if you look at especially Frandsen and Germany prior to World War one a military service had become part of sort of civil expectation that you are really not going to be a full citizen you're really not considered a full man until you've done your time in the service the Brits will do the same thing that this becomes your patriotic duty and the vast majority of the soldiers generally accept that that's one of the reasons they keep going and in the armies that crack like the Russian army and the Italian Army in 1917 comes close to it it's when you have failed to bring the guys in but at the same time take care of their needs the expectations of the society that things start to rot so it's amazing probably that war nations don't break yes in fact in April 1917 a hundred years ago the French 50% of the divisions of the French army undergo what the French call collective and discipline what we'd call beauty and it comes after we talk I showed you that change in German doctrine at the univers army believes that they've got the answer that they've figured out how to use artillery then the Germans changed the rules of the game and so in 1917 Robert Nivelle the French commander is basically promising the politicians and the soldiers that his offensive against chemin de Dom is going to break through the lines and in the war and when the French tried their same old tricks against the new doctrine the French soldiers lose massive amounts of men and basically lose heart but even after they lose heart going to collective and discipline the agreement of the soldier is we're not going to attack but we're also not going to let the Germans take anymore France so it's that delicate ballet but you're right was gonna be an issue yes well you mentioned the role of the engineers but I wanted to point out that they had a lot of them employing miners that were digging miles and miles of tunnels way under the trenches and laying explosive charges to collapse the enemy trenches and and and engage them with flamethrowers and stuff like that through the trenches the underneath the trenches oh absolutely in fact there's a place called the beauty of aqua and France just to the north west of Verdun which is on a commanding hill and whoever commanded the hill had then used the artillery and between 1915 and the time the Americans captured at 1918 there's this constant war and the hill is you know not much larger than the Dole Center here but the French will come in from one side dig out a gallery underneath the German trenches packet full of explosives to blow it up and the Germans would do the same and so by the time the war was over it was a nice little town you go there today it's nothing but crater to pond crater and at the first day of the battle of the somme the British do the same thing laid mines underneath the German lines they blow up but then it's a race can the other guy you know recapture the lip of the crater before you can attack oh by the way there were still one of those mines that didn't go off on the battle it's still there and they don't know where it is so a lightning strikes off another one I believe in the 60 so be careful if you're around this all but absolutely and the same idea that if the frontline trenches are gone then it makes your crossing no man's land and tap from that first trench that much easier but thank you hi and thanks for a great lecture I have a question about the effect on civilian societies in America from World War one for example in Europe you started to see women working outside of the home in large numbers and munitions factories and that's something that will have continued as their America was further away from the theater or they're something like that happened in American civilian society oh absolutely well I clicked well you see and you see this and all the European societies but probably more and the French the British and the American that you do necessarily the central powers for some cultural reasons in fact when you're building all of those shells a lot of the people who are building them in England er are women and the problem is it's a chemical explosive and it's toxic it turns your skin yellow and if you breathe it in and poisons you in fact they call them Canaries because it actually changes their stand to yellow and both in Britain in the United States women serving unprecedented numbers in industry will ultimately lead to the right to vote in fact Woodrow Wilson will come out as a strong support proponent for giving women the right to vote because of the work that they do and they'll get it in 1920 about a month a year and a half after the war so it's changing society as it's changing the battlefront itself thank you as well a definition of combined-arms ah absolutely combined warms is you're basically trying to get the best out of every one of the come that you have so by the time of battle of Amiens you had the air service the aircraft you had artillery you had the infantry you had the artillery at the engineers and what you're trying to do is to maximize the effectiveness of each of those while overcoming their weaknesses so for example the tanks would go through break down the wire suppress the the the emplacements machine guns the infantry would be right behind them so the minute that the tanks break through there now consolidating the trench the artillery of course has paved the way for all those are going on so what you're trying to do is is create a massive nasty stew for the enemy that puts them in a dilemma and we still do the same thing today that will combine airpower and artillery and tanks and infantry and special ops all together to create that dilemma for the enemy did that clarify a little we do have trench warfare in some places in World War two if you look at Stalingrad and some of the other battles it's it's the trench has become in many ways that the city itself we're horrified by World War one because it's it is attrition old war or war two is mobile attritional war you're gonna lose a lot more people but but it's something psychologically when you're only taking you know a couple of yards for losing several thousand man it's it's futile when you were taking several tens or twenties of miles a day and losing the same amount of guys somehow at least you feel like you're accomplishing something so both of them are mass a total trishal wars but the ability of now aviation and the perfection of things like tanks and mechanized infantry is allowing you to go through those defenses and keep the enemy off-balance so they can't dig in and get those advantages from the defense let's hurry to choke a message has trench warfare in years before World War one is it the first time or it oh no as it refers is always warfare okay yeah and that was a really bad question yeah no no no not at all that's a good one it's when with some French warfare first used in warfare Oh Stone stumpy oh and some minions if you go to a place in Britain called Layton fort it's an Iron Age fort where they basically created on top of a hill concentric defenses out of earthworks so it's it's almost as old as warfare because if if you're up on a hill and you're dug in and the other guy is going to come up the hill you've got an advantage if you look at modern trench warfare a siege warfare is basically trench warfare and that's been long around forever and the American Civil War especially in 1864 and 1865 you start to see the glimmers of what you'll see in World War one and the Atlanta Campaign Sherman versus Johnson and then hood in the summer of 1864 massive amounts of field fortifications on the Kennesaw line and also around Atlanta and outside of Petersburg Virginia the same thing and you're starting to see the same dynamic and it's just as deadly if you're attacking relatively in the Civil War your hope of breaking those trenches is pretty pretty dim but it's lacking the the explosive power of artillery and the amount of firepower that you'll see in World War one so it's just fact in that extra little bit of nastiness good question that's a good question I thought Sean subsequent to the subsequent to the war with these staggering casualties on all sides what did that do to government policies to do something about trying to re-establish a population were there active government programs for that and we've lost millions and billions of people oh yeah and and this is going to be felt especially by the French the French will lose 1.3 million men in the war and percentage-wise they're only lagging behind the Serbians is the percentage of the population that's lost and France already had a declining population especially relative to Germany before the war get started and so when you not only lose that number of men but also when you have an army of of pushing six million during the war those guys aren't you know making sweet sweet love so by the time you get to the 1930s you have what the French call the hollow ears in fact one French politician will say that the the biggest threat to French security coming in that area is fornication so what we need more of it and the the population of France actually does not return to its pre 1914 rate until the 1960s because of that bubble it gets so bad that when the war ends the French are actually actively trying to convince the American soldiers to stay stay beat Fifi settle down have a good life and some of the soldiers do it and some of the totalitarian regimes that will rise be it Mussolini's Italy be it the Japanese the Hitler Germany and be it Stalin's Russia will all push for you know beef go forth and be multiple be fruitful because they see that as a as a critical wartime necessity the democracies not so much what the will do for the French for example will have a big influence on world war two going into World War one the French soldier was conscripted for three so they could match the relative number of the Germans after the war we need those French guys to be you know meeting Fifi and so in 1930 they lower the amount of time the soldiers spend in the ranks from three years to one year and when you take out time for leaves and you take out time for holidays you let him go back home and bring in the crops for example of that one year that you have that French soldier in the critical period of 1930 165 days you have that soldier for training and any military guys here for military guys okay a few you can't do much with a soldier in a hundred and sixty-five days you can barely teach him to march it maybe a little bit of shooting and so by the time you get to 1940 the German soldiers are generally just better trained than the French conscripts are coming up and that all goes back to that population policy good question well now that before the rest of you how much just how much training say the National Guard provisions there's a great book on that you know this is the United States it's really it's almost a national tragedy what happens and it's a shame that what we do we go into this war and we're still that army of 1914 the guys with the red breeches if you're compared to the French that's thrown into 1917 1918 and while the Allies and the Germans have all learned we we really haven't caught up and so we are trying to learn everything that they've painfully done in three years in a very short amount of time and both due to lack of time and lack of resources we don't have a she goes to train with we don't have enough artillery pieces the train with most of the artillery but never see the cannons that they're going to use until they pick it up for the French same thing with the machine guns is for the most part the American soldiers are going into battle horribly ill trained and heartily ill prepared and October of 1918 the Battle of meuse-argonne is the bloodiest month in American history and the second week of the battle we lose over 6,000 dead and again compare that to 17 years of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and once we start losing all those guys we're really not prepared for bringing in the replacements and one of the greatest saddest things I've ever read about in American history is that you have a number of soldiers that are showing up on the front lines and the fall of 1918 that were drafted spent a couple days in camp or put on ships sent to France and we're in the front lines a month later and there are tales of soldiers having to teach these replacements how to load their rifles as they were going in about that's a crime and thank God were a little bit better than that now and it's amazing that they continued to fight and dig crack in them in the face of that I would go to Tom Hansen for that answer but we have some similar problems you've got that rapid transition from pitch time to war time in fact dr. Hansen has written a book on this that I highly recommend though it's probably not as bad as what some of the accounts have made it out to be but we always have that problem we the the national security state that we have today is really only a product of that mid 1950s to the present if you look at American wars prior to that we are never really prepared for what we're facing and in the case of World War one in World War two as we were learning these lessons we're going up against guys I've been doing it for a while and they beat on us quite a bit before we figure it out yes sir at Vimy Ridge there was a change it's like change an offensive coordination yes and it seems to me that and met with a modicum of success but it seems to me after that I know it wasn't really past time well in my reign this is this is the dilemma that they deal with the world war 1 and the French call it Greek montage or Pierce a do you go for a small nibbling offensive where you just limit your objective you've grabbed the piece of terrain and you hold it or do you go for the Pierce a the breakthrough and Vimy Ridge and what will happen around Hill 60 which is it's just in that same neighborhood is that type of precisely prepared set piece battle so you you have the time you bring up the forces you study the enemy you dig those tunnels underneath the enemy line to blow them up before you assault but the idea is you're only going to go grab what you have and hold and as long as you can do that then the problem of what do you do with your artillery now that you've captured it doesn't become an issue where the offensives really start to break down in World War 1 it is after you've had that success first of all realize that you've had a success and then being able to do something behind it and if you have broken through if you're going to keep the success you've got to be able to bring up those supplies and those artillery but if you're only doing that set piece battle like the Canadians pull off a bivy it's a lot easier but the course the downside to that is the Allied army would reach Berlin now if they just kept those limited attacks limited attacks good question Shawn you described the efforts of the British and French and the efforts of the Germans over over four long years to try to come up with some solution and break through the British and French and their tanks and planes the Germans have their of their gas there multiple trans lines there's some troopers the question is if you look at the Allies and Germans respectively in your opinion who did the better job of doctrinal development and also who came which side came closest to developing the methods that would be successful in world war two oh we love the Germans and we're guilty of this at Fort Leavenworth Oh the Germans vectors all saying you've never really expand oh and not your fault that you have events which is probably said by the Germans I don't know abut but the Germans are sort of have a propensity for war a lot of that has to do with geography but I think we overstate that the Germans are really good at some of the tactical stuff but when it comes to making strategy they're a basket case and the disasters that you will see in World War two are priests aged by the disasters that disastrous strategic decisions that they make it over one and I think we also overemphasize the German tactical acumen what they do have is a official army system for capturing honestly and opening open openly the mistakes that are made in trying to systematically put systems in place but at the same time the Allies know the advantages that they have and are playing them as best they can and a lot of the stormtrooper tactics that you see are also being done by the British and the French on a much smaller scale so they're all making these innovations the Germans just tend to get some of the better credit for it what the Germans will do though in the 1920s and 1930s is ask ugly questions while the the British in the fridge go hey we want that stunk let's not do it again German geography and the the fact that they live in an ugly Clark house neighborhood convinces them that they had better continue to study this and so under a general named Hans bond sect they do probably the most open and honest investigation of the war and the first thing he says is tell me what happened honestly openly let reputations be crushed of a need be because this is too important so tell me what happened tell me why it happened which is also important and once you tell me what happened honestly tell me why it happened honestly then and only then you get to the important thing is okay now what are we going to do about it and the British are a little bit more hesitant of damaging reputation so their history of World War one tends to be a little more skewed the French are about the same but the French have the Germans close by so they have to take more seriously the French are often criticized for being too defensive the number one take away they their army has role or one is firepower kills firepower kills firepower kills and the Maginot Line and the defense of doctrine and going into World War two is designed to do just that and they're often maligned for it the problem is the French are absolutely right that the number one killer in World War one is our Tillery the number one killer world war two is artillery the problem is the Germans get moving much quicker than the French can respond and by the time the French are trying to learn these lessons it's too late the mechanization is giving the Germans the advantage but we can talk about that after anyone else well thank you very much for your attention [Applause] I'll be around asking other questions if you have

Channel: The Dole Institute of Politics

Views: 69,401

Rating: 4.7848969 out of 5

Keywords: Dole Institute of Politics, University of Kansas, World War I, No Man's Land, Dr. Richard S. Faulkner, Modern Warfare

Id: Cs-18CyxOX0

Length: 84min 45sec (5085 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2017