How The World Prepared For Trench Warfare | The Great War In Numbers | Timeline

hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on timeline my name is dan snow and i want to tell you about history hit tv it's like the netflix for history hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians we've got an exclusive offer available to fans of timeline if you go to history hit tv you can either follow the information below this video or just google history hit tv and use the code timeline you get a special introductory offer go and check it out in the meantime enjoy this video [Music] a war of numbers men ammunition guns ships aircraft quantity is the difference between victory and defeat and for the first time in history everything is recorded in exacting detail a billion artillery shells a million machine guns 50 billion bullets 65 million men at war who die at a rate of 6 000 a day a war of numbers fought by calculating generals for whom no cost is too high in the decades leading up to the first world war europe has been transformed a world of peasant farmers craft workshops and horse-drawn carts has turned into a world of factories mills and railways industrialization has revolutionized production and changed society and it's now about to transform the nature of war october 1914 within just weeks of war commencing the shocking nature of industrial warfare will become clear the germans are trying to outflank the french and the british the allies need to stop them the two sides confront each other in the belgian region of flanders at the strategically important town of eep this is to be one of the most famous battles in the history of warfare the battle of epo is vital because it represented germany's last gasp effort to try and win the war in the west before the end of 1914. holding eep means just as much to the british the reason that the fighting for the british seems to focus particularly around the town of ypres is because it's the nodal point of highways that lead to the channel ports if the british can hold this northern nodal town they are in a position to bring in reinforcements in the future to continue to support their belgian allies and their french partners at the first battle of eep the weapon that causes most heartache in germany is the rifle which had been used in war for more than half a century but by 1914 british engineers have improved the design as several thousand german student volunteers advance towards the british lines they are met with a devastating hail of bullets every british infantryman has been issued with a lee enfield smle mark iii rifle four million of them will soon be in the hands of british soldiers this is the short magazine lienfield the short refers to the length of the barrel not the size of the magazine it's adopted by the british army in 1908 and on the outbreak of war the soldiers of the bef go off to war with this weapon it operates in a very simple system we take off the safety catch we open up the bolts and we take five bullets the army called them rounds we push them in the charger bridge and load them into the magazine we then do the same again another five that now gives me 10 rounds loaded into the magazine the german mauser rifle only takes five rounds so a soldier armed with this can fire far more frequently and more effectively than his german opponents 15 rounds a minute is regarded as minimum the highest number of rounds recorded by one soldier is 37 in one minute including 22 bullseyes at 300 yards it's deadly with this weapon you can do a lot of damage at even a range of 2 000 yards with not many soldiers because they can fire so frequently at eep the germans experience the shocking nature of industrial war young wide-eyed students are the victims the result was pretty much inevitable german flesh and blood being thrown against british lines thinly held that they were the result was that large numbers of german students and young soldiers were killed such that even today it's still known as the kindermort the massacre of the innocence three thousand of germany's brightest young men now lie in the german student cemetery at langermark but the body count does not deter the german generals they simply send more and more men towards the british lines between october the 19th and november the 22nd the german army sacrifices 80 000 men the british army holds its ground but its losses too are shocking 54 000 casualties of the men who leave britain to fight at the outbreak of war within a matter of weeks more than a third are lost you could argue that the before pretty much cease to exist by the end of november 1914 [Music] both sides are exhausted but the battle is a stalemate and the slaughter is only the beginning each army needs shelter from the other's weapons so they decide to dig trenches ever more of them stretching ever further for thousands upon thousands of miles warfare has changed radically now we have rifles and machine guns that can engage 1 000 yards or more artillery can rain down shrapnel and high explosive infantry simply cannot survive in the open the only way it can protect itself is to dig in by war's end the trench labyrinth on the western front totals an astonishing 25 000 miles enough to encircle the planet february 1915 after months of killing at eep the british decide to connect their smaller isolated trenches into a long line when soldiers dig into the wet cold mud the full scale of the slaughter becomes apparent it was impossible to dig more than a foot without uncovering a dead body from the earlier battle trenches are a response to firepower the only way to stay alive on the battlefield is to get into the ground itself all of this material comes into use we get sandbags never full of sand here actually full of chalk and then the arrival of these things called trench mats sometimes called duck boards these things get your feet out of the mud and here using inverted a-frames we're actually able to have water running underneath if it's raining heavily both sides we've got corrugated iron but in the flanders winter the duck board flooring and the corrugated iron walls are too feeble to keep the elements at bay for british soldiers it's a living nightmare there's a famous quote from one british observer that says you imagine hell to be fire but it isn't hell is mud british trenches were in a terrible start there were insufficient trench stores such as wooden planks and sandbags to make them habitable and they were continuously flooded in the wetwood as the rhine's felled bodies floated in the water which was often knee-deep on the soldiers and sometimes even waste deep the flooded state of british trenches were a nightmare for the soldiers health who are suffering from trench foot hypothermia bronchitis and much more besides disease and infection is so devastating it accounts for one-third of military deaths that's over three million people you have the cold you have the mud you have rats everywhere one of the things that a lot of troops wrote about was the lice infested with lice in fact getting rid of your lice became almost a full-time job unto itself german trench systems are far better built and maintained than the british they had deeply dug concrete bunkers very well organized the germans were digging in for the long haul whereas the british and french expected to use their trenches as jumping off points for an offensive the germans were preparing to stay there for years if necessary the germans are right new weapons pitted against vast armies hiding in their trenches will cause a bloody stalemate and casualties on a scale never seen before [Music] just a few months into the war there are trench systems stretching almost 500 miles from the channel coast to the swiss border there are front line trenches support trenches reserve trenches and linking them all communications trenches and spread across the killing fields above a new terrifying weapon of war barbed wire barbed war is an agricultural invention of the late 1800s the american army had weaponized it during the spanish-american war of the late 1890s and the british army had used it in a similar fashion during the boer war in south africa barbed wire is invented in the mid-19th century as a cheap way to control cattle now it will be used to control and kill humans attacking soldiers avoiding the barbed wire are funneled towards machine guns like cattle to the slaughter those who try to clamber over the barbed wire are snagged easy prey for rifles barbed wire is so terrifyingly efficient that over the course of the war three million miles of it is produced enough to wrap around the planet 120 times barbed wire and trenches are the physical symbols of the stalemate reached at the start of 1915. in an effort to break that stalemate the british army turns to another recent invention [Music] it's 12 years since the wright brothers stunned the world with the first powered flight it doesn't take long for the generals to see the potential use of aircraft in war commander of royal flying corps first wing is lieutenant colonel hugh trenchard trenchard has many ideas about how the royal flying corps could contribute to the coming offensive but the one which hague seizes upon is the use of aircraft to carry out reconnaissance flights over german lines the tool of reconnaissance for the rfc is the camera [Music] in january 1915 the rfc is supplied with a cameras designed to take aerial photographs of german lines and their hidden artillery batteries the planes will be put to devastating use against the germans at the french town of nerve chappelle this will be a military assault of a new kind britain's royal flying corps will send its planes over german positions to photograph them this was the first time that the british army had aerial reconnaissance carried out on a large scale and the royal flying corps did its work remarkably well in previous wars and battles reconnaissance had mainly been carried out by the cavalry but in the first world war where you had this line of trenches it was very difficult for anyone that led the cavalry to get beyond the enemy lines but what was new was the aeroplane you could send airplanes up to a considerable height and the observers inside could either sketch what was underneath or could take photographs and these photographs could then be placed together to create a mosaic map of the enemy lines to carry out an effective bombardment that hits all aspects of the enemy's defensive system you need more than just men on the ground with binoculars you need to take to the skies you need aerial observation this novel use of planes gives the british a huge tactical advantage from now on for all sides aerial reconnaissance would be indispensable [Music] the number of rfc aerial reconnaissance photographs printed in 1915 total 80 000 by 1918 the cameras they use have been improved and there are thousands more aircraft to fly them above enemy lines as a result the number of pictures they take increases massively to almost 6 million the british have proved how important planes are and yet at the start of the war they find they have far too few of them in 1914 the british only have 193 planes the french have 541 austria had 64. the germans have more planes than any other combatant with 694 but it's a testament to the strength of british manufacturing at the time that they are quickly able to turn the tables the manufacturing infrastructure required to build so many planes is absolutely enormous you just have to look between 1914 and 1918 the number of french aircraft workers rose from 12 and a half thousand to 185 000 and by the end of the war britain's aircraft industry is easily the largest in the world and employs 347 000 workers over the course of the war the allies make 120 000 aircraft out producing germany by practically two-thirds but in august 1915 the use of the airplane takes a new even more deadly turn the dutch engineer anthony focker developed a mechanism that would allow to fire a machine gun through the rotating propeller of a plane and that gave the nascent german air force around about eight months of superiority anthony fokker's interrupter gear links the firing mechanism of a mounted machine gun with the crankshaft of an aircraft's propeller this allows german pilots to fire through a propeller without destroying its blades fokker's invention turns the agile and speedy german irondecker into the world's first fighter aircraft royal flying corps reconnaissance planes now find themselves under fire from german fighter pilots and are soon being shot out of the sky at an alarming rate of 60 per month this revolution in aerial warfare becomes known as the focker scourge the focker scourge is significant for battles being fought on the ground because the infantry and the artillery are now heavily reliant on what aeroplanes can do for them the average life expectancy of british army pilots becomes just 11 days the royal flying corps gets a nickname the suicide club but its reconnaissance missions are claiming even more german lives on the ground aerial photographs taken over nov chappelle are being used to devastating effect by the british never before has an artillery attack been so well targeted and so terrifyingly effective 342 british guns fire thousands of shells with deadly accuracy what's more for weight of shells fired per yard of enemy front it is the heaviest bombardment of the war so far the artillery blasts a hole in the german lines which is quickly filled by 60 000 men of the british first army victory should be theirs but now things go wrong for the british although the ground beyond the german front line is there for the taking the infantry have to wait british artillery is still shelling the empty area in front of the troops german forces were in complete disarray long before the artillery barrage ended the british have yet to master another modern weapon of war which is being used for the first time telecommunications german shells cut telephone lines interference blocked wireless transmissions and messengers carrying precious orders and reports disappeared into the smoke of battle and were never seen again in this brutal war the art of communication has not kept pace with the art of killing british and indian soldiers will pay with their lives march 1915 at nerf chappelle in a fatal lack of communication the british infantry advance has been blocked by its own artillery shelling the delay highlights the growing importance of a powerful new instrument of war the telephone was patented by alexander graham bell in 1876 it was used first by post offices railway stations stock exchanges and wealthy individuals now it will be used by generals to communicate with their front line troops what i've got here is the d3 phone the standard phone of early in the war we've got here a watch set which allows me to put this on my ear and have it on my head so i can listen because the message comes in i've then got the standard telephone handset which i can flip open and use in the normal way but next the batteries i've then got a morse code set which means that if my other station is fairly close we use this if the signal is weak we put it away and we use morse code and we listen into the message and note it down the problem is to make this work you have to have telephone cables and if you go too far forward or the enemy shelling cuts the telephone cable this thing is utterly useless and at nerf chapelle as the infantry advance communications break down the gunners don't know where the infantry are the infantry can't get the gunner's support the battle really grinds to a halt because of the limitations of this new telephone system at nerf chapelle british telephone communication is still down and that pause gave the germans enough time to reorganize their defenses by the time the british gunners are finally ordered to cease fire the germans are plugging the hole in their line with 90 infantrymen of the 11th jager battalion advancing towards them are 9 000 men of the british first army although outnumbered 100 to 1 the jaegers have one overriding advantage they have brought with them a new kind of mechanized weapon which will slaughter humans at a speed and on a scale that will shock the world they've brought with them machine guns and machine guns are a great leveler in the first world war machine guns truly changed the mathematics of warfare the reality of warfare a leigh enfield rifle for example british troops were trained to fire 15 rounds a minute which was pretty quick but machine guns could fire something like 600 rounds a minute that's 40 times as many bullets the story of the machine gun dates back to 1862 when american inventor dr richard gatling patents the gatling gun gatling hopes the weapon's extraordinary power to kill will discourage war and save lives he is wrong in the 1880s american inventor hiram stevens maxim improves the design his gun fires an extraordinary 11 bullets a second in the battlefield conditions of world war one machine guns are spewing out more than 600 rounds every single minute one machine gunner has the firepower of 40 riflemen at the battle of the somme just 10 british machine guns were fired for 12 hours sending out one million rounds between 1914 and 18 1.1 million are made in the factories of the great powers by the start of 1915 germany's arsenal of mg08 machine guns numbers 10 000 at nerf chappelle the 90 infantrymen have just two machine guns against 9 000 british attackers but it's enough the small units are able to use just two maxim machine guns and that's sufficient to lay down a belt of fire of something like 24 000 rounds every 15 minutes crossing that open ground against that weight of fire means that the advantage is then conferred back on the defenders in the space of 90 minutes they're able to inflict more than a thousand casualties on the attacking british infantry in the end the only thing that stops the jaegers is the resumption of the british artillery barrage by the end of the battle 21 000 men have been killed or wounded and all that's happened is the german line has moved by about a mile the pattern of the war on the western front is set its entrenched stalemate a war of bloody attrition generals order massive artillery bombardments to kill as many enemy soldiers as possible and then send thousands of their own men over the top to be cut down in often calamitous infantry advances to fight such a war british generals will demand an endless supply of men bullets and artillery shells at the beginning of 1915 britain is producing 7 000 big shells a day which sounds an awful lot but it is nowhere near enough the british arrive at nerf chapelle with over 200 000 shells which has taken british factories a month to produce but the shells are spent in just four days by the end of the great war over a billion shells have been fired by all sides that is an absolutely extraordinary number the shell industry simply was not set up to produce the ammunition required by these guns on the 14th of may a headline in the evening telegraph proclaims scarcity of shells hinders british attacks the scandal topples asquith's liberal government the shell crisis gave the conservatives an opportunity to force upon him the much desired coalition government that they had been agitating for since august 1914 so serious is the shell crisis that most british guns are reduced to firing just four times a day but with enough shells they could fire three hundred times a day to deal with the crisis the government does something previously unthinkable the british government is going to have to structurally change its relationship to industry in a method that's going to be termed war communism a level of involvement of government in production unimaginable before the war with large parts of industry now under state control the government prioritizes the production of shells it faces two challenges first a shortage of manpower and second a shortage of a volatile liquid called acetone it solves the first by recruiting a new industrial army around a million strong consisting mostly of women the second is solved by a manchester chemist called keim weitzman who invents a fermentation method to turn grain into acetone to do this the government commandeers brewing and distillery equipment and sets up two new factories which will produce 90 000 gallons of acetone a year as a result by the end of 1915 british shell production rises to a whopping 16.4 million and by 1917 the british empire is supplying more than 15 million shells a year but in this new industrial war britain and germany are too evenly matched to break the stalemate first lord of the admiralty winston churchill has an idea why not pit britain's new industrial army against the primitive forces of the ottoman empire if britain captures gallipoli and the bosphorus it will open a sea route to russia the allies try and open up a second front because their front and the west have become bogged down in the stalemate of trench warfare they see this as a way of unblocking the war achieving a link up with the russians and winning a war in the east if the war in the west isn't working they're able then to send an amphibious force to invade gallipoli [Music] but then when they do that they discovered that the ottoman forces equipped with modern german weapons are able to use these very effectively using the high ground to turn the landing beaches into a killing zone and then to simply engage them in the same sort of trench warfare as they had in the west it becomes another stalemate it bogs down no one's going anywhere unfortunately for britain's imperial forces the ottomans had been supplied with advanced german machine guns allied soldiers are mercilessly cut down total casualties from the gallipoli campaign reach a staggering 400 000 many of them from britain's colonies conflict on the ground and in the air is being transformed by technology and mass production and in 1915 they combine again to bring new and previously unimaginable levels of violence to war at sea the lines of what is right and wrong are absolutely blurred and this kind of warfare is a descent into inhumanity that the world hasn't seen before but in this new war of numbers there is one area in which britain has a clear lead the british royal navy is the world's biggest with more ships than the german imperial fleet britain rules the waves and now sets out to cut off supplies to germany the hunger blockade will starve the german people of food and german industry of raw materials the naval blockade was a really controversial strategy and the germans protested actually this wasn't hitting troops this was hitting innocent civilians back on the home front the german government puts its people on starvation rations of just 1 000 calories a day soon germans are suffering from malnutrition and associated diseases scurvy tuberculosis and dysentery the german suffered an enormous shortage of not only raw materials but fertilizer and food stuff such as grain cereals meat potatoes and this causes incredible uh disquiet and unrest throughout germany and even in austria by war's end deaths linked to malnutrition total almost nine hundred thousand the usa is also unhappy with the blockade for america's giant farms industrial germany is one of their biggest markets at this point in the war they're still trading with germany and this naval blockade means that none of their merchant ships can get through they're not earning any foreign currency and so of course it's bad for the american economy as well to break the blockade germany turns to another innovative weapon a weapon that will change the nature of naval warfare they call it the untersi boot or undersea boat it will become famous across the world as the u-boat germany is desperate to end the royal navy's sea blockade starving its people of food and its industry of raw materials but its fleet is massively outnumbered so it turns to a new terrifying weapon the submarine the first military sub used in action was the turtle in 1776 the americans tried to attach bombs to the hulls of british ships by the first world war german shipyards are building u-boats with an incredible range of 7 800 miles armed with six torpedoes and a fearsome 88 millimeter deck gun they are killing machines but for their crews life on board is worse than grim conditions in submarines were awful they were dirty smelly cramped and pretty terrifying but what u-boat crews fear most are the odds of survival which are roughly 50-50 375 subs set sail from german ports 202 are lost in action u-boat crews number 11 400 almost half will lose their lives in february 1915 germany declares the waters around the british isles of warsaw u-boats are ordered to break so-called prize rules and sink on site any ship in british waters even neutrals this it turns out is a bad idea on may the 7th u-20 is patrolling 18 kilometers off the coast of southern ireland when it spots the lusitania an american passenger boat steaming toward liverpool without warning u-20 carries out her murderous orders we attacked it with torpedoes scoring direct hits right on the central line of the ship itself the ship sank very very rapidly it's on mitigated carnage 1960 passengers and crew are on board 1197 perish 124 of them are american citizens it's an act of barbarism for which the germans will pay dearly ever since the reign of henry viii if you wanted to to sink an enemy ship then you sort of you stop and you search for contraband and then you allow people to leave the ship and then you sink it so if there was any humanity in naval warfare before then it is definitely reduced by the onset of of the submarine menace the loss of innocent lives is a propaganda disaster for the germans recruitment posters went up across london and other british cities demanding justice and revenge for the lusitania riots broke out across london and went on for days millions of pounds of damage against german shops german citizens or even people with german sounding names worse still is the outrage in america the usa is not even at war but germany is sinking american ships and killing its people president woodrow wilson is pushed closer to joining a war he had hoped to avoid the royal navy's revenge for the attack is brutal british sub hunter hms baralong is 70 miles northwest of cornwall posing as a merchant vessel when it sneaks up on and sinks u-boat u-27 and the brits do not play by the rules there are a number of german sailors in the water and instead of taking them prisoner they shot them in the water and this caused outrage in germany and the germans called it a war crime though war has always been bloody and brutal europe's old ruling classes had thought of it as a kind of game with codes of conduct and honour but the horror of industrial war sweeps that away and the germans who think themselves the most civilized people now turn to what many consider the ugliest and cruelest weapons of war the germans are outnumbered they're well aware of it the enemy the allies have more men they've got more guns more everything they cannot win by simply trying to match the enemy what they can do is reach for new technology and if that new technology is poison gas that may or may not be legal they're going to use it it's their war winning card gas warfare came as a surprise um and there was no protection available to men in the trenches from it gas is a terrifying weapon that causes awful injuries what it made you do is drown on dry land it would um agonizingly damage your lungs so that they filled up with water and you couldn't breathe you see photos of victims and their their hands are in clawed positions where they've literally been trying to claw out their own throat all the great powers signed the 1899 hague convention prohibiting chemical projectiles but in this hellish war conventions count for nothing every sector of german industry is dragged into service and her chemical industry is the biggest of all the other great powers so large that it accounts for 40 of global chemical exports chemist fritz harbour of the kaiser wilhelm institute builds their first chemical weapon using chlorine on april the 22nd at the second battle of eep 6 000 gas cylinders are brought to the front line the germans really took their gloves off they opened up these huge cylinders under the valves and out came this greenish yellow gas and floated towards the french lines the sickly fog smelling slightly of pepper and pineapple drifts across to the french trenches enveloping the soldiers at first they are unsure what to make of it what was really happening here was this a smoke screen and it's only as this thick yellowish fog reaches the allied lines and the troops begin to suffocate that they realize the true horror of what's happening to them they flee many of them suffocate it's panic this single release of gas results in the gruesome death of 800 men the german generals are delighted but the chemist fritz harbour will soon regret his actions fritz harbour's wife clara was so disturbed by the work that her husband was doing that she actually shot herself with his military weapon because she couldn't stand to think what her husband had done harbor who is jewish will later flee nazi germany the poisoned gas germany subsequently develops will be used to exterminate harbour's own people europe's jews and other so-called non-humans but in world war one britain quickly follows germany and within six months has built its own chlorine chemical weapons these are first used at the battle of luz but for the british it's a disaster the wind did not carry the gas to the germans but instead blew it back onto the british defenders british general hubert gough aptly summed this up by commenting that gas was a boomerang alloy to solve the problem a captain in the royal engineers william livens invents the so-called livens projector a mortar that fires gas-filled canisters over the course of the war livens projectors will fire 200 000 barrels of deadly gas after chlorine comes phosgene which also attacks the throat and lungs but the effects are far worse of all the gas is used by far the biggest killer is fosgee it accounts for 76 000 of the 90 000 gas deaths [Music] gas attacks prompt governments to order over 100 million gas masks but before they arrive at the front soldiers must somehow make their own the solution was simply using a moistened handkerchief or a sock over the mouth and nose the best liquid to use actually was urine but not fresh urine it had to be stale that allowed the ammonia to develop which in some ways neutralized the gas however very quickly the army adopt this thing which is the hypo helmet it's a bag which goes over the head and once it goes over your head it's already soaked in photography fixative and what that does is it converts the chlorine gas into common salts there are problems with it one of which you're going to tuck it in around your neck next problem is you get a build up of carbon dioxide inside it and if it's raining then the liquid runs down you're facing into your eyes and people will tear these things off and try and get out of the gas cloud but early in the war early in the use of gas the best thing available the hypo helmet but against chemicals gas masks don't always work the next weapon devised in germany is sulfur mustard known to the terrified troops as mustard gas this time a mask cannot save you mustard gas is a uniquely awful chemical weapon it burned your skin when it came in contact with it leaving you with agonizing blisters those who died from mustard gas often endured a protracted and miserable death it would take four or five weeks to finally pass away and those four or five weeks will be spent coughing up blood and slowly dying and agonizing death all the imperial generals in world war one are guilty of ordering the use of poison gas the british use fourteen thousand tons the french twenty 26 000 tons but the biggest users by far are the germans who use 52 000 tons poisonous gas is not 1915's only new and terrifying weapon another german invention is the flarman virfa or flame thrower a tank of pressurized gas is used to force flammable oil across an igniting wick and out of a steel nozzle the result is a 20 meter jet of intense fire and choking black smoke on the battlefield flamethrowers are used to drive men out of the trenches where they can be moaned down by machine guns they are first used against the french in october 1914 the british encountered them during a german night raid on trenches at hygge flanders on july the 30th 1915 the first the british defenders know of their appearance is when the night sky is illuminated by a wave of liquid fire washing over the parapet and rolling through the british trenches igniting many materials wherever it touches the silence of the evening is shattered by the screams of those caught by this dreadful attack not surprisingly flamethrower operators become prime targets for enemy snipers the life expectancy of flamethrower operators is often very short in the first world war over the course of the war the germans make around 650 flamethrower attacks if they achieve surprise they are devastatingly effective but if they're caught in the open the flamethrower operators often pay a high price in lives but neither gas nor flame nor artillery shell can break the deadlock in 1915. the new industrial weapons do not secure victory for any of the competing imperial powers they simply magnify the horrors of war you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

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Keywords: History, Full Documentary, Documentaries, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, 2017 documentary, BBC documentary, Channel 4 documentary, history documentary, documentary history, ww1, great war, trench warfare, trench combat, ww1 soldiers, 1914, world war 1, ww1 history, history channel, world war i (military conflict)

Id: X2nxNmJoaNs

Length: 45min 13sec (2713 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021