Trench Warfare

World War OneTotal War/Modern Warfare

Myth

Reality

War Is HELL !!

Real life in the trenches was

MISERABLE

If you survived the fighting and didn’t get shell shock THEN there was….

This WAS a beautiful forest!

Sacrifices in War

The reality of ‘going over the top’ was very different!

Boredom, daily duties, grinding routine and

more waiting.

Then there were moments of sheer

TERROR.

A Multi-Front War

The Western Front

Mud by Gilbert Rogers

Questions: Respond on your Left Side.1. What does the painting show?2. Look at the colours the artist has used. How do they make you

feel?3. What do you notice about the colour of the soldier’s uniform?4. Look at the type of paint the artist has used. Does it make the

picture look realistic or not?5. Where do you think the artist was when he painted this picture?

This picture shows Canadian machine gunners on Vimy Ridge during the 1917 Battle of Arras

What do you think might be happening around the soldier?

Comprehension Check:

• As Ms. Gilluly goes over the design of the trenches, you are to:–Sketch out a diagram of how the

trenches were set up and label the key aspects.

• Then you will turn to your partner and double-check when we finish this section

Trench Warfare

Trench Warfare: Reasons It Developed

• Developed due to the machine gun• Traditional military charges on open land

no longer worked; thousands gunned down

• Needed protection from the machine gun fire, so they dug the trenches

• Development of modern warfare

Trenches and Shovels• At the beginning of the war, the British

army owned 2500 shovels.• By the end of the war, the British army

owned over 10.5 million shovels.• All of this was due to the development and

reliance on trench warfare.• By the end of the war, both sides had dug

15,000 miles of trenches.• That is the equivalent of digging across

the United State five times.

Soldiers digging trenches while protected against gas attacks

Trenches• Were not new…used in ancient and medieval

times and during the American Civil War• But trenches was not used as the main source

of fighting until WW1• It was at the Battle of the Marne that the

Germans were the first to dig trenches to find protection from the pursuing British forces.

• By the end of 1914, two lines of trenches reach across 500 miles from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Trench Warfare – type of fighting during World War I in which both sides dug trenches protected by mines and barbed wire

Trench Warfare

Cross-section of a front-line trench

Germany was going to have to fight a long war on 2 fronts. Realizing this, the German command sent thousands of troops from France to aid its forces in the east. Meanwhile, the war on the Western Front settled into a stalemate.

By early 1915, opposing armies on the Western Front had dug miles of parallel trenches to protect themselves from enemy fire. This set the stage for what became known as trench warfare.

The German commander, General Erich von Falkenhayn, decided that his troops must at all costs hold onto those parts of France and Belgium that Germany still occupied.

War of Attrition• What was the War of Attrition?

– It was a war based on wearing the other side down by constant attacks and heavy losses.

• Where did this war take place?– Europe

• When did it take place?– 1916

• Why was it called this?– It was called war of attrition

because they lost millions of people.

• What was the significance of the war?– It’s what WWI turned into after

losing all those men, due to the ongoing attacks.

General Erich von Falkenhayn ordered his men to dig trenches that would provide them with protection from the advancing French and British troops.

The Allies soon realized that they could not break through this line and they also began to dig trenches.

After a few months these trenches had spread from the North Sea to the Swiss Frontier.

As the Germans were the first to decide where to stand fast and dig, they had been able to choose the best places to build their trenches.

The possession of the higher ground not only gave the Germans a tactical advantage, but it forced the British and French to live in the worst conditions. Most of this area was rarely a few feet above sea level.

As soon as soldiers began to dig down they would invariably find water two or three feet below the surface.

Water-logged trenches were a constant problem for soldiers on the Western Front.

How they built the trenches

• Built all along the Western Front---476 miles of trenches

• Also used in Battle of Galliopoli; however the design was different—much more shallow and little space in no-man’s land

• Dug several trenches; each serving a different purpose

• Used barbed wire to protect the top as an obstacle for charging men to gain entrance into the trench

Trench Warfare

Building of Trenches

Anatomy of a Trench

• Typically reached 10 feet deep, so soldiers could walk around without being seen by the enemy.

• In areas where trenches were more shallow, a careless soldier could let his head rise above the top for enemy snipers to target.

• Trenches had duckboards, or wooden planks at the bottom, which kept feet dry and out of the mud.

Anatomy of a Trench

• Trenches contained saps, short cul-de-sacs dug forward and connected to the front line trench by a little tunnel.

• Each night, two guards crawled out to the sap and sat for hours.

• They listened for sounds from the enemy’s line or any movement or noise that could signal attack preparations.

Trench Warfare in France

Building of Trenches

TRENCH DESIGN•Frontline trenches were usually about seven feet deep and six feet wide.

• The front of the trench was known as the parapet.

•The top two or three feet of the parapet and the parados (the rear side of the trench) would consist of a thick line of sandbags to absorb any bullets or shell fragments.

•In a trench of this depth it was impossible to see over the top, so a two or three-foot ledge known as a fire-step, was added.

•Duck-boards were also placed at the bottom of the trenches to protect soldiers from problems such as trench foot.

•Soldiers also made dugouts and funk holes in the side of the trenches to give them some protection from the weather and enemy fire.

Types of Trenches• Support or Cover Trenches: behind the front

line about 30 yards. • Soldiers were stationed there in case the

enemy broke through the front line.• Behind the Support Trenches, were the

Reserve Trenches: used to relay messages and to transport reinforcements, ammo, and food supplies during times of battle through Communication Trenches: joined all three trench lines

Most Frequented Trenches• Given names by the Germans like:o Hansa Wego Munster Gasse

• Given names by the British soldiers like:o The Strando New Bond Street

• Some trenches grew so complete that soldiers needed guides to maneuver through the trenches

• Soldiers, even whole units, easily lost their way in the maze of dead ends.

Our trenches are... ankle deep mud. In some places trenches are waist deep in water. Time is spent digging, filling sandbags, building up parapets, fetching stores, etc. One does not have time to be weary.

Types of Soldier•Engineers (or Sappers) repaired bridges and roads. Dug trenches.•Artillery Soldiers manned big guns.•Signallers ran telephone lines to carry messages to trenches.•Staff Officers assisted the Generals in planning and organising.•Generals usually lived in large mansions in the French countryside. Rarely went to the Front Line to see conditions.

An aerial photograph of the opposing trenches and no-man's land in Artois, France, July 22, 1917. German trenches are at the right and bottom, British trenches are at the top left. The vertical line to the left of centre indicates the course of a pre-war road.

View from the air TODAY of trenches dug during WWI

Germany 1,935,000

Russia 1,700,000

France 1,368,000

Austria-Hungary 1,200,000

British Empire 942,135

Ottoman Empire 725,000

Italy 680,000

Romania 300,000

United States 116,516

Bulgaria 87,495

Belgium 45,550

Serbia 45,000

Greece 23,098

Portugal 8,145

Montenegro 3,000

Japan 1,344

Military Casualties in World War I: 1914-1918

Fear and Anticipation

As you sit in the trench, what do you fear? What dangers do you face?

• How are you preparing, physically and mentally to face those dangers?

• How does it feel to be in that position?

Daily Life in Trenches

Daily Life in the Trenches

• Start with morning “Stand To”-an hour before dawn everyone is woken up and ordered to climb up on the fire step to guard against a dawn raid.

• Then “Morning Hate”-machine gun fire, shelling, small arms fire into the mist to ensure their safety at dawn.

What should be the caption for this

photo?

Daily Life in the Trenches

Daily Life in Trenches• Then rum may be issued to some men.• Time to clean the rifles & weapons

inspections by officers• Breakfast would be served-unofficial truce

between both sides.• Another inspection by company commander• Assign daily chores: refilling sandbags,

repair duckboards, drain the trenches, clean out the latrines

• After chores, read, write letters home, nap, & many wrote poetry or songs.

French soldiers firing over their own dead

• There has been constant shelling for 3 days. How does your head feel?

• Describe the destruction you expect to see around you the next morning.

• Do you expect to die? How do you cope with that feeling?• What did the enemy hope to gain by this constant

shelling?

First bombardment

Exposure to the elements

Mud & water

Trench Warfare: Conditions

• Lice• Rats • Cramped up• Flooded trenches• Diseases• Decaying flesh

No smiling and relaxed faces…

No clean uniforms…

Their equipment is scattered everywhere…

Boredom and sleep are obvious…

How the uniform and equipment changed after just three weeks in the trenches…

Clothing• British Army Armour: Has

curved metal plates for the chest and back. It is meant to stop snipers’ bullets. But the metal is very thin and curves in the middle, so any bullet hitting in the center of the armour will be directed into you and not away from you.

• Trench Coats: Germans started using them first. It helps keep them warm and protect from the rain.

• Bullet-Proof Bibles: Pocket-sized copies of the New Testament being bought and sent by British mothers to their sons. There are stories that these little Bibles have stopped rifle bullets.

• Tights: Many Scottish soldiers wear kilts. They started to wear tights to protect their legs from poison gas.

Dealing with boredom and cramped living quarters

• What do you do to keep from getting bored?• Your leg has a cramp. How do you get rid of it?• The soldier next to you keeps sneezing and

coughing. What can you do to keep from getting sick?• Your uniform is wet. How do you get more

comfortable?

Going Over the Top

• Phrase given to the soldiers when it was time to try to take the opposing trench

• Means running across no-man’s land

• About 8 out of every 10 soldiers who went over the top would die

We started away just after dawn from our camp and I think it was about an hour later that we encountered the enemy. They were on the opposite side of the valley and as we came over the brow of the hill they opened on us with rifle fire and shrapnel from about 900 yards. We lost three officers and about 100 men killed and wounded in that half hour. I do not want any more days like that one. (this section censored) Anyway we drove the Germans back and held them there for eight days.I cannot tell you all I should like to, as it would never reach you.Private James Mitchell in a letter to his father on October 17th, 1914.

Soldiers in an exposed trench, bracing for an incoming attack

• As captain, it’s your job to reassure your men, to give them confidence and make them want to continue to fight. How do you do this?

• You are feeling homesick and want to write home. What do you write? Do you spare them any details?

Over the Top

I have not written to you for a long time, but I have thought of you … It is, indeed, not so simple a matter to write from the war, really from the war; and what you read … in the papers usually <shows a> lack of understanding that does not allow a man to get hold of the war, to breathe it in although he is living in the midst of it.The further I penetrate its true inwardness the more I see the hopelessness of making it comprehensive for those who only understand life in the terms of peacetime, and apply these same ideas to war in spite of themselves. They only think that they understand it. It is as if fishes living in water would have a clear conception of what living in the air is like. When one is hauled out on to dry land and dies in the air, then he will know something about it. So it is with the war. Feeling deeply about it, one becomes less able to talk about it every day. Not because one understands it less each day, but because one grasps it better. But it is a silent teacher, and he who learns becomes silent too.Rudolf Binding, letter (April, 1915)

No Man’s Land

Trench Warfare

“No Man’s Land”

No-Man’s Land• Term used by the soldiers to describe the ground

between the 2 opposing trenches• Width could vary from 500 yards to as narrow as 7

yards; the average was 250 yards• Contained a lot of barbed wire; some places 100 ft

deep• If there had been a lot of fighting, no-man’s land

was covered with abandoned military equipment, the rotting corpses, and total annihilation of the land with shell holes

• At the Battle of Somme, 200,000 men were left to rot in No-Mans Land

No Man’s Land

Coping With Songs and Jokes• Don’t Worry

• When you are a soldier you can be in one of two places:

• A dangerous place or a safe place.

• If you’re in a safe place…don’t worry.

• If you’re in a dangerous place you can be one of two things:

• One is wounded and the other is not.

• If you’re not wounded…don’t worry.

• If you are wounded it is dangerous or slight.

• If it’s slight…don’t worry.

• If it’s dangerous, then one of two things will happen:

• You’ll die or you’ll recover.

• If you recover…don’t worry.

• If you die…you can’t worry.

• In these circumstances a soldier never worries.

Coping with Songs and Jokes• 1914 Version:

• Though your heart may ache a while…never mind.

• Though your face may lose its smile…never mind.

• For there’s sunshine after rain

• And then gladness follows pain,

• You’ll be happy once again…never mind.

• 1916 Version:

• If you’re hung up on barbed wire…never mind.

• If your sleeping place is damp…never mind.

• If you wake up with a cramp…never mind.

• If your trench should fall in some.

• Fill your cars and make you dumb.

• While the sergeant drinks your rum…never mind.

British Comic Song about German Shells

• I want to go home• I want to go home, I want to go home.• I don’t want to go in the trenches no more,• Where whizz-bangs and shrapnel they

whistle and roar.• Take me over the sea, where the

Germans can’t get at me.• Oh my, I don’t want to die, I want to go

home.

On your Left Side:

• With your partner, come up with your own joke on an aspect of Trench Life.

Mess Time in the Trenches

Rotten Rations• Typical Diet for a

British Soldier in 1914:

• 1 ¼ lb of meat• 4 ounces of bacon• 3 ounces of cheese• 1 ¼ lb of bread• ½ ounce of salt• 8 ounces of fresh

vegetables=

• 1/36 ounces of pepper

• 3 ounces of sugar• 5/8 ounces of tea• 1/20 ounces of

mustard• ¼ ounces of tobacco

1916 Joke Poem on Tin Plum and Apple Jam• Fear

• A terror hangs over our heads.

• I scarcely dare to think

• Of the awful doom that each one dreads

• From which the bravest shrink.

• It’s not the crashing shrapnel shell

• It’s not the sniper’s shot,

• It’s not the machine gun’s burst of Hell.

• These matter not a jot.

• It’s a far worse thing than that, son.

• With which we have to grapple.

• It’s if we see another one

• More tin of Plum and Apple.

General Fears• Constant fear of imminent death. • Life expectancy of a 2nd Lieutenant in the

trenches was three months. • Soldiers could be:• Crushed by a collapsed trench;• Ripped to shreds by shrapnel;• Cut in half by machine gun fire;• Gutted by a bayonet;• Blown apart by highly explosive shells; • Drowned in a shell hole;• Bullet through the brain.

German Food Rations• 1914:• 1 ½ lbs of bread

• ¾ lb of fresh or frozen meat

• 25 grams of coffee

• ¾ ounce of salt

• 3 ¼ lb of potatoes

• ¾ ounce of sugar

• 2 cigars

• 2 cigarettes

• 10 ml of rum

• 250 ml of wine

• 500 ml of beer

• 1918:• One tin of corned beef• 10 biscuits• 5 to 7 pints of army

tea• By the end of 1918 a

meal was turnip stew served with chunks of turnip bread

PROBLEM:

When it rained the trenches flooded, resulting in a horrible medical condition called “trench foot”. Because of the moisture, the soldiers feet literally rot.

• Trench Foot

Debilitating Injuries

On your Left Side:• Today we call Shell-Shock, Post-Traumatic

Stress Disorder. And since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, it has become more common.

• Why do you think humans respond this way to war? Explain.

• Some people do not believe it to be a true medical problem. And this was an issue for the first Gulf War vets.

• What are your thoughts on this and explain why?

Rats

• Rats in their millions infested the trenches.• Two main types: brown & black rats• Brown Rats most feared for they gorged

themselves on the human remains & grew to the size of cats.

• The men would hunt them with gunfire, bayonet, or clubbing them to death.

• Rats spread infections & contaminated the food.

Huddled in trenches between bombing raids

• What would you do to get rid of rats?• Your ration for the day is a tin of ham and a slice of

bread. How are you going to make it last?• The rats have nibbled on your bread. Will you eat it?• You eat some spoiled food and now feel very sick. You

develop diarrhea. What can you do?

With a partner:

• Of all the insects and animals that tormented the soldiers in the trenches, which would have bothered you the most and why?

Terrible Toilets• Toilets were built just behind the trenches out of sight of the enemy• Deep pits with wooden seats on top• Latrines: trench toilets; pits 4ft to 5ft deep; were often not cleaned

out as much as they should be• Some soldiers lit cigarettes while they sat on the holes doing their

business, and the enemy snipers would wait and aim for the glow from the cigarette.

• Between the stagnant mud, the latrine, chloride of lime on un-buried corpses, rotting sandbags, stale human sweat, fumes, etc…the stench made you ill

• In 1917 battles in Flanders, the troops did not have proper trenches, just shell holes and sandbags. There were no toilet huts. One officer wrote home:

• “If you want to do your daily job of urinating and otherwise there is an empty tin can, and you have to do that in front of all your men, and then chuck the contents, (but not the tin can), out over the back.”

Terrible Toilets• Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on

the Western Front, described the toilets:“The older soldiers don’t use the unpleasant,

indoor, common toilet, where 20 men sit side-by-side in a line. As it is not raining, they use the individual square wooden boxes with carrying handles on the sides. They pull three into a circle and sit there in the sun all afternoon reading, smoking, talking, playing cards.”

Art of World War I

Maurice Denis, Soirée calme en première ligne (Quiet Evening on the Front Line), 1917, oil on canvas, Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine - BDIC, Paris.

“A Street in Arras”John Singer Sargent, 1918

“Oppy Wood” – John Nash, 1917

“Those Who Have Lost Their Names”Albin Eggar-Linz, 1914

“Gassed and Wounded”Eric Kennington, 1918

“Paths of Glory”C. R. W. Nevinson, 1917

Trench Warfare: Analysis

• This was their new tactic in war.

• After the war, it had left horrific scars.

• Made many people not want to have another World War ever again.

The Cost of War