This area could range in size from fifty to several hundred yards and was often littered with barbed wire, booby traps, and dead bodies. The area between the two front-line trenches was called No Man’s Land. The floor may have been dirt or lined with wooden boards called “duck boards.” Trenches required constant maintenance and daily repair, as the area was incredibly wet and constantly under assault.Īn aerial photo of the trench lines at Fey-en-Haye, France, via the National World War I Museum & Memorial, Kansas City The sides of the trenches may have been reinforced with wood planks, woven sticks, or barbed wire. The front was lined with sandbags for protection. Trenches ranged from 6-10 feet deep on average, though they could be deeper in certain areas. Lastly, tunneling, the safest route, was digging a trench underground and removing the roof last.Īpproximately 475 miles of trenches were dug on the Western Front, though this was not all a contiguous distance. Sapping was the process of adding onto an existing trench from one end. Entrenching involved soldiers digging the trenches straight down from the surface. There were several ways for soldiers to dig trenches, but regardless, they were dug by hand. Trenches were built in a zigzag pattern in order to be most effective for defense. Armies on both sides began digging trenches to protect themselves against this weaponry. Trenches began to show up late in 1914 after the original onslaught of the war led to major losses due to artillery and machine guns. However, trench warfare has historically been most heavily associated with World War I and experienced the most rapid development during this period. It was used institutionally for the first time during the American Civil War, generally as a defensive tactic. Trench warfare was not new in the early twentieth century, as it was first developed in seventeenth-century France. What is Trench Warfare? Undated photo of a WWI trench, via the National WWI Museum & Memorial, Kansas City On the Western Front, however, the primary mode of battle was trench warfare. The fighting on the Eastern Front was, as one might picture when they think about warfare, large armies fighting overland in an attempt to capture one another’s territory. This dual approach was a German strategy called the Schlieffen Plan, attributed to Alfred Graf von Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff. The majority of fighting in World War I took place in two locations, or fronts: the Eastern Front, which stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and the Western Front, which was concentrated in Germany and France. Russian infantry drills on the Eastern Front, via Warfare History Network At its conclusion, it would reconfigure boundary lines, kill and wound millions, alter countless lives, and set the stage for another world conflict just decades later. The war would continue through November 1918. The two main adversaries in the conflict were the Allies, which included Britain, France, Serbia, Russia, Japan, and later the United States and the Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. A month after the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and World War I officially broke out as allies on both sides of the conflict followed suit. Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Serbian Nationalist organization, the Black Hand, killed Ferdinand. The spark that set off this tinderbox was the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, next in line for the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28, 1914. Colonialism was ripe in places such as Africa, where European countries were divvying up land. Alliances were being made in which countries such as Russia and Serbia were pledging to support one another if fighting ever broke out. A number of factors contributed to these feelings among a number of countries. Tension was rife throughout Europe in the early twentieth century. Tensions Set the Stage for War Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Achille Beltrame, illustration for the newspaper La Domenica del Corriere, July 12th, 1914, via
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