Weapons in WWI

By: Shawn Parker

Land Combat

Tube Artillery

•Hasn’t changed in the past three hundred years.

•Three Main Types

•Guns

•Mortars

•Howitzer

•Had poor mobility

Guns

• Fire projectiles at a very high velocity

• Flat trajectory• Greatest Range • The Picture to the

left shows a soldier carrying “Tommy Guns”, which is a submachine gun

Mortars

• Relatively light projectile

• Highs range of attack• Above 45 Degrees of

fire

Howitzer

• Extremely versatile weapon,

• Able to fire at both high and low angles

• Its muzzle velocity and range are less than a gun of comparable size, but it is far more accurate. This is a picture of a Howitzer used in World War I

Machine Gun

• When the United States entered World War I in 1917 the army possessed fewer than 1,500 machine guns.

• By July 1918 U.S. Army divisions were equipped with the new, water-cooled, .30-caliber Brownings.

• Marlin-Rockwell Company produced an air-cooled rapid-fire weapon for use on either tanks or a tripod.– They were proved to be ineffective and were shortly abandoned

• Fired belt-fed ammunition at a rate of 450 to 600 rpm

Tanks

• First developed by the British

• Only Great Britain, France and Germany deployed tanks

• Release pre-maturely

• Originally no effect, later improved.

•World War I tank outside the national museum

•Tank is very small

•Inside the tank grew very hot, very quick

Aircrafts and WWI

• Had a potential for battlefield reconnaissance and bombing missions

• Dog fights were fights between two combat pilots

• One mistake could cost a pilot his life

• They only expected combat pilots to live 40 to 60 hours of flight time

Chemical & Biological Warfare

• Early forms of Chemical warfare were designed to attack or disable enemies with flame

• Chlorine Gas

• Mustard Gas

• Phosgene

• Both sides hurried to protect themselves with gas masks

Chemical And Biological Warfare Continued…

• Improved means of delivering the toxins.

• Put in artillery and mortar shells

• Between the two sides 125,000 tons of gas was used

• Over 100,000 of the 1 million infected, died.

Gas Mask

• As you can see to the left, a French man and his dog are wearing gas masks to help prevent the inhalation of gases.

Chlorine Gas

• Drawing it into your lungs causes acute bronchitis

• Congests the face until a lively purple causing a large amount of pain

• Men saved themselves by covering their mouth and noses with a handkerchief covered in urine to neutralize the gas

Mustard Gas

• Could penetrate clothing• Gas masks only caused limited protection• Caused:

» Blindness» Sever burns» Large painful blisters

• Soldiers could not touch the effected areas or it would cause the blisters to spread

• Some effected soldiers could not stop themselves and tore themselves to death

Phosgene

• Could seep through many of the masks that were being worn

• A choking agent

• Made its way into the lungs, then turned into hydrochloric acid

Flame Thrower

• Designed to inflict casualty and destroy enemy material

• Germans created a portable flamethrower, a flammenwefer

• Projected a stream of burning petroleum at the enemy

Naval Destroyers

• Many uses:» Used to safeguard the battle fleets» Used to hunt down enemy submarines

• Became vital to the Ally’s forces with the implementation of the Convoy System

E-Boat

• Built by the United States

• First appeared in 1912

• First permanent radio on board

• Saw limited action in World War I

Anti-Submarine Warfare

• Germans U-Boats (Submarines) were becoming a problem

• British and French established an Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee  which made 3 general ways of detections

Echo-Sounding (Sonar)

• Monitors noise and measures their magnetic displacement

• A quartz crystal vibrator, emits a high-frequency sound wave that passes through the water and is reflected back by any solid object it encounters.

• The depth is calculated by the amount of time it takes for the wave to return

Hydrophones

• An underwater microphone

• Used to hear sound that all submerged submarines make

• Monitored the sound