World War 1 Weapons

World War 1 Essay

World War 1 started out with swords, horses, and basic rifles and pistols. At the end of the war, most armies who were fighting ended up with jeeps, tanks, airplanes, automatic machine guns, mines, and many more new military weapons. There are two weapons that I want to mainly focus on this topic. Those two weapons are poison gas and machine guns. These two weapons lead to the deaths of countless soldiers lives. The invention of the poison gas and the machine gun sparked an endless race to see which nation would have the most firepower and dominance of military technology.

There were four main gasses used in World War 1: Tear Gas, Chlorine, Phosgene & Diphosgene, and Mustard Gas. Out of the four gasses, only the tear gas caused little to no deaths on the battlefield. Poison gas was deliberately used to incapacitate soldiers in mass numbers and leave them vulnerable to attacks. Chlorine was the most fatal of the four gasses because no soldier was prepared for the effects caused on the body. Once gas masks were given to the soldiers, the fatality of the gas dropped quickly. The gas still helped incapacitate soldiers by blinding them, giving them respiratory problems, skin problems, and leaving soldiers unconscious. The poison gas was usually a very light yellow color that filled trenches quickly with the use of artillery.

“Throughout World War 1, the machine gun was accountable for approximately 85% of the total soldier’s deaths on the battlefield.” The machine gun is the most famous weapon that was formed during World War 1. This new weapon of their time could fire hundreds of rounds at enemies in just a couple minutes. The machine gun during WW1 was mainly used as a defensive weapon because of its weight, and its easy setup on the edge of a trench. If an enemy started running through no-mans-land, they would almost be immediately devoured by hundreds of bullets from a machine gun nest in a trench.

As I said before, World War 1 was...