World War 1 Trench Warfare

On June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to Austria and Hungary’s throne, and his wife were assassinated by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip. This is what started it all—the Great War, the War of the Nations, the end of all wars—World War I. Due to the assassination of Ferdinand, a chain reaction of war declarations spread throughout Europe. This war lasted four years and was fought on every ocean and on almost every continent. World War I changed the future of wars forever with the first use of more advanced equipment, the first and last use of trench warfare, and the transformation of the United Stated into the largest military power in the world. The new advancements in technology around the 1900s proved quite useful between 1914 and 1918. With the use of machine guns, chemical weapons, tanks, and aircrafts. The first machine gun was introduced in World War I; the hundred pound, water-cooled gun could fire …show more content…
Soldiers constantly rotated duties; whether it was fighting on the front lines, providing support, on sentry duty, or resting for a short period of time. Aside from constant artillery and sniper fire, most offensive actions were taken at night. The dark provided enough of an advantage that soldiers could leave the trenches, conduct surveillance, and execute raids. Daylight was usually dedicated to the defense and maintenance of the trenches. All the soldiers except for the specialists such as the snipers and machine-gunners were required to do maintenance on the trenches. By 1918, over eight million people had lost their lives fighting on the fronts. After the war, the area known as the Western Front had trenches that stretched nearly twenty-five thousand miles from the English Channel to Switzerland. As the British poet Siegfried Sassoon wrote, “When all is done and said, the war was mainly a matter of holes and