World War 1 can any one help me with homework for daughter?

Question

She needs to know what jobs the soldiers had to do once they got "over there" apart from trying to kill the others!!

Answer 1

WWI was fought the old fashioned way, trench to trench. Usually the first thing they had to do was establish a boundary by digging trenches to facilitate movement between other units. It would allow runners to deliver messages between officers (radios didn't exist).
When they were ready, they would leave the trenches and charge the enemy and try to take over their trenches.
So one would assume that digging was their first job as well as laying barbed wire around the area to slow down the enemy advances.

Answer 2

Soldiers do a lot of jobs. It depends on what thier job was.

In general, there was a lot of digging because the allies were trying to extend trenches.

They also conducted patrols. I had a friend that was in the horse cavalry in WWI. They did scouting, but they didn't ride their horses a lot doing it ofcourse.

Artillery soldiers would maintain their guns and fire barrages at enemy trenches.

Signal soldiers ran messages, laid wire for communications and still used flags and carrier pidgeons.

Cooks still cooked.

Supply soldiers still drove and carted supplies around to the trenches.

Military Police directed traffic behind the trenches and took care of POWs.

Medics and doctors treated the wounded, and tried to help with fighting things like trench foot.

Something few people know about is that for food, they still used live stock a lot, so the Army Vetrinary Corps had to maintain the health of herds which is why they have the job of food inspection today still.

Answer 3

The largest part of the soldiers were employed in supporting the front line troops, supplies of ammunition and food had to be constantly moved forward.

In the front line are the troops were constantly repairing or preparing their fighting positions, barbed wire was being laid mainly at night and in silence so as not to attract enemy fire.

Units (depending upon the activity at the front) were located to the rear areas for training, but primarily to get hot showers and a change of clothes, there would have been relatively little free time as training in new methods of attack were in constant progress.

As I mentioned before there were many soldiers who were employed in supporting the front line troops, the cooks, tailors, even shoe makers, even the medical troops.

The Quarter-Master troops who would have had the responsibility for issuing new kit/clothes and weapons, then there were the road building troops, railway building troops, Some troops were responsible for salvaging the large amounts of equipment scattered over the old battlefield areas, they would recover rifles and equipment left on the field of battle or from the dead.

And the saddest of all would have been the units responsible for gathering the remains and bodies of the fallen and trying to bury them, in some cases the bodies could have lain exposed for months on the battlefield and there would have been no chance to identify the remains. At other times even the temporary battlefield graves would have received shellfire and the markers destroyed, again leading to no possibility of identifying the victims,

I hope this helps some.

Answer 4

Training the divisions the Army would eventually took establishing thirty-two camps or cantonments throughout the United States. How much training incoming soldiers needed before going overseas had long been a matter of debate, but in 1917 the War Department settled on four months. It established a sixteen-week program that emphasized training soldiers by military specialty, e.g., riflemen, artillery gunners, supply or personnel clerks, or medical specialists. Division commanders at the cantonments would train their men progressively from individual to battalion level but only within each battalion’s specialty fields. Within the four-month period, the War Department policy gave the divisional commanders latitude to vary the content and duration of the specialty training. Initially, much to the dismay of Pershing and his staff in France, this training only emphasized trench, or positional, warfare and excluded rifle marksmanship and other elements of a more open and mobile warfare. Moreover, with the entire training period dedicated to the development of individual and small-unit skills, the larger units never came together to train as combined-arms teams. Until the end of the war, the training managers at the War Department had various degrees of success as the department worked to establish a consistent training regime and to move away from the sole emphasis on trench warfare. The Army, however, was never able to implement an effective method for combined-arms training at the regiment and division levels before the units deployed.

Answer 5

ww1 was in my opinion worst than any other war for it's time.it was fought the same way as the civil war in the trenches,it was originally in the planning two hundred years before it started,had a dmz line nearly seven hundred miles long diag from northen france to border of northern italy/switzerland,it created following: great pandemic of 1918 killing 50-100 million worldwide and 50 thousand in us,created the great depression,created communism in russia and eventually in china,broke up the ottoman empire,creating the seperate persian countries and giving rise to 'lawrence of arabia', an actual traitor/creator of today's evils in middle east,it also created the world war two,korean war,vietnam war:movies on subject: german movie 'westfront 1918',all quiet on the western front,sergeant york,the lost battalion,a silence of arms

Answer 6

I think they are the same in every war.
Almost Every job you can imagine the military has.

Answer 7

Its the same as with any war, some dug trenches and filled sand bags, some drove trucks, some were artillerymen, office clerks etc etc etc.

Answer 8

Jobs they did:
Transporting cargo.
Engineers built bridges.
Patched anything that was damaged on the way over.
dug trenches.
set traps.
etc...