Homework again!?

Question

Ok its history this time and heres what it says in the book 'Pretend your a survivor in world war 1 and write why so many things went wrong and so many people died'

Maybe its hard to help me with this but if you have studied world war 1 then maybe you could help me :D

Answer 1

Well there was a lot to fear in World War I.

If you were on foot... There was the constant threat of artillery (like Germany's Big Bertha), mustard gas (it would rip your lungs apart), guns, barbed wire, bayonets, aerial bombs, and trenchfoot (which involves staying in standing water for long periods of time... your skin starts rotting).

If you were a pilot... Flying was pretty new, so the kinks weren't worked out yet. The engines would catch fire often, and they would go up in flames with ease because they were primarily made out of cloth and wood. Also because of this, gunfire from the ground could rip right through your plane (that's how the Red Baron met his end).

If you were at sea... U-boats were a recent German innovation (actually, the sinking of the Lusitania by a U-boat was what got the U.S. involved in the first place) and added the element of surprise to the battle, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

Ok World War I was a definite fluke. It started because an archduke was shot and people started popping up with weapons and declaring war on each other. It was an arms' race to an arms' race. Things started to go wrong because people had developed finer machinery and more advanced weapons but found no need to change their strategies. For instance, they dug long huge trenches that stretched miles and miles and would hole up in them for months at a time. Then when they would try to surface and shoot the enemy, they found out that their trenches weren't exactly miles apart so their machine guns ripped through the enemy like swiss cheese. Barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes, photographs, automatic cannons and new diseases all led to the bloody end of WWI. Trenchfoot, caused by the horrific conditions within these mile-long trenches, ate the flesh off the foot until it rotted completely, leaving the area prone to infections that were easily caught and usually fatal. Countries had grown accustomed to fighting only yards apart and hand-to-hand combat but with the arrival of aforementioned weapons, close combat was a bloody mess. The area between trenches was called "No Man's Land" because usually there were no trees or bushes or plants to hide behind so you were shot down. If there were trees they were lined with barbed wire that you couldn't see so you'd run into the grove thinking you were safe then you get cut into a million pieces. And if you're running towards a mortar or cannon, you're thinking that it'll miss you by about a hundred yards because most older cannons couldn't aim and you're obliterated by shrattle because the cannonball hit you dead on. Or you could pretend you're out at sea, up in the Crow's Nest, trying to see if there are any enemy ships. You see one far off in the distance and you're shouting to your captain to prepare the cannons, when all of a sudden your ship capsizes and you're swimming amidst the blood and guts of your fellow crew members. You can barely make out the silver of a submarine as it shoots off in a forward direction, ready to destroy the next target.

That was why WWI was so bloody!

Answer 3

OK. I'm an infantryman - just a private soldier. The damn high ranking officers send us out of the trenches to attack through barbed wire while machine guns and artillery shells mow us down. These generals are sitting in chateaus drinking wine miles behind the front lines. They have no idea what conditions are like here. They never risk their lives but spend ours as if we didn't mean anything at all. Bitter, am I? That isn't the half of it!

Answer 4

To attack the enemy in WW1, soldiers leapt out of their trenches in broad daylight and charged the enemy, which was usually well-prepared and showered their attackers with shells and bullets as they crossed 'No Man's Land'. The intention was to overwhelm enemy defences, but this very rarely worked because soldiers got tangled up in barbed wire and died in such numbers that they usually had to treat before they got very far.

Both sides bombarded one another's trenches with heavy artillery night and day, and they sometimes released Mustard gas when the wind blew towards the enemy trenches, which had the effect of blinding many soldiers. A lot of soldiers were shot by their officers for cowardice, while a lot commit suicide because they were traumatized. Careless soldiers who moved around while exposed to the enemy's trenches were shot by snipers.

Other factors for the high casualties were lethal diseases such as pneumonia that were caused by poor hygeinic conditions and rotting corpses, the intense cold in Northern France and on the Eastern Front that often caused deadly hypothermia, and the backwardness of medicine and surgery at the time which could do little to save the lives of badly wounded soldiers (wounds would easily get infected because of rats, lice, and filth).