What impact did new technology and industrialization have on World War I?

Question

What impact did new technology and industrialization have on World War I?

Answer 1

I love this.

New technology allowed both sides to be much more effecient at killing each other.  Planes for scouting, artillery for bombarding (long range moratrs with an increased impact), machine guns to mow dow dozens on men in a matter of seconds.  Warships were only used a handful of times so I don't have anything on that.  The rifles became better and snipers were able to pick off enemies from hundreds of meters away, unlike rifles.  Tanks played an insignificant role in World War I, but they were impervious to bullets, there were not rocket launchers and only the allies had tanks (but a few).

Industrialization allowed weapons, food, munitions, artillery, planes, etc. to be produced on a mass scale, allowing the equipment of more men, and better equipment, since the weapons that would have normally taken a long time to hand build could now be built in the dozen to thousands each day.  Think of the American civil war, the Union was able to mass produce everything.

Though the new technology did not have that much of an effect, it was the fact that they used old age tactics (marching up and firing in a line, and treating war like a gentleman's game).  Because of this it bogged down into trench warfare, which did exist before that (it was used in the civil war, and the 7 years war or frencha nd indian war).

Answer 2

unfortunately the ability to kill more people in less time. a better example of new tech was in the civil war. Dr. Gatling's new "machine gun" he thought the horrors of the mass killings would bring the war to a quicker end, sadly it did not. new tech was always first thought of (by mostly peaceful nations) as a deterrent. but alas human nature would not allow it. from dogfights, trenches and tanks of ww1 to the atomic bomb in ww2 to gas and patriot missiles, we have been able to kill, maim, and  annihilate more people in a lesser amount of time. sad

Answer 3

Ok - here's one which surprised me.  What was the greatest amount of anything sent by ship from America to Europe in WW One??  

I don't know if you were thinking "horse feed".  Thousands of horses were sent over both for French troops but for our own cavalry.  It was believed that once the breakthrough came then our cavalry would ride all the way to Berlin.

Well...  there was never a cavalry action in WW One because if you ever got a bunch of horses together in one spot the Germans would drop a shell into the middle of it and wipe out the horses and people.  

So that's one thing that technology did - the Germans' ability to aim those big guns with exploding shells so accurately that you could no longer amass cavalry meant that we wasted untold zillions of dollars keeping a massive cavalry in France.

The odd part was that we also had the technology to aim those big guns with exploding shells, but apparently it never occurred to us that the Germans did too!

Also - and this is the big one - somebody forgot to tell the generals (who never went near the front) that somebody had invented the machine gun.  So they'd keep ordering charges.  It wasn't all that uncommon to kill as many people as we lost in Vietnam (in 10 years) in a couple days in WW One.  Most of those losses were due to plain stupidity on the part of the brass.