The tanks cut commanding figures on the battlefield These hulking armed and armored vehicles measured 26 feet 7 9 m long and towered more than 8 feet 2 4 m off the ground Their caterpillar tracks carried them easily over the uneven ground and stripes of war paint camouflaged their metal bodies Although they moved no more than four miles per hour 6 4 kmh the tanks handily overcame German defenses They attacked their enemies with machine gun fire Bullets pinged off their metal bodies They crushed the nests of barbed wire littering no man s land They uprooted trees standing in THE GREAT WAR World War I lasted from July 28 1914 until were the Central powers and the Allies November 11 1918 The conflict started Germany and Austria Hungary formed the after the assassination of Austro Hungarian Central powers while the United Kingdom Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 1914 France and Russia made up the Allies When in Sarajevo Bosnia by a member of a Serbian the United States entered the war in 1917 it terrorist group Ferdinand was heir to the joined the Allies Fighting took place on the Austro Hungarian throne Tensions between eastern and western fronts Stretching north European countries were high even before to south from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea but his assassination led Austria Hungary to the eastern front included fighting in most declare war on Serbia which appealed to of Eastern Europe and spread into Central its ally Russia As a result Austria Hungary's Europe The western front stretched from the ally Germany declared war on Russia on English Channel to the Swiss border August 1 1914 The two sides of the war
their paths They even drove over wide German trenches using heavy bundles of brushwood as makeshift bridges At 6 20 a m the British opened fire on the unsuspecting German line bombarding NO MAN's LAND No man's land was the desolate neutral ground between the lines of the Allies and the Central powers Exploded shells and gunfire scarred this dangerous stretch of land Soldiers attempting to charge the enemy had to cross through no man's land This left them vulnerable to gunfire from enemies who were protected by their trenches As a result bodies of dead soldiers from both armies were strewn across the ground unburied them with machine guns shells and explosives As one British tank officer described The whole of the enemy's lines were lit up in a tossing bubbling torrent of multicolored flame 3 A hail of German machine gun fire and trench mortars fell around the tanks in response But the tanks armored bodies were bulletproof against machine gun fire and no obstacle seemed difficult for the tanks to overcome A German officer later recounted his chilling encounter with the British tanks at Cambrai I could see a whole chain of these steel monsters advancing toward our trenches The tank to our front was barely a hundred meters 330 feet away by now The light machine gun had fired off its last belt of ammunition without visible effect what was to be done 2 4 The German soldiers were left apparently defenseless against the new British weapon They could only watch as the war machines continued their slow measured advance toward their
The desolation of no man's land reflected the war's destruction The battle of Cambrai was not the first time German troops had seen tanks in battle It was however the first time tanks were mobilized en masse Cambrai showed the true potential of these battlefield tanks for the first time The British had developed the tanks to fill a specific need on the battlefield They needed these armored war machines to help break the deadlock that had grown on the western front THE TRENCHES OF WORLD WAR By 1915 the Germans of the Central powers and the British and French of the Allies had fought themselves into a stalemate Both sides underestimated the power of modern automatic weapons Machine guns rapid firing artillery and magazine fed rifles had already seen battle in the Boer War 1899 1902 and
the Russo Japanese War 1904 05 But nobody predicted just how lethal and destructive the weapons could be Military officers on both sides attempted to combat these modern weapons using freshly outdated military tactics At the war's start military officials employed the same tactics they had used successfully in wars of the past They held that the key to success was to attack first So officers sent masses of infantry charging forward But foot charges were no match for automatic weapons nor were strategies that called for mass formations However officers continued using their obsolete strategies even after they were proven ineffective Soldiers were still sent to charge the enemy with rifle and bayonet only to be mowed down by enemy fire One British officer observed The French officers advance about 20 yards 18 m ahead of their men as calmly as though on parade but so far I have not seen one of them get more than 50 yards 46 m without being knocked over On the battlefield there was nowhere to take cover Advancing men were exposed and vulnerable targets for the enemy who were able to take aim from the protection of their trenches Continued use of these strategies resulted in a deadlock on the western front It prompted both sides to dig into the ground for protection Armies carved vast trenches into the landscape They used the trenches as shelter and defense against enemy fire In total a maze of approximately 25 000 miles 40 000 km of trenches was constructed They stretched 470 miles 760
