DEADLY NEW WEAPONS Most military leaders didn’t fully understand how the new weapons of World War I changed how modern wars were fought Millions of soldiers died before those lessons would be learned A British S E 5 biplane By the time World War I erupted in 1914 the world was quickly changing New machines were being invented at a dizzying pace That included weapons Not only did huge armies clash during the war so did old and new technologies Millions of horses galloped across Europe even as huge metal tanks rumbled over the bomb craters and barbed wire of no-man’s-land Sabers and single-shot rifles competed with machines guns that could kill or maim hundreds of soldiers every minute World War I is famous for introducing or improving several kinds of deadly weapons Tanks were invented to break through the stalemate of trench warfare Machine guns helped stop the massed attacks that had worked so well in previous wars Poison gas submarines huge battleships airplanes and improved artillery all added up to warfare that was more lethal than the world had ever seen
The world’s major powers created lethal navies during World War I
DREADNOUGHTS At the start of the 1900s Great Britain had the most powerful navy on Earth Warships protected British colonies all over the world from Canada and Africa to India and Australia Trade from these colonies was important to the British economy In the 1800s naval warfare had changed During the American Civil War both the Union and Confederate navies built ships with iron plating and steam engines The Union’s USS Monitor even had a turret on top That allowed its cannon to fire in one direction while the ship moved in another In the last half of the 1800s the world’s navies upgraded their ships By 1900 modern steel-hulled vessels had replaced wooden ships with sails The first clash between two fleets with modern ships was the Battle of Tsushima Straight It was fought in 1905 in the Sea of Japan during the Russo-Japanese War The Japanese navy dealt the Russians a humiliating defeat destroying or capturing most of enemy’s fleet The Japanese ships had a major advantage they were faster and had more powerful guns Great Britain learned from the Japanese victory that modern battleships must be fast and have powerful long-range guns If Great Britain were to keep control of the seas and protect its empire it had to upgrade its ships In February 1906 Great Britain’s Royal Navy launched the HMS Dreadnought It was a new design of battleship that made other warships on the seas obsolete HMS dreadnought had the all-big-gun design
Great Britain’s HMS dreadnought launched in 1906 The huge battleship with massive guns made all other ships obsolete
