Western Front

During World War I. Haber was in charge of the German poison gas program. In April of 1915. the Germans used chlorine for the first time on the Western front, causing 5000 fatalities. Haber s wife. Clara, was aghast she pleaded with her husband to forsake poison gas. When he adamantly refused to do so. she committed suicide. 

By the end of the war, poison gases filled one in four artillery shells used by both sides. In military terms, however, poison gas failed. Since masks provided quite effective protection, poison gas was never a decisive weapon on the Western Front the fatality rate for firearms was ten times higher. Poison gas was not used in the next world war. In fact, if World War I had continued, chemical warfare would have backfired on the Germans. Prevailing winds blow eastward, and Germany had run out of mask material and had no fabric to reclothe soldiers blistered by corrosive gases. 

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque... 

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque Hiroshima by John Hersey The Red Badge of Gourage by Stephen Crane... 

Rutherford was knighted in 1914, and during World War I he made the Manchester laboratory into a center for research on defense against submarine attacks. His former assistants, Marsden and Geiger, didn t participate in the research, however. They were both on the Western front, on opposing sides. 

Quiet on the Western Front. Any bright ideas One of the company s advertising managers replied, What about All Noisy on the Eastern Behind ... 

Gas Shells. No casualty-producing gas shells were used until near the end of WWI (June 1915) when the Germans brought out their K shell. The allies began firing such shells in Jan 1916. From then on die percentage of gas shells used on both sides steadily increased. By far the greatest number of all gas shells used in WWI was fired on the Western Front, next came the Eastern Front, and the Austro-Italian Fronts followed... 

The British army had ample experience in the Boer War of how accurate rifle Are could inflict heavy casualties and bring a frontal attack to a halt, and the Russo-Japanese War had confirmed that modem artillery could be expected to be very effective against troops in the open. Even before war ceased to be mobile in 1914, troops would dig impromptu Are pits. What was not anticipated was that the unprecedented size of the armies on the Western Front would make it possible to build and defend continuous series of trenches from the Channel to the Swiss border, or that rifles would be supplemented by machine guns in the ratio of 1 to every 20 infantry by 1918 compared with 1 to every 500 in 1914. 

A. M. Low, Modem Armaments (London Scientific Book Club, 1939), pp. 108—16 Rolf-Dieter Muller, Total war as a result of new weapons The use of chemical agents in World War F, in Roger Chickering and Stig Forster (eds.) Great War Total War Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914—1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.95—111 Albert Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 123, 185-7. 

British military strategy in the First World War is an enduring subject of debate. Should Britain have used command of the sea to land forces at strategic points Should commitment to the Western Front have been limited and more effort been put into defeating Germany s allies On the Western Front itself, did tanks offer an alternative to the strategy of attrition represented by the Somme and Passchendaele These were... 

William James Philpott, Anglo-French Relations and Strategy on the Western Front, 1914— 18 (Basingstoke Macmillan, 1996), pp.8—49. 

For Haig s excessive optimism, see Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson 1914-1918 (Oxford Blackwell, 1992),pp. 106-7, 113-16, 124, 146-53. For trenchant criticism of Haig persisting with battles beyond the capacity of his army, see Winter, Haig s Command, pp. 45-69, 88-98, 103-13. 

Griffiths, Paddy, Battle Tactics of the Western Front The British Army s Art of Attack, 1916-18, New Haven and London Yale University Press, 1994. 

Palazzo, Albert, Seeking Victory on the Western Front The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I, Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 2000. 

The Killing Ground The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modem Warfare, 1900-1918, London Allen and Unwin, 1987. 

British Expeditionary Force (BEF) assumed it must land in France within days of war being declared for it to be effective. These plans show the extent to which strategists committed themselves to the view that standing on the defensive would lead to destruction. These strategic calculations, however, proved to be ill-founded and the end of 1914 locked the armies on the Western Front in a deadly, static form of trench warfare and about to experience the nightmare intensification of the industrialised battlefield. 

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