Inventions of the Great War.
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The great World War was more than two-thirds over when America entered the struggle, and yet in a sense this country was in the war from its very beginning. Three great inventions controlled the character of the fighting and made it different from any other the world has ever seen. These three inventions were American. The submarine was our invention; it carried the war into the sea. The airplane was an American invention; it carried the war into the sky. We invented the machine-gun; it drove the war into the ground.
It is not my purpose to boast of American genius but, rather, to show that we entered the war with heavy responsibilities. The inventions we had given to the world had been developed marvelously in other lands. Furthermore they were in the hands of a determined and unscrupulous foe, and we found before us the task of overcoming the very machines that we had created. Yankee ingenuity was faced with a real test.
The only way of overcoming the airplane was to build more and better machines than the enemy possessed. This we tried to do, but first we had to be taught by our allies the latest refinements of this machine, and the war was over before we had more than started our aërial program. The machine-gun and its accessory, barbed wire (also an American invention), were overcome by the tank; and we may find what little comfort we can in the fact that its invention was inspired by the sight of an American farm tractor. But the tank was a British creation and was undoubtedly the most important invention of the war. On the sea we were faced with a most baffling problem. The U-boat could not be coped with by the building of swarms of submarines. The essential here was a means of locating the enemy and destroying him even while he lurked under the surface. Two American inventions, the hydrophone and the depth bomb, made the lot of the U-boat decidedly unenviable and they hastened if they did not actually end German frightfulness on the sea.
But these were by no means the only inventions of the war. Great Britain showed wonderful ingenuity and resourcefulness in many directions; France did marvels with the airplane and showed great cleverness in her development of the tank and there was a host of minor inventions to her credit; while Italy showed marked skill in the creation of large airplanes and small seacraft.
The Central Powers, on the other hand, were less originative but showed marked resourcefulness in developing the inventions of others. Forts were made valueless by the large portable Austrian guns. The long range gun that shelled Paris was a sensational achievement, but it cannot be called a great invention because it was of little military value. The great German Zeppelins were far from a success because they depended for their buoyancy on a highly inflammable gas. It is interesting to note that while the Germans were acknowledging the failure of their dirigibles the British were launching an airship program, and here in America we had found an economical way of producing a non-inflammable balloon gas which promises a great future for aërial navigation.
The most important German contribution to the war—it cannot be classed as an invention—was poison gas, and it was not long ere they regretted this infraction of the rules of civilized warfare adopted at the Hague Conference; for the Allies soon gave them a big dose of their own medicine and before the war was over, fairly deluged them with lethal gases of every variety.
Many inventions of our own and of our allies were not fully developed when the war ended, and there were some which, although primarily intended for purposes of war, will be most serviceable in time of peace. For this war was not one of mere destruction. It set men to thinking as they had never thought before. It intensified their inventive faculties, and as a result, the world is richer in many ways. Lessons of thrift and economy have been taught us. Manufacturers have learned the value of standardization. The business man has gained an appreciation of scientific research.
The whole story is too big to be contained within the covers of a single book, but I have selected the more important and interesting inventions and have endeavored to describe them in simple language for the benefit of the reader who is not technically trained.
A. Russell Bond
New York, May, 1919
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
I
The War In and Under the Ground
3
II
Hand-Grenades and Trench Mortars
20
III
Guns that Fire Themselves
41
IV
Guns and Super-Guns
62
V
The Battle of the Chemists
85
VI
Tanks
107
VII
The War in the Air
123
VIII
Ships that Sail the Skies
148
IX
Getting the Range
169
X
Talking in the Sky
184
XI
Warriors of the Paint-Brush
209
XII
Submarines
232
XIII
Getting the Best of the U-Boat
253
XIV
"Devil's Eggs"
276
XV
Surface Boats
298
XVI
Reclaiming the Victims of the Submarines
310
Index
339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Oil-tempering the lining of a big gun
Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
Lines of zig-zag trenches as viewed from an aëroplane
8
French sappers using stethoscopes to detect the mining operations of the enemy
9
A 3-inch Stokes mortar and two of its shells
36
Dropping a shell into a 6-inch trench mortar
36
The Maxim machine-gun operated by the energy of the recoil
37
Colt machine-gun partly broken away to show the operating mechanism
37
The Lewis gun which produces its own cooling current
44
The Benèt-Mercié gun operated by gas
44
Browning machine-gun, weighing 34½ pounds
45
Browning machinw-rifle, weight only 15 pounds
45
Lewis machine-guns in action at the front
52
An elaborate German machine-gun fort
53
Comparative diagram of the path of a projectile from the German super-gun
60
One of our 16-inch coast defence guns on a disappearing mount
61
Height of gun as compared with the New York City Hall
61
The 121-mile gun designed by American ordnance officer
68
American 16-inch rifle on a railway mount
69
A long-distance sub-calibered French gun on a railway mount
76
Inside of a shrapnel shell and details of the fuse cap
77
Search-light shell and one of its candles
77
Putting on the gas-masks to meet a gas cloud attack
84
Even the horses had to be masked
85
Portable flame-throwing apparatus
85
Liquid fire streaming from fixed flame-throwing apparatus
92
Cleaning up a dugout with the "fire-broom"
93
British tank climbing out of a trench at Cambrai
112
Even trees were no barrier to the British tank
113
The German tank was very heavy and cumbersome
113
The speedy British "Whippet" tank that can travel at a speed of twelve miles per hour
120
The French high-speed "baby" tank
120
Section through our Mark VIII tank showing the layout of the interior
121
A Handley-Page bombing plane with one of its wings folded back
128
How an object dropped from the Woolworth Building would increase its speed in falling
129
Machine-gun mounted to fire over the blades of the propeller
136
Mechanism for firing between the blades of the propeller
136
It would take a hundred horses to supply the power for a small airplane
137
The flying-tank
144
An N-C (Navy-Curtiss) seaplane of the type that made the first flight across the Atlantic
145
A big German Zeppelin that was forced to come down on French soil
148
Observation car lowered from a Zeppelin sailing above the clouds
149
Giant British dirigible built along the lines of a Zeppelin
156
One of the engine cars or "power eggs" of a British dirigible
156
Crew of the C-5 (American coastal dirigible) starting for Newfoundland to make a transatlantic flight
157
The curious tail of a kite balloon
160
Observers in the basket of an observation balloon
160
Enormous range-finders mounted on a gun turret of an American warship
161
British anti-aircraft section getting the range of an enemy aviator
176
A British aviator making observations over the German lines
177
Radio headgear of an airman
192
Carrying on conversation by radio with an aviator miles away
192
Long distance radio apparatus at the Arlington (Va.) station
193
A giant gun concealed among trees behind the French lines
212
Observing the enemy from a papier-mâché replica of a dead horse
213
Camouflaged headquarters of the American 26th Division in France
220
A camouflaged ship in the Hudson River on Victory Day
221
Complex mass of wheels and dials inside a German submarine
240
Surrendered German submarines, showing the net cutters at the bow
241
Forward end of a U-boat
256
A depth bomb mortar and a set of "ash cans" at the stern of an American destroyer
257
A depth bomb mortar in action and a depth bomb snapped as it is being hurled through the air
260
Airplane stunning a U-boat with a depth bomb
261
The false hatch of a mystery ship
268
The same hatch opened to disclose the 3-inch gun and crew
268
A French hydrophone installation with which the presence of submarines was detected
269
Section of a captured mine-laying U-boat
272
A paravane hauled up with a shark caught in its jaws
273
A Dutch mine-sweeper engaged in clearing the North Sea of German mines
288
Hooking up enemy anchored mines
289
An Italian "sea tank" climbing over a harbor boom
300
Deck of a British aircraft mothership or "hush ship"
301
Electrically propelled boat or surface torpedo, attacking a warship
304
Hauling a seaplane up on a barge so that it may be towed
305
Climbing into an armored diving suit
320
Lowering an armored diver into the water
320
A diver's sea sled ready to be towed along the bed of the sea
321
The sea sled on land showing the forward horizontal and after vertical rudders
321
The diving sphere built for deep sea salvage operations
324
The pneumatic breakwater
325
INVENTIONS OF THE GREAT WAR
CHAPTER I
The War in and Under the Ground
For years the Germans had been preparing for war. The whole world knew this, but it had no idea how elaborate were their preparations, and how these were carried out to the very minutest detail. When the call to arms was sounded, it was a matter of only a few hours before a vast army had been assembled—fully armed, completely equipped, ready to swarm over the frontiers into Belgium and thence into France. It took much longer for the French to raise their armies of defense, and still longer for the British to furnish France with any adequate help. Despite the heroic resistance of Belgium, the Entente Allies were unprepared to stem the tide of German soldiers who poured into the northern part of France.
So easy did the march to Paris seem, that the Germans grew careless in their advance and then suddenly they met with a reverse that sent them back in full retreat. However, the military authorities of Germany had studied not only how to attack but also how to retreat and how to stand on the defensive. In this, as in every other phase of the conflict, they were far in advance of the rest of the world, and after their defeat in the First Battle of the Marne, they retired to a strong position and hastily prepared to stand on the defensive. When the Allies tried to drive them farther back, they found that the German army had simply sunk into the ground. The war of manœuver had given way to trench warfare, which lasted through long, tedious months nearly to the end of the great conflict.
The Germans found it necessary to make the stand because the Russians were putting up such a strong fight on Germany's eastern frontier. Men had to be withdrawn from the western front to stem the Russian tide, which meant that the western armies of the kaiser had to cease their offensive activities for the time being. The delay was fatal to the Germans, for they had opposed to them not only brave men but intelligent men who were quick to learn. And when the Germans were ready to resume operations in the West, they found that the Allies also had sunk into the ground and had learned all their tricks of trench warfare, adding a number of new ones of their own.
The whole character of the war was changed. The opposing forces were dead-locked and neither could break through the other's lines. The idea of digging into the ground did not originate with this war, but never before had it been carried out on so extensive a scale. The inventive faculties of both sides were vainly exercised to find some way of breaking the dead-lock. Hundreds of new inventions were developed. The history of war from the days of the ancient Romans up to the present time was searched for some means of breaking down the opposing lines. However, the dead-lock was not broken until a special machine had been invented, a traveling fort. But the story of that machine is told in another chapter.
At the outset the Allies dug very shallow ditches, such as had been used in previous wars. When it was found that these burrows would have to be occupied for weeks and months, the French and British imitated the Germans and dug their trenches so deep that men could walk through them freely, without danger of exposing their heads above ground; and as the ditches grew deeper, they had to be provided with a firing-step on which the riflemen could stand to fire over the top of the trenches. The trenches were zig-zagged so that they could not be flanked, otherwise they would have made dangerous traps for the defenders; for had the enemy gained one end of the trench, he could have fired down the full length of it, killing or wounding every man it contained. But zig-zagging made it necessary to capture each turn separately. There were lines upon lines of these trenches. Ordinarily there were but three lines, several hundred feet apart, with communicating trenches connecting them, and then several kilometers1 farther back were reserve trenches, also connected by communicating trenches with the front lines.
1 A kilometer is, roughly, six tenths of a mile; or six miles would equal ten kilometers.
Men did not dare to show themselves out in the open near the battle-front for a mile or more behind the front-line trenches, for the enemy's sharp-shooters were always on the watch for a target. The men had to stay in the trenches day and night for two or more weeks at a time, and sleeping-accommodations of a very rough sort were provided for them in dugouts which opened into the trenches. The dugouts of the Allies were comparatively crude affairs, but the Germans spent a great deal of time upon their burrows.
Source : Wikipedia
It is not my purpose to boast of American genius but, rather, to show that we entered the war with heavy responsibilities. The inventions we had given to the world had been developed marvelously in other lands. Furthermore they were in the hands of a determined and unscrupulous foe, and we found before us the task of overcoming the very machines that we had created. Yankee ingenuity was faced with a real test.
The only way of overcoming the airplane was to build more and better machines than the enemy possessed. This we tried to do, but first we had to be taught by our allies the latest refinements of this machine, and the war was over before we had more than started our aërial program. The machine-gun and its accessory, barbed wire (also an American invention), were overcome by the tank; and we may find what little comfort we can in the fact that its invention was inspired by the sight of an American farm tractor. But the tank was a British creation and was undoubtedly the most important invention of the war. On the sea we were faced with a most baffling problem. The U-boat could not be coped with by the building of swarms of submarines. The essential here was a means of locating the enemy and destroying him even while he lurked under the surface. Two American inventions, the hydrophone and the depth bomb, made the lot of the U-boat decidedly unenviable and they hastened if they did not actually end German frightfulness on the sea.
But these were by no means the only inventions of the war. Great Britain showed wonderful ingenuity and resourcefulness in many directions; France did marvels with the airplane and showed great cleverness in her development of the tank and there was a host of minor inventions to her credit; while Italy showed marked skill in the creation of large airplanes and small seacraft.
The Central Powers, on the other hand, were less originative but showed marked resourcefulness in developing the inventions of others. Forts were made valueless by the large portable Austrian guns. The long range gun that shelled Paris was a sensational achievement, but it cannot be called a great invention because it was of little military value. The great German Zeppelins were far from a success because they depended for their buoyancy on a highly inflammable gas. It is interesting to note that while the Germans were acknowledging the failure of their dirigibles the British were launching an airship program, and here in America we had found an economical way of producing a non-inflammable balloon gas which promises a great future for aërial navigation.
The most important German contribution to the war—it cannot be classed as an invention—was poison gas, and it was not long ere they regretted this infraction of the rules of civilized warfare adopted at the Hague Conference; for the Allies soon gave them a big dose of their own medicine and before the war was over, fairly deluged them with lethal gases of every variety.
Many inventions of our own and of our allies were not fully developed when the war ended, and there were some which, although primarily intended for purposes of war, will be most serviceable in time of peace. For this war was not one of mere destruction. It set men to thinking as they had never thought before. It intensified their inventive faculties, and as a result, the world is richer in many ways. Lessons of thrift and economy have been taught us. Manufacturers have learned the value of standardization. The business man has gained an appreciation of scientific research.
The whole story is too big to be contained within the covers of a single book, but I have selected the more important and interesting inventions and have endeavored to describe them in simple language for the benefit of the reader who is not technically trained.
A. Russell Bond
New York, May, 1919
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
PAGE
I
The War In and Under the Ground
3
II
Hand-Grenades and Trench Mortars
20
III
Guns that Fire Themselves
41
IV
Guns and Super-Guns
62
V
The Battle of the Chemists
85
VI
Tanks
107
VII
The War in the Air
123
VIII
Ships that Sail the Skies
148
IX
Getting the Range
169
X
Talking in the Sky
184
XI
Warriors of the Paint-Brush
209
XII
Submarines
232
XIII
Getting the Best of the U-Boat
253
XIV
"Devil's Eggs"
276
XV
Surface Boats
298
XVI
Reclaiming the Victims of the Submarines
310
Index
339
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Oil-tempering the lining of a big gun
Frontispiece
FACING
PAGE
Lines of zig-zag trenches as viewed from an aëroplane
8
French sappers using stethoscopes to detect the mining operations of the enemy
9
A 3-inch Stokes mortar and two of its shells
36
Dropping a shell into a 6-inch trench mortar
36
The Maxim machine-gun operated by the energy of the recoil
37
Colt machine-gun partly broken away to show the operating mechanism
37
The Lewis gun which produces its own cooling current
44
The Benèt-Mercié gun operated by gas
44
Browning machine-gun, weighing 34½ pounds
45
Browning machinw-rifle, weight only 15 pounds
45
Lewis machine-guns in action at the front
52
An elaborate German machine-gun fort
53
Comparative diagram of the path of a projectile from the German super-gun
60
One of our 16-inch coast defence guns on a disappearing mount
61
Height of gun as compared with the New York City Hall
61
The 121-mile gun designed by American ordnance officer
68
American 16-inch rifle on a railway mount
69
A long-distance sub-calibered French gun on a railway mount
76
Inside of a shrapnel shell and details of the fuse cap
77
Search-light shell and one of its candles
77
Putting on the gas-masks to meet a gas cloud attack
84
Even the horses had to be masked
85
Portable flame-throwing apparatus
85
Liquid fire streaming from fixed flame-throwing apparatus
92
Cleaning up a dugout with the "fire-broom"
93
British tank climbing out of a trench at Cambrai
112
Even trees were no barrier to the British tank
113
The German tank was very heavy and cumbersome
113
The speedy British "Whippet" tank that can travel at a speed of twelve miles per hour
120
The French high-speed "baby" tank
120
Section through our Mark VIII tank showing the layout of the interior
121
A Handley-Page bombing plane with one of its wings folded back
128
How an object dropped from the Woolworth Building would increase its speed in falling
129
Machine-gun mounted to fire over the blades of the propeller
136
Mechanism for firing between the blades of the propeller
136
It would take a hundred horses to supply the power for a small airplane
137
The flying-tank
144
An N-C (Navy-Curtiss) seaplane of the type that made the first flight across the Atlantic
145
A big German Zeppelin that was forced to come down on French soil
148
Observation car lowered from a Zeppelin sailing above the clouds
149
Giant British dirigible built along the lines of a Zeppelin
156
One of the engine cars or "power eggs" of a British dirigible
156
Crew of the C-5 (American coastal dirigible) starting for Newfoundland to make a transatlantic flight
157
The curious tail of a kite balloon
160
Observers in the basket of an observation balloon
160
Enormous range-finders mounted on a gun turret of an American warship
161
British anti-aircraft section getting the range of an enemy aviator
176
A British aviator making observations over the German lines
177
Radio headgear of an airman
192
Carrying on conversation by radio with an aviator miles away
192
Long distance radio apparatus at the Arlington (Va.) station
193
A giant gun concealed among trees behind the French lines
212
Observing the enemy from a papier-mâché replica of a dead horse
213
Camouflaged headquarters of the American 26th Division in France
220
A camouflaged ship in the Hudson River on Victory Day
221
Complex mass of wheels and dials inside a German submarine
240
Surrendered German submarines, showing the net cutters at the bow
241
Forward end of a U-boat
256
A depth bomb mortar and a set of "ash cans" at the stern of an American destroyer
257
A depth bomb mortar in action and a depth bomb snapped as it is being hurled through the air
260
Airplane stunning a U-boat with a depth bomb
261
The false hatch of a mystery ship
268
The same hatch opened to disclose the 3-inch gun and crew
268
A French hydrophone installation with which the presence of submarines was detected
269
Section of a captured mine-laying U-boat
272
A paravane hauled up with a shark caught in its jaws
273
A Dutch mine-sweeper engaged in clearing the North Sea of German mines
288
Hooking up enemy anchored mines
289
An Italian "sea tank" climbing over a harbor boom
300
Deck of a British aircraft mothership or "hush ship"
301
Electrically propelled boat or surface torpedo, attacking a warship
304
Hauling a seaplane up on a barge so that it may be towed
305
Climbing into an armored diving suit
320
Lowering an armored diver into the water
320
A diver's sea sled ready to be towed along the bed of the sea
321
The sea sled on land showing the forward horizontal and after vertical rudders
321
The diving sphere built for deep sea salvage operations
324
The pneumatic breakwater
325
INVENTIONS OF THE GREAT WAR
CHAPTER I
The War in and Under the Ground
For years the Germans had been preparing for war. The whole world knew this, but it had no idea how elaborate were their preparations, and how these were carried out to the very minutest detail. When the call to arms was sounded, it was a matter of only a few hours before a vast army had been assembled—fully armed, completely equipped, ready to swarm over the frontiers into Belgium and thence into France. It took much longer for the French to raise their armies of defense, and still longer for the British to furnish France with any adequate help. Despite the heroic resistance of Belgium, the Entente Allies were unprepared to stem the tide of German soldiers who poured into the northern part of France.
So easy did the march to Paris seem, that the Germans grew careless in their advance and then suddenly they met with a reverse that sent them back in full retreat. However, the military authorities of Germany had studied not only how to attack but also how to retreat and how to stand on the defensive. In this, as in every other phase of the conflict, they were far in advance of the rest of the world, and after their defeat in the First Battle of the Marne, they retired to a strong position and hastily prepared to stand on the defensive. When the Allies tried to drive them farther back, they found that the German army had simply sunk into the ground. The war of manœuver had given way to trench warfare, which lasted through long, tedious months nearly to the end of the great conflict.
The Germans found it necessary to make the stand because the Russians were putting up such a strong fight on Germany's eastern frontier. Men had to be withdrawn from the western front to stem the Russian tide, which meant that the western armies of the kaiser had to cease their offensive activities for the time being. The delay was fatal to the Germans, for they had opposed to them not only brave men but intelligent men who were quick to learn. And when the Germans were ready to resume operations in the West, they found that the Allies also had sunk into the ground and had learned all their tricks of trench warfare, adding a number of new ones of their own.
The whole character of the war was changed. The opposing forces were dead-locked and neither could break through the other's lines. The idea of digging into the ground did not originate with this war, but never before had it been carried out on so extensive a scale. The inventive faculties of both sides were vainly exercised to find some way of breaking the dead-lock. Hundreds of new inventions were developed. The history of war from the days of the ancient Romans up to the present time was searched for some means of breaking down the opposing lines. However, the dead-lock was not broken until a special machine had been invented, a traveling fort. But the story of that machine is told in another chapter.
At the outset the Allies dug very shallow ditches, such as had been used in previous wars. When it was found that these burrows would have to be occupied for weeks and months, the French and British imitated the Germans and dug their trenches so deep that men could walk through them freely, without danger of exposing their heads above ground; and as the ditches grew deeper, they had to be provided with a firing-step on which the riflemen could stand to fire over the top of the trenches. The trenches were zig-zagged so that they could not be flanked, otherwise they would have made dangerous traps for the defenders; for had the enemy gained one end of the trench, he could have fired down the full length of it, killing or wounding every man it contained. But zig-zagging made it necessary to capture each turn separately. There were lines upon lines of these trenches. Ordinarily there were but three lines, several hundred feet apart, with communicating trenches connecting them, and then several kilometers1 farther back were reserve trenches, also connected by communicating trenches with the front lines.
1 A kilometer is, roughly, six tenths of a mile; or six miles would equal ten kilometers.
Men did not dare to show themselves out in the open near the battle-front for a mile or more behind the front-line trenches, for the enemy's sharp-shooters were always on the watch for a target. The men had to stay in the trenches day and night for two or more weeks at a time, and sleeping-accommodations of a very rough sort were provided for them in dugouts which opened into the trenches. The dugouts of the Allies were comparatively crude affairs, but the Germans spent a great deal of time upon their burrows.
Source : Wikipedia