HISTORY 1DD3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Trench Warfare, Swiss Alps, English Channel
1 Nov 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Script 2: on the course of the first world war. Nor was it due to the horrors that were unleashed: previous wars had been equally brutal, and indeed, the rate of survival from wounds was better in the first world war than in most previous wars. Even some of the new but had their precursors in smaller conflicts going back to the american civil. What was new, what made the war unprecedented, was the combination of scale, intensity, innovation and the singular application of industrialization to the killing. Consequently, although previous conflicts had seen high casualty rates, usually these occurred in sporadic battles or over a long period of time. No war had seen so many killed or wounded in such a short period of time: in four and half years, more than 12 million soldiers were killed and a similar number seriously wounded. Hundreds of thousands more would suffer physiological damage.
