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13. Like Gallipoli,
snipers
could cause the deaths of many soldiers not
conscious of the need to keep their heads low at all times. Many soldiers
woke up in the morning to find the soldier on guard duty dead at his post.
English sapper, John French saw the dangers of snipers first hand, “Sorry
to say one of our chaps got killed this morning by a sniper. He was just on
the point of being relieved when he forgot himself and put himself above
the parapet got a bullet clean through his head” - From the Diary of
Sapper John French published by the Daily Mail 16th April, 1916.
14.
Some
new weapons
did prove successful and destructive. Mortars
could land directly into a trench and cause maximum damage and planes
like the German Gotha planes were feared by the AIF for their accuracy in
dropping bombs and also identifying sites for artillery fire to be directed
upon. Even Zeppelins were very successful for the same reasons until the
Commonwealth forces worked out a way of piercing their outer linings.
Tanks, despite being cumbersome and being prone to mechanical
breakdown and getting stuck in the Flander’s mud by the time of the
war’s last year, with refined construction and proper co-ordination with
troops, were beginning to make a difference. However, overall as Reid
page 72 says “World War 1 was a war of material, of shells and machine
gun bullets, against which the simple bravery of the individual too often
counted for little”
15. The
machine gun
, particularly those located in pillboxes, proved to be
the dominant weapon on the battlefield. Its continual spray of fire made
frontal advances over open ground almost impossible. As a result casualty
rates “ballooned” in battles like the Somme offensive, Fromelles, Pozieres
and Passchendaele. German troops had been advised to aim their machine
gun fire at the knees of attackers so that they could be incapacitated and
being unable to move they could be easily accounted for later.
Being wounded in no man’s land meant death unless you could be
retrieved by a stretcher bearer. Stretcher bearers were also very brave
individuals, often moving from shell hole to shell hole to retrieve injured
soldiers and drag them back to their trenches.
Initially a couple of machine guns were allocated to each battalion, by the
war’s end hundreds were allocated to the AIF. The Lewis gun, named
after its inventor Isaac Lewis, was a lighter machine gun, carried by
attacking troops, than its heavier German counterpart which was more
effective operating in a static position.
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