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Gilbert Reid relates the story of the technological and tactical inventions that changed the course of the First World War.

It was called The Great War. Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Turkey against France, Britain and Russia. Its other name: World War I, 1914-1918. In the west, the fighting quickly froze into a stalemate, with neither side strong enough to defeat the other. The stalemate created the "Western Front" - a 750-kilometre long line of muddy trenches and fortifications, of barbed wire, machine gun nests, artillery emplacements and pillboxes, a line that stretched through France and Belgium, from the Swiss Alps to the North Sea.

The industrial and scientific progress of the 19th Century created a wealth of new processes and products - and among those products were new weapons: accurate, long range, rapid firing rifles; heavy machine-guns; and rapid firing artillery, as well as useful industrial products such as barbed wire. The first three of these inventions provided massive firepower and, added together, made a defensive position almost impregnable and made attack - particularly over open ground - almost suicidal. Cavalry, the only truly mobile arm, was helpless against dug-in machine-gunners and quick-firing riflemen spraying the ground with hundreds if not thousands of bullets a minute. The only thing to do was to dig in. And so the men dug in. "No Man's Land" - the ground between two hostile trench systems - became a field of death, a killing field.

It took the generals some time, and some very costly experiments in attacking enemy positions - with hundreds of thousands of dead - to discover how bad the problem was.

So a race to invent new methods of breaking through - of making war and firepower mobile again - developed. Out of the chemical and dyeing industry, the Germans developed poisoned gas - hoping to terrorize or kill Allied troops and flush them from their trenches. Using aircraft and photography, and using all the chemical and metallurgical and mathematical skills they could command, both sides tried to develop more accurate and more powerful artillery: guns that would fire high explosives one, two, three, five kilometers, hoping to blast a way through enemy lines. Grasping for a way to get troops across the deadly fire-swept "No Man's Land", Britain and France came up a new invention: the tank - an armored box on caterpillar tracks - and into battle it went in 1916, slow, clumsy, and terrifying, but still very vulnerable, particularly to mechanical breakdown and to enemy artillery.

While artillery became more sophisticated, its firing plans, in an attack, had to be coordinated with the advance of the infantry - infantry artillery gunners couldn't see and with which they couldn't communicate. Otherwise the high explosives and shrapnel would pulverize their own men. Communications during battle were a nightmare: radio was not yet effective, telephone lines rarely survived battle conditions, light flashes, flares, flags got lost in the smoke and thunder of battle, runners carrying messages had a very high mortality rate, aircraft overhead couldn't always make out what was happening, and couldn't always communicate what they did know to headquarters. Everything was tried - including carrier pigeons: some of the earliest tanks had pigeon roosts, so the pigeons could fly battle reports back to headquarters.

More mobile war needed more specialized infantry. So the infantry became more specialized - each man concentrating on certain skills - and acquired a host of "local" weapons - a semi-portable machine gun, the Lewis Gun, a variety of trench mortars, plus grenades or "bombs" as they were known, and rifle-grenades that could be fired from a rifle, like a local one-man howitzer.

Tactics and strategy had to evolve quickly to match the new weaponry that was being developed.

The Canadian Corps, led by two remarkable officers, Julian Byng and Arthur Currie, was open to ideas from every direction and adopted all the new tactics and new weapons that were being developed by the British and French armies, and equipped itself with a very high degree of fire power - more machine guns and more Lewis guns than almost any other force. So, when the war became mobile in 1918, the Canadian Corps was ready to spearhead the attack on German positions, and make a huge contribution to the rapid end of the war and to victory - November 11, 1918. Finally technology and tactics had broken the technological deadlock.

The learning curve got steeper as the war progressed - but learning in war is tragically expensive. Every lesson is paid for in blood. In Canada's case, with a population of 7.5 million, the cost was 60,000 dead, and over 170,000 wounded. In terms of dying, it was Canada's greatest war.

War Science was produced for IDEAS by Max Allen. Gilbert Reid wrote the television series "For King and Empire" based on books by Norm Christie, hosted by Norm Christie, and produced by Pete Williamson.

Related Web Sites:

For King and Empire, part of a project that includes a six-part television documentary series broadcast on History Television. The site is devoted to Canadian soldiers' experiences during the Great War. It includes an extensive list of related web sites.

The Canadian Great War Homepage, part of the Canadian Military Heritage Project.

World War I - Trenches on the Web

World War 1, The Great War

National Archives of Canada: Canadian Soldiers of the First World War

The Canadian War Museum

CEF Books, Canadian Expeditionary Force books site with books written by Norm Christie and books published by Norm Christie, including classic first hand accounts from the battlefields of the First World War.

L'Histoirial de la Grande Guerre or The Museum of the Great War, a French site with English and German versions.

La Grande Guerre, a French site with many photographs and stories.

*Please note: CBC does not endorse the content of any external sites.

Photo credits:
Photographs used in The Battlefields Today section are by Gilbert Reid.
Other photographs used courtesy of Photos of the Great War web site, a World War One image archive. Two photographs above: A Post in the Canadian Front line, February 1918, and HM Pigeon Service, May 1917 are from the collection of William R. Bird. Originals of these photographs are held by the National Archives of Canada, Department of National Defence fonds, accession 1964-114. The book covers in the Memoirs of Battle section are courtesy of (Norm Christie) CEF Books.