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U.S. History 1877-Present 6: The First Modern War 75 Views
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Description:
Believe it or not, when WWI started, people still rode into battle on horseback to engage in sword fights. Sword fights. People just don't fight like they used to.
Transcript
- 00:00
the first world war has a lot of nicknames the war for democracy the [Soldiers in a trench]
- 00:04
Great War the war to end all wars who had that one didn't prove accurate huh
- 00:10
World War one has also been called the first modern war what exactly made it so
- 00:15
modern sleek design and fuel efficiency huh no way it was new weapons that made [Super car and a tank appears]
- 00:21
it much easier that killed scads of people at the same time the military
Full Transcript
- 00:25
technology had been improving in small ways for a long time before 1914 a new
- 00:30
rifle here a better bullet there may be a nice ironclad battleship every now and [Rifle fires bullet]
- 00:35
then but most of those technologies still usually came down to one dude
- 00:38
killing another dude mano-a-mano and in warfare a little one-on-one attention is [Man hits man with bat]
- 00:43
always nice the u.s. Civil War was actually the war that used the very
- 00:48
first weapon of mass destruction the Gatling gun which was an early machine [Man uses gatling gun]
- 00:52
gun it introduced a new era of warfare where one person could kill hundreds of
- 00:57
people by pressing down a trigger oh yay for convenience but in Europe in
- 01:02
1914 everyone still expected to fight an old-fashioned mano-a-mano war with fancy [Men fighting with swords]
- 01:06
pistols an engraved sort we unsophisticated Americans might use
- 01:10
those new machine guns but no not in Europe no siree so when the First World
- 01:15
War hit Europeans were still riding in a battle on horses with swords ah the good [European riding a horse]
- 01:20
old days but during the course of the war tons of technologies were invented
- 01:24
or perfected that could kill folks on a scale here supportin imagined modern [Horse riding a tank]
- 01:28
machine guns could mow down hundreds of men in minutes poison gas could maim and
- 01:32
kill soldiers by the trench wall airplanes and tanks can fly over or
- 01:35
smash enemy line it took a while before soldiers and leaders understood what all [Tank plows over soldier]
- 01:39
this meant at the beginning they were still into the whole lineup in neat rows
- 01:44
in charge strategy which didn't mix well with machine guns and flesh it was kind
- 01:50
of like playing whack-a-mole at them all just kind of sat there [Hammer whacking a mole]
- 01:53
long story short a guy on horseback just isn't that intimidating to hit tank
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