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U.S. History 1877-Present Videos 173 videos

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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.

Language:
English Language

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

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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