![]() At the highest levels of command, the positions of friendly and enemy troops alike would be depicted (see above). Both sides dug elaborate networks of trenches to protect their men and enable them to hold a line. In the meantime, of course, the enemy would be on the move again. It’s no work of art, but it represents a remarkable step in the evolution of warfare. The gridded map below, which shows the effective range of different types of artillery pieces, is an example of the type used by spotters and gunners to coordinate artillery fire. “Someone would actually be running back and forth through the shell fire to communicate the messages,” Moore says. Instead, both sides used cable telephone lines-and human runners when the lines got cut by enemy fire. Radios had been invented by that point, but they were still too bulky to be widely used in the field. One approach was to use spotters, who’d take up a vantage point on a hill or other elevated area and send messages back to the gunners about where their shots were landing. But this created a new challenge: how to aim at a target that’s not directly visible. By WWI that had changed, thanks to powerful artillery that could fire well beyond the line of sight. Throughout most of human history, people could only take aim at an enemy they could see. Many of the maps, which come from the Library of Congress, were featured in a recent paper and two blog posts by Ryan Moore, a cartographic specialist at the library with an interest in military history. The maps in the gallery at the top of this post illustrate these deadly innovations and other defining features of the war, including the complex networks of trenches dug by both sides and the devastating German U-boat attacks on Allied commercial ships-a major factor in drawing the U.S. Airplanes-another relatively recent invention-allowed both sides to update their maps daily with the positions of enemy troops. Recent cartographic innovations allowed artillery gunners to fire at targets they couldn’t directly see and aim their guns without first firing “ranging shots” that would ruin the element of surprise. It was to become one of the deadliest wars in human history, claiming more than 15 million lives.Īdvances in military technology-including more lethal artillery and rapid-fire machine guns- contributed to the heavy toll. By the time the United States entered World War I, 100 years ago today, the conflict had been raging in Europe for nearly three years.
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