The Changing Nature of Warfare in the 20th Century

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The Changing Nature of Warfare in the 20th Century

• Revision notes

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• Warfare at the beginning of the twentieth
  century land
• There had been little change in tactics in land
  warfare since the Napoleonic wars
• Commanders still placed a great importance on the
  role of the cavalry, soldiers on horseback, as an
  offensive weapon.
• There was an increasing emphasis on mass infantry
  attacks
• Most countries had introduced conscription. The
  German army increased from 500,000 in 1900 to one
  and a half million in 1914.

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• The railway brought faster and more efficient
  transport of troops, weapons and supplies
• The light field gun, based on the French 75mm
  gun, was standard equipment and could fire up to
  20 shells a minute.
• The breech-loading rifle remained the standard
  weapon for the infantryman together with the
  bayonet.
• The machine gun, capable of firing up to 600
  rounds a minute, was in common use. It was
  capable of inflicting heavy casualties on the
  attackers.

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• Warfare at the beginning of the century at sea
• Armour-plating produced vessels protected by
  steel more than a foot thick.
• Battleships had rotating, armoured gun-turrets
  and 15 inch guns.
• HMS Dreadnought was completed in 1906. It was
  powered by steam turbines making it two knots per
  hour faster than its nearest rival.

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• The submarine was developed at the very beginning
  of the twentieth century.
• The aeroplane was only invented in 1903. In 1912
  the British set up the Royal Flying Corps. No
  other country began the First World War with a
  properly trained air force.

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• Changing methods of land warfare The First World
  War
• The failure of Germanys Schlieffen Plan led to
  trench warfare and three years of stalemate.
• Machine guns accounted for 90 of Allied victims
  at the Battle of the Somme, in 1916.
• Commanders used the mass infantry attack across
  no-mans land. This resulted in very heavy
  casualties on both sides.

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• The Germans were the first to use poisonous gas
  at the 2nd Battle of Ypres, April 1915. The
  Allies soon retaliated.
• Gas was unsuccessful because the wind in France
  generally blew in the direction of the Germans,
  which prevented them using it very often.
• Both sides used a constant bombardment of enemy
  positions before an attack. At one stage, the
  Germans had over 20,000 heavy guns.

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• Tanks were first used during the Battle of the
  Somme, in July 1916, but were too slow and
  unreliable with many breaking down.
• They proved decisive in the Allied successes of
  July-November 1918.

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• The Second World War
• Blitzkrieg used shock tactics. Motorised
  vehicles, tanks and air power were co-ordinated
  by radio communications as they pushed deep into
  enemy territory.
• Reinforcements would then follow the advance
  forces and take secure control of the territory
  captured.
• Parachutists were dropped behind enemy lines to
  capture bridges and other important targets and
  further disrupt communications.

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• Dive-bombers moved ahead of the tanks and
  attacked enemy strong points.
• The French had constructed the Maginot Line.
  Hitlers armies simply by-passed the Maginot Line
  by making a daring advance through the Ardennes
  region of Belgium in May 1940.
• Blitzkrieg was very effective in the German
  invasion of the Soviet Union of June 1941.
• Ultimately it proved unsuccessful due to a
  combination of the huge distances involved, the
  impact of the severe Russian winter and the
  strong Soviet resistance.

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• Early German Panzer mark II tanks were only 10
  tonnes in weight and armed with 20mm guns.
• Four years later, the Germans were using Tiger
  mark II tanks weighing 68 tonnes and armed with
  88mm guns.
• In July 1943, the Germans launched an attack on
  the Russians at Kursk. In the greatest tank
  battle in history, the Germans were defeated
  mainly due to the highly effective Soviet T34
  tanks.

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• Guerrilla Tactics
• In the Vietnam War, the Viet Cong, led by Ho Chi
  Minh, were heavily outnumbered and outgunned by
  the US and South Vietnamese forces in open
  warfare.
• Guerrilla warfare proved to be a nightmare for
  the US army. Guerrillas did not wear uniform.
  They attacked and then disappeared into the
  jungle, into the villages or into their tunnels.

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• The Viet Cong fighters were expected to be
  courteous and respectful to the Vietnamese
  peasants. They often helped the peasants in the
  fields during busy periods.
• Similar tactics were employed in Afghanistan by
  the Mujaheddin, rebel tribesman who opposed the
  Soviet invasion of 1979.
• They successfully attacked Russian supply routes
  and shot at their planes. By 1988 they
  controlled over 75 of the country.

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• Changing methods of sea and aerial warfare
• At Jutland the German battleships inflicted
  heavier losses on the British. Nevertheless it
  was a strategic victory for the British.
• In the early stages of the war, German U-boats
  concentrated their attacks on Allied warships.
• From 1916 unrestricted U-boat warfare allowed
  Allied ships to be torpedoed without warning.
  This proved very effective and by June 1917
  Britain had lost 500,000 tons to the U-boats and
  London only had six weeks supply of food left.

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• From mid-1917 almost all merchant ships travelled
  in convoys. British and US ships escorted
  merchant ships in close formation
• Allied shipping losses fell by 20 when the
  convoy system was introduced.
• U-boats also played an important role in the
  Second World War. During the early years of the
  Battle of the Atlantic, U-boats were able to
  avoid detection.

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• Wolf packs of U-boats were able to lie in wait
  and torpedo the convoys in mid-Atlantic. In 1941
  the Allies lost 1300 ships rising to 1661 in the
  following year.
• From late 1941 onwards, the British code breakers
  at Bletchley Park got better at decoding German
  codes. Between May 1942 and May 1943, they
  managed to steer 105 out of 174 convoys across
  the Atlantic without any interference from
  U-boats.

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• Special support groups of destroyers were created
  fitted with powerful radar and listening
  equipment that could pick up on radio signals
  from U-boats
• Between June and December 1943 the Allies sank
  141 U-boats, losing only 57 ships themselves.
• Aircraft carriers had been under development
  since the First World War
• In November 1940, Swordfish torpedo bombers
  launched from the British carrier, HMS
  Illustrious, sank three Italian battleships
  within Taranto Harbour.

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• The Japanese navy quickly obtained a full report
  and used aircraft from aircraft carriers to
  attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, 7 December
  1941
• Control of the Pacific was dependant on a
  combination of air and sea power. At Midway in
  May 1942 when the Americans destroyed four
  Japanese carriers, they did the very thing the
  Japanese had failed to do at Pearl Harbor.

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• Air
• In the early stages of the First World War, the
  most important aircraft were airships. German
  airships, known as Zeppelins, were used to bomb
  British towns.
• The first raids were in 1915. They achieved
  psychological damage civilians in Britain were
  no longer safe.
• In 1914 aeroplanes were very unreliable and
  highly dangerous and were mainly used for
  observation.

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• Soon the dogfight had developed, at first using
  pistols and rifles but, in April 1915, the planes
  were successfully fitted with machine guns.
• The Germans developed the Fokker fighter plane
  with a synchronised machine-gun mounted in front
  of the pilot firing between the rotating
  propeller blades.
• By 1918 the primitive planes had given way to
  sleek fighters such as the Sopwith Camel and the
  Fokker Triplane.

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• The standard German bomber was the Gotha.
  Between December 1914 and June 1917 there were 57
  German aeroplane raids on Britain, mostly on
  London. 5000 people were killed or wounded by
  German bombs.
• During the Second World War, air power now became
  essential to army and naval operations. The
  Polish airforce was destroyed on the ground in
  1939.

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• The Battle of Britain prevented a German invasion
  of Britain. Fighter Command, with Spitfires and
  Hurricanes and supported by radar, was able to
  fight off the Luftwaffe.
• Britains investment in radar in the 1930s meant
  that RAF planes were not caught on the ground as
  the Luftwaffe approached.
• From 1940 to 1941 the Luftwaffe attempted to
  blitz Britain into submission by bombing major
  British cities.

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• Berlin and other major German cities were bombed
  regularly from 1943 to 1945 using high explosive
  and incendiary bombs which caused fires to rage
  uncontrollably.
• German war production was disrupted but Germany
  did not surrender. The Allied armies advancing
  in to Germany forced the final surrender.
• In 1944 Hitler launched secret weapons. The V1
  flying bomb was jet-powered and filled with a
  tonne of high explosives. It fell to the ground
  when the engine cut out.

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• In 1944 the worlds first jet aircraft, the
  British Gloster Meteor, was created.
• During the Vietnam War was the USA launched
  Operation Rolling Thunder. US air power could
  not defeat the Communists it could only slow
  them down.
• The USA also used Agent Orange, a highly toxic
  weedkiller and Napalm.

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• The development of atomic and nuclear weapons
• On 6 August, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay,
  dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of
  Hiroshima. Three days later a second was dropped
  on the city of Nagasaki.
• In 1949 the USSR detonated its first atomic bomb.
  Three years later, the USA detonated the first
  hydrogen bomb.

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• By the end of the 1950s both sides had developed
  H-bombs small enough to be dropped from a bomber
  and ICBMs
• In 1957 the USSR launched the Sputnik satellite
  into orbit around the earth. This technology
  could be applied to missiles with nuclear
  warheads.
• Their development acted as a deterrent. This was
  known as situation MAD Mutual Assured
  Destruction

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• The Cuban Missile Crisis
• USA spy planes found photographic evidence of
  Soviet missile sites on Cuba.
• Kennedy, the US President, blockaded the
  Caribbean island and demanded the removal of the
  missiles.
• Khruschev backed down and eventually agreed to
  remove the missiles. War had been averted.

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• Détente an easing of strained relations
  especially between states
• 1963 Nick Hardcastle born
• 1963 The Test Ban Treaty
• 1968 The Non-Proliferation Treaty
• 1972 SALT 1 Strategic arms limitation treaty 1
• 1977 the Soviet Union began replacing
  out-of-date missiles in Eastern Europe with new
  SS-20 nuclear missiles.
• 1979 SALT 2

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• President Carter allowed the US military to
  develop Cruise Missile
• By 1979 the USA had stationed Pershing missiles
  in western Europe as an answer to the SS-20s
• In 1982 President Reagan gave the go-ahead for
  the Strategic Defense Initiative (Star Wars)
• The collapse of the Soviet Empire at the end of
  the 1980s brought an end to the Cold War and the
  nuclear arms race.

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• Warfare at the end of the twentieth century
• By the end of the twentieth century there were
  two forms of warfare nuclear and conventional
• The destructive power of nuclear weapons still
  acted as a deterrent
• Countries, instead, fought with increasingly high
  tech conventional weapons.

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• In the First Gulf War, 1991, the Allies, mainly
  the USA and the UK, made a series of air attacks
  on Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, to lower the
  morale of the Iraqi citizens.
• The second phase, the attack on the Iraqi army
  itself, drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and
  confirmed the continued importance of land forces
  in major conflicts.

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• Warfare at the end of the twentieth century
• By the end of the twentieth century there were
  two forms of warfare nuclear and conventional
• The destructive power of nuclear weapons still
  acted as a deterrent
• Countries, instead, fought with increasingly high
  tech conventional weapons.