Trench Warfare in WW1

Trench Warfare

By: Hannes Kruger

Conditions

Life in the trenches in ww1 were harsh ,a third of the people who died in the western front occurred in the trenches. The soldiers had to live with rats, frogs and lice in the trenches.A closely related sickness to the trenches ,that is called trench foot, was a fungal infection that could sometimes leed to gangereen. As a cause of bad quality  food for the soldiers,some soldiers got malnutrition and severe diarrhea. One of the worst conditions in the trenches were the mud filling up the trenches, due to heavy rainfall. Many times dead soldiers were ingulfed up by the mud.

This is a picture of the typical trench in WW1.

Trenches

The trenches were mainly set because the two armies were actually  evenly matched up. The trenches helped each side to keep the land that they won in the first stages of the war. Sometimes the opposition side dug a tunnel underneath the British and allied trenches. They then filled up these tunnels with explosives and tried to blow the target’s trenches open. This technique failed many times,but even when it worked it did not cause a lot of damage on the target’s trenches.

The Equipment

This is the gear of a typical british soldier. As you can see it was a lot of things each soldier had to carry.The equipment between other soldiers,would be similar. Sometimes the soldier had to carry the pieces of a  machine gun ,if they were located in a machine gun squad. These squads were usually made up of three to five soldiers. The squads needed to be this big,because the machine guns were very heavy and made up of many pieces.