The Changing Nature of Warfare in

the 20th Century

Revision notes

 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.

 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.

 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 gunturrets 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 The Second World War

Blitzkrieg used shock tactics. Motorised
vehicles, tanks and air power were coordinated 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 Wolf packs of U-boats were able to lie in

wait and torpedo the convoys in midAtlantic. 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 Uboats.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.

 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

 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.

 Dtente 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

 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 goahead 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.

 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.

 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.

 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.