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In 1884, Hiram Maxim built the first effective machine gun, which revolutionized warfare. Born in 1840 in Sangersville, Maine, Maxim was apprenticed at 14 to a carriage maker. While learning that trade, he exhibited a knack for invention, designing a mousetrap that automatically reset and rid local mills of rodents.
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John Moses Browning was a genius of an inventor, but, the genius in his Model 1895 was in his circumventing the patents of another American, Hiram Maxim. Browning's new gun was the Colt M1895 machine gun, developed between 1891 and 1895. It was known as a “potato digger” for its peculiar down-swinging arm driven by a gas piston.
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Submarines first became a major factor in naval warfare during World War I,when Germany employed them to destroy surface merchant vessels.In such attacks submarines used their primary weapon,a self-propelled underwater missile known as a torpedo. Unrestricted submarine warfare was first introduced in World War I in early 1915,when Germany declared the area around the British Isles a war zone,in which all merchant ships, including those from neutral countries,would be attacked by the German navy.
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On April 22, 1915, German forces shock Allied soldiers along the western front by firing more than 150 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French colonial divisions at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans, and it devastated the Allied line. Overall, British forces lost 59,000 men dead, wounded or captured in the month-long battle. More than 6,500 of those casualties were Canadian, including more than 2,000 Canadian dead.
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The Fokker Scourge occurred during the First World War from July 1915 to early 1916, when Imperial German Flying Corps units, equipped with Fokker Eindecker (Fokker monoplane) fighters, gained an advantage over the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the French Aéronautique Militaire. “In late July of 1915, British pilots and observers were reporting encounters with a strange new German monoplane that seemed engineered specifically to destroy airplanes: the Fokker Eindecker.”
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The British Mark I was the first ever tank to see combat. Mark I tanks went into action for the first time on 15 September 1916 on the Somme. Eight others were shipped out to Palestine and saw action at Gaza, the first time tanks were ever used in a desert setting.
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On February 1, 1917, the lethal threat of the German U-boat submarine raises its head again, as Germany returns to the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare it had previously suspended in response to pressure from the United States and other neutral countries. By 1917, the war was not going well for Germany on the Western Front.
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The Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and imposed harsh penalties in terms of loss of territory, massive reparations payments
and demilitarization.
The Treaty of Versailles gave Germany new boundaries. Germany was required to accept responsibility for causing all the damage of the war that was “imposed upon [the Allies] by the aggression of Germany…” and to pay an unspecified amount of money in reparations.
