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One of the weirder and more catastrophic side effects of the First World War was what happened to Imperial Russia. We’re about to see not just one but two Russian Revolutions, and then several years of civil war within Russia, that is going to leave the whole country in shambles for many years to come, and is going to set up some of animosity that will lead to World War II, the Chinese Communist revolution, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But before we get to all that, things are going to get really bad in Russia itself.

And before I get to what I have to say about the Russian Revolution, I need to say that there’s really no way that you can cover something as complex as the Russian Revolution in one 20 minute podcast, so I’ve broken this up into two revolutions, and two episodes.

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One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time. Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men. But World War I dwarfed even this. There were more than 5 million men on each side over the course of the war, and that was only on the western front, not counting the several million more involved on the eastern front and in other parts of the world.

We’re going to look at several of these big battles today, including the bloodiest one of the war, the Battle of the Somme, which is going to feature the single bloodiest day of the war, and is one of the deadliest battles in human history. In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of battles between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II, the Battle of the Somme would be the deadliest, bloodiest battle in all of human history.

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World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it. There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability. Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundreds of thousands. And the weapons themselves could fire farther and more rapidly, and more accurately than ever before.

Even though the technology of warfare had advanced dramatically, the strategy and tactics had not. We talked a bit about this in the episodes on the American civil war, but World War I took it to a whole new level. The real upshot of the changes in technology meant that an army that was well dug-in to a defensive position had a huge advantage over an army that was trying to attack them. Men in defensive positions were relatively safe, but men advancing over open fields to attack the defensive positions were incredibly vulnerable to artillery, machine guns, and even just plain rifle fire.

The military leaders of WWI knew this, but they didn’t really take it to heart until pretty late in the war. So we’re about to go into about 4 straight years of brutal trench warfare on the western front.

Website: shortwalkthroughhistory.com

email: shortwalkthroughhistory@gmail.com