Minimize casualties in WW1

You could also minimize casualties by giving one side a decisive advantage allowing for a quick victory before the years long mobilization can have its impact on the populations. For example i'm pretty sure Sarin could be made in the time frame, that stuff is not comparable to any chemical weapons that were deployed, it's a thousand times more deadly and there's no way to protect the troops. If one of the peace time armies rushed to the borders simply ceases to exist within weeks of the beginning the war would be over for that side.
 
The Bangalore Torpedo was invented in 1912.
But not really effective against the amount of wire in No Mans Land, and slow to deploy

The line tossing charges keeps the crew farther back
and in a vehicle

Latest Engineer vehicle being reloaded
yqVEFZf.jpg

The M58 linear demolition charge started out as a way to clear anti tank mines very quickly. Deployed in the mid '80s in a towed trailer, with nearly a one ton charge of C4 in a 350 feet of line pulled by a rocket.

No reason this couldn't have been done on a smaller scale, line tossing rockets date back to the 19thC, and using aluminized ammonium nitrate in place of the plastic explosive C4.


During WWII, the British almost got there with their Conger line tossing system.
Congercarrier2.jpg

But this used a Bren carrier without an engine(so was towed), an 5" surplus 'Z Battery' rocket to loft an empty hose, that would then be pumped full of slightly geletinized nitroglycerin, similar as used in the infamous 'Sticky Bomb' and then detonated.

Crews didn't have a lot of faith being around that much nitroglycerin for some reason, and only used a few times after D-Day
 
You could also minimize casualties by giving one side a decisive advantage allowing for a quick victory before the years long mobilization can have its impact on the populations. For example i'm pretty sure Sarin could be made in the time frame, that stuff is not comparable to any chemical weapons that were deployed, it's a thousand times more deadly and there's no way to protect the troops. If one of the peace time armies rushed to the borders simply ceases to exist within weeks of the beginning the war would be over for that side.

deploying nerve gases isn't easy, and the danger of storage is immense when stored 'ready to go' vs the binary 'mix during launch'

There's no way to protect your own guys.

Hard pass.
 
Indeed.

What if Austria-Hungary and Germany would have accepted Gunther Burtyns proposal for a tank in 1911? Could that have been decisive in the Battle of the Marne or the Race to the Sea?
Most likely no. The problem at the Marne was getting enough people and munitions there, if you have to ferry around hundreds of those 10 ton heavy tin cans you'll probably have an even worse defeat. And the Allies getting to salvage and replicate a rather advanced design of a tank as opposed to coming up with their own contraptions.

It has to be something that the existing army can take with them and gives an overwhelming advantage that can not be mitigated quickly enough.
 
Remember reading an article in a Canadian newspaper years ago, when complaints were high concerning deaths of troops in Afghanistan concluded, that statistically young men were safer in a combat zone that in ‘safe’ urban homeland areas. Statistics can be manipulated.

That is why I gave the sources of the data. You can check their track records. They are fairly good and reliable.
 
You would think something this simple would be implemented a lot earlier than the tank.



Bangalores were short and time consuming to deploy. Line charges were just a string of bombs propelled by a rocket and wire could be cleared a hundred yards at a time.

The rockets of the day were not strong enough or stable enough in flight to carry a line charge across a deep minefield.
 
What if Austria-Hungary and Germany would have accepted Gunther Burtyns proposal for a tank in 1911? Could that have been decisive in the Battle of the Marne or the Race to the Sea?

I've seen that joke before. The trench crossing arms were impractical and while the car was bullet resistant, it was unstable and not plated well enough to survive an artillery near miss. It needs a lot of work to make it even float and track lay properly across torn up muddy ground. It is about as functional as that botched Russian engineering horror with the big wheels, the "shoot me now", that we saw illustrated above. The Austrians did test it and told Burstyn to try again.
 
one point of your graph is the world population is growing as a percentage the numbers are going down.

Correct, but the other numbers in the data sets are raw deaths and total conflicts versus the 1946 baseline, and are not ratios to rising population, so does it matter?
 
Yes, 'n' how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned
Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see
Yes, 'n' how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind
 
Most likely no. The problem at the Marne was getting enough people and munitions there, if you have to ferry around hundreds of those 10 ton heavy tin cans you'll probably have an even worse defeat. And the Allies getting to salvage and replicate a rather advanced design of a tank as opposed to coming up with their own contraptions.

It has to be something that the existing army can take with them and gives an overwhelming advantage that can not be mitigated quickly enough.

Might have been of some utility for taking the areas between the twelve fort surrounding Liege at the start of the War, rwhile waiting for the Krupp 42cm guns to be setup

burstynDRAW.gif


Specifications for Motorgeschütz
Günther Burstyn, 1911
length 3.5 m (without boom)
width 1,9 m
height 1,9 m
combat weight about 7 t
Powertrain Truck engine of 45 hp, Tracks: Holt based
speed calculated: Road: 28.8 km/h; Was to have had transport wheels attached for faster travel
Cross Country: 8 km/h
Armor Front: 8 mm; Rear and side armor: 4 mm; additional 3 mm bulkhead
Armament 1x 37 mm rapid-fire cannon; 2 light machine guns planned on later machines
crew 3 men (commander / loader-gunner / driver( sitting in the rear, looking backwards:cool:)
 
As a side note, John Monash, the General who planned Hamel would have replaced Haig in 1919 (Lloyd George said Haig's replacement was to be a Dominion officer (Currie or Monash) but later said Monash (Currie was 'tainted') . Not bad for a Dominion Reservist from the artillery, Jewish and of German descent.

Sorry but the Monash/Currie thing is just post war mischief making by Lloyd George and you will find plenty of Canadian sources who claim it would have been Currie not Monash. In reality there was zero chance the British army would have appointed a Colonial officer as overall commander, regardless of their qualities. If Haig had been replaced it would most likely have been Rawlinson or one of the other British generals who distinguished themselves in 1918. As I say though this just another of Lloyd-George's efforts to rewrite history after the war, along with claiming that it was the naval blockade and revolution in Germany that ended the war not the victories on the Western Front, thus playing into the stabbed in the back myth.
 
I think the Monash/Currie thing as a misunderstanding, between AN and THE Army. I find it completely plausible that once the 5 division AIF and 4 division CEF were put together they become AN army and a Dominion general given command of it. What I don't find plausible is a corps commader, even one of the only 2 permanent corps in the BEF, would be given command of the BEF over the heads of at least 5 Army commanders.
 
The rockets of the day were not strong enough or stable enough in flight to carry a line charge across a deep minefield.

Only because there was zero investment in rocket experimentation between mid-1800s to WWI. It doesn’t require advanced rocketry to launch a line charge.
 
Only because there was zero investment in rocket experimentation between mid-1800s to WWI. It doesn’t require advanced rocketry to launch a line charge.

It requires a good knowledge of aerodynamic forces, a better knowledge of solid propellants and tail control and a bit of esoteric skill in how to factor an offset center of gravity for aforesaid rocket to drag to what amounts to a kite tail of 200-400 kg line of high explosive packed flexible tubing about 200 to 400 meters long, ALL of which you do not get until AFTER WW II during which event when the work was actually done for JATO. The line charge rocket rounds the British supplied for the raid on Pointe de Hoc which had nowhere near this difficult a set of parameters to meet, merely only required to carry a 1 kg grappling hook and ~100 meters of knotted line (about 40 kg) up a cliff ... most of them failed.
 
It requires a good knowledge of aerodynamic forces, a better knowledge of solid propellants and tail control and a bit of esoteric skill in how to factor an offset center of gravity for aforesaid rocket to drag to what amounts to a kite tail of 200-400 kg line of high explosive packed flexible tubing about 200 to 400 meters long, ALL of which you do not get until AFTER WW II during which event when the work was actually done for JATO. The line charge rocket rounds the British supplied for the raid on Pointe de Hoc which had nowhere near this difficult a set of parameters to meet, merely only required to carry a 1 kg grappling hook and ~100 meters of knotted line (about 40 kg) up a cliff ... most of them failed.

APOBS is only a hundred pounds of explosive balls in a nylon hose. It’s extremely simple. Rockets were already developed before WWII. The Katyusha was in service by 1941 but its motors were used in aircraft weapons testing in the 1930s, inspired by similar French air to air rocket in WWI.

The reason the British grapling hook system failed was they failed to factor in rope get heavier when wet. It had nothing to do with the rocket.
 
It requires a good knowledge of aerodynamic forces, a better knowledge of solid propellants and tail control and a bit of esoteric skill in how to factor an offset center of gravity for aforesaid rocket to drag to what amounts to a kite tail of 200-400 kg line of high explosive packed flexible tubing about 200 to 400 meters long, ALL of which you do not get until AFTER WW II during which event when the work was actually done for JATO. The line charge rocket rounds the British supplied for the raid on Pointe de Hoc which had nowhere near this difficult a set of parameters to meet, merely only required to carry a 1 kg grappling hook and ~100 meters of knotted line (about 40 kg) up a cliff ... most of them failed.
Two stage, black powder rocket for rescue line in 1855, for 500 yards
https://books.google.com/books?id=tvhMAQAAMAAJ&pg=RA4-PA21#v=onepage&q&f=false.

All the building blocks are there, and it's easier once smokeless powder is on the scene
 
Remove a lot of overly aggressive officers from command. Pointless attacks and counter-attacks with no real purpose needlessly got men killed on all sides
 
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