Which weapon of World War 1 contributed most to the stalemate or death on the western front during world war 1?

Answer 1

Weapons such as the machine gun and artillery made it very hard to cross no-mans land, or an open expanse between the two sides, and survive. Various gas weapons were also used to hinder infantry, such as chlorine gas and mustard gas. These gases would damage or kill foot soldiers. Some obstacles such as barbed wire, mines, and terrain also made it difficult to attack.

With the introduction of tanks, it was much easier for armies to break stalemates and advance into enemy territory.

Answer 2

World War I - breaking the stalemate

Tactics involving a combination of hundreds of tanks, cannon-equipped (aka "males") and machine-gun equipped ("females"), rotating turrets models (like the French FT-17 in this photo) or not (like the British tanks), made all the difference for the success of 1918 Allied counter-offensives.

Throughout World War I, the major combatants slowly groped their way towards various tactics aimed at breaking the stalemate of trench warfare, beginning with the French and Germans, with the British Empire forces also contributing to the collective learning experience. The Germans could reinforce their western front with additional troops from the east once Russia dropped out of the war in 1917. This allowed the German army to take units out of the line and to train them in new methods and tactics, such as those of the stormtroopers.

The stormtrooper methods involved men rushing forward in small groups using whatever cover was available and laying down covering fire for other groups in the same unit as they moved forward. The new tactics, intended to achieve surprise by disrupting entrenched enemy positions, aimed to bypass strongpoints and to attack the weakest parts of an enemy's line. Additionally, they acknowledged the futility of managing a grand detailed plan of operations from afar, opting instead for junior officers on the spot to exercise initiative. These infiltration tactics proved very successful during the German 1918 Spring Offensive against Allied forces.

Conceived to provide protection from fire, tanks added mobility as well. As the Allied forces perfected them, they broke the stalemate. While not effectively employed at first, Allied tanks had tremendous effects on the morale of German troops in the closing stages of the war on the Western front. The average infantryman had no anti-tank capability, and there were no specialised anti-tank guns. Once the Allies began to use concentrations of tanks, they broke through German lines relatively easily and could not be dislodged through infantry counterattack.

During the last 100 days of World War I the Allied forces broke through the German trench system and harried the Germans back using infantry supported by tanks and by close air support. Between the two world wars these techniques and innovations were developed and described worldwide by people like B.H. Liddell Hart, J. Walter Christie, Charles de Gaulle, Cavalcanti de Albuquerque and Russian military theorists, among others. The Germans picked up such ideas, developed them further and later put them into practice as blitzkrieg during World War II.

Answer 3

tanks