What was the most important bit of technology in the 1st world war?
The tank for sure, but not because it put “the fear of God” into the German’s. What the tank did was restore mobility to the battlefield and without mobility there could be no victory. The fundamental problem in WWI was that the European powers had not fought a major war in almost 35 years. In that 35 years the weapons had changed (repeating rifles, rapid-fire artillery and of course the machine gun) but the tactics had not. What ensued in the fall of 1914 was massive slaughter on a scale never before seen. The only solution at the time was to dig in to protect from that massive firepower. Thus static trench warfare was born, with millions of men facing each other across no-man’s land and neither side having the ability to do much about it. The tank was the solution to the trench warfare problem and once tank tactics were perfected and the tanks themselves available in quantity in 1918 the German line’s broke and the war came to an end. The tank was the answer to the machine gun and ba
