Presentation aiming to understand all decisive changes in warfare technology, that happened between World War I (1914 - 1918) and World War II (1939 - 1945), analyzing its historical impact and relevance.

1. Weapons and technological evolution from the First World War
(1914 – 1918) to the Second World War (1939 – 1945).
Teacher: Edgar Villegas Vásquez
historiansbaccalaureate@gmail.com / @eddievillegasv
https://lacajadepandoratemasdehistoriacontemporanea.wordpress.com

2. The era of the coordinated offensive:
the Blitzkrieg Era, the age of pincer
movements, and the amphibious
landings of Normandy (1)
• If we make a comparison with World War
I (1914 – 1918), tanks in World War II
(1939 – 1945) were faster: autonomous in
fuel, and, initially, lighter.
• With the end of WWI, however, tanks had
become much bigger and more modern
(especially German and Soviet Russian
tanks).
• Germans used their Panzer Tanks in a
modern concept of warfare, aiming to
avoid a war front stalemate like 1914: it
was named “lighting war” or “Blitzkrieg”.
• Blitzkrieg involved in 1939 the last
advancements in armored vehicles, land
warfare, aircraft, and artillery.

3. The era of the coordinated offensive: the
Blitzkrieg Era, the age of pincer
movements, and the amphibious landings
of Normandy (2)
• Bombers were used in Blitzkrieg to
destroy enemy positions in a specific
weak point, sending parachutists behind
enemy lines; then, motorized divisions
coordinated the advance of tanks and
infantry divisions through the gap;
finally, artillery helped to break through
enemy lines (radio transmissions were
useful to confuse the enemy).
• A second resource to avoid a stalemate
on the front during World War II was to
coordinate “Blitzkrieg” strategy with
pincer movements in World War II (as
the Barbarossa Operation in 1941, and
the invasion of Germany in 1944).
• Pincer movements encircled large
groups of enemy soldiers (who then had
to surrender, as they were cut off from
supplies and reinforcements).

4. Changes in armored warfare: the
tank offensives in Cambrai (1917)
and the Battle of the Kursk (1943).
• Cambrai in 1917 was the first tank
offensive in World War I: British Mark
IV tanks easily breached the German line
(but they were stopped because of their
mechanic vulnerability, and the advances
in antitank artillery in German forces).
• A different scenario happened in the
battle of Kursk in 1943: there, Russian
T34 tanks and anti –tank weapons had
the opportunity to stop the German Tiger
Tanks (by attacking them from different
sides).
• T34’s were easy to construct if compared
with the almost “indestructible” Tiger
(that took a long time to be built).

5. Changes in armored
warfare: the tank
offensives in Cambrai
(1917) and the Battle of
the Kursk (1943).
• Before WW2, anti-tank
weapons were very
primitive (high caliber rifles,
mostly).
• The introduction of
blitzkrieg tactics brought
improvements in anti tank
weapons as the bazooka
(United States), or de
Panzershreck and the
Panzerfaust (Nazi
Germany).
• They were essentially small
rockets launched to tanks.

6. Decisive changes in aircraft and air
warfare during World War I and World
War II (1)
• During World War I, planes were principally
used to spot enemy positions and for dogfights
(fighter vs. fighter).
• WWI planes were light, and their capacity to
carry bombs was very limited.
• The emergence of the age of modern aircraft
and the age of bombing campaigns came with
the concept of Blitzkrieg (between the 1920s
and 1930s).
• Hitler started the German rearmament program
in 1935 and built the Luftwaffe (the most
formidable air force at the start of WW2).
• The first Nazi test of aircraft in a heavy
bombardment campaign came in 1937, when
the Luftwaffe attacked Guernica with the
Condor Legion, during the Spanish Civil War
(1936 – 1939).

7. Decisive changes in aircraft
and air warfare during World
War I and World War II (2)
• Bombing campaigns were
massive in World War II. Some of
the most important were the
Battle of Great Britain (1940) and
the Allied bombardments over
Germany (1944 – 1945) and
Japan (1944 – 1945).
• Sometimes bombardment planes
were psychological weapons
because of their sound or because
of their carrying capacity of
bombs: the German Stuka (Ju 87),
and the US B 29 (known formally
as the “flying fortress” are some
examples).

8. Changes in sea warfare between 1914
and 1945: From the Dreadnought to
the Yamato, and the age of carrier
battles (1)
• One of the principal reasons for World War I
were the tensions between Great Britain and
Germany, because of the naval arms race and
the Dreadnought Project.
• The HMS Dreadnought was a battleship with
only heavy guns, much more advanced than
earlier battleships.
• The HMS Dreadnought (Great Britain) and
the HMS Kaiser Friedrich III (Germany)
were some examples of dreadnoughts on both
sides.
• Naval strategists during WWI believed that a
naval clash between dreadnoughts fleets was
very risky, because the possibility of having a
whole fleet destroyed in few hours (the battle
of Jutland in 1916 was the only naval clash in
WWI).

9. Changes in sea warfare between 1914
and 1945: From the Dreadnought to
the Yamato, and the age of carrier
battles (2)
• Dreadnoughts and modern battleships
were understood as a symbol of naval
power and self – strength of a country:
like the Yamato of the Japanese Empire in
World War II (1941 – 1945), the biggest
battleship ever built.
• Aircraft carriers were first designed in the
1920s but were massively used during
World War Two, mostly by two countries :
Japan and the United States.
• Carriers made it possible to create the
concept of air – naval warfare, and use
planes to attack enemy ships: for example
during the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941)
and in the battles of Midway and the Coral
Sea in 1942.

10. Decisive changes in U Boat
Warfare tactics from 1914 to
1945 (1)
• U-boats (“Unterseeboote”) or
submarines were useful to the
Germans and British naval
warfare strategy (with the
intention of harassing enemy
shores and attack supply lines and
convoys).
• During World War II, U-boats also
demonstrated their power: Hitler
launched an U-boat campaign, to
strangle the allied line of supplies
to the UK (this led to food
shortages in British cities).

11. }
Decisive changes in U Boat
Warfare tactics from 1914 to
1945 (2)
• The Allied response of the German U-
boat campaign was using ship convoys (
escorting large groups of merchant ships,
using destroyers and aircraft carriers).
• As an alternative strategy to avoid U-
boats, convoys used to navigate through
the arctic seas ( seeking to block any
submarines, using icebergs as a natural
barrier).
• Submarines were hunted by destroyers,
using depth charges principally
(underwater explosives were launched
calculating the location of the U boat) and
using sonars (an underwater radar).
• The British intelligence also managed to
break the German Enigma Code used to
communicate with submarines.

12. Modifications in land tactics: from
the battles at Verdun and the
Somme (1916) to the battles of
Stalingrad and Berlin (1942/1945).
• The offensives combining massive
shelling and frontal attacks (as Verdun
and the Somme in 1916) were changed
during World War II: warfare became
mobile and quick between 1939 and
1941.
• The only weakness of the Blitzkrieg
strategy was a possible separation or
extreme distance between lines of
supplies/ logistics: Hitler’s Blitzkrieg
showed these failures during the Nazi
invasion of the Soviet Union (as the war
progressed between 1942 - 1943.
German troops ran out of fuel and
supplies or froze to death in winter).

13. Modifications in land tactics: from
the battles at Verdun and the
Somme (1916) to the battles of
Stalingrad and Berlin (1942/1945).
• Lighting war also led to failure in urban
combats (for the control of important
cities).
• These urban close quarter combat fights
favored stubborn resistance in the easily
defensible ruins of the cities.
• During the Battle of Stalingrad (1942 –
1945) or the Battle of Berlin (1945),
urban warfare experienced dramatic
conditions (rubble, snipers, civilian
interference).

14. Chemical Warfare: from Chlorine
and Mustard gas to Zyklon - B and
Sarin gas (1)
• Gas was innovative during World War 1,
and was used by the Germans as a
resource to break the deadlock at the
Western Front.
• The first use of gas happened during the
First Battle of Ypres (1915).
• After chlorine gas, Mustard gas was also
used in World War I.
• During WWI gas masks were still
ineffective in design (and for filtering
some toxic agents in gas).
• After the end of World War I in 1918, in
1925, the Geneva Protocol was signed
(forbidding any use of asphyxiant or
poisonous gases or bacteriological
weapons).

15. Chemical Warfare: from Chlorine
and Mustard gas to Zyklon - B and
Sarin gas (2)
• During World War II, poisonous agents
were used during the Final Solution in the
Nazi network of Extermination Camps : as
the infamous Zyklon – B (1942 – 1945).
• Sarin gas was accidentally invented by the
German Chemical Company IG Farben.
• This German chemical corporation
wanted to create a powerful insecticide
(the formula of this chemical agent was
taken by the German Army, and sarin was
used and stockpiled as war weapon).

16. Bombing offensives: from the
shelling campaigns in France
during 1916 to the
bombardments over the Axis
between 1944 – 1945
• What happened in shelling campaigns as
Verdun and the Somme during 1916 can
be summarized with the case of Fort
Douamont.
• Fort Douamont was a French fortress
located in France (that was almost erased
by the aggressive nature of the shelling
and attacks in both sides to
capture/recapture the fort).
• Big Bertha’s used in World War I were
replaced by heavy air bombardment
campaigns in World War II.
• Bombing campaigns aimed not only to
destroying infrastructure, but to unleash a
big number of civilian casualties (pointing
to make collapse the enemy government
by a civil uprising, as was intended in
Tokyo and with Berlin, between 1944 and
1945).

17. The emergence of the missile
age and the nuclear age: the
V1 and V2 rockets to “Little
Boy” and “Fatman” (1)
• The prototype of modern missiles
were Nazi V1 and V2 rockets: they
were used as psychological weapons
over England (after the failure of
Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in taking the
island during 1940).
• The emergence of the nuclear age
came with “Little Boy” and
“Fatman” (two nuclear bombs used
in August 1945 by the US).
• Both nuclear weapons determined
the surrender of Japan immediately
after two nuclear explosions (
achieving what costly and heavy
bombardment campaigns conducted
by the US couldn’t).

18. The emergence of the missile
age and the nuclear age: the
V1 and V2 rockets to “Little
Boy” and “Fatman” (2)
• A single nuclear bomb could
provoke the collapse of an enemy
government; maybe, destroy an
important city or strategic
infrastructure in a state; or finally,
destroy a heavy concentration of
enemy ground forces.
• Nuclear bombs brought the age of
atomic weapons and the emergence
of the Cold War (1945 –
1989/1991).

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