World War I: Difference between revisions
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*** Less the Italian General Staff (who were- all things considering- about as competent as anybody else and probably the equals or superiors of their Austro-Hungarian opponents) and more Luigi Cadorna, who came within a few steps of turning Italy into a military dictatorship under his command and who practically ran the war for the first two years of Italy's involvement. How bad was he? To this day the term cadorna is still used as slang for something crappy BY THE ITALIANS. Unsurprisingly, the front turned around almost immediately when Cadorna was finally removed from power and replaced with Diaz in spite of Diaz inheriting the exact situation Cadorna had had with the additional negative effect of the enemy's smashing victory and Caporetto a month or so earlier.
** Also the way the way war broke out because of the various war plans. If Russia thought there would be any trouble with Austria they would mobilize against Austria and Germany, and if Germany thought Russia was mobilizing they would immediately invade France and Belgium. Guess what happened.
* [[Improvised Weapon]]: Early on in the war, the British were able to defeat the Germans using massed rifle fire. However, as trench warfare developed, much of the fighting occured in close quarters when raiding trenches, for which the long bolt action rifles, with bayonets fixed, were utterly impractical. Soldiers took to using shovels, knives, brass knuckles, clubs and ''maces'' as mêlée weapons. As the British had discontinued the use of grenades several decades earlier, soldiers had to improvise those as well until the Mills Bomb was issued.
* [[It Got Worse]]: After the war ended, the world was devastated by the Spanish Flu -- spread by the returning soldiers who had more or less created ideal pandemic conditions by staying in wet trenches with corpses everywhere -- which killed up to 100 million people (by comparison, four years of War killed perhaps 16 million people)
* [[Knight Templar Parent]]: Franz Joseph.
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** After all was totted up, it's reckoned that one ton of explosives was spent killing each of the war's casualties.
** There is also the Paris Gun, an enormous cannon built by the Germans that could fire shells ''eighty miles'', so far and high that Coriolis Force affected the shots.
* [[Mundane Utility]]: One of the first military uses for aircraft, a technology which man has sought desperately since its infancy millions of years ago and has only now just acquired, was to look at the enemy from a very high place.
* [[Multinational Team]]: Applies to most belligerent empires/states:
** British Empire and Commonwealth armies were assembled from a quarter of the globe. A flotilla of Japanese destroyers even served with the British Mediterranean fleet.
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* [[Tank Goodness]]: The first in history.
* [[Tear Jerker]]: Many heart-warming poems and gut-wrenching stories were written, but perhaps the greatest tearjerker of the entire conflict is the reality of millions of men, no matter their nationality, going into battle perfectly aware they were going to die. To make it even more tragic, the war itself resulted in little more than setting up an ''even worse'' world war.
* [[Unskilled but Strong]]: Many new technologies of the war didn't have developed tactics beyond straight-foward attacking late war, but were still amazingly effective with unsubtle, direct use.
* [[Ur Example]]: Some historians credit the [[Seven Years War]] from 1756 to 1763 as the real first World War, because of its global nature. World War I may then just be the [[Trope Codifier]].
* [[War Is Hell]]: This war was so horrible that everyone involved decided to never engage in war again.
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