Casualties and key battles
Throughout World War 1, the machine gun was the predominant cause for the deaths of millions of men. This was due to the shear ferocity of the machine gun on the battlefield and its ability to quickly and efficiently take down a large number of people in a matter of minutes no matter what the conditions were. Throughout World War 1, the machine gun was accountable for approximately 85% of the total soldier’s deaths on the battlefields with the Battle of the Somme being the most notorious due to 60,000 people being killed on the first day alone, most from machine gun fire. Besides being killed by machine guns, soldiers would have also died from other military weapons such as rifles, artillery fire, bayonets, flamethrowers and grenades, though these weapons did not create a death toll on the same scale of the machine gun. A majority of this total death rate is from Russia due to the lack of effective control and the armament condition of Russia throughout this particular time in history. |
A graph showing the number of casualites from each country throughout World War 1.
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