World War 1 : The Reality of war
World War I was also known as the Great War, the World War, the War of the Nations, and the War to End All Wars.
French Second Lieutenant Alfred Joubaire wrote in his diary about WWI just before he died that
“Humanity is mad! It must be mad to do what it is doing. What a massacre. What scenes of horror and carnage! I cannot find words to translate my impressions. Hell cannot be so terrible! Men are mad!”.
By numbers:
More than 65 million men from 30 countries fought in WWI.
Nearly 10 million died.
The Allies (The Entente Powers) lost about 6 million soldiers.
The Central Powers lost about 4 million.
There were over 35 million civilian and soldier casualties in WWI. Over 15 million died and 20 million were wounded.
Russia mobilized 12 million troops during WWI, making it the largest army in the war. More than 3/4 were killed, wounded, or went missing in action.
The Germans were the first to use flamethrowers in WWI.Their flamethrowers could fire jets of flame as far as
130 feet (40 m).c
The Pool of Peace is a 40-ft (12-m) deep lake near Messines, Belgium. It fills a crater made in 1917 when the British
detonated a mine containing 45 tons of explosives.
For the span of WWI, from 1914-1918, 274 German U-boats sank 6,596 ships. The five most successful U-boats were U-35 (sank 224 ships), U-39 (154 ships), U-38 (137 ships), U-34 (121 ships), and U-33 (84 ships). Most of these were sunk near the coast, particularly in the English Channel.