Agar, Gatling, Maxim, Lewis, Browning, and Hotchkiss–what was it about the US of A that gave the world most of its early machine and repeating gun designers?
A large in-house demand for guns, from both military and civilians?
Very few other countries needed or dared to put such firepower in the hands of the general public, it seems to me. Britain, for example, did not have a wild frontier or continuous wars against displaced natives, and hunting was more reserved for the upper classes. Their last serious internal war was 1745 IIRC and did not involve the scale of the US civil war.
Fortune Bailey and David Williams were also Americans.
No, most of them went to Europe because that was where the buyers were; Lewis to the UK, Browning to Belgium, Hotchkiss to France, and Maxim to everywhere. Hiram Maxim told the Times of London, ‘‘In 1882 I was in Vienna, where I met an American whom I had known in the States. He said: ‘Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.’’’ You are promoting what I assume is a recent myth based on Americans’ supposed love of guns.
That is laughable, I’m afraid.
Reinforced concrete was new.
The Haber process was new.
Reading this thread with much interest. My late (American) grandfather fought in WWI but never talked much about it. I have his uniform, shaving kit, helmet and medals, including a Purple Heart. But I know little about, at least compared to my knowledge of WWII.
Now that we have all the SD WWI buffs gathered, I’m interested in their opinion of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast and his WWI coverage to date:
Warning that these are long podcasts. Three hours plus, each. But I love them. Carlin has a way to make history feel more real to me rather than reading battle damage statistics, He seems to have a knack for putting things in perspective.
I’m curious to know what other Dopers think about Hardcore History.
I survived four hours of the Goths, I think I can handle this. 
The generals of WWI weren’t stupid enough to have cavalry charge unbroken fronts, but they were incredibly deluded about cavalry’s role in modern warfare. Check out the Encyclopedia Britannica article about cavalry written in 1911. They thought machine guns and modern artillery would improve the effectiveness of cavalry–since they could tear open wide holes in enemy lines that cavalry would then exploit. Well, how did they explain the poor performance of cavalry in the American Civil/Franco-Prussian/Russo-Japanese wars? They basically explained it away: the terrain was poor for cavalry, the troops and commanders were not up to modern standards, their firepower wasn’t enough. Amazingly enough, at the Somme the British plan was to follow up the planned breakthrough with a Napoleonesque cavalry pursuit. Two years into the war!
Jebus! Napoleon’s own damned cavalry couldn’t do that at Waterloo. Nor could the French at Agincourt. Nor could any cavalry against a tight formation of disciplined pikemen pretty much forever. Cavalry as mobile infantry, as mosquitos harassing the flanks and tearing up rail lines behind lines? Sure, as demonstrated in the ACW. Scouts? Useful if they didn’t get the bit in their teeth and start freelancing (I’m looking at you, JEB Stuart). But a glorious cavalry charge sweeping through the gap, full of élan, éclat, and éclairs? In a general’s wet dream, perhaps, but rarely actually tried, much less tried successfully, in recent centuries.
Also the early ammunition, using black powder, tended to jam alot. Even early smokeless powder had its issues with jamming.
installLSC. That was amazingly prescient of the Encyclopaedia, since that is exactly what happened. Only with mechanised rather than horse cavalry. And traditional horse cavalry did well enough in the Eastern Front and the Middle East.
Another thing to consider, which has been missed. WW1, especially 1914 machine guns were heavy cumbersome things, best used in fixed positions (they were exceptions). What really made war devastating was the fact that troops were equipped with bolt action magazine fed rifles. These allowed lines to deliver massive and continuous volleys at each other. At Mons for instance, the British Army decimated the German attackers using mostly rifle fire.
The 2 Corps Moltke sent to the Eastern Front would have covered that hole pretty well.
Not amazing really. If you did manage to break into the enemy front line, how would you exploit that? The early tanks moved at a walking pace (if at all- reliability was dreadful) so what else could you use? The main snag was that the German methods of defence in depth meant that you would have to tear a really big and deep hole in the line before you could get cavalry through it.
Indeed, Mitchell was incredibly wrong on a lot of things and gets credit where it isn’t really due. He fervently believed that airpower had made navies obsolete and advocated disbanding the US Navy completely in favor of aircraft to defend the US shores. That he predicted a future war with Japan including an attack on Pearl Harbor is often mentioned, what isn’t mentioned as often is that keeping in step he thought it would come from land bases in the Pacific, not aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers, being ships, he considered useless - not only can they not operate efficiently on the high seas but even if they could they cannot place sufficient aircraft in the air at one time to insure a concentrated operation.
I’m going to take a literal approach to answering the OP’s question.
Bear in mind that we have grown up with vivid war movies and live wartime footage. We ALL have stark, striking, brutal pictures in our minds of what modern war is like from the jungles of SE Asia to the deserts of Afghanistan. Most of us watched the first Gulf War on CNN live as it happened. Even the youngest children among us have grown up with combat movies, video games, cartoons in glorious, lifelike color, along with deafening sound effects. (My late husband said that the thing that was most striking to him about combat was that it was incredibly noisy, like an ongoing 50-car pileup or sound loop of a train wreck.)
Go back to 1900. There were no movies or newsreel footage. If you hadn’t been to the front yourself, you wouldn’t have any idea what to expect except from what you read in books. The average person would not have these familiar (to us) late 20th century scenes of realistic wartime conditions in his/her head. They might have seen some Civil War photos or still battlefield pictures. Any male family member who had been to war would not have sat around the dinner table and told stories of brutality, blood, dysentery, limbs blown off, friends dying in their arms.
I think it’s [del]hard[/del] next to impossible for us to imagine the contrast between the media/information overload we experience today (and that we have grown up with) and the dearth of mass media/information in people’s lives as the world entered World War I. People back then got their news through two-dimensional newspapers and books (with drawings and some black and white photos) and that was about it.
The OP asked “what kind of war were they expecting?” and to me the answer is that the young men going off to WWI could not possibly picture the kind of war that even children today are all too familiar with after decades real-time coverage and starkly realistic war movies.
True. New soldiers in the ACW called their first battle “seeing the elephant,” as if they were off to a circus. However, Wikipedia says, “Elephant ‘sightings’ often begin with excitement and high ideals only to be disappointing or disenchanting. The high excitement followed by the low frustrations are what epitomize the elephant as something most wanted to ‘see’ but few would have wanted to ‘see’ again,” and that’s how I’ve always understood its use when I’ve encountered it. By September most guys had seen enough of the elephant, thankyouverymuch, and they started to dig their, and their replacements’, new homes for the next four years.
Simplification–the Leadership, Civilian & Military, of the Great Powers of World War One, expected results more or less like the Colonial Wars. Perhaps a trifle harder.
When they didn’t get that, they assumed their own troops weren’t trying hard, and repeated the trench rush. Over & over.
This must have been the case, because just about every one of the eventual horrors of WW I was more or less displayed during the US Civil War.
They for whatever reason, didn’t end up fighting the same way during the Franco-Prussian war and some of the others between 1865 and 1914.
How about: The smokeless magazine rifle, smokeless propellants, high explosive, long-range (beyond line of sight) artillery, air power, motor vehicles, oil-fired warships, over-the-horizon naval gunnery, turbine propulsion …
Gas attacks, trench warfare and aerial bombardment?