What are the 3 main lines of trenches?
What are the 3 main lines of trenches?
As historian Paul Fussell describes it, there were usually three lines of trenches: a front-line trench located 50 yards to a mile from its enemy counterpart, guarded by tangled lines of barbed wire; a support trench line several hundred yards back; and a reserve line several hundred yards behind that.
What was the front-line trench used for in ww1?
Long, narrow trenches dug into the ground at the front, usually by the infantry soldiers who would occupy them for weeks at a time, were designed to protect World War I troops from machine-gun fire and artillery attack from the air.
What were the trench lines called?
The first, or front, line of trenches was known as the outpost line and was thinly held by scattered machine gunners distributed behind dense entanglements of barbed wire. The main line of resistance was a parallel series of two, three, or four lines of trenches containing the bulk of the defending troops.
Why did they dig trenches in ww1?
World War I was a war of trenches. After the early war of movement in the late summer of 1914, artillery and machine guns forced the armies on the Western Front to dig trenches to protect themselves.
What is a trench line?
Noun. trenchline (plural trenchlines) The line (path) of a trench (chiefly a combat trench, but also e.g. one for burying a pipe).
Who dug the trenches in ww1?
soldiers
The trenches were dug by soldiers and there were three ways to dig them. Sometimes the soldiers would simply dig the trenches straight into the ground – a method known as entrenching. Entrenching was fast, but the soldiers were open to enemy fire while they dug. Another method was to extend a trench on one end.
What was the worst thing about trench warfare?
Exposed to the elements, trenches filled with water and became muddy quagmires. One of the worst fears of the common Western Front soldier was ‘trench foot’: gangrene of the feet and toes, caused by constant immersion in water. Trench soldiers also contended with ticks, lice, rats, flies and mosquitos.
What happened to dead bodies of trench warfare in WWI?
Many men killed in the trenches were buried almost where they fell. If a trench subsided, or new trenches or dugouts were needed, large numbers of decomposing bodies would be found just below the surface.