pyrrhiccomedy: “ warhistoryonline: “This is Trench Warfare. Photo taken by an official British Photographer during WWI, c.1917. http://wrhstol.com/2xcxYWU ” I was curious what those bright lights actually were. At a glance, they resemble tracer...

pyrrhiccomedy:

warhistoryonline:

This is Trench Warfare. Photo taken by an official British Photographer during WWI, c.1917. http://wrhstol.com/2xcxYWU

I was curious what those bright lights actually were. At a glance, they resemble tracer artillery fire, as in this picture from the Finnish-Soviet Winter War in 1939:

image

But you can see that the ‘heads’ of the tracer fire remain bright until the artillery shells hit the ground. In the picture from WWI, the lights ‘fizzle out’ while they’re still in the sky. The whole purpose of tracer rounds is to illuminate the path of the payload until it, to put it politely, reaches its destination: that way the soldiers can correct their aim, even in darkness.

As it turns out, tracer rounds had not even been developed for artillery shells by 1917. Those are actually flares. They were fired off constantly at night by both sides in order to spot raiding parties. When it was dark, teams of 20-30 soldiers would army crawl across the deadly no man’s land that separated them from the enemy’s trenches, then attack with knives, bayonets, and brass knuckles. The objective was to take out enemy officers, recover documents, damage enemy morale, and remain silent. Noise would cause an alarm to be raised and make escape desperately unlikely; and so they fought with essentially medieval weaponry, with only a few hand grenades and pistols to use in an emergency.