Trench Warfare – Weapons of WW1

On today’s show with GunBroker.com, we’re covering anything and everything in trench warfare. First up on the slate? The big guns – artillery. Artillery was used mainly to bust up troops bunkered down in trenches. As the design of trenches evolved so did the artillery, during WW1 the proximity fuse was refined for artillery to pepper the troops below with shrapnel. Artillery was used in conjunction with trench mortars which were lobbed super high to hopefully come down in the trenches and rain down molten hot shrapnel directly inside. Shrapnel from artillery and mortars was absolutely devastating on the battlefield, causing all sorts of flesh tearing, bone crushing wounds.

Next up, we get up close and personal. You guessed it, bayonets. A common misconception on bayonets is that they’re just a giant knife, but they are not made for that at all. They can somewhat take an edge but the type of steel they are made from is more designed for thrusting and penetrating through body armor. While still holding a place on the battlefield today, it seems that it has migrated more towards being a traditional piece, with a much more diminished role. Post-WW1, standard bayonet size has shrunk dramatically. Starting at a 16” blade standard issue in WW1 all the way down to a 10” blade in modern warfare. The shrinkage in blade size caused many of these to be ground down to a 10” blade, which created a very large subset of collecting in bayonets with original Model 1905s still in their 16” configuration quite rare to see!

Closing out our episode we dive into “Trench Shotguns.” If you’re shopping for a WW1 shotgun on GunBroker.com, you may want to listen in to this episode beforehand. On the flip side of that, if you’re a seller of a Model 12 or 1897 we apologize ahead of time! A long standing belief of WW1 shotguns were that they were used as a “trench broom” to go through and clear trenches of enemies, but due to new research it seems that the primary use of WW1 shotguns was actually rear guard duty for guarding prisoners in camps. Allen goes into the top Model 12s and 1897 shotguns from the WW1 era sold on GunBroker.com and the price range that they went for recently.

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