In March 1915, at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle, the British fired more shells in a single 35-minute bombardment than they had during the whole Boer War.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
By 1917, thanks to the new munitions factories and the women that worked in them, the British Empire was supplying more than 50 million shells a year.
From each one of them rose separate columns of smoke, meeting in a pall overhead, and through the smoke came stabbing flashes of fire as German shells burst with thudding shocks of sound. This was the front line of battle.
I flew a full string of 35 combat missions over some of the most heavily defended targets in Europe. We were hitting Hitler's oil refineries, his tank factories, his aircraft factories, his railway yards. Those were our prime targets.
Before I read the 'Bloody Sunday' script, I have to admit I hadn't thought about it that much. There was probably even part of me which assumed there was no smoke without fire. That the Catholics who were shot must have done something to provoke such a response from the army. I was extremely ignorant of the whole situation.
The early firings contained many stones.
In 1940, Germany toppled France in 20 days, and the panzerdivizion symbolized war's shift from drawn-out conflicts using massive fortifications to rapid-fire engagements built around manned, motorized armor.
Few remember that the battle of Rorke's Drift was fought on the same day that the British Army suffered its most humiliating defeat at nearby Isandlwana.
What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.
Suddenly, at about ten o'clock, a dull thud sounded somewhere far away from us, and simultaneously we saw a small white round cloud about half a mile ahead of us where the shrapnel had exploded. The battle had begun.
On the eighteenth of December 1972, when we thought we were getting another of the hundreds of little tactical air raids, we heard the bombs going in out there in the railroad yards and this went on for about thirty minutes.