World war I
Barbed wire goes to war
As early as the 1880's, the worlds militaries began adopting the new invention as a means of preventing enemy infiltration. In 1888, British Army gave procedures on how to effectively lay down barbed wire effectively. Ten years later, U.S. forces in the Spanish American War were holding their positions using barbed wire, as were the British troops in the Second Boer War. It was also used in the Russo-Japanese War.
The barbed wire battlefield
By the outbreak of the First World War, Europes militaries had long since added barbed wire to their arsenal. After the First Battle of the Marn and the rise of trench warfare on the Western Front. Barbed wire appeared on both sides of No Man's Land in ever increasing quantities.
Wire cutters became as valuable to soldiers on the Western Front as any weapon. In fact the British devised a curved wire cutting blade that could be fitted in to the muzzle of the Lee Enfield rifle, sort of like a bayonet.
The taNk
The impossibility of barbed wire led directly to the development of one weapon that would single handedly change the nature of land warfare forever - the tank. Engineered to break the deadlock of trench warfare, the vehicles' caterpillar treads were designed specifically to roll over the craters and shell-pocket landscape of the Western Front and drive through the vast stretches of barbed wire past enemy trenches and on to final victory.