WW1 Artillery: The Weapon That Caused Most Casualties

Artillery was the deadliest weapon of World War 1: historians estimate it caused roughly 60% of all battlefield casualties between 1914 and 1918 - more than machine guns, rifles, poison gas and aircraft combined. The man who decided whether a position held was not the rifleman in the trench but the gun crew several kilometres behind it.

This article is for readers interested in World War 1 history who want to understand why contemporaries called artillery "the god of war", which types of guns fought on the fronts, and how that experience is reflected in modern strategy games set in 1914.

Why artillery became the decisive weapon

Before 1914, general staffs planned a fast war of manoeuvre: infantry advances, cavalry pursues, guns support. By the autumn of 1914 that plan had collapsed. Magazine rifles and machine guns made open assault suicidal, the front froze into a continuous trench line from the North Sea to Switzerland, and the only way to reach an enemy dug into the ground was indirect, high-angle fire.

The consequence was arithmetic. Destroying a dugout or cutting barbed wire takes not hundreds but millions of shells. Artillery moved from a supporting arm to the main one, and infantry became the force that merely occupied what the guns had already destroyed. We covered how the front reached deadlock in our article on trench warfare.

Types of World War 1 artillery

Artillery of 1914-1918 is usually grouped into four families by role and firing trajectory.

Field artillery

Light quick-firing guns of 75-77 mm were the workhorses of the war. The French 75 mm Model 1897, thanks to its hydro-pneumatic recoil system, delivered 15-30 rounds per minute without re-aiming, which was revolutionary in 1914. Its counterparts were the German 77 mm FK 96 n.A., the British 18-pounder and the Russian 76.2 mm M1902.

Howitzers and heavy artillery

A field gun's flat trajectory is useless against a trench. Howitzers of 105-305 mm lobbed shells along a steep arc, striking the target from above. Heavy artillery became the scarce resource every headquarters fought for: almost nobody had enough in 1914, and by 1918 it formed the backbone of every offensive preparation.

Trench mortars

No man's land was often only 50-200 metres wide, and a conventional gun was the wrong tool. The German Minenwerfer and the British Stokes mortar (1915) solved the short-range problem: light, portable, and fast-firing.

Railway and anti-aircraft guns

Super-heavy pieces were mounted on railway carriages simply because there was no other way to move them. In parallel with the rise of reconnaissance and bomber aviation, an entirely new class of anti-aircraft guns appeared that had barely existed before the war.

The biggest guns of the war: Big Bertha and the Paris Gun

Big Bertha (Dicke Bertha) was a 420 mm Krupp siege howitzer. Its shell weighed 820 kg and travelled about 9.3 km. In August 1914 these howitzers cracked the concrete forts of Liege, considered impregnable, in a matter of days, and destroyed the pre-war faith in fortresses.

The Paris Gun (Paris-Geschutz) of 1918 answered a different question: a barrel over 30 metres long, a shell of roughly 106 kg, and a range of about 120 km. Its trajectory peaked at around 40 km altitude, effectively the first human-made object to reach the stratosphere. Its military value was negligible: some 320 rounds fired at Paris killed about 250 people. It was a weapon of psychological pressure, not destruction.

The shell crisis: when industry wins the war

The central lesson of the artillery war was logistical. Pre-war ammunition consumption estimates proved too low by an order of magnitude, and in 1915 Britain went through the Shell Crisis, which cost the Secretary of State for War his post and led to a dedicated Ministry of Munitions.

The scale is striking even by modern standards:

• Before the Somme offensive (24 June to 1 July 1916) the British fired over 1.5 million shells in seven days.
• Before the attack at Messines Ridge in June 1917, around 3.5 million shells.
• At Verdun on 21 February 1916 the Germans massed about 1,200 guns on a narrow sector.
• Across the war British industry produced roughly 218 million shells.

War stopped being a matter of armies and became a matter of factories. Whoever produced more steel and explosives set the tempo at the front. We broke down total casualty figures and how they were distributed in a separate piece on World War 1 casualties.

The creeping barrage and counter-battery fire

For the first two years artillery worked bluntly: multi-day bombardments churned the ground into a swamp, warned the enemy an attack was coming, and made that same ground impassable for the attackers' own infantry.

The answer was the creeping barrage: a moving curtain of explosions advancing ahead of the infantry at roughly 90 metres every three minutes. The idea was simple. Infantry walks behind a wall of fire and reaches the trench before the defenders can climb out of their dugouts. The weakness was the rigid timetable: gunners fired by the clock, not by the situation. If the infantry fell behind in mud or uncut wire, it lost its cover; if it pushed ahead, it walked into its own shells.

The second revolution was counter-battery work. British sound ranging and flash spotting could, by 1918, locate an enemy battery to within about 50 metres without sending up a single spotter aircraft. Combined with predicted fire, this restored surprise: on 8 August 1918 at Amiens the Allies opened up with over 2,000 guns and no preliminary bombardment at all, and broke through.

The cost: shell shock, the iron harvest and ruined ground

Constant bombardment produced a condition 1914 medicine had no name for. The term shell shock was introduced in 1915 by the psychologist Charles Myers; today we would call it combat trauma.

The second legacy is physical. Rain and mud pushed the proportion of unexploded shells to as much as 30% in some sectors. Belgium and France still dig up hundreds of tonnes of century-old munitions every year, a phenomenon locals call the iron harvest. Parts of the Verdun battlefield remain closed to agriculture to this day.

How artillery works in Frontkrieg

In Frontkrieg, a free browser strategy game about World War 1, artillery reproduces exactly this logic rather than simply hitting harder. It strikes at a range infantry cannot answer and deals damage without entering close combat; it is slow and fragile without escort, so a column of guns alone dies to a single cavalry raid; and it is irreplaceable where the enemy has dug in and a frontal assault costs too much.

Put differently, the game forces the same decisions a 1916 staff faced: how many barrels to mass on one sector, whether to spend resources on a siege, or whether to look for a way around. The technical details - range, counters and employment tactics - are covered in our artillery guide, while the other arms are covered in the articles on machine guns and tanks.

Frequently asked questions

Was artillery really the biggest killer in WW1?

Yes. Most estimates attribute about 60% of battlefield casualties in 1914-1918 to artillery fire, and up to two thirds on some sectors of the Western Front. Machine guns, despite their reputation, rank second.

What types of artillery were used in WW1?

By role: field artillery (light quick-firing guns), howitzers and heavy artillery (high-angle fire against entrenched targets), trench mortars (short-range fire across no man's land), plus railway and anti-aircraft guns. The defining differences are trajectory and range.

What was the largest artillery gun in WW1?

By calibre, the 420 mm Big Bertha howitzer, firing an 820 kg shell. By range, the Paris Gun of 1918, which threw a 106 kg shell roughly 120 km.

Why did the creeping barrage fail?

Because of its rigid schedule. The guns lifted their fire on a timetable rather than in response to the infantry's actual progress. A delay of a few minutes caused by mud or uncut wire left the attackers exposed in front of intact machine gun nests.

Conclusion

World War 1 artillery changed not only tactics but the very definition of victory: fronts were broken by weight of fire, accuracy of calculation and an industry capable of producing millions of shells, not by courage alone. From the crude week-long bombardments of 1915 to the precise counter-battery fire of 1918, it is the story of war becoming an engineering problem.

Want to test those decisions yourself? Start a match in Frontkrieg: a new game begins every day, registration is free with no pay-to-win, and more history and mechanics articles are in our blog.

Source: World War I - Wikipedia