When people talk about the horrors of the First World War, they usually mention the trenches, the artillery, and the machine guns.

And those were indeed horrifying.

But there was another kind of horror in that war that doesn’t get talked about nearly as much, and those were the trench raiders.

We’re going to tell you everything about their way of fighting, but I have to warn you that some of what you’re about to hear is hard to stomach.

Now, if you’re still here, let’s start by understanding what led to hand-to-hand combat in what everyone thought was a modern way of fighting.

and then we’ll move from there.

In the years leading up to 1914, European military leaders had an almost religious faith in the power of offensive action.

France, in particular, still acting smart despite its humiliating defeat to Prussia back in 1871, developed the most extreme version of this philosophy.

French generals [music] preached that an army’s sheer will to conquer could overcome any disadvantage on the battlefield.

And they genuinely believed it was the key to victory.

And if you want to know just how seriously they took this idea, consider that a proposal to replace the bright red trousers of French soldiers with something less visible was actually rejected on the grounds that it would hurt this fighting spirit.

Now, the bayonet stood right at the center of this whole philosophy.

You see, before 1914, rifle and bayonet combinations were designed specifically to maximize reach, which was basically the ability to stab an enemy soldier before he could stab you.

And this led to a sort of race where nations [music] competed to create the longest possible rifle.

The French Lee model 1886 rifle had a bayonet blade measuring about 20 in long with an X-shaped [music] cross-section designed to punch through thick clothing.

When you combined that bayonet with the rifle itself, you ended up with a weapon about 6 ft long.

The Germans respected its deadly effectiveness so much that they gave it a nickname, the French needle.

Well, Germany responded in kind with their own design.

The bayonet for the Ga 98 rifle had a blade just under 20 [music] in long, which created a combined length of about 5’9 in.

And this long bayonet was specifically designed to allow infantry soldiers to bring down [music] cavalry men from their horses, which tells you something about how military planners were still thinking in [music] terms of the previous century’s warfare.

Training was based on thrust, parry, and lunge techniques with targets identified as the throat, breast, [music] and groin.

French troops trained in formations they called elbow to elbow specifically for maximum shock effect when they charged.

By the way, there was one German bayonet that would become quite controversial once the war started.

The sawback bayonet.

This was issued to pioneer and engineering units, and it had 29 double teeth along its spine for purely practical purposes like cutting brushwood, wire, and wood for gun positions.

But when allies discovered them on the battlefield, they turned what was basically a tool into a symbol of Germanic barbarism, claiming that the intentionally serrated edge caused far worse wounds than ordinary bayonets.

The truth was that the sawback was actually counterproductive in combat and likely to get caught in clothing, but that mattered little for propaganda.

German soldiers became so afraid of being captured with these bayonets that most were eventually recalled and had their teeth ground off before being reissued.

Going back to the story, the actual war began and those generals were eager to prove just how right their tactics were.

Well, spoiler alert, you already know how the fighting in the First World War would look after just the first couple months.

The first of many catastrophes [music] came in August 1914 when France launched the great offensive into German held Alsace Lraine.

French soldiers advanced in those bright red trousers and blue coats with bands playing and flags flying, officers leading from the front with drawn swords in the manner of their Napoleonic ancestors.

And they marched directly into [music] the killing zone of modern industrial warfare.

August 22nd became the deadliest single day in French military history.

In just one 24-hour period, 27,000 French soldiers were killed.

That was more than on any other single day in the entire history of French warfare.

So much for the revolutionary undefeable tactic.

Machine guns and artillery coupled with barbed wire mowed down infantry long before they could ever get close to bayonet range.

Then the Germans suffered their own catastrophe when they tried the same thing on a massive scale.

During the first battle of the man, Crown Prince Wilhelm ordered 100,000 German soldiers to fix bayonets and charged the French lines in darkness.

French 75 mm guns opened fire into the packed gray ranks of German infantry.

German units panicked in the darkness in utter confusion.

Two German units fired on each other at almost pointblank range and the assault suffered about 15,000 casualties.

And these were just some of the similar outcomes of battles early in the war.

All those failed offensives and broken charges led to attempts by both sides to outflank each other.

But there was a new factor in warfare that made this basically impossible.

The first airplanes were now being used to provide aerial reconnaissance, which meant each side could actually see where the attack was coming from and prepare to meet it.

With the firepower of new artillery and machine guns that were being used on such a scale for the first time, infantry charging across open ground was mowed down over and over again, and the survivors had nothing else to do but dig in wherever they stopped in order to survive.

Each flanking attempt was met and blocked, and as the fighting moved northward, temporary defensive positions became permanent.

In attack after attack during what [music] became known as the race to the sea, neither side could outflank the other.

And soon both sides had settled into the trench warfare that would define the rest of the war.

Opposing lines of trenches now snaked from the Belgian coast all the way to the Swiss border, creating 440 unbroken miles of fortification.

You see, a revolution in firepower had not been matched by similar advances in tactics.

And this created a grueling form of warfare where the defender held every advantage.

There were no flanks to turn anymore.

Every attack now had to be frontal directly into [music] prepared defensive positions.

Over 4 million men had been killed or wounded in just the first 5 months.

So now what happens when everything that was thought before suddenly proves catastrophically wrong and is getting thousands upon thousands of soldiers killed? Well, the answer would eventually lie not in advancing weapons [music] and tactics, but rather in going back to medieval times of swords and body armor.

Believe it or not, the obvious question for commanders was how to break through these trench lines.

And the answer, at least according to military thinking of the time, was artillery.

You would bombard the enemy trenches for days, sometimes even a full week, pulverizing everything in front of you.

The artillery would destroy the barbed wire, collapse the trenches, kill or demoralize the defenders, and knock out their machine guns.

Then your infantry would simply walk across no man’s land, and occupy what was left of the enemy positions.

That was the theory anyway.

But it didn’t work like that at all.

The most notorious example came at the SO where the British fired over one and a half million shells during a 7-day bombardment.

Commanders were so confident that they ordered soldiers not to run but to walk just to maintain discipline because the Germans would surely all be dead after such a bombardment anyway.

Well, that optimism proved catastrophically misplaced.

And the SOA is remembered, as you know, as the deadliest day in British military history.

The Germans had built deep dugouts, some of them 40 ft underground, reinforced with concrete.

The soldiers inside could simply wait out even the heaviest bombardment in relative safety, and then [music] scramble back to their firing positions and mow down soldiers walking across the open ground.

And for some reason, this was so hard for the commanders to understand, and [music] they would send wave after wave after wave of soldiers going over the top and dying without any real success.

Even if they managed to capture some section of enemy trenches, there were always two or three more lines behind it.

And the attacking force would be so badly beaten up while taking the first line that they would inevitably lose it in the enemy counterattack.

Everything would be right back where it started after a day or two.

With nothing accomplished except thousands of men dying.

So with these massive frontal assaults proving so catastrophically useless, another approach began to emerge.

small-cale raids, hitand-run attacks at night, not designed to break through the line and hold territory, but simply to slip in, accomplish specific objectives, and slip back out again before the enemy could respond in force.

There were some early experiments happening almost as [music] soon as the trenches formed.

But the tactic really came together with the Canadians, and you’re about to hear why hand-to-hand combat in the First World War was much different and significantly more horrific than what soldiers had trained for.

Before we explain the trench raiders, first take a look at the conditions in which they’re about to be fighting and how their armament went back several centuries in history.

Frontline trenches were typically about 7 ft deep and 6 ft wide with 2 to 3 ft of sandbags on top.

German trenches were often deeper, reaching 10 to [music] 12 ft with timber or concrete supports.

And all trenches were built in zigzag or jagged patterns on purpose.

You see, if a trench ran straight, a single shell landing inside could explode down the entire [music] length and kill everyone inside.

The zigzag pattern meant a blast would be contained to just that one bay and a few unfortunate soldiers.

But because of all those twists and turns, soldiers could typically see no more than about 30 ft ahead of them at any time.

Now in these cramped twisting corridors, the infantry rifles that armies had spent decades making longer with what were basically swords attached to them rather than bayonets suddenly became the main problem.

Boltaction rifles that were designed for shooting at enemies 300 yd away were basically useless when fighting happened within arms reach.

Another problem was that bayonets would often get stuck in bodies.

One Australian soldier described watching a fellow soldier who drove his bayonet through a German and then into a hardwood beam behind him and he just couldn’t pull it out.

The bayonet had to be released from the rifle, leaving the Germans stuck there where the poor guy died.

There were even cases where two soldiers were found dead, having stabbed each other with their bayonets at the exact same moment.

Through these horrible situations, soldiers on both sides quickly figured out that a long rifle with a bayonet just wasn’t the right tool for close quarters battle.

So they reached for clubs, knives, and sharpened shovels.

Weapons that would have been perfectly familiar to their medieval ancestors.

Trench clubs became the weapon of choice for night raids.

They had some creative designs like using the empty metal casings from mills bombs fixed to wooden handles.

Others took the handles from their entrenching tools and added weights, then drove hobnails all around the head.

Some looked like morning stars from the Middle Ages with those iron spikes.

There were even clubs with flexible coils for extra striking power.

So much about the modern way of fighting.

Trench knives soon came in all kinds of varieties, but the most famous trench knife was definitely the American Mark1 with brass knuckles and spikes on them to stop an enemy from grabbing your knife hand.

The bottom of the handle extended into what they called a skull crusher cap.

So, you can imagine how it worked.

These knives were issued completely blackened to [music] prevent any glinting in moonlight that might give away a raider’s position.

But among all these improvised weapons, the shovel proved to be the most effective of all.

It was much better for striking because of its weight, and soldiers sharpened the edges so it would create a devastating effect on the human body wherever you hit someone.

And unlike the bayonet, it wouldn’t get stuck.

Now, this return to medieval times went beyond just weapons.

It extended to armor as well.

The Germans first issued body armor.

However, the steel breastplate weighed over 20 pounds.

So, they were only practical for centuries and machine gunners in stationary positions, not troops who had to run and fight in them.

The Americans experimented quite a bit with the Brewster body shield, a 40lb thing made of chrome nickel steel that could actually stop a rifle round, [music] but it was everything but practical, so it was never used on the battlefield.

Now that you understand why these medieval weapons came back, let’s go into the raids and how they performed in practice.

A handful of men crawling through the darkness could get past the machine guns that would have mowed down a mass assault.

They didn’t need to cut through barbed wire across an entire front.

Just find or make a single path through it.

They didn’t need to overrun a whole trench system, just get into a specific section, do what they came to do, and get out.

And because they operated at night without those massive artillery bombardments announcing their arrival, they could actually achieve surprise in a way that the big attacks never could.

But this was only if everything went according to plan, which was rare.

While all armies eventually developed trench raiding, the Canadians elevated it to an art form and became the experts in violent nighttime trips into enemy territory.

The first major organized trench raid of the war happened on February 28th, 1915 when 100 men of the Princess Patricia’s Canadian light infantry attacked German positions near.

They destroyed 30 yards of German trenches while the raid cost five killed, seven wounded and two [music] missing.

Canadians made another big raid on Petite Du farm when 170 volunteers prepared for 10 days with scout patrols, training, and rehearsals.

Artillery shelled the enemy wire beforehand while raiders stripped off anything that could identify them if captured.

At 2:30 in the morning on November 17th, they attacked.

They achieved complete surprise because the German sentries had taken cover from the rain.

In just 20 minutes, they killed around 30 Germans and [music] captured 12 prisoners along with valuable intelligence, including new rubber gas masks.

The casualties were only one man killed, and that was by accidental friendly fire, plus one slightly wounded.

You see, the objectives of these raids weren’t really about taking ground.

The most common purpose was intelligence gathering, capturing prisoners who could be questioned to find out which units were facing you and whether reinforcements were being brought in and things like that.

Raiders also tried to destroy valuable equipment like machine guns, wreck dugouts, and simply kill as many enemy soldiers as possible to wear down their numbers.

Beyond the practical value, there was also a psychological reason.

High command believed that constant raiding kept the troops aggressive and alert, maintaining what they called the offensive spirit.

And there was another purpose that was darker and more cynical.

In many sectors, soldiers on both sides had developed what became known as a live and let live system.

Basically, informal truses where both sides quietly agreed not to shoot to kill.

There were agreements not to shell the latrines or attack during breakfast.

However, officers used trench raids deliberately to break these arrangements and force their men back into active fighting.

Before going over the top, raiders blackened their faces with burnt cork or brown grease.

They wore thick rubber gloves to handle barbed wire silently and protect their hands.

All rattling gear and shiny objects were stripped off.

Raiders carried those weapons we mentioned optimized for close-up silent killing.

Then, when silence no longer mattered, they used bombs and pistols, and operations were timed to a maximum of 20 minutes so they could hopefully slip back before the enemy reinforcements would arrive.

[music] Now, actually carrying out a trench raid was an extremely dangerous and complicated business, and the raiders had a whole series of obstacles that could get them killed at any stage.

The first challenge was simply crossing no man’s land, which was usually several hundred yards across, though in some [music] places it could be as narrow as 30 ft.

The terrain itself was a nightmare of mud and shell craters, littered with debris, rotting corpses, and tangles of barbed wire.

Raiders moved on their bellies, crawling forward inch by inch through the darkness.

The great thing, as one soldier put it, was patience.

If you went slow enough and kept on your belly, you couldn’t be heard or seen.

The wire was a major obstacle.

Barbed wire was sometimes 30 ft wide and 5 or 6 feet tall with multiple rows of iron stakes and strand upon strand of barbed wire.

Some had empty tins hung on them that would rattle and give warning if anyone touched it.

Wire cutting parties would sometimes go out nights before the raid to cut paths, so the raiding party would spend less time in the open.

At any moment during the crossing, raiders faced [music] the terrifying possibility of illumination.

Both sides used star shells, which were artillery rounds that burst at a certain height and lit up a magnesium flare hanging from a small parachute.

When one went up, it blazed brightly for a minute or more, lighting up no man’s land like midday sun.

The Germans also used pistol flares that gave light for 10 or 15 seconds.

The instant raiders saw a flare going up, they would freeze, not daring to move until the light died.

Any movement caught in the glare would bring down machine gun fire immediately.

One veteran explained that you had to keep your head down and your eyes closed because if you watch the light, your eyes would reflect it and the enemy sentries looking into the darkness would spot you more easily.

Then the next thing to take care of were the sentries.

Both sides kept listening posts out in no man’s land in front of the main trench line specifically to detect enemy parties.

If they spotted anything suspicious, they would immediately raise the alarm and the whole front would start firing into no man’s land.

So raiders had to find these listening posts and either avoid or silence them.

Standard practice was to creep slowly up on the centuries and then kill them as quietly as possible in the silence of the night.

Enemy patrols were another danger.

Both sides sent men out into no man’s land at night, so there was always a chance that a raiding party would run into an enemy patrol doing the same thing.

These encounters could turn into desperate hand-to-hand battles in the shell holes and craters of no man’s [music] land.

Raiders and patrols also learned that when the enemy wasn’t firing any shots and wasn’t sending up any flares, it meant that they also had a patrol out somewhere nearby.

When two patrols of opposing sides accidentally met in no man’s land, they sometimes let each other pass without fighting because they both knew that if someone started shooting, the whole front section would open up and nobody was coming back to their line.

though sometimes they just let each other go their separate ways.

Once the raiders actually reached the enemy trench and dropped inside, the brutal and uplose fighting began immediately.

Every second spent in the enemy trench was another second for enemy soldiers in neighboring sections to grab their weapons and come running.

So they had to make it count.

They used the chaos and confusion, killed as many soldiers as they could, threw grenades into dugouts, destroyed equipment, and if possible captured prisoners.

Then the return journey was usually the most dangerous part of all.

The raiders were now moving quickly, possibly dragging unwilling prisoners or wounded comrades through no man’s land back to their lines.

Machine guns and artillery could sweep across no man’s land at any moment.

In all that chaos and darkness, many raiders got disoriented, lost their sense of direction, and jumped into a trench with a sense of relief, only to realize they had made a terrible mistake.

They came back to the enemy trench, where the soldiers inside weren’t quite happy to see them.

Friendly fire was another concern on the return.

Even if nothing else had killed you somehow.

The centuries in your own trench knew a raiding party was out.

But in the confusion of darkness and incoming fire, it was easy for an understandably nervous man to shoot at shapes coming over the parapet.

Password systems were set up so returning raiders could identify themselves when challenged, hopefully.

But then sometimes the sentry was relieved and the new one didn’t get the information about the raiding party that might be coming back in a few hours.

And all of this effort, all of this risk was for objectives that often seem trivial to the men who were dying doing them.

The officers 30 miles behind the lines wanted [music] to know what was going on on the opposite side.

So, they simply ordered someone to go and take a look.

Many trench raiding operations were never mentioned outside of command because the men simply went out and none of them ever returned.

And even if the raid was successful without many casualties, it would likely only bring retaliation the following night.

Armies gradually developed purpose-built weapons for trench fighting.

The pistol, which had previously been just a secondary weapon or something officers carried, became essential for raiding parties.

The British Webly revolver worked well in mud, but it only held six rounds.

The Colt M1911 was highly prized by the Americans, while the Germans had their Luga.

The MP18 was the real breakthrough for trench fighting.

Chambered in 9 millimeter firing at about 400 rounds per minute from a 32 round drum magazine.

It gave German stormtroopers devastating firepower in the tight spaces of trenches.

Only about 3,000 actually saw frontline combat.

But the MP18 [music] proved the concept worked and it set the pattern for most submachine guns that came after it.

The American contribution to trench weapons was the infamous Winchester model 1897 trench shotgun.

The most interesting thing you’ve surely heard about this gun was what they called slam fire.

Unlike modern pumpaction shotguns, the M1897 didn’t have a trigger disconnector, which [music] meant it fired every time the action closed as long as the trigger was held down.

A trained soldier could fire all six shells in about 2 seconds, making it impossible not to hit a large number of enemy soldiers.

It worked so well that the German government formally protested against the use of shotguns, threatening to execute soldiers captured with them or even shotgun shells, arguing that they caused unnecessary suffering.

The Germans were then reminded of their flamethrowers and poisonous gases as examples of weapons that [music] actually caused unnecessary suffering and were told that if they retaliated against soldiers captured with shotguns, the response would be much worse.

The close [music] quarters killing in the trenches also forced armies to develop proper hand-to-hand combat training, and programs in jiu-jitsu, boxing, and wrestling were implemented on all sides.

As the war ground on, both sides began to realize that small-cale raiding, while useful, would never win the war by itself.

What was needed was a way to apply those same principles of speed, surprise, and close quarters violence on a much larger scale.

And that is exactly what the Germans set out to create.

They created the first official Stormtrooper unit with an idea that would change trench warfare and show the first reliable way to break the deadlock.

Instead of attacking the whole width of the front like every failed offensive before, stormtroopers would attack key points only.

They would completely bypass strong points, leaving those for the follow-up waves to deal with and seep into the enemy’s rear to overrun artillery batteries and command posts.

The idea was to cut frontline troops off from their headquarters and supply depots.

and the whole system would collapse from within.

Now, this was a completely different approach from the trench raiders we talked about earlier.

Raiders would slip in, gather intelligence, and slip back out.

Stormtroopers had a different objective.

They would create breaches that regular infantry could then pour through and exploit.

This required a complete change in how commanders thought about battle.

Junior officers were encouraged to lead through their own personal judgment rather than waiting for orders from above because independence, quick thinking, [music] and resourcefulness were needed in real time.

game in order to succeed.

Stormtroopers were elite soldiers recruited from volunteers, mostly men under 25 with athletic backgrounds.

They carried satchels full of grenades, and when the MP8 submachine gun became available, stormtroopers got priority for them.

They also used Luga pistols with an extended [music] 32 round drum magazine and a shoulder stock.

They even had flamethrowers and a lighter version of the MG08 machine gun that could be brought forward during an attack.

and of course trench clubs, [music] knives, maces, and other tools for the inevitable hand-to-hand fighting.

In the end, Italy developed its own elite assault forces around the same time called the Arditi, which means the daring ones.

But unlike the Germans, who spread assault tactics throughout the whole army, the Italians kept their elite units separate.

Some Arditi units became infamous for choosing to fight with nothing but grenades and their signature daggers.

They did achieve real successes and they terrified enemy troops who faced them but at tremendous cost.

They had an extremely high casualty rate unsurprisingly and many raids ended simply with nobody from the party ever returning.

They were strictly volunteers chosen from the bravest and fittest soldiers available.

But it was the German stormtroopers who proved just how devastating these new tactics could be when applied on a large scale.

At the Battle of Caparetto in October 1917, German stormtrooper units led an attack that captured 265,000 Italian prisoners and advanced over 60 m toward Venice.

Owen RML, who would become one of the most famous German generals of the next war, was a 26-year-old stormtrooper commander at the time.

With just 150 men, he captured 1,500 Italian prisoners in a single action by finding hidden paths through Italian positions and attacking from behind when nobody expected him.

[music] Caparto showed what storm troopers could do.

But Germany’s real target was always the Western Front, and soon they would get their chance.

When Germany ended the war with Russia in March 1918, nearly 50 divisions were transferred west.

For the first time since 1914, Germany actually outnumbered the Allies on the Western Front.

This was their chance to win the war before American troops arrived in overwhelming numbers.

The spring offensive began with over 1 million shells fired in just 5 hours.

The biggest artillery barrage of the entire war.

Fog on the morning of March 21st allowed stormtroopers to slip deep into British positions without being seen.

They achieved the deepest advances on the Western Front since 1914, pushing forward 40 mi in 2 weeks.

For the first time in years, warfare became mobile again.

And it even looked like Germany might actually have a chance to win the war.

But the problem was that the Germans had not expected such success, and they weren’t adequately prepared to take advantage of it.

Stormtroopers quickly moved faster than their own artillery could follow, and supply lines collapsed over the cratered wasteland the artillery had created.

The best men had been pulled out of regular units and concentrated into storm units.

And these elite soldiers suffered disproportionately heavy casualties that simply couldn’t be replaced.

The offensive eventually stalled, and this failure was part of why Germany ultimately lost the war.

What followed was an Allied counterattack with over 400 tanks and the biggest combined force attack until then.

By autumn, over 100,000 German prisoners had been taken and the armistice came on November 11th, 1918.

Europe in 1914 was considered the pinnacle of modern civilization, the most technologically advanced society the world had ever seen.

And yet, this modern war spiraled into the most primal and savage form of combat known to man.

Despite artillery, machine guns, airplanes, submarines, warships, and tanks, it all eventually ended with clubs and sharpened shovels.