Guns, Gas and Flame: Weapons of the Great War

Big Bertha was the nickname for a German 42-centimeter siege howitzer built by Krupp and first used in 1914. Its shells weighed roughly 800 kilograms and broke the concrete forts at Liege that had been believed able to resist any artillery, showing that fixed fortifications had been outpaced.

The German army first used the flamethrower in combat in February 1915, near Verdun. The operator carried fuel and pressurized gas on his back and cleared trench sections at close range, but the short range and the fuel on his back made him a target.

Designed by Wilfred Stokes and adopted by the British Army in 1915, this smoothbore tube let a crew drop a finned bomb onto a fixed firing pin and launch it automatically. It filled the gap between hand grenades and heavy field artillery, and later infantry mortars follow its template.

The French Chauchat of 1915 was built from stamped sheet metal for cheap mass production, and about 262,000 were made by the war's end. It gave squads a portable automatic weapon, though its open half-moon magazine fouled in the mud and the American 1918 version proved defective.

The Livens Projector was a steel tube buried at an angle, into which a crew dropped a drum of poison gas. Fired electrically in batteries of dozens or hundreds, it delivered a sudden cloud without waiting for a favorable wind, as earlier cylinder releases had required.

The SPAD S.XIII was a French biplane fighter of 1917 with twin synchronized machine guns and a sturdy airframe that could dive fast without failing. Allied units flew it in large numbers, and it carried the top-scoring American ace of the war, Eddie Rickenbacker.

Designed by Hugo Schmeisser and introduced in 1918, the Bergmann MP18 fired 9mm pistol ammunition from a drum magazine. It is widely regarded as the first practical mass-produced submachine gun, and it suited German Stormtrooper squads that infiltrated trench lines.

First fired at Paris in March 1918 from about 120 kilometers away, the Paris Gun sent shells roughly 40 kilometers high, into the stratosphere. Its worn barrel forced the crews to number and fire the shells in sequence, and it killed about 250 people, chiefly a blow at civilian morale.