The most advanced civilization the world had ever known descended into a form of combat that would have been familiar to its medieval ancestors, and the men who fought it carried weapons that belonged in a darker century.
Between the thunderous artillery barrages and the relentless chatter of machine guns that defined the First World War, there existed a nightmare within the nightmare. These were the trench raiders, small bands of men who crawled through the mud and corpses of no man’s land in the dead of night, armed not with the modern rifles they had trained with, but with clubs, knives, and sharpened shovels.
The story of how modern warfare collapsed into primal savagery begins with a catastrophic failure of military thinking. In the years before 1914, European generals preached an almost religious faith in the power of offensive action. France, still humiliated by its defeat to Prussia in 1871, embraced this philosophy with fanatical intensity, believing that sheer will to conquer could overcome any battlefield disadvantage.
This dogma was so deeply entrenched that a proposal to replace the bright red trousers of French soldiers with less visible uniforms was rejected on the grounds that it would damage fighting spirit. The bayonet stood at the very center of this philosophy, and nations competed to create the longest possible rifle, believing that reach meant victory in close combat.
The French Lee model 1886 rifle featured a bayonet blade approximately 20 inches long with an X-shaped cross-section, creating a weapon about six feet in total length. The Germans respected its deadly effectiveness so much they nicknamed it the French needle. Germany responded with their own design, a bayonet for the Gewehr 98 rifle that created a combined length of about five feet nine inches.
These long bayonets were specifically designed to allow infantry to bring down cavalrymen from their horses, revealing how military planners were still thinking in terms of the previous century’s warfare. Training focused on thrust, parry, and lunge techniques, with targets identified as the throat, breast, and groin. French troops drilled in elbow-to-elbow formations for maximum shock effect.
One German bayonet would become notorious once war began. The sawback bayonet, issued to pioneer and engineering units, featured 29 double teeth along its spine for practical purposes like cutting brushwood and wire. But when Allied forces discovered them on the battlefield, they transformed a simple tool into a symbol of Germanic barbarism, claiming the serrated edge caused far worse wounds.
The truth was that the sawback was counterproductive in combat, likely to get caught in clothing, but propaganda mattered little for the truth. German soldiers became so terrified of being captured with these bayonets that most were eventually recalled and had their teeth ground off before being reissued.
Then the war began, and the generals were eager to prove their tactics right. The first catastrophe came in August 1914 when France launched its great offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. French soldiers advanced in bright red trousers and blue coats, bands playing and flags flying, officers leading from the front with drawn swords in the manner of their Napoleonic ancestors.
They marched directly into the killing zone of modern industrial warfare. August 22nd became the deadliest single day in French military history, with 27,000 French soldiers killed in a single 24-hour period. Machine guns and artillery, coupled with barbed wire, mowed down infantry long before they could ever reach bayonet range.
The Germans suffered their own catastrophe at the First Battle of the Marne, when Crown Prince Wilhelm ordered 100,000 soldiers to fix bayonets and charge the French lines in darkness. French 75mm guns opened fire into the packed gray ranks, German units panicked in utter confusion, and two German units fired on each other at almost point-blank range. The assault suffered about 15,000 casualties.
All those failed offensives led to attempts by both sides to outflank each other, but a new factor made this impossible. Airplanes were now providing aerial reconnaissance, meaning each side could see where attacks were coming from and prepare to meet them. Each flanking attempt was blocked, and temporary defensive positions became permanent as the fighting moved northward.
Opposing trench lines soon snaked from the Belgian coast all the way to the Swiss border, creating 440 unbroken miles of fortification. A revolution in firepower had not been matched by advances in tactics, creating a grueling form of warfare where the defender held every advantage. There were no flanks to turn anymore.
Over four million men had been killed or wounded in just the first five months.
The answer to breaking these trench lines, according to military thinking, was artillery. You would bombard enemy trenches for days, sometimes a full week, pulverizing everything in front of you. Then infantry would simply walk across no man’s land and occupy what remained.
The most notorious example came at the Somme, where the British fired over one and a half million shells during a seven-day bombardment.
Commanders were so confident they ordered soldiers to walk, not run, just to maintain discipline. That optimism proved catastrophically misplaced. The Germans had built deep dugouts, some 40 feet underground and reinforced with concrete.
Soldiers inside simply waited out the heaviest bombardments in relative safety, then scrambled back to their firing positions and mowed down the soldiers walking across open ground.
Wave after wave went over the top and died without any real success. Even when they captured some section of enemy trenches, there were always two or three more lines behind it, and the attacking force would inevitably lose it in the enemy counterattack. Everything returned to where it started after a day or two, with nothing accomplished except thousands of men dying.
So another approach began to emerge. Small-scale raids, hit-and-run attacks at night, designed not to break through and hold territory, but simply to slip in, accomplish specific objectives, and slip back out before the enemy could respond in force. The tactic really came together with the Canadians, who elevated trench raiding to an art form.
The conditions these raiders fought in defy modern understanding. Frontline trenches were typically seven feet deep and six feet wide, built in zigzag patterns so a single shell blast would be contained to just one bay. Because of all those twists and turns, soldiers could typically see no more than about 30 feet ahead of them at any time.
In these cramped twisting corridors, the long rifles that armies had spent decades making suddenly became the main problem. 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, unable to pull it out.
The bayonet had to be released, leaving the German stuck there where the poor man died.
Soldiers on both sides quickly figured out that a long rifle with a bayonet was not 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, with creative designs including empty metal casings from Mills bombs fixed to wooden handles.
Others took handles from entrenching tools, added weights, and drove hobnails around the head. Some looked like morning stars with iron spikes. Trench knives came in all varieties, but the most famous was the American Mark 1, with brass knuckles and spikes to stop an enemy from grabbing the knife hand, and a skull crusher cap on the handle.
These knives were completely blackened to prevent any glinting in moonlight.
But among all these improvised weapons, the shovel proved most effective of all. Its weight made it much better for striking, and soldiers sharpened the edges to create devastating effects on the human body. Unlike the bayonet, it would not get stuck.
This return to medieval times extended to armor as well, with the Germans issuing steel breastplates that weighed over 20 pounds, practical only for sentries and machine gunners in stationary positions.
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 the town of Ypres. They destroyed 30 yards of German trenches, at a cost of five killed, seven wounded, and two missing. The Canadians made another significant raid at Petite Douve farm when 170 volunteers prepared for 10 days with scout patrols and rehearsals.
At 2:30 in the morning on November 17th, they attacked, achieving complete surprise because German sentries had taken cover from the rain. In just 20 minutes, they killed around 30 Germans and captured 12 prisoners along with valuable intelligence, including new rubber gas masks. Their casualties were only one man killed by accidental friendly fire, plus one slightly wounded.
The objectives of these raids were not about taking ground. The most common purpose was intelligence gathering, capturing prisoners who could be questioned about which units were facing them and whether reinforcements were being brought in. Raiders also destroyed valuable equipment like machine guns, wrecked dugouts, and killed as many enemy soldiers as possible to wear down their numbers.
There was a psychological reason as well. High command believed constant raiding kept troops aggressive and alert, maintaining the offensive spirit. But there was another purpose, darker and more cynical.
Soldiers on both sides had developed what became known as the live and let live system, informal truces where both sides quietly agreed not to shoot to ππΎππ.
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, wore thick rubber gloves to handle barbed wire silently, and stripped off all rattling gear and shiny objects. Operations were timed to a maximum of 20 minutes so they could slip back before enemy reinforcements arrived.
The first challenge was simply crossing no man’s land, usually several hundred yards across, though in some places as narrow as 30 feet. The terrain 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 could not be heard or seen. Barbed wire was sometimes 30 feet wide and five or six feet tall, with empty tins hung on it that would rattle and give warning if anyone touched it.
Wire cutting parties would sometimes go out nights before a raid to cut paths.
At any moment during the crossing, raiders faced the terrifying possibility of illumination. Star shells burst at a certain height, lighting up a magnesium flare hanging from a small parachute, blazing brightly for a minute or more and lighting up no man’s land like midday sun. The instant raiders saw a flare going up, they froze, not daring to move until the light died.
One veteran explained you had to keep your head down and your eyes closed because if you watched the light, your eyes would reflect it and enemy sentries would spot you more easily. Then came the sentries. Both sides kept listening posts out in no man’s land to detect enemy parties.
Raiders had to find these listening posts and either avoid or silence them, creeping up slowly and killing as quietly as possible.
Enemy patrols were another danger. Both sides sent men out at night, so raiding parties would sometimes run into enemy patrols doing the same thing, resulting in desperate hand-to-hand battles in shell holes. Soldiers learned that when the enemy was not firing shots and not sending up flares, it meant they also had a patrol out.
Sometimes two opposing patrols would meet and silently let each other pass, knowing that any shooting would bring fire down on everyone.
Once raiders reached the enemy trench and dropped inside, the brutal and up-close 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. They killed as many as they could, threw grenades into dugouts, destroyed equipment, and captured prisoners if possible.
The return journey was usually the most dangerous part of all. Raiders moved quickly, possibly dragging unwilling prisoners or wounded comrades through no man’s land. Machine guns and artillery could sweep across at any moment.
In the chaos and darkness, many raiders got disoriented and jumped into a trench with relief, only to realize they had made a terrible mistake and returned to the enemy trench.
Friendly fire was another concern. Sentries in their own trench knew a raiding party was out, but in the confusion it was easy for a nervous man to shoot at shapes coming over the parapet. Password systems were set up so returning raiders could identify themselves, but sometimes the sentry was relieved and the new one never got the information that a raiding party might be coming back.
All of this effort, all of this risk, was for objectives that often seemed trivial to the men dying to accomplish them. Officers 30 miles behind the lines wanted 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.
Armies gradually developed purpose-built weapons for trench fighting. The pistol, previously a secondary weapon, became essential for raiding parties. The British Webley revolver worked well in mud but held only six rounds.
The Colt M1911 was highly prized by Americans, while the Germans had their Luger. The MP18 was the real breakthrough, a submachine gun chambered in 9mm firing about 400 rounds per minute from a 32-round drum magazine.
Only about 3,000 MP18s actually saw frontline combat, but the weapon proved the concept and set the pattern for most submachine guns that came after it. The American contribution was the infamous Winchester Model 1897 trench shotgun, which featured what was called slam fire. Unlike modern pump-action shotguns, the M1897 had no trigger disconnector, meaning 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 two seconds. It worked so well that the German government formally protested, threatening to execute soldiers captured with them or even with shotgun shells, arguing they caused unnecessary suffering. The Germans were then reminded of their flamethrowers and poisonous gas and told that retaliation would bring a much worse response.
The close quarters killing forced armies to develop proper hand-to-hand combat training, with programs in jiu-jitsu, boxing, and wrestling implemented on all sides. As the war ground on, both sides began to realize that small-scale raiding, while useful, would never win the war by itself. What was needed was a way to apply the same principles of speed, surprise, and close quarters violence on a much larger scale.
That is exactly what the Germans set out to create. They formed the first official Stormtrooper units with an idea that would change trench warfare. Instead of attacking the whole width of the front like every failed offensive before, stormtroopers would attack key points only, completely bypassing strong points and leaving them for follow-up waves while slipping into the enemy rear to overrun artillery batteries and command posts.
This was a completely different approach from trench raiders. Raiders would slip in, gather intelligence, and slip back out. Stormtroopers had a different objective, creating breaches that regular infantry could pour through and exploit.
Junior officers were encouraged to lead through personal judgment rather than waiting for orders from above, requiring independence, quick thinking, and resourcefulness in real time.
Stormtroopers were elite soldiers recruited from volunteers, mostly men under 25 with athletic backgrounds. They carried satchels full of grenades and got priority for MP18 submachine guns. They used Luger pistols with extended 32-round drum magazines and shoulder stocks, flamethrowers, and lighter machine guns that could be brought forward during an attack.
And of course, they carried trench clubs, knives, maces, and other tools for inevitable hand-to-hand fighting.
Italy developed its own elite assault forces around the same time, called the Arditi, meaning the daring ones. Unlike the Germans, who spread assault tactics throughout the whole army, the Italians kept their elite units separate. Some Arditi units became infamous for fighting with nothing but grenades and their signature daggers, achieving real successes and terrifying enemy troops, but at tremendous cost with extremely high casualty rates.
It was the German stormtroopers who proved just how devastating these new tactics could be on a large scale. At the Battle of Caporetto in October 1917, German stormtrooper units led an attack that captured 265,000 Italian prisoners and advanced over 60 miles toward Venice. A 26-year-old stormtrooper commander named Erwin Rommel, who would become one of Germany’s most famous generals in the next war, captured 1,500 Italian prisoners with just 150 men.
Caporetto showed what stormtroopers could do, but Germany’s real target was always the Western Front. 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.
The spring offensive began with over one million shells fired in just five 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 miles in two weeks. For the first time in years, warfare became mobile again, and it even looked like Germany might win the war.
But the Germans had not expected such success and were not prepared to take advantage of it. Stormtroopers outran their own artillery, supply lines collapsed over the cratered wasteland, and the best men had been pulled out of regular units and concentrated into storm units. These elite soldiers suffered disproportionately heavy casualties that simply could not be replaced.
The offensive stalled, and that 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 had been considered the pinnacle of modern civilization, the most technologically advanced society the world had ever seen.
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. The men who crawled through the darkness of no man’s land carried the weapons of their ancestors into the most mechanized war humanity had ever waged, and in doing so, they revealed the terrifying truth that lurks beneath the surface of modern civilization.
