The Great War on the Western Front started in August 1914 as a vast war of maneuver in which 7 German Armies swept across Belgium, Northern France and Luxembourg and met a combined Anglo-French force. Stopped at the Marne some six weeks into the war, everything got rather…static.
Each side dug in and kept digging until a line of trenches within rifle range of each other ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border.
Royal Seaforths holding a trench while under fire from a German sniper along the Western Front, 1914. You can see where sitting like this all day would get old and at night, some of the more adventuresome lads went looking for a little payback. (And yes, the bulldog is awesome!)
Men, with time on their hands and enterprising young leaders soon took to the popular new tactic of trench raiding, in which small forces would venture out over the top and creep through No Man’s Land, wiping out the enemy’s forward observation posts (typically sheltered out in a stinking water-filled shell hole between the lines). Occasionally these groups would slip into communications trenches and wreck havoc with the sentries on duty while the bulk of the troops slept in bunkers and further down the line, then run back across before a concentrated effort to repel the invaders was joined.
A raiding party of scoundrels from the 1/8th irish King’s Liverpool Regiment, April 1916. Note the liberal sprinkling of handguns, bats and clubs– as well as headgear to include at least one captured Prussian pickelhauben. IWM image
This led to a good deal of medieval armor, improvised weapons, and things that generally looked more at place during the Siege of Acre than on a modern battlefield.
British Armor experiments with plated vests and eye pro, 1915. Tell me this doesn’t scream steampunk!
More of the Experimental British Trench Raiding Ensemble 1915 to include steel cover and gauntlet with dagger
And another version of plate. While the Brits looked at this stuff, the principal result was the tin-hat helmet issued to the Tommies rather than much other gear.
The Germans very much got into the act as well, and even issued some vests and reinforced steel helmets–mainly reserving their armor for snipers
Thus….
The Allies captured huge caches of the stuff in 1918 once the Kaiser went kaput.
…Which led to ballistics experiments by both the French and British showing that, against rifle bullets of the time, the armor was virtually useless, but still provided a modicum of protection from edged weapons, shrapnel and low-powered handgun rounds.
