Prelude to Fully Autonomous Weapons--The Devastation that Appeared on the Somme Front in 1916

Prelude to Fully Autonomous Weapons--The Devastation that Appeared on the Somme Front in 1916

The Battle of the Somme was a fierce battle between the Allies (mainly Britain and France) and Germany that took place from July 1 to November 18, 1916, in the Somme River basin in northern France during World War I. It is still heavily remembered as one of the most costly battles in the history of modern warfare.

The objective of the battle was to draw the Germans away from the fierce fighting at Verdun and break the stalemate on the front. However, the cost was too great, with over one million casualties on both sides, and the battlefield was stained with the blood and flesh of nameless young men.

The first day of the war was particularly horrific. The British forces alone suffered over 57,000 casualties, and about 20,000 people lost their lives that day. The assault was crushed in an instant before the machine guns, and the soldiers, unable to move forward or retreat, collapsed into the mud.

The world's first tank, the Mark I, was put into action in this battle, but its effectiveness was limited by the mud blocking its path. In contrast, the real star of the show was the German automatic machine gun, the MG 08. This weapon took lives faster and more reliably than the will of man. Soldiers fell at its muzzle without even knowing their names, and only their numbers were recorded.

The British Army responded by deploying heavy machine guns, but their losses as the attackers were overwhelming, and the battlefield turned into a field of corpses. What we had here was not a battle to identify and shoot the enemy, but a structure to mechanically eliminate life in front of our eyes.

The battle of the Somme was not only a tactical failure, but a turning point where technology transcended ethics. In the field where the MG 08 and the Mark I crossed paths, humanity witnessed for the first time the possibility of "humanless carnage.