During the battle of the Somme, so-called fire brigades of horses were used to transport troops rapidly to vulnerable parts of British front line. They were used for communication, carrying messengers, and for transport. Despite this, horses remained valuable to the military throughout the war. Soldiers in cavalry regiments fought largely on foot, or, later, in tanks. Germany stopped using cavalry as fighting units in 1917, but although Britain continued to use cavalry throughout the war, they had little success on the Western Front. The first significant use of chlorine gas by the Germans was at Ypres in April 1915 and it was first used by the British at Loos in September 1915. Poison gas was also a new weapon at this time. Cavalry was deployed alongside tanks at first, but tanks eventually took over the role of shock combat. In 1917, tanks, which could crush barbed wire and deflect machine gun fire, were introduced. Trenches, shell-holes, barbed wire and machine guns proved deadly to both horses and riders and cavalry charges became ineffective. It was the changing nature of warfare that rendered traditional cavalry useless on the Western Front. The horse gas mask reflects some of the technological changes that occurred during the First World War. Both the Germans and the British used gas as a weapon during the First World War. The provenance of this gas mask is unknown, but it is thought to be a German model, collected by a British soldier perhaps as a souvenir. Gas masks issued to soldiers protected the eyes as well as the nose and mouth as some gases could cause blindness as well as pneumonia. Horses were less vulnerable than humans to the effects of gas. As with early gas masks used by the soldiers, it is likely that the fabric was soaked in a chemical such as phenol or sodium hyposulphite to neutralise the gas. The mask does not have a canister attached to filter out the gas. The open end has leather straps which were used to fit the mask on the horse’s head and metal fittings that were attached to the horse’s bridle. Cox apparently suffered no short term effects from the gassing - his June 16, 1919, honorable discharge reported him being "0 percent disabled.The gas mask is a fabric cylinder designed to be drawn up and over the horse’s nose and mouth, like a nose bag. After training at Camp Bowie, Cox was deployed to Europe where he was one of 70,552 Americans exposed to gas during the war. He served as a private in Company B, 7th Infantry before rising to a sergeant in Company H, 142nd Infantry, 36th Division, a consolidated unit of infantries from Oklahoma and Texas. entered the war, gas masks such as this one had been developed with chemical absorbents that limited the impact of chloride gas. An eyewitness account described the impact as "a burning sensation in the head, red-hot needles in the lungs, the throat seized as by a strangler." By the time the U.S. This gas mask was worn by 21 year old Levi Nathan Cox from Clarendon, Texas.Ĭhemical warfare using chloride gas was first released by German troops on April 22, 1915, killing 1,100 Allied soldiers and injuring an unknown number of others. Gas masks were developed in WWI to protect soldiers from the effects of chloride gas.
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