Soldier of Fortune Magazine The Journal of Professional Adventurers
Some never made it off the drawing board. Others are carried, worn, and remembered more than a century later.
Walk across a modern military installation and WWI keeps turning up. It’s in the arms room, the protective-equipment locker, procurement contracts, and even over the radio. The war produced an extraordinary amount of raw invention into four years. Some worked. Some never made it beyond paper.
Soldier of Fortune takes a look at five stories from that burst of wartime invention that captured our attention. They include a doomsday machine that never left the drawing board, a sidearm that became a classic, a shotgun whose descendants remain under Army contract, a mask that became standard combat equipment, and a pilot’s callsign still being radioed out more than a century after he earned it.
The Machine That Was Too Big to Build
In 1915, with the Russian army encircled and desperate on the Eastern Front, an engineer came up with a plan for a massive and impenetrable rolling fortress. The machine would carry its own artillery, workshops, sleeping quarters, and sewer system, crushing everything from trenches to entire villages beneath it. The “Egg of Death” showed one extreme of wartime invention: imagination running far ahead of what industry could possibly build.
Igor Rozin tells the story.
Read the full story: Russia’s ‘Egg of Death’ Was Meant to Turn the Tide of World War I
A Sidearm Born Before the War
The M1911 is the sidearm an entire generation of WWI doughboys carried into the trenches, patented just three years before the war began. The M1911 crossed the Atlantic with American troops in 1917 and 1918, then served in every major American conflict for the rest of the century.
Read the full story: John Browning’s M1911 Was Patented on Valentine’s Day
The Shotgun That Terrified Germany
The “Trench Broom” built its reputation in the close confines of WWI trench warfare, where American troops used pump-action shotguns to devastating effect. Descended from the Winchester Model 1897 pump gun, the trench shotgun’s job was to wreak close-quarters devastation, where raw stopping power mattered more than a rifle’s range and precision. More than a century after doughboys carried the original through the trenches of France, the U.S. military is still buying combat shotguns – just newer ones.
Austin Lee takes a closer look.
Read the full story: The Trench Broom: 12-Gauge Shotguns in the U.S. Military
The Mask Born From the First Gas Attack
German forces released chlorine gas over Allied trenches at Ypres on April 22, 1915, in the first large-scale chemical attack in modern warfare. What followed was a frantic race to build something that could keep a soldier breathing on a battlefield that had turned the air itself into a weapon. The earliest wartime defenses were chemical-soaked cotton pads and primitive masks with fogging eyepieces that barely worked. But that first attack kicked off a furious evolution in military respiratory protection.
British forces historians follow the trail.
Read the full story: How Gas Masks Evolved From Trenches of WWI
The Callsign Still Flying Missions Today
First Lt. Frank Luke Jr. was 21 years old, known as the “Arizona Balloon Buster.” He died within 19 months of joining the war. In that short stretch he became one of the most feared pilots in the sky, destroying 14 enemy observation balloons and 18 aircraft, including 13 kills in a single five-day span. More than a century later, when Air Force F-22 pilots shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon over American soil in February 2023, they flew under the callsigns FRANK01 and FRANK02 — a tribute to a WWI ace whose name American fighter pilots carried back into the sky.
Read the full story: Pilots Who Shot Down Spy Airship Used Callsigns Honoring World War I ‘Balloon Buster’ Frank Luke
The war ended more than a century ago, but pieces of it never left the battlefield.
