‍ ‍ The Trench Warfare Dept. was one of the largest departments in the Ministry of Munitions, yet most students of WWI know little about it.

Today, in the Russo-Ukraine War, our ways of waging war are being transformed by the rapid innovation of new technology - all things Drones and AI – and with it the equally rapid evolution of tactics on the battlefield necessary to employ, or evade, these innovations. Between 1915 and 1918 the Trench Warfare Department introduced innovations that were equally transformative, overseeing the research and development, then the manufacture and introduction of new weapon systems such as grenades, trench mortars, chemical munitions, body armour such as the helmet, and many other items of equipment that made the soldier in his trench more effective, and perhaps even a little bit safer.

Over the last decade I have worked, on and off, on a history of this unique department for none has previously existed. The outcome of my labours was a book of some 300,000 words, which has failed to find a publisher. On reflection, this should not be a surprise to me. The potential market for such a book is small, and looking back at my work it reads more like a PhD thesis than a finished book. However, not wishing to abandon a subject that I, at least, find fascinating, I have decided to offer an abridged version where individual sections, rather than the whole, will be of interest to my readers.

The format I have decided to adopt is to break each chapter down into sections published weekly. When done, I will reassemble them into the complete chapter, building the book as we go along. If you find what I have written of interest, please circulate it to friends and acquaintances. Thank you.

Acknowledgements.

This book is based primarily on archival research, as little information about the Trench Warfare Department has been published by other historians. The largest number of files, several thousand, are the Ministry of Munitions Files in MUN5 and MUN4 in the National Archives, Kew. They are referred to as MUN in the footnotes, and I express my thanks for permission to quote from these files and the staff of the National Archives for valuable assistance and help. This book would not be possible without the very important, but little consulted, archive of Viscount Addison in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. I am exceedingly grateful to the present Viscount Addison for permission to access and quote from these papers and the staff of the Bodleian for their courtesy and assistance to a researcher unfamiliar with the mores of that venerable institution

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