First Industrialized War

[Motherland]

I find it difficult to characterize the American Civil War as the first industrialized war simply because it was so one-sided. While the Union used all of the components of industrialized warfare to put down the rebellion, but the south had very little to none of this. While our Civil War demonstrated what an power an industrialized nation can harness to put down a comparatively primitive backwater, it did little show what the horror that would happen when two (or more) fully industrialized nations threw their weight at each other, as was seen in the First World War.

[Rob52240]

The south had some railroad, they also built the first ironclad.

[pembquist]

I think there is an issue of semantics here.  I think of WWI as the first industrial war because I think it is the first time that killing achieved an industrial efficiency in transforming people into corpses with the use of machinery.  Maybe its a matter of degree but the efficiency of high explosives, long range artillery, machine guns, and poison gas to kill people smack of a industrial  process that makes the civil war's technology of killing look much more hands on and craftsman like, if you can use that word, even if the weapons themselves were the result of industrial process's.  Sort of like a steel hand plane vs a thickness planer or gas welding vs a mig robot.