I am recreating a WWI battlefield but cant decide which one. What are the major battlefeild features of the major battlefields of WWI?

by FloodedYeti
TheWellSpokenMan

Based off of your response to /u/DisheveledLibrarian's question, the Battle of Hamel might be an appropriate battle to look at. It occurred late in the war, 4 July 1918 to be exact and so benefited from four years of tactical and technological innovation.

The fighting took place around and within the Le Hamel hamlet so featured urban fighting as the Germans had reinforced the hamlet's ruins. Here is a photo of a Mark V tank mopping up German resistance after the town was captured. There were German trenches along the crest of the hill to the east of the hamlet, a position known to the Germans as the Wolfberg. The Wolfberg was the final objective of the battle and the remnants of the trenches are still there...though they now resemble sand traps on a golf course.

The battle is also potentially the first successful employment of a combined arms strategy by the Allies on the Western Front. The battle saw close cooperation and support between infantry and tanks, excellent gunnery by a now very efficient and well trained artillery corps and also the effective use of air power for air support, reconnaissance and also the provision of supplies which were dropped from the air to advancing infantry. As First World War battles go, it wasn't huge, ten Australian infantry battalions, four American infantry companies, 60 tanks and some 600 guns. It should also be noted that this came soon after the German Spring Offensive fizzled out so German resistance was not as stiff as it once was nor were the German positions as well constructed as they often were in Northern France and Belgium.

A detailed account of the battle plan and the battle itself can be found here and here respectively. Those accounts are written by Dr Charles Bean, the official Australian War historian during the conflict. Bean was actually at Hamel, recording the battle as it happoened and worked meticulously after the war to write Australia's account of the conflict.

Here is a map of the battle as well from a book I have here called the The Atlas of Australia's Wars by John Coates.

Hopefully this meets your criteria for your project. Please let me know if you'd like any more information and if you wouldn't mind sharing your project when it is done, I'd love to see it.

DisheveledLibrarian

What kind of WWI battlefield are you trying to recreate? Are you looking for a western front style trench battle, you might consider The Ypres salient or one of the Gallipoli beachheads. There was some fighting in the Trentino (the alpine frontier between Italy and Austria-Hungary) that was done on mountain sides, and was rather unique. If you're looking for more open field combat (cavalry charges, etc.) you may want to consider some of the battles in the Palestine campaign, I think the decisive one was at Beersheba. There are some notable battles on the Eastern front as well, (Tannenburg, the Brusilov offensive) but the sheer scale of the battlefields might make them hard to recreate. There were some notable sieges in the east, like the Austrian fortress city of Presmysl that might be interesting.