First, how much was WWI a stalemate? Was it equally a stalemate at the tactical level as the strategic level?
Second, why was it such a stalemate?
I would like to keep this discussion limited as to how and why WWI was a stalemate for several years.
About a week from now, I will start another thread asking how that stalemate was broken. Please keep your contribution as to how and why it was broken for the next thread so as not to mix them up.
Old methods of waging war against newer weapons of death. The war was being run by old generals who believed that frontal assault and attrition wins the day, but the advent of the Vickers and Maschinengewehr 08 machine guns made frontal assault suicidal. Aircraft, while becoming increasingly used, were still not equipped for effective air-to-ground assault against entrenched troops and were used more for bombing towns and larger targets.
In addition to Chefguy’s points there were a few more factors.
Artillery was even more deadly than machine guns, and could cut attacking forces to ribbons on open ground.
Logistics and communications favoured the defender. Even if the attacker could take the first line of trenches any reinforcements and supplies had to be brought through the torn up no-mans land whereas the defender could bring in reinforcements through the relatively unscathed rear areas. And there was no reliable way of communicating with attack units (radios were too bulky to be man-portable, telephone wires liable to be cut by shelling), so the rare successes couldn’t be capitalised on.
Note that this all applies ot the Western Front, the Eastern Front was considerably more fluid, as were the Middle East and African campaigns.
In addition, on the Western Front there was as high a concentration of soldiers available strategically as there were tactically – i.e. enough to cover the entire front with soldiers on both sides. Whereas the Eastern Front had a lot less troop concentration and so there was a lot more room for outmaneuvreing your opponent.
I’m not really sure saying old generals believed attrition wins the day is correct, they would have loved a war of manouver. What had happened was that the size of the armies involved and the state of technology had made defense a lot easier than attack. Frontal assualts was all you could do, and actually were succesful if done right. So you’ve attacked the enemy line and created a hole, now what? You’ve got tired spent troops in a forward position. The enemy is in a good position to counter attack, with roads and railways able to move troops and supplies to the breakthrough point quickly. You have no way of doing the same, any supply line is through an area most likely still covered by enemy artillery. How do you tell your artillery to not target what you have just captured and hold, and target the enemy positions? If a combat unit see an opportunity, are they allowed to take it or do they have to relay that information higher up to get permission?
Short answer: both sides were too evenly matched. Slaughter ensued.
Frontal assalts against well-defended positions (machine guns) were suicidal.
Oddly enough, this was known since the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The Russian soldiers were defending fixed positions, and they were equipped with machine guns. Despite fanatically brave charges by the Japanese infantry, the Russians mowed down the attackers (with almost no losses to themselves).Generals like Haig and Nivelle never bothered to read up on this.
The breakthrough came when the Brish and French developed tanks-this allowed defended lines to be breached.
The Generals were trained in manuever and flank attacks, but the solid line of entrenchments meant that it was difficult to achieve any flank attacks. They knew charging machine guns was dumb, but they had a hard time figuring out which tactics would be succesfull. Consider that the introduction of gas attacks, then tanks, were all attempts to think outside the box.
Also, the defenders didn’t use the same tactics from beginning to end, either, so what might work this time may not work next time. Both attacker and defenders struggled to figure out a winning set of tactics. (The word “stormtrooper” originated in WW1. link )
Poor communications (radios being heavy, tempermental and fragile, land lines cut by artillery) meant that coordinating attacks and counterattacks, and following through on breakthroughs (aka reinforcing success) was extremely difficult.
In addition to the other points:
Generals on both sides were too in love with cavalry–the units that were supposed to exploit breakthroughs and get into the enemy rear. Horse-mounted soldiers, like infantry, stood no chance against machine gun nests. Perhaps the fact that cavalry were the remnant of knights and the officer corps included large numbers of aristocrats had something to do with the reluctance to let go.
Artillery was also a hindrance to maneuver warfare. Mass bombardment didn’t do much to soften up resistance unless it was followed immediately by an attack–otherwise the other side had time to regroup. The closer the bombardment in time and space to the attack, the more chance of simply killing your own men. And the shells chewed up the battlefield, which was a disadvantage to the attacker.
Indeed, and the first couple of months of the war on the Western Front was a war of maneuver. Once the German offensive was stopped and then the race to the sea finished it became impossible for either side to outflank the other as the front line turned into solid trench lines running from the Channel coast to the Swiss border. There wasn’t really an alternative to frontal assaults against heavily fortified positions that had great depth to them. Taking the first of an enemy’s trench lines wasn’t much of a victory when there were three or more trench lines already prepared behind the first extending a mile or more in depth behind the front line.
Technology outraced tactics, same as in the US Civil War, which, BTW was our WW1.
No radio telephony. No heli-borne assault brigades. No parachute brigades. Feeble air power. No flank to turn. Combined operations feeble, services not cooperation-minded. Internal combustion engine still unreliable. Cavalry not the preferred weapon of exploitation - the only weapon of exploitation available.
So what made the big difference in World War II? Tanks? I assume that trenches are totally ineffective against tanks.
Sometimes they did – the German attack on Verdun was based upon the realization that for every German soldier killed, the French lost 1.5. They picked Verdun and expected to bleed France dry. There was no real intention on a breakthrough (though they would, of course, have capitalized on one); they just wanted the French to keep defending the salient.
The French did (and don’t blame Petain for that – he was ordered not to retreat by General de Castelneau, who spent a day at the battlefield).
The Germans finally broke it off when they realized casualties there were a 1 to 1 ratio, too much for them to sustain.
As mentioned above, WWI broke out at a time when military technology was at a stage where the defensive trumped the offensive. Cheap and numerous machine guns made attacking fixed positions very difficult, and the western, Italian and Gallipoli fronts were relatively narrow with a high density of troops, so there was no way around the trenches. The eastern front had a much lower troop density and so was much more a war of manoeuvre, which is why the Germans were able to decisively defeat the Russians and drive them out of the war.
Another factor was lack of battlefield supply and communications. Let’s say your attacking troops make a breakthrough, against all the odds (examples include Cambrai 1917 and St Michel 1918). Having got through the trench lines, what do they do next? They have no re-supply and no radios, and no way to know what the enemy is doing and where their reserves are coming from. You have no arm of breakthrough exploitation as your cavalry has been mostly disbanded, and is pretty useless against modern infantry anyway. Your high command has little or no knowledge of your status, and few reserves left as everything they could scrape together was in the main assault force. Inevitably the enemy’s fresh reserves fall on your exhausted, disorganised and directionless men, who have little cover (as the trenches they’ve captured “point” the wrong way). Now the counter-attacker has all the advantages, so you get pushed back where you came from.
We need to cover the forbidden subject of why the WWI deadlock was eventually broken here; it was essentially the sophisticated combined arms offensive - yes tanks were a part of it but the biggest development was the rolling artillery barrage in co-ordination with the infantry offence. Vast batteries of heavy artillery paste the enemy trenches, and just before your guys get there to mop up the hiding enemy front line the arty move back to paste the enemy second line troops, rinse and repeat.
Moving on to WWII you now have a triangular combined arms doctrine not seen since the Napoleonic wars. Tanks kill infantry, AT kills tanks, infantry kill AT. Trenches are useful but still vulnerable to the WWI tactics, plus you now have planes as mobile rapid-reaction artillery. And every unit has radios.
Partially. Artillery, and Airplanes were at least as important. Pour enough ordnance on any fortification and you can overrun it. At Verdun both sides had about 200 artillery barrels per km of front. At Kursk, the Soviets had nearly 2000 barrels per km. And the advancing troops had reliable radios they could use to communicate with the gunners. Which meant, not only did the Soviets have about 10 times as many guns, they included 25+ years of improvements, and they were used to vastly greater effect. At Verdun the soldiers had to wait for the guns to stop before they went over the top. At Kursk, the soldiers advanced with the barrage, and were providing constant live feedback. And tricks like airborne and amphibious assault allowed maneuver over around and behind any fortifications. And reliable motorized transport, meant when you did get through or past a fortification you could really move to exploit it.
Still for the average WWII infantry man the best place to be was in some sort of fortification, be it pill box, bunker, foxhole or even just behind a stone wall. And the worst place to be was out in the open in front of one. But the march of progress meant that they were no longer the dominant things they once were.
Sorry MichaelEmouse, I screwed up with my question. I didn’t read carefully enough the last paragraph in your OP. 
Not a big deal if it stops now. I don’t mean to be difficult but I do want to keep the analysis of the problem separate from the analysis of the solution for clarity’s sake. It’s usually less confusing to have the problem mapped out before moving on to the solution.
I do promise that I’ll ask about that next week.
But notably, the generals didn’t learn from the Civil War, a major failing. This may be because of two issues: First, the Franco-Prussian war didn’t end up like this, despite both sides have advance modern technology. Second, British and French armies had a lot more experience fighting colonial wars than European brawls.
The Franco-Prussian war featured both sides having armies ready to go, and the fighting did not last long for anyone to resort to impromptu conscript forces*. As a result, the armies were pretty sizeable but not as big as the Civil War armies. More importantly, Germany had kept pace with armaments and training, but France had not, and was mowed down in battle after battle. Thus, last major European war had been a one-sided victory of speed, firepower, and skill, in an era when the only machine guns were huge and hefty Gatling pieces.
*Both sides did perform a quick mobilization, but the German one was well-organized, swift, and IIRC both sides drew on trained soldiers instead of random civilians.
Colonial fighting, on the other hand, featured plenty of manuever and favored the small, disciplined European forces with ample firepower over huge masses. A few machine guns completely dominated any open area, and could perform grisly work even in closer quarters. Critically, European armies didn’t wind up using them on each other.
Actually, they’re very effective against tanks, they just have to be dug deeper and wider. Anti-tank ditch seems to be the more preferred term, but anti-tank trench is equally correct. There’s a good picture of the anti-tank ditch that was on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border here measuring 2m deep and 4m across. There’s a picture here of a Syrian T-62 that’s fallen into an Israeli anti-tank ditch - though the more I look at that picture the more it looks like its a model diorama. Hmm, and it’s on Iran defense forums, I had no idea such a thing existed. In any event, here’s a picture of a Soviet T-34 that’s fallen into an anti-tank ditch.
I’m far from an expert, but I thought the French actually had some better technology–like their rifles–but the Germans were better trained and led.
