So I have a really problem, my friend wants to borrow my time machine to see what WWI looked like. Problem is it only goes back to 1939. Where and when could WWII pass for a WWI battlefield to a layman?
I remember reading somewhere a report from air reconnaissance of, I think the Hurtgen Forest who reported it looked ‘like Passchendaele’, any other ones?
Trench warfare was used in WWII, Stalingrad, Kursk a few others. But they won’t look much like WWI because Panzers and T-34’s were heavily used. I find it hard to imagine there was any major battles in WWII where tanks which distinctly do not look like WWI tanks were not used to some degree by one side or the other.
You can go back much further than a WWI setting. Some of WWII was shockingly primitive. Cavalry units were widespread especially in the Soviet Union where more than 6 million horses were employed in the war effort.
The last major cavalry charge took place during WWII when 600 Italian soldiers galloped straight into Soviet forces with their sabers drawn. That wasn’t ancient Rome or even the American Civil War, it was 1942 and they weren’t kidding around.
You can find similar, low-tech tactics all over WWII. It wasn’t just airplanes, submarines, machine guns and atomic bombs. A lot of it was just horse drawn carts and poorly equipped soldiers fighting it out the best way they could on the periphery.
I’d say some of the island fighting in the Pacific would resemble WWI’s trench warfare. You had dug-in defenders and attacks that were measured in yards of ground gained.
Adding to Shagnasty’s post, a lot of the so-called German “Blitzkrieg” was horse drawn.
The French also defended WWI style forts along the Maginot Line that were eventually overrun by Germans.
Holland, Belgium, Norway, Italy, England, and other nations still had (and some still do have) Monarchs.
Even the late entry of the United States and their invasion of France mirrors WW1
Well, not all of WWI was trench warfare. The war on the Russian Front was very fluid, IIRC. But, still, actual warfare would have looked very different - it was much, much more mechanised in the Second World War.
Presumably a lot of the early Chinese-Japanese battles would resemble World War 1 somewhat as neither side had a lot of tanks or armored vehicles and their weapons tended to exclusively be bolt-action rifles and static machine gun nests. The armored vehicles they had also tended to be very out of date (some WW1 vintage tanks were still being used by both sides). The only real “modern” touches would be the aircraft, the Nationalist Chinese used a lot of biplanes but they didn’t really resemble WW1 aircraft except for the wings, while the Japanese had plenty of monoplanes in operation.
… and a small part of it was dog carts.
Granted, not an actual combat, but French morale-boosting films claimed the Char 2C was an active weapon and it looked like a WW1 tank.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the Siege of Leningrad. Started Sept. 1941, siege lifted Jan. 1944 (and a couple more months to clear out the area).
It was mostly static trench warfare with a lot of artillery bombardment. Some non-WWI style aerial attacks. Tank warfare was limited due to extensive tank traps and other countermeasures.
While you’re right about German dependence on horse-drawn transport, only one section of blockhouses of the Maginot Line was ever taken by German attack. of course, the collapse of french resistance elsewhere rendered unnecessary direct assault on the Line itself.
I would reckon that the defence of Kohima and Imphal would fit into this. infantry rushes of entrenched and defended positions by the Japanese. Absolutely bitter fighting.
IIRC the joke about the start of WWII was they called it the “sitzkreig”. After a lightning attack to occupy Poland, everyone said “well, you wanted a war, you got it…” then proceeded to do nothing but stare back and forth across the western front until the next spring (when all hell broke loose, via Belgium). The French had their Maginot line, not sure what the Germans across from it had but I imagine trenches was part of it?
Not a lot; most. The horse was the primary method by which heavy things were hauled by the German army in the field throughout the war; some 80% of German formations relied on horses to draw supplies and artillery.
This probably had more to do with Germany losing the war than, say, the defeat at Stalingrad, and no, I’m not kidding. While they had no realistic alternative (there wasn’t enough oil to have a truly mechanized army) the difference between a horse-drawn army and an army with trucks, which is who they were fighting on both fronts for the last half the war, is… well, there’s a reason armies don’t use horses so much anymore. A jeep or a truck is about a thousand times more economical and labor efficient and enables fully supplied operations hundred of miles from railhead, as opposed to maybe thirty miles if you are using horses.
The Allied advance up Italy was a complete slog, with multiple German defensive lines with well-dug-in positions, where the terrain made tank warfare impossible. Other than on the Austrian-Italian front, it’s difficult to think of a major WWI battle conducted against something as naturally defensible as Monte Cassino.
You should take your time machine FORWARD in time and buy an improved model that can access pre-1939.
“Passchendaele with tree bursts” is the phrase ascribed to Ernest Hemingway. A great deal of WWII looked a lot like WWI; the war was a lot less mobile than is often imagined. Normandy and Anzio (and for that matter most of the Italian campaign) were horrific battles that went on for months with the front line advancing either very slowly or not at all until a breakthrough was achieved. On the Eastern front both sides had time to dig in quite deeply on the ‘quiet’ parts of the front in the north and center where the front line didn’t move during 1942. I say ‘quiet’ because it was in fact quite bloody with numerous costly offensives by the Soviets against the Rzhev salient until the Germans abandoned it in March 1943 in order to shorten their front lines by 230 miles.
The opening months of WWI were also quite mobile with the German advance across Belgium and northern France before being stopped at the Marne followed by the Race to the Sea as both sides tried to outflank the other until the front lines settled into place and became the trench line running from the channel to Alps that WWI is often remembered as.
The big difference between WWI and WWII land combat was use of mass armored forces for rapid exploitation of breakthroughs in enemy lines (as often as not first created by infantry), as opposed to the use of tanks to support infantry which was a feature of both wars (though mainly limited to the Entente forces on western front in the final year of WWI). This new feature was highly important in a number of campaigns, but not in others. And it was only intermittently a factor even where it applied, as in the examples given of the WWII western front in 1944-5, relatively static warfare in the Normandy beachhead for some weeks, then a rapid armor led advance to the German border in July-Sept, basically static warfare till the German counter offensive in December, more slogging until German resistance began to collapse in early March 1945.
And with a lower density of forces, warfare could be mobile without much armor, as in campaigns in Mideast and Eastern Front in WWI, or China or the early Pacific campaigns (Malaya, initial stage of Philippines) considered part of WWII.
It also depends what level you’re looking at. In top line strategic terms Napoleon reached Moscow in 1812 in less time, from a generally similar starting point, than it took the Germans to get as close to that city as they ever did in 1941. The speed of advance of armies all things considered was not a direct function of the speed of motor v horse drawn vehicles and foot travel (and as noted, 1941 German infantry divisions, ie most of their divisions, traveled mainly by foot with mainly horse drawn logistics). OTOH at a soldier’s eye view 1812 and 1941 combat were different in very important ways (if still the same in certain basic human ways). This is also somewhat the case comparing the closer together world wars.
Thanks for the replies folks, good point about the cavalry in WWII, I’d forgotten just how much armies were still reliant on the humble horse even in the '40s.
On the eastern front (in WWI), if I can tack a rider question on - I know it was a lot more fluid than the trenches of the western front, but why was this? I’ve always read that the trenches were a result of a ‘perfect storm’ of defensive technology outclassing offensive and communications, but why didn’t this apply to the Tsar’s armies? The front being just too big to be defended the same way the North Sea to Switzerland? Too far from population centers? Shitty transport infrastructure kneecapping the logistics necessary? The technology ‘enjoyed’ by the western armies being out of reach of the Russian Empire? Can anyone put me out of my misery on this one?
I remember that the Australians gained a lot of WWI experience in making trenches; by the time WWII came they showed how good they had become by defending Tobruk from Rommel in North Africa for several months.
IIRC there were other places where trench warfare took place in the North African desert.
