And these wars taught that concentrated headlong charges could still carry the day.
This supposed lesson that “you cannot charge a well entrenched enemy” is not really true.
It is possible. It will cost you, so you’d better not waste it, but it is not impossible to charge machine-guns and trenches.
Even in WWII there were still charges against entrenched troops, ever hear of Normandy?
What do you suggest?
Actually, a number of Civil War tactics did emerge, which could have been developed much further.
One of which is that trench defenders have one significant weakness: surprise. When an attack wasn’t preceded by (largely pointless) artillery bombardment, attackers were often able to drive straight through the lines. This required extremely disciplined and focused attacks rather than “human waves”.
Another option was the undermine, a classic siege tool adapted to the new circumstances. This was used more than once and proved effective at disrupting enemy lines. Neither was perfected, but then both were done without any kind of long-range communication and were developed during war itself.
Likewise, American troops may have undergone the usual “new-soldier-casualty” period, but did not adopt trench warfare as the solution. Instead, we adapted. The casualties were high, but we learned fast.
Just to add to my previous 2 cents:
I think that the “lessons to be learned from the US” is a bit of an over US-centric notion. Innefectiveness of attacking entrenched positions was not something the Euro’s should absolutely have picked up on.
Remember that he soldiers in the American civil-war were not regular, professional soldiers.
The natural reaction for people, who are shot at, is to take cover.
What happened, most times, during the American civil-war was that the first line, when it encountered too much oppositional fire, would hunker down at the first opportunity. usually a ditch or a fence or a wall, anything that gives some sense of protection.
From that position they would just exchange fire and it would be extremely difficult to get the attack going again.
Successive lines would sooner join the hunkered down men as renew the attack by advancing further than them.
The professional German and French soldiers from the wars of 1864, 1866, Mexico, Italy, Crimea and 1870-71 were a different kettle of fish.
They could be relied on to keep the attack going. At Gravelotte-St Privat, for example, the Prussian Guard suffered horrendous losses, but they sustained their attack and overcame the entrenched French.
It wasn’t until the Franco-Prussian war that machine guns were only beginning to make an impression. But they weren’t belt-fed yet and the effect wasn’t better than a well-coordinated rifle volley.
What the generals had learned was that if the attack could be sustained, it was possible to win. Hence Germany’s emphasis on obedience to orders and French talk of the “Furia Francese”.
By the time WWI arrived machine guns and artillery had evolved even further, but there hadn’t been that much war-experience with them between 1871 and 1914.
Besides, not all Euro’s were the same. The Germans were not as keen on these assaults as the French and British, plus they were the ones who started the trenches in the first place and were much, much better at how to build them.
They learned never to get involved in a land war in America.
I am not a historian or a general, so here is my only semi-informed opinion:
Yeah, I think it’s true artillery bombardments were quite useless and mostly served as a warning that an attack was imminent.
But to what extent are the American Civil War and the First World War comparable in terms of the suitability of certain tactics? In the First World War there were lines stretching for hundreds of miles that had to be held, and any salients created would be difficult to defend, so simply breaking through lines might not be the decisive victory it could be in other wars. Most battles in the American Civil War were just a few days long, I believe, whereas the big battles in the First World War, such as the Somme and the first three Battles of Ypres could last for months. The Battle of Verdun lasted from February to December 1916. Several First World War battles also saw casualties in the range of a million or more, compared to the fifty thousand or so at Gettysburg. This suggests to me that there was much more of a stalemate in the First World War with more static lines and greater infrastructure to bring reinforcements and supplies to the front, while there was a lot more opportunity for mobility in the American Civil War which allowed for more flexible tactics.
Well, not any more so than any two wars in the firearms era, no.
Characterizing the U.S. Civil War or World War I as merely “headlong charges against entrenched positions” suggests a lack of understanding of both wars.
Yes, there’s more to do. What’s your point? Forget tactics for a moment: in the entirety of WW1, why are there so few bold and decisive moves? Why did the generals at the top simply repeat the actions shown to be so foolish time and time again? Why did it fall to American troops to use the skills French mountain units had already devised and perfected? For that matter, why did the war turn into a massive mutual siege on a Continental scale? These were actions chosen by specific people at specific times; they were neither inevitable or unavoidable.
To the point, your post implies a certain fatalism, which had in particular infected the upper echelons of the British, and led to the pointlessly wasteful human-waves.
Still, the ACW was often headlong charges against prepared, fortified positions, without enough time to dig trenches. See: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, etc; while WWI had four years of pointless and unremembered back and forth punctuated by larger, but still pointless, back and forth at places like the Marne and Passchendaele.
I’d strongly recommend that anyone discussing WWI tactics or whether European observers learned from the the ACW read Barbara Tuckman’s “The Guns of August”.
Correct me if I don’t have this right.
(1) Grant defeated Lee at Gettysburg because Lee was outflanked and his best cavalry
force arrived late.
(2) The Petersburg trenches were not overrun because the collapse of the tunnels caused
a large depression in which most of the Union attackers were trapped, creating a
Confederate “turkey shoot”.
(3) The trench called the “Western Front” was created by a series of flanking operations
by both sides until the battle line stretched from the Alps to the North Sea.
(4) The stalemate was unbroken until General Pershing put a million soldiers in a square mile
frontal assault that punched right thru the German line.
Why am I asked to forget tactics, then immediately asked questions about tactics?
My point is all there in my post. The wars were different. Lessons learned in the American Civil War wouldn’t necessarily apply to the First World War. Trying to break through lines hundreds of miles long, where breaking through just earns you a pocket of land surrounded on 3 sides by enemies that can potentially be cut off, may not have a lasting effect except for casualties on your side. How can you prevent these salients from occurring? Move the whole line forward at once, I suppose.
There were plenty of “bold” moves. Decisive moves aren’t necessarily up to the military commanders if the situation doesn’t allow for them. Why did it become a massive mutual siege? My understanding is the Germans advanced as per their Schlieffen Plan, hoping to take Paris. They decided it would be easier to go through Belgium to reach Paris, which understandably upset the Belgians and brought the British into the war. The Germans were held back and repelled before being able to surround Paris, so rather than lose more ground, they dug in. As I wrote earlier, the technology of the time heavily favoured defenders, so the Allies had to respond in kind and dig trenches. Since they actually weren’t so stupid they thought attacking defended trenches from the front was the best plan to start with, both sides attempted to outflank each other in the “Race to the Sea”. Soon the result of this were lines stretching from the the Belgian coast on the North Sea, through France to Switzerland. I don’t know if it would have been better to bite the bullet and go for a huge attack before this point, but no one expected such a long and bloody war, so a decisive attack requiring huge casualties on your own side may not have seemed necessary at that point.
Grant wasn’t at Gettysburg. He was at Vicksburg at the time.
The initial German assault was pretty bold and decisive - but the English and French managed to hold it off before they got to their objectives, and after that it all devolved into the trench warfare we remember most from that war. My impression (and I’m no WW1 scholar, so anyone can correct me) is that the Germans thought they could take out the French quickly before anyone would be able to react. So in that sense they learned the lessons that Little Nemo mentions - decisive action and mobilization early wins the war (it worked in the Franco-Prussian War, after all). They just couldn’t quite execute, and at that point the other point raised by Brinkmann in Chimera’s post comes more into play - once you get past that initial “wipe out the army” phase of an initial attack you better have the support of the people behind you.
This is wrong twice;
As pointed out, Grant was not there. At the exact same time he was defeating the Confederates at Vicksburg, which was arguably the most important battle of the war and is generally regarded as one of the most brilliant offensive campaigns ever devised.
Lee was not “outflanked” at Gettysburg, he just couldn’t defeat an army that was in a better defensive position with short internal lines of communication.
Er, no.
The stalemate was broken because the Germans attacked in March 1918 with everything they had in an effort to finally win the war. They didn’t, and the Allied counteroffensive overwhelmed them. The battle that broke the Germans and started the rampage, the Battle of Amiens, included a relatively small American contingent so I’m not sure what Pershing has to do with it.
That was the idea. March through Belgium and Luxembourg, where the French wouldn’t expect an attack to come from, and encircle Paris, bringing about French surrender in a few weeks. The Russians were expected to mobilize slowly, giving the German army time to march back east to meet them after defeating France. Unfortunately, for the Germans, they didn’t expect Britain to honour its treaty with the Belgians and come to their aid, they never succeeded in reaching Paris thanks to French and British forces at the Marne, and Russia mobilized quicker than expected, resulting in a two-front war that the plan was intended to avoid.
It seems to me that study of the experience of the Confederacy would be quite relevant to the strategic concerns of Germany prior to WWI. The CSA was up against a larger power with a greater manpower and industrial base, as well as a superior navy.
I’m sure Germany would have loved nothing more than to fight a series of Franco-Prussian type wars. Quick and decisive is the way to go. But what happens if you can’t fight that kind of war? Say… if your decisive offensive falters on the Marne. What then?
And I wouldn’t dismiss the Civil War as nothing more than undisciplined rabble, bloodily flailing against one another in futile assaults. These were combined arms field armies arranged in corps, just like the Europeans. Sure, the militia and volunteers of 1861 were no match for any professional European army of the time, but they would become more than a match by 1863 (I suspect that it was this, the army manned by militia, volunteers, and conscripts, that the Europeans primarily disdained. The situation in Europe meant that they couldn’t get away with raising a new army almost from scratch and learning as they fought, as America could and has historically done) . Tactically, the exploits of Lee with Jackson and Longstreet are worthy of study. Operationally, the Vicksburg campaign and Sherman’s campaign in Georgia were brilliantly conducted. Strategically, there are clear lessons to be learned if you contrast the inconclusive fighting in the east which resulted in stalemate with the rapid collapse of the Confederate war machine once Grant was put in charge in 1864. Möltke’s summary dismissal of its value for study was his loss.
Tactics != Strategy. Learn the difference
Not necessary. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and later events demonstrated that breakthroughs could and did force retreat. More to the point, the trenches were only possible because the armies spread out; a concentrated army was quite capable of breaking through even on sheer bodies, and could potentially have won the war if it were concentrated enough and well-supported.
You continue to insist that no options were possible except meatgrinder assaults, yet your own arguments demonstrate that alternative methods were used and did in fact succeed. Even if one was utterly convinced of that, the meatgrinders accomplished nothing. The western powers could have literally done better by never attacking during the entire war.
More to the point, they most certainly should have recognized very early that assaulting trenches dead-on was a difficult task which could only ever succeed if well designed and well-supported. And that’s absolutely a strategic concern, because it requires training and support all the way from the top.
This is actually a good point. It’s extremely like that if the Germans had not had to fight Russia as well as England and France, they would have won the war outright within three years. And they would have accomplished that by learning the very lessons that England and France largely shunned: rapid assaults, using spearpoint forces to create a gap, and . By the late war, when Germany had beaten Russia and had enough bodies to spare, they were already getting desperately short on resources and could never properly follow-up on any success.
This. It wasn’t just the ground war that brought Germany to the table, it was also the blockade. Just sit in your trenches and wait for famine and disease to do their job.
Because attacking at various points along the line keeps the enemy spread out so that they can’t attack effectively till your blockade has time to work.