You don’t need to use, and lose, so many men (overall in the Battles of the Somme being around a million British and French killed or wounded) to keep the enemy pinned down.
Technology at which point of WWI? The stuff they had in 1914 was a bit basic in many respects but it was a different kettle of fish by 1918.
It’s worth bearing in mind that not all of WWI was fought in muddy trenches on the Western Front - the Palestinian and African theatres were more mobile, with cavalry and armoured cars and so on.
One of the things British learnt from the Boer War was that a (slightly) lighter spitzer projectile was better for accurate, long range shooting than a heavy round-nose one. (They learnt this the hard way, with the Boers being excellent shots at long range using Mauser rifles).
If you have a look at military rifles from around WWI, you’ll see their sights are graduated to ranges that just seem ludicrously impractical - 2000 yards for the SMLE Mk III and about the same on the Russian M91/30, for example.
What people were expecting after the Boer War was a long-range sniping match, basically - not the trench warfare hell that the Western Front turned into.
This is (simplistically) kind of true in a physical sense.
Politically, it would have lost the war. The Western powers were in a state of constant argument, and one of them sitting back on their heels would have infuriated the other. There was a boatload of politics behind almost every move the Western powers made, all of it with the general design of keeping the alliance together. It’s easy for the armchair generals to talk about how dumb those old timey guys were in 1916; in context, however, the decisions they made were largely logical ones based on the military and political situations they were in.
I’m not suggesting everything they did was brilliant, and would not deny that the war in general was utterly insane, though the insanity was well in place before the strategic decisions were being made. But pretending that anyone here in Haig or Foch’s place would have had any significantly better ideas, with the information available at the time, is just stunningly silly. It’s not even realistic to think Haig had a choice to attack in the summer of 1916; the offensive was a political decision, an agreement between France and Great Britain, and had Haig said on May 1916 “well, no, on second thought, I’m not doing this” he would simply have been fired and replaced with someone, probably Rawlinson, who would.
The primary killer of men in the first world war (and most subsequent wars) was artillery, and modern artillery was only invented in 1897.
The artillery of the ACW wasn’t much different from the artillery of the Napoleonic wars, and it wasn’t really that effective even against fixed positions. The whole oh-shit-the-world-just-exploded-and-everyone’s-dead kind of artillery fire you see in war movies just didn’t really happen with the technology of the ACW.
Did you ever notice how the general uniform of the ACW period had the men wearing soft field caps? It’s a pretty reasonable choice, since there wasn’t anything you could wear on your head that would stop a bullet. Armies wore soft caps all the way up to the beginning of WW1, when suddenly everyone started dying from sharp bits of artillery shrapnel from the air hitting them in the noggin. So a year into WW1 suddenly steel helmets were all the rage. Steel helmets didn’t stop bullets, but provided significant protection against airburst shrapnel. The style of helmet with the wide brim used by the British and later Americans were designed especially for this purpose.
Machine guns are one of those things that looks cool in movies and video games but really weren’t that awesome in real life. They suffered from all kinds of problems - the barrels heated up and wore out with extensive use, they used huge amounts of ammo that had to be laboriously transported on the backs of other men, and they often jammed. At best a 2 man machine gun team could put down as much fire as say, a 12 man section armed with rifles, for a while, until they ran out of ammo/wore out the barrel/broke the gun/got blown up by artillery because they can’t move as quickly. It’s a nice thing to have but didn’t fundamentally change any aspect of the game.
A better question would be why the European observers didn’t learn anything from the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, where all of these things were abundantly clear.
That actually was the German strategy for a long period of time. That’s why, in general, German trenches were well-fortified, permanent constructions while English and French trenches were dirt and sandbags, “because we’ll be pushing forward out of them any day now”.
I thought the German trenches were like that because they were built by Germans and the others were built by, well, Brits and Frenchmen, but I’m judging that based on cars of the '60s and '70s built in those nations.
There is that too. The Germans have a saying “wenn schon, denn schon”, which roughly translates to “If we have to do it, then we might as well do it right.”
No use doing a shoddy half-job.
Yep, with Audie Murphy and John Wayne leading the way.
Spielberg is making a movie of it with Tom Hanks playing Pershing. Screwball inventor Robin Williams invents the tank for the attack and is finally validated by the military establishment after years of being ignored.
Saw a film once, Italian I think, about a factory worker (early 1900’s) whose truck keeps getting stuck in the mud. Slowly, on his own spare time, by trial and error he invents tracks, as a means to overcome the problem.
He finds out that he has to pay a fee for the patent that will finally get him and his family out of poverty. He cuts off two of his fingers, for insurance money.
On his way to the patent office, in the city, he decides to drop in at one of those new fangled cinema thingies. Where he sees a news reel of tanks breaking through the German lines…
If their societies were (and possibly just so) that lavish of blood, then they perhaps deserved what they got and got what they deserved. I cannot say what France and Britain would have allowed; I can say what they should have done. More to the point, there were voices then as now who urged that people abandon the err, “tactic” of mad suicidal charges, and spoke up very quickly. You can argue people refused to make wise choices; all I can do is point out that it isn’t an answer to the reality that they did not, in fact, make wise choices.
Simply put, almost every attack made by the western powers was a substantial net negative, with nothing to show for it but a pile of bodies. The Germans actually came close to winning outright on the battlefield; the western powers did not and never had a prayer of doing so, and this became obvious very early on.
This… is not so. The Machine Gun had its limitations, but it was exceedingly effective at one thing: denying the enemy access to a specific location. And because of the nature of trench warfare, this was greatly increased in importance. You would be completely correct in terms of WW2, where the machine-gun was heavily used in standard tactics for all sides but wasn’t in and of itself indispensable because of the fluid nature of the conflict. In WW1, the machine gun could offer a very powerful defense in extremely tight quarters, which is exactly what was needed.
Slam John Wayne to your heart’s content, but you do NOT diss Audie Murphy, you churlish cur! 
Cite? I ask because I can’t find that it exists. I suppose Williams’ wacky inventor is based on Walter Christie, but his first tank didn’t get shown until 1924. He may have been odd, but his tank suspension was used on the T-34 and most of your own Cruiser series.
I apologize for continuing that WWII hijack. After all, even Old Man Christie wasn’t born until a month after the ACW ended and his contribution to the WWI war effort was thwarted, in part because he had pissed off the US Army, a practice he continued the rest of his life.