If you read the history, the British army was one of the best in the world in 1914. The NCOs and officers had learned a tremendous amount from the Boer War-they had learned how to fight against guerillas, and had the best snipers/sharpshooters in Europe.
Consequently, when the German Army encountered the British in 1914, the Germans were shocked-the British snipers shot up their advance so badly, that the Germans thought every man was firing a machine gun. Strong points and fortified trenches were used to great effect, and the German advance was halted.
Later on, we read of the British troops being slaughtered enmasse-as their idiotic generals commanded them to make frontal assaults against german positions.
So all of these highly experienced troops were wasted-why was this allowed to happen?
As these experienced soldiers were killed off, they were replaced by recruits who died like flies-due to the inexperience of their junior officers-what a waste!
The primary thing you have to realize is that World War I, and in particular 1914 and 1915 were literally a huge turning point / sea change in warfare.
Prior to WWI, warfare was essentially the same as during the US Civil War, only with longer-ranged rifles. Look at the Franco-Prussian war for examples. The 3 combat arms were still infantry, cavalry and artillery, with direct-fire artillery being the primary type. Infantry still fought in line style formations, only spread out more. Machine guns were primarily thought of as a sort of curiosity, not as a primary infantry weapon, and were generally employed much more like artillery than as a direct-fire weapon.
1914 happened upon the scene, and widely deployed machine guns and indirect fire artillery made the line-style formations more or less suicidal, and the infantry re-learned what the Civil War soldiers had discovered- digging in was the way to survive.
Problem was, it took a little while for everyone to learn the new lessons, and unfortunately, most of the pre-war highly trained soldiers were casualties as a result.
As for the “over-the-top” style attacks, what else was there? Tanks were first used in combat in 1916, and tended to be effective during attacks against entrenched enemies, but were deployed kind of piecemeal and weren’t the war-winner that people think. And, there was tactical innovation throughout the war, but primarily in the forms of pre-assault barrages, rolling barrages and infiltration tactics. They did the best with what they had- ultimately the collapse of Germany is what ended the war, not any great tactical or strategic advancements.
The first part of the OP’s post seems to refer to the Battle of Mons. The Germans were advancing across open country, some of them on horseback, while the British were dug in awaiting them. The British had been trained to fire 15 rounds in 60 seconds, plus they made effective use of their field artillery.
The second part of the OP seems to refer to the Somme. After the first few months of open warfare in 1914 (which yielded the highest kill per day rates), and the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, the Germans fell back to their choice of the best terrain: usually on higher ground than the Allies. And, since battle tends to favor the defenders, the British had the worst of it. Even so, German casualties were actually higher at the Somme, and roughly equal between the German attackers and French defenders at Verdun.
IMHO, WWI is one war that defeats revisionist armchair generals as easily as it did the actual ones. It’s easy to say “let’s just hunker down and safely snipe and lob shells at the Germans until the Navy’s blockade starves them,” but pretty soon you are commanded to do something to relieve the pressure from the French or else they collapse.
Very few of the old professional British Army were around by the time of the Somme (1916). The initial BEF was largely wiped out by the end of the First Battle of Ypres in November 1914.
The experienced soldiers weren’t wasted though - they helped stop the Germans from taking Paris and putting France out of the war.
A minor nitpick - modern infantry still fights in line formation, albeit at a much smaller scale. An infantry platoon, after setting up a base of fire, flanking and advancing under cover, will array itself in loose lines before assaulting an enemy position.
Also, the British Army of 1914 was tiny by Continental standards. Some years earlier Bismark had been asked what he would do if the British Army landed in Germany and he said “Send out a squad of police.”
After the retreat from Mons and the following battles the nucleus of the British Army was wiped out. What you had then was the territorials and eventually Kitcheners New Army.
I think you are also overestimating how well the British Army performed in the Boer War. Though they eventually won, they were fighting a small guerilla style Army and it took them years and very questionable tactics by Kitchener to triumph (Concentration Camps for women and children). There were a lot of blunders made by the British (Spion Kop one of the most prominent). Redvers Buller VC received a lot of criticism for his generalship although this has been watered down in more recent years. Plus, of course, it wasn’t the British alone fighting the Boers- amongst others there were South African and Australian contingents .
I think the machine gun was only one part of the tactical stagnation on the european front. The thing about WWI was that it was already difficult to make advances at the onset of hostilities - but damn near impossible as time wore on and things like artillery and reserve tactics improved. Not only was artillery better at the start of hostilities than it had been in the previous decade, it continued to get better at an astonishing rate. It got bigger and more organized. Huge and elaborate mechanisms of reinforcement also added to the problem. Making an initial gain was all well and great but it was too easy for both sides to hold massive forces in reserve and out of danger while making the attacking party pay for every inch of territory gained with machine gun and cannon, then counter attacking at the nearest convenience.
I think that tactics were not so much “insufficient” on a grand scale - it’s just that the nature of war itself changed to something lasting longer and costing more. Britain, as everybody, discovered this.
Ah yes, the OP has subscribed to the Blackadder school of history.
You are right something happened, the British Army; for perhaps the only time in its history, the boast “finest army in the world” was justified, when during the Hundred Days they handed kasier bill’s boys their asses. This included smashing through the Hindenberg line in about 3 days.
Finally I would also say this; 78 British and Dominion generals were killed in the war and 150 wounded. Lions led by donkey’s my ass.
I’m reading a WWI history right now, and one thing that keeps coming out is that everyone – British, French, German, Russian, Austrian, etc. felt the best way to attack was by a massed frontal assault. They continued to believe this for battle after battle, even though both they and their opponents had machine guns, gas, focused artillery and all the rest.
Just speaking in terms of battlefield tactics, WWI was quite possibly the stupidest event in history.
I just meant that the days of companies, battalions and regiments forming up in line died in about 1914. I know that on a smaller scale, lines are still used.
That being said, a lot of that old-timey stuff was around a lot longer than I’d have thought. I used to have a 1920s US junior officer’s field guide, and it had a lot of pages devoted to directing volley fire on distant targets from infantrymen armed with M1903 rifles and BARs. Stuff like how to estimate distance and how to instruct your platoon in how to set their sights, so that all the rounds would fall roughly in the same place.
What other choice did they have?
Sometimes there were other factors: the Germans set a frontal attack on Verdun because they were seeing that for every German soldier killed, two Frenchmen died. They figured that they’d be sacrificing one for two and eventually bleeding France dry. But the actual ratio at Verdun was one for one (I suspect the favorable numbers previously were because Germans were defending), so the strategy failed.
This was my point-the British Army in the Boer War LEARNED that frontal attacks were suicidal. In Africa, they learned how to take cover, work with the landscape, and set up strong points. Plus, having large numbers of expert marksmen (snipers) gave them the ability to inflict huge losses upon advancing troops…and (incidentally) to target and kill platoon commanders and officers-whose loss would be a major blow to the German Army.
The question is-why did they waste this valuable experience? Losing men with such experience was a double disaster:
-you lost capable, resourceful front line troops
-you deprived the recruits of their expertise-seasoned NCOs are the best instructors for new recruits (they learned the tough lessons and passed them on).
There was no other choice; The lines extended from the North Sea to the Swiss border and they could not be flanked.
And they did not “keep throwing men at the trenches”. The front was a place of ceaseless innovation; see the creeping barrage, the mines that were detonated, attempts to employ air power and finally tanks which did break through.
The single biggest handicap an attacker had was communications. At the start of the attack, the offensive artillery was usually right on target and effective. Note the aforementioned Ypres. The Germans lost huge numbers to British artillery that targeted their defensive lines. But once the attackers reached and passed the first defensive line, they were cut off from communicating with their supporting artillery. Radios in those days were more like furniture than a device and could not be carried into battle, much less operate reliably under fire. Telephone lines were carried by attacking troops but were always, ALWAYS cut by defending artillery and troops. This meant that attacking artillery stopped firing on the enemy once the troops had reached it and could not, usually, fire beyond it with any hope of hitting anything but the earth. The attackers were unable to direct it in onto the secondary line of defence. Many schemes were tried to get around this: timed rolling barrages that the troops had to keep behind, rudimentary communications like flares, runners, and pigeons, aerial spotters for the artillery, advanced recon to ID targets on the secondary lines. All these systems failed or were not effective enough to deliver worthwhile gains.
ralph124c I think you are forgetting how truly tiny the British Army was in 1914. There were 6 divisions in the UK army and 14 more in the territorial force, around 300,000 men total. Then they had about the same number of men in unorganized reserves. It was Kitchener’s opinion that the territorial force and the reserves were functionally useless. So he had 6 real divisions to work with… this is in comparison of the the German functional equivalent of IIRC around 80 divisions on the western front.
Kitchener had two choices, use them to train and leaven the volunteer and later conscript armies, or to use them has the sharp tip of the spear to deflect the worst of the advance in 1914. And while he would have preferred to use them as trainers, he mostly chose to use them in battle. The regular army made up most of the 7 divisions in the initial BEF. And they certainly did achieve a measure of success at Mons, during the Great Retreat, and of course in the first battle of Marne. By by the end of Marne that initial force had suffered around a 50% casualty rate. The old army was gone before the UK ever took an offensive action. They had no trained anti-guerrilla army, they had no mass of snipers. As effective pound-for-pound as the UK army was, it had been ground to dust by the German war machine. By the time the UK was ready to take offensive action, what they had left was an army of untrained volunteers and the “useless” reserves and territorial force.
Even if they hadn’t been used up in those first few months, it is hard to imagine what difference 70,000 men really could have made among the over 5 million men that eventually served. The army that fought the Boer War was functionally a completely different army than the one that fought WWI. That army was dead or running training exercises for the army that ended up going over the top.
The failure was the British Navy’s.
An aggressive showdown between Germany & the Empire at sea would have fallen to England.
And then, shelling German port cities, & landing Royal Marines.
And Germany would fall.
But the Admirals were too timid.
Such a n action could well have destroyed the Royal Navy as a fighting force. The RN was shown the be behind tactically from the Germans at Jutland and other engagements. Their advantage was strategic; they could block of Germany and bottle in the High Seas fleet which could (as it did at Jutland) “assualt in goaler but remain in jail”.
Churchill had just such a crackpot idea-landing soldiers on the German coast.
Of course, the german submarines wold have made this a hazardous enterprise. But don’t forget-Jutland was seen as a British victory-had Jellicoe been more aggressive, he would have folowed up with a big attack-which would have destroyed the High Seas Fleet.
This is sheer fantasy for a number of reasons (many already outlined by others above:
[ol]
[li]The German Navy was designed from the start for such an aggressive showdown at sea in German homewaters. Tirpitz calculated that the outcome of such a showdown was so uncertain, and the Royal Navy’s other commitments were so extensive that the British Admiralty could not risk such an encounter. Unlike Jutland you’ll also face dozens of German torpedo boats and a number of submarines so victory is far from assured (and defeat could be catastrophic).[/li][li]Even if the Royal Navy wins a Tsushima scale victory where are you going to make the landing, look at a map of Germany in 1914, very limited options there.[/li][li]Who are you going to land? The regular army is tied up in Flanders, most of the marines are in Antwerp and the territorials are ill-equipped and trained.[/li][li]How are you going to land them? There’s no vast fleet of landing craft available so you’ll need a port, it’ll be more Dieppe than D-Day.[/li][li]Once you’ve successfully seized Kiel say what will you do then? You’re still vastly outnumbered and the practicalities of the time heavily favour the defence so most likely your landing force is sealed off by the Germans and cannot move further.[/li][/ol]
The only major amphibious operation in WWI was Gallipoli, hardly a stunning success. While the German coast lacks such forbidding terrain it’s much easier for the Germans to transport forces to combat any landings than it was for the Turks.
Oh and as an endnote - take a look at what happened in the Zeebrugge raid in 1918. The landings were sort of a success (although the Germans had the port back into operation within a few days) but the British suffered a 30% casualty rate.