It’s Armistice Day tomorrow, when we in the UK remember our war dead, prompted by the slaughter in the First World War.
Popular conception, and I’ll admit my image of it, is of static trench lines where generals still with a 19th century view of warfare order their men to march slowly towards German machine guns to be scythed down in no-man’s land. Then when that failed they tried it again. And again…
Is this image accurate? How often did this scene play itself out? Was it something that just the French and British suffered from (Haig gets a lot of blame for this) or were there Russian and Central Powers commanders who were equally as clueless?
More nuanced answer, the problem on the Western front was that due to geographic features, namely the. North Sea and the Swiss border the enemy could not be outflanked. This meant that a frontal assault was all they could feasibly do. Unfortunately the sheer side of the armies was such that then could no achieve a breakthrough, there was simply no area where concentration of offensive forces to defensive forces was such that a breakthrough could be made (which happened often enough) and exploited (rarely).
Compounding this was the fact that this is before the era of portable radios. A general could no longer control his forces through voice and sight alone. He did not have radios which permitted easy communications. So if there was a breakthrough, which as said above, was common enough, he could not reinforces success, often because he had no way of knowing, see the Ulster division on the first day of the Somme.
What finally succeeded was the use of tanks to achieve and exploit a breakthrough on a narrow line. The 100 days are perhaps unparalleled in British military history, some of the most consistent victories ever achieved by. British arms.
But how did they ever get to that point. I mean, when they threw several hundred thousand people in to the Somne, and they all died, how did they justify sending the next batch? What was the point, what was to be gained? Why couldn’t they agree to stop fighting once the lines become mostly static, and hundreds of thousands of people were dying?
Generals are taught the tactics of the previous war. It worked then and if it doesn’t work now, you are probably didn’t coordinate it properly or some such thing. Many of the slaughters in the U.S. Civil War were a result of the old training that didn’t take into account rifled barrels.
By rigorous process of elimination, those who are kind heartened or let the deaths of many men influence their tactical decisions, do not rise through the ranks to become generals.
As a corollary to #2, they have the mindset to “avenge” the deaths of those men by becoming more aggressive. A hundred thousand Americans/British/French just died? Let’s get the bastards. Peace? Never!
Coming up with new tactics for modern weaponry requires a full re-write of the books they learned from and this requires trial and error. If you do come up with a theory as to how a new method of attack might work, you had better damn well be right lest you face a court-martial for defying “tried and true” military tactics.
Simple inertia and blustery. It was good enough for Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill. My men are just as good as his. Attack!
But, even with all of these factors going against a general, in every war, within a few years the highers ups come up with new tactics that win the current war. Then 20 years later the process repeats. WWII was sort of the exception because of the prohibition against chemical weapons and the fact that the intervening years were preparation for another war as the Treaty of Versailles almost guaranteed one.
Sorry, my post did not make that clear. If there is one thing the Western front had, it was innovation. They tried everything they thought might work. Poison gas, mining (planting huge amounts of explosives under the enemy lines), various types if artillery infantry coordination. Some things worked, some did not. Then kept trying until they got it. They did not keep doing the same thing over and over again.
The problem is, given approximate technological parity, there’s no plausible expectation of it working out very well. You say “ok, the enemy is approximately at the same tech level as me, and has generals around my skill level.” So I am planning to get those bastards by killing a few hundred thousand of them, and I uh…don’t expect to lose approximately as many of my own people in return?
Getting revenge is one thing, having to lose thousands of lives (to take thousands of the “enemy” lives) to do so is something else.
Are generals irrational gamblers or something? (since some “bets” in terms of tactical decisions pay off “favorably”) Do they somehow actually believe that if they do things a little different next time, they are going to win overwhelmingly without losing about as many killed as the enemy will lose?
Yes, but everything new they tried, the enemy found a way to do something to counter it. (for the most part). You’d think after excitedly saying “our new <insert tactic/weapon here> will let us overwhelm those bastards! Let’s use it!” enough times, and having it not cause victory, would cause leaders to be skeptical about their chances.
Melchett: Now, Field Marshal Haig has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.
Blackadder: Now, would this brilliant plan involve us climbing out of our trenches and walking slowly towards the enemy sir?
Darling: How can you possibly know that Blackadder? It’s classified information.
Blackadder: It’s the same plan that we used last time, and the seventeen times before that.
Melchett: E-E-Exactly! And that is what so brilliant about it! We will catch the watchful Hun totally off guard! Doing precisely what we have done eighteen times before is exactly the last thing they’ll expect us to do this time!
Within certain limits, you’re not overly concerned with losing more men than your opponent as long as you win in the long run and don’t deplete your forces too much.
In the US Civil War, Lee and his generals consistently won against larger Union forces, and usually lost fewer men. But the first Union commanders, despite their numerical superiority, wouldn’t press an attack after large losses. Grant finally won because no matter how many men he lost he continued the attack. He lost many more men than Lee in the battles of the Overland Campaign. However, he could continue to call up more men while Lee was unable to replace losses.
Frontal assaults on trenches did work in World War I…
…just not on the Western Front. There were numerous cases on the eastern front (the German breakthrough at Gorlice in 1915, the Russian Brusilov offensive in 1916, the Central Powers conquests of Serbia and Romania) where conventional offensives did work, and that was a major reason why the Western Front generals kept trying. They though if they just could perfect the offensive they could have similar success. And in 1918, the Germans just missed winning the war with more sophisticated versions of frontal assaults.
Plus what was their alternative? If Haig had walked into Lloyd George’s office and said “I can’t think of any better way to win the war, let’s just sign a peace with Germany when our closest ally is still occupied by them” what do you think happens? From all the evidence we have the war was still supported by the large majority of Britons, Frenchmen, and Germans (until the last year of war when food deprivation really took hold).
The French mindset, at least, was to never give any more ground, and attack at every opportunity. This was influenced by the Franco-Prussian War, where the French were defeated because their tactics were to fight a defensive was from fortresses. They spent the next 40 years teaching their officers to always stay on the attack, which meant disaster in WWI.
The Germans tried to take advantage of this at Verdun: they noticed that two French soldiers died for every German, so they forced a battle, expecting the French to go there to attack. They were right - the French could easily have withdrawn to more defensible and shorter lines (Verdun was a salient that extended out from the res of the line), but they chose to defend every inch of French soil. Howeve, the casualties on the German side were roughly equal to the French, making the plan worthless.
The French kept “attaque a outrance” as a principle the entire war. They learned their lesson, so they built the Maginot Line. Unfortunately…
It is interesting to see how the art of war evolved from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. I do not think the world will ever see again wars of trenches and positions like we saw in the last century. I think wars will evolve more toward urban fighting but also not at conquering and holding terrain but getting at the enemy who is on the same terrain.
In WWI you had a war whose aim was conquering terrain and holding it. Thus the trenches.
In the Spanish civil war it was the same. Sometimes the front did not move for years and the trenches and fortifications were only meters apart. The idea was that you controlled the terrain and the rest just followed. In the battles they would suffer huge losses to take a hill which might be lost the same day with a cost of thousands of casualties to the enemy. This happened over and over. The aim was to control a contiguous patch of land. In the battle of Jarama the international brigades suffered huge losses. Some hills were taken and lost up to three times on the same day. The International Brigades, including the Lincoln Battallion, suffered huge losses there. One hill was called “Suicide Hill” (40.2179, -3.5038) and you can still see in Google the trenches and fortifications around it. The Battle of Jarama lasted less than three weeks and the casualties were huge, maybe about 30,000 between both sides. There are some monuments there to those who fought and many trenches and other fortifications. If you read about it and then go there to see where it happened you get a much better idea of what war was like at the time. The enemy were on the other side of the river or up the hill and the objective was to charge and take the terrain. The guys shooting at you were just trying to prevent that. By looking at a map you could get a good idea of how things stood.
WWII was similar but more mechanized and on a much larger scale.
But in Vietnam we begin to see asymmetric war where the terrain is used to advantage but the immediate aim is not to conquer and hold it, it is to destroy the enemy where ever they are. There are no front lines and no rear. It is everybody against everybody.
The way things are changing in war I do not believe the world will see wars like happened in the first half of the 20th century. Future wars will be very different.
Something similar happened in naval warfare. Up until the 16th century naval battles were land battles fought on ships. The sailors sailed up to the enemy and the soldiers tried to board, fight and conquer. Ships were just castles floating on water. Lepanto was the last great battle of this sort.
At that time the English realized they could not match the Spanish warships but they also did not need to. They used smaller, faster, more maneuverable ships to harass the Spanish ships and that’s all they needed. After that nobody tried to board the enemy, they just tried to sink them or set them on fire or destroy them.
It would have suited the Germans very well to stop the war at that point. They had got large portions of France and Belgium’s most economically important areas which they intended to incorporate into the Wilhelmine Reich permanently and deprive France of most of its coalfields. Sitting on what they wanted, they could afford to adopt a defensive posture, break up enemy attacks with artillery and seal off penetrations with reinforcements over lines of interior communication.
‘Hundreds of thousands’ of peoples’ sons and husbands mean the stakes become higher. Having invested so many lives in the strategy means you can’t just say “oh, well, looks like it’s not worth the bother of trying to fight it to a decision, let’s just go back to the way things were before it all started”.
I would suggest that the less-nuanced view of the generals was pretty accurate on the Italian Front. The Italian generals really did spend most of the war thinking that just one more push would surely dislodge the Austrians. This was partly exacerbated by the fact that the major Italian war aims were capturing Trieste and Trent, which were both tantalizingly close (about 10 miles from the front during most of the war) and so it really did seem like throwing men at the front could have been decisive. It wasn’t until the last few months of the war that they started really trying the tactical and technological innovations from the Western Front, but by then the Central Powers were starting to deteriorate anyways.
Trenches are defensive tactics and not the first choice of an attacking army. They’re employed to deter an enemy from attacking and/or to make it very costly to assault. (WWII’s Maginot Line was just a fancy trench that the Nazis simply flanked. No lesson had been learned.)
Pre-war military tactics usually fail to keep up with military/non-military advances in technology. The generals are expected to adapt to changes in the field. Some are better at it than others. Some adapt faster than others. The initial German advance on the Western Front had became a stalemate. In order for the Germans to retain captured territory and resources, they built trenches. The French and British responded with trenches of their own in order to keep pressure on, and hopefully break/flank, the German lines. Really, really long trenches backed up by more trenches. Break-thrus became increasingly more difficult to achieve and almost impossible to hold. (Maybe a really, really large assault will work?)
The goal was then to determine the best way to beat an entrenched enemy and sucessfully carry it out. Repeated massive waves of soldiers were tried ending in the debacle at the Somme. (Well that obviously didn’t work so let’s try something else.) The modern obvious choice would be a beach landing behind the enemy but really large landings hadn’t been perfected yet.
So…what’s left? Tanks, poison gas, better artillery, more effective artillery shells, faster aircraft, sapping, attrition, starvation, mutiny… Someone was going to eventually break thru or quit.
The Eastern Front remained more of a mobile war. The Russians undermined the Russians and the Central Powers were then able to concentrate on the western Front.
Where the generals stupid? Not usually. Were they slow learners? Quite possibly. Did the generals decide how their enemies would respond? No. The Generals generally responded to the situation presented to them with the weapons and soldiers they had on hand.
Can you expand on that? I don’t know much about WWI, but I was under the impression that the Germans came very close to winning… in 1914, when their initial advance very nearly wrapped things up. Then I was vaguely under the impression that the lines of the front stayed static for a long time, and then eventually tanks let the West start pushing the lines backwards, and Germany eventually surrendered due more or less to starvation and weariness despite no enemies being anywhere near the pre-war borders… which part(s) of that are wrong?
Well, to be “fair” Luigi Cadorna did win our in house Worst Military Leader game ;). I was pulling for Arthur Percival, but Cadorna was certainly deserving.