That makes sense if we could have total control of a battlefield and all possible outcomes. But rarely in war (or anything else) is there a single rational actor calling the shots.
If there were authorities high enough to organize a gas attack of this scale, they should have also been high enough up to order troop movements as well.
… it worked exactly as it was supposed to, it’s the damn Ardennes forest that didn’t, by being overly tank friendly.
It was subsequently shot for treason.
[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I wonder if any of those who feel the generals were incompetent may have any alternative ideas to win WW1?
[/QUOTE]
Not have one ? 
General Nivelle had the correct idea (a rolling "creeping"artillery barrage) followed up by a well led strong infantry attack. Unfortunately he gave away the strategy, and allowed the Germans to regroup. The British also achieved a major breakthough with tanks (Cambrai)…but failed to follow it up. Haig kept up his futile attacks, and did so in places that guaranteed disaster (his artillery had destroyed the drainage system in the Flanders fields, and made his battlefield a quagmire-many of his soldiers actually drowned! The man learned nothing despite losing hundreds of thousands of men.
Blame that decision on the politicians not the generals.
It wasn’t as great an idea in practice as it sounded in theory. It was actually really hard to kill entrenched troops with artillery. They’d shell an enemy position for days and then attack and find that the enemy line was pretty much completely intact.
All those prolonged artillery barrages seemed to do was give the enemy advance notice of where you were planning an offensive. This gave him time to ready reserves in that sector. And the artillery chewed up the ground so much it made it difficult for infantry to move through it (and impossible for anything other than infantry - like reinforcements, supplies, and medics - to move through).
Brusilov accidentally came up with a better idea although he didn’t realize it. He commanded a secondary sector of the Russian lines. And because his sector wasn’t considered important, he wasn’t given priority for artillery shells. So he didn’t have the ammunition for the prolonged barrages that were considered proper. All he could do was fire a short barrage just before his attack.
And it turned out that worked. Most of the troops who were killed by artillery were killed in the first few rounds when they were caught by surprise - after that they’d dig in to their shelters and wait out the attack. So his hour-long barrage killed just about as many Austrian troops as a week-long barrage would have. And all of the Austrians expected that there would be the regular long barrage before the actual attack. So when the barrage stopped and the Russians attacked after a short barrage, they caught the Austrians completely by surprise. There had been no time to bring up the usual reserves or dig secondary trenches, so once the frontline was crossed, the Russians could keep moving - and the shorter barrage meant they had good ground to travel on. At a time when major offensives got stalled within a mile, the Brusilov offensive advanced forty miles.
And then its success essentially killed the offensive. Brusilov had adopted these tactics out of necessity not conviction. When he succeeded, he was given full support and all the artillery shells he wanted. So he stopped and went back to the traditional prolonged barrages before advancing any further and as a result his offensive stalled.
You’re right in that it’s all dependent on what the aims of the war are, but typically the point is to compel the other nation to your own nation’s will, and the best way to do that is to destroy their capacity to resist in an organized fashion and do one of several things- negotiate with the enemy government to get what you’re looking for, occupy the place and install a friendly government or conquer the place and make it part of your empire.
The first and 3rd are the more classic approaches- see the Franco-Prussian War, WWI, 1st Gulf War, US Civil War, Roman conquest of Gaul, etc…
The second approach assumes that the population will be relatively passive toward your troops, and that the government you install will have a reasonable dose of legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Sometimes it works (post war WWII), sometimes it doesn’t (2nd Gulf War / Iraq insurgency).
All that said, airstrikes and commando raids can’t accomplish anything long-term in these terms - you do need boots on the ground to occupy the country or at least a big portion of it in order to compel them. We saw how well defeating Saddam Hussein without occupying Iraq did in 1991- he more or less gave us the finger for another 12 years because we didn’t actually remove him and the Baath party from power. (the botching of the subsequent occupation is a different issue from what I’m talking about, so let’s not get into that here)
Weeeeellll…maybe. I certainly agree that they should have been prepared to reinforce success, but I think they considered the success would be way more modest than it turned out.
If they had gone all-out, however, it’s worth wondering how it would have turned out. They gouged a hole in the line; if they had advanced further, could they have sent in cavalry to exploit, or at least wreck the Allied rear? Maybe even have caused the whole line to fall back onto the Channel Ports?
However, if it had not been that successful and, say, the Allies were able to plug the gap a few miles back (although miles were gold-dust in WW1), I think the value of gas as an offensive weapon would have been spent. The gas attack at 2nd Ypres worked because the Allies hadn’t invested much energy into gas masks or containment procedures, and it was only by urinating into handkerchiefs that the Canadians held their line and changed the course of the battle. After that, with increasingly sophisticated anti-gas technology and procedures, it would have become a rusty sabre.
Interesting as a one-off, possible game-changer, though.
I’m going with yes. They were dumb.
The treaty that we celebrate today, went into effect on November 11th at 11 AM.
It was put out to the armies that is when the war would officially end well before this time. What territories would go to which country was all settled, but yet, some Generals decided to hold attacks in the morning. “Hey! We can recapture that town!” It’s not 11 AM yet. We can still fight and you can still die. So men died on this day for absolutely no reason but the stupidity of Generals.
The thing is that was what they in fact did.
The problem was until proper combined arms tactics were introduced…by the British…most ideas that worked, worked only for a while. Everybody expected poison gas to be a game changers, but it turned out to be dependant on the prevailing winds, less effective when surprise was not an issue, i was relatively easy to supply your troops with gas masks . Same with tanks, mechanically unreliable and as Cambrai showed; mobile field guns could defeat them. Remember, in all the celebrations about Cambrai, it is forgotten that the attacking forces advanced 5 miles and lost 179 tanks out of 300.
What worked was a combination of various idea, applied in and executed in sync. Like the 100 days. Use of short sharp bombardments, followed by a combined armour and infantry attack on a narrow front, by passing strong points, with aircraft and gas in support.
Agreed.
I’d strongly recommend the OP read Barbara Tuchman’s “The Guns of August” to learn what the WWI generals were thinking.
I’m not saying it would have single-handedly won the war. But it was an opportunity for a major victory without serious casualties. And how often did those come along?
But the gas attack example I mentioned showed the opposite. It wasn’t the first attack. They made several attacks and incrementally increased the amount of gas used and the size of the target area. They were treating it like it was a test instead of an actual weapon. By the time they had decided to actually do something, they had lost any element of surprise.
Or the first tank offensives. Okay, they found the tanks were effective in battle but prone to break down in the field. Did they order a crash program on fixing the mechanical problems or even just increasing production so they could put more tanks in the field? No, even after seeing that tanks worked they continued to produce them at the same pace they had been.
The problem was that in 1918 too many generals were still trying to act like it was 1914 and nothing had changed in military science (and they didn’t even have a realistic concept of what war was like in 1914). To the end of the war, Haig was still making plans for cavalry charges.
I’m not claiming I’m a brilliant general. I have no professional military training. But I can at least see that what they were doing wasn’t working which is more than the actual professionals could figure out.
But again, the winning move was what the Allied generals did: the meat-grinder. It came at tremendous cost, but it was Germany which sued for an armistice, not the Allies.
The comparison to Grant’s determined assaults, which earned him the “butcher” reputation, is an apt one. Some wars can only be won by attrition, which is extremely costly.
I also lack experience and training but I must state that the above is inaccurate.
Re Tanks; after the initial use, Haig requested thathundreds more be delivered. The problems were technical, not tactical, which is what the generals were responsible for. There is another thing which is lost in the whole arguments. At the time there were literally hundreds of ideas floating around and the generals had no way of knowing without actual use which would work. What seems obvious now, did not then,If they actually tried every quack idea that was presented, the army and its industrial support would collapse in a weak.
As for cavalry, what is forgotten is that cavalry did have a role to play. It had been used extensively in the East and in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Even on the Western front, Cavalry did have some notable successes, the Indian Secunderabad brigade on the Somme for instance.
One idea imposed on the generals was of course the proposal that Germany could be beaten by knocking out its allies elsewhere. And that led to Gallipoli.
Gallipoli was dreamed up by Churchill-it was a good idea, but impossible in practice. A big reason why it failed was because the British took so long to plan it, that the Turks got wind of it and strengthened their defenses to the point that the British and French faced impossible odds. Also, the idiotic British general who commanded the operation failed to have his troops capture the high ground ( hard to believe it, but the heights overlooking the landing zones were not manned-but the British allowed the Turks to move in to them).
That, and the leading ships struck some mines, pissed their pants and turned tail. They should either have more thoroughly mineswept or kept going!
Looks like an interesting read, I’ll check it out if I get a chance.
Question that may be really stupid, but I’m going to ask it anyway - the trench system with its near-suicidal runs into machine guns, mines, gas and shelling ran from the North Sea to the borders of neutral Switzerland. Bar violating Swiss neutrality, there seems a real obvious way around. Why didn’t they flank the trench system by sea, land troops behind the defences? Especially when the Royal Navy held supremacy.
You’d need a serious naval operation to support it, but it’s got to be better than sending men into the maws of German guns because you’ve no other ideas.
This is well addressed in my favourite book on the war Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy. In essence it says that politicians on both sides put out peace feelers - but only when their side seemed to have an advantage at the time. The side currently on the back foot would never agree to make peace at that time, as their population would say “if we quit while we’re behind, all our brave men died for nothing!”. Then when they were ahead they’d put out peace feelers, but then the other side couldn’t countenance failure.
The war had to be won on the battlefield before the politicians on the losing side could be made to see sense.
Advancing into your own gas causes you just as many problems as it does the enemy.
There was plenty of such planning, the problem was in execution. As the attacker you have already amassed what reserves you have and thrown them into the attack; even if successful they find themselves in or behind enemy lines with no new and detailed orders. There were no portable radios yet. They had no idea how the attacks of their flanking units went - are we up here by ourselves, about to get overrun? We feel vulnerable when not in our trenches any more!
The defender on the other hand has been able to gather up his reserves, who are now attacking your successful (but exhausted) men from three sides, with no trench protection, no supporting artillery fire from your side - while his artillery know exactly where you are and have registered their guns on (what were) their own trenches for just this eventuality.
That is, it’s harder than it looks. They needed ways of exploiting any attacking success, and they just didn’t have them until 1917.
Like you the Brits though of this, but it too was harder than it looked. There was such a plan, Operation Hush, along with several previous ones. All were planned in concert with inland attacks, but needed those other attacks to make certain progress benchmarks before the landings could go ahead - throwing one division behind enemy lines in a quiet section of the front would see it trapped or annihilated, something between a Dieppe and an Anzio. The Germans figured out something was coming since the Belgian troops in front of them were suddenly replaced by British, and so they put in some spoiling attacks too.
In a grand strategic sense the Gallipoli landings were an end-run around an entire front, but again flaws in execution ruined the plan.