This essentially is what happened. The problem is that artillery attacks at this level are essentially a form of attrition warfare. Firing artillery in the general direction of entrenched soldiers is very ineffective - you’re going to need dozens of shells to inflict a single casualty. The war ends up being an issue of which side can launch a hundred million shells without breaking.
This rarely worked. Artillery barrages signaled attacks. If you started shelling the enemy trenches, their soldiers could button up and be relatively safe. But their artillery would start firing into the no man’s land between the trenches and catch your soldiers out in the open.
One of the factors that made the storm troopers effective was that they stop trying to do this. They realized surprise was more effective than artillery support.
That’s exactly what they did. In August 1914 the BEF had 410 artillery pieces of all calibres, at the start of the Somme in July 1916 the 4th Army alone had 1493 guns of all types and 1.7 million shells were fired in the 8 day preliminary bombardment. By the Armistice the BEF had 6406 guns and was able to fire off 940,000 rounds in one 24 hour period in September 1918.
Cranking out heavy artillery (and it was the heavies that were needed) was not easy. Industry had to be geared up from a standing start. The French and Germans also had to build up their artillery but had the advantage that their industry was already set up to supply their multi-million strong conscript armies whereas Britain’s volunteer army was much smaller. An even bigger problem was the supply of ammunition. Corners were cut and it is estimated that nearly 1 in 3 of the shells fired at the Somme were duds - mostly made in Britain, not imported from the States!
It was at the Somme they tried what Sage Rat is proposing - using massed artillery to destroy the defenders so the infantry can walk in unopposed. It didn’t turn out too well. As I’ve mentioned up thread, they didn’t just need the guns they needed a doctrine and technique for using all arms effectively.
You probably know more about WWI than I, Marcus, and with respect to the larger war taken as a gestalt, I’m sure you’re correct that the generals tried lots of different tactics.
But I interpreted the OP’s question as being more about specific, one-time/one-place battles, and what other tactics could have been attempted on-the-fly. And there’s no doubt that some allied commanders, at least in the immediate short term, were just plain too damn stubborn (and/or insufficiently clever) to keep from making the same bloody mistake over and over and over again, costing thousands of lives. Haig’s insistence at the Somme in sending his troops in human waves repeatedly into a lethal machine-gun kill zone, with no appreciable gains, is the sort of thing that the OP and I were getting at.
Further, it’s not true that Haig valued his men highly, either as human beings OR as military resources. Nor was he averse to sacrificing them en masse:
Except it isn’t true that the Somme had “no appreciable gains.” Gains aren’t measured solely in terms of ground gained. Without the Battle of the Somme, the French army would likely have collapsed in 1916.
Fair enough but I don’t think the “general defensive posture upon the WestFront” was down to waiting for a solution to the tactical problems of the continuous trench lines. More to a military strategic view of where the best results could be obtained and a need to support their Austro-Hungarian allies who had suffered horribly. The Germans already had the strategic initiative in the west - they could afford to dig in and wait.
True enough. In both world wars Germany and the German army did stupendously. I think it was Martin van Creveld who calculated the 1 German was worth nearly 2 British/American soldiers in WW2 - the trouble was in both wars they took on even bigger odds and lost.
Um! Bracing is an interesting word. Partial and biased might be more accurate. Butchers and Bunglers is a straight bit of special pleading with little pretension to academic rigour. He knows what he thinks and uses anything he can to support his argument. His un-nuanced views are contrary to most modern academic opinion. Even historians such as John Keegan - no fan of Haig - is much more balanced in his views of the performance of Allied commanders.
Just to note Wullie Robertson was not part of Haig’s command - he was his boss! I agree he was nobody’s fool and he supported Haig throughout.
I’ve read an interesting interpretation that says that the Central Powers were essentially broken by the waves of allies they confronted. In the first year of the war they fought against the Russians and the French. By the time they wore down those armies, Britain had mobilized and Italy entered the war so the Central Powers were essentially fighting a new war. And around the time the British and Italians were worn down, the United States entered the war. This third wave was what finally broke the Central Powers.
Sorry, I must have been unclear. The whole point of the system developed in 1917-18 was to avoid firing masses of shells into the blue and advertising your intentions. The targets were carefully chosen and predictive fire allowed hits with the first rounds - before the enemy took cover. In most cases the artillery started only minutes before the infantry left their trenches, neutralising the enemy batteries with a mixture of gas and high explosive, and the rolling barrage on the front line driving the enemy underground - and keeping them there - until the infantry had crossed no-man’s-land.
There may have been cases where Storm-troopers advanced without artillery support but this was certainly not the case with Operation Michael in 1918 - the Germans deployed massive artillery support orchestrated by by their expert, Colonel Bruchmuller.
Except it never happened that way, you could argue about it for the Russians, the Italians or even the Austrians but France and GB fought the war from beginning to end (except for the 1917 mutiny hiatus). And the US played a minor role militarily, there’s hardly one operation in which they were involved where they werent an auxiliary force. The last wave that took down Germany was still manned mostly by the French.
The British (and later the French) perfected the “creeping barrage” by the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Infantry would follow closely behind the artillery barrage which would advance about 50 to 100 yards every few minutes. That way they could attack before ze Germans could return to their positions.
I’d argue that last bit. Numerically the French probably still outnumbered the BEF in the second half of 1918 but it was the BEF (with the ANZAC and Canadian forces to the fore) that was providing the main strike power during the last Hundred Days.
I’m not claiming that the Americans single-handedly beat the Germans - as you noted, their actual contributions on the battlefield were minor. The point I was making was that it was the realization that there was a whole new war on the horizon after two previous wars had been fought that finally broke German morale.
That doesn’t negate what I said. The defending troops were in trenches and the attacking troops were crossing no man’s land. If both sides were firing artillery, the attacking troops in the open would take much higher casualties.
So, between sending wave after wave of men to their death by charging machine guns OR telling those same men to simply wait and fortify while production is ramped up, which would have been the wiser strategy?
The latter is an option and it probably would have been the better course of action.
What do you do while you wait? Allow the French army to get destroyed? Allied politicians would not have been able to sell a defensive war.
How? I think everyone would have wanted this, but I don’t see any way of doing it.
The Dardenelles was never going to be more than a side show. Even knocking turkey out of the war wouldn’t have really changed anything. Germany needed to be bled dry, and that could only happen on the Western Front (and the East to a lesser extent).
Better methods were adopted - the creeping barrage etc. The problem with just taking the front line of the enemy was that the enemy ends up closer to their supply lines in fresh positions, you end up in crumbling positions further from yours, and all supplies/reinforcements/artillery etc has to come up over destroyed land. The line had to be fully ruptured, and when it was, in 1918, it was clear that it could be exploited.
Never heard or read anything to suggest this would have been anything but a catastrophic disaster.
The best decision for the Allies, especially Britain, would have been not to fight. But if they decided to fight and win, it had to be done on the Western front, and done by bleeding the Germans out, as the Germans had seized the best ground in 1914, and had no need to attack further. Also remember the British army alone was a volunteer army (conscripts didn’t arrive till after the Somme), and Britain didn’t have the reserve masses of trained men to act as NCOs that the Germans had. Despite what Liddell Hart claimed, this meant the stormtrooper tactics of the Germans in 1918 really couldn’t have been successfully adopted by the British, especially earlier in the war.
And think what might have happened in 1918 had the German advance had the reserves it had lost at the Somme and Ypres.
A few thoughts on that. Firstly how do you decide when you have enough artillery and how do you work out the most effective way of using it? The successful tactics from the end of the war were distilled out of experience not dreamt up on paper. Second, the enemy might not conform to your ideas! Do they just sit still and wait for you to grow overwhelmingly strong or do they do something about it? Could also note that however much artillery you have your not going to defeat a 4.5 million strong German army that has not been ground down by a whole series of earlier battles. Thirdly, as noted, the Germans were occupying a large chunk of France. Lets imagine a hostile power has occupied the key industrial part of the States and is shipping a 100,000 workers away to forced labour. Is it feasible for a democracy to sit back and say, sorry, can’t do anything for you for now - we’ll try and liberate you in a few years when it’s safer?
Yes, and this was the problem in earlier attacks. To say it again, part of the artillery plan in 1918 would be to take out the enemy artillery batteries with predicted fire just so they could not fire on your troops as they advanced.
People forget WWI wasn’t exclusively fought on the Western Front- there was an Eastern Front (until the Russian revolution) and there was also Palestine, which covered much of the Middle East.
The war in Palestine was a lot more “mobile” than the Western Front- armoured cars, cavalry charges, guerilla warfare, and so on. In that environment, the British (which includes ANZAC troops) actually did pretty well, Gallipoli notwithstanding.
With the benefit of hindsight, if I were on either side I would try to develop some form of communication for the attack troops to direct artillery. It might have to be something stupid like guys running field phone wire behind the attacking troops but it could make a hell of a difference to have that ability to support advancing troops. The Germans used colored flares in 1918 but they were rudimentary communication and prone to failure.
Other things like using tanks properly when they became available and using Bursilov artillery tactics should be straightforward.
On the other ‘fields’ of battle different strategy should be employed. If you are Germany, get the damn surface fleet out and operating. Having the damn things sunk in a massacre would almost be a step up above sitting in harbors for the entire war post-Jutland.
I don’t think we are going to convince each other! In my view, for many reasons, practical and political, it was not possible for the French and their junior partners, the BEF, to sit back and do nothing in 1915-16.
To add another point to my quick list above, as **Martin Enfield **reminds us the Germans were attacking on the Eastern Front - and winning. Allowing the German 2-3 years of no pressure in the west to knock the Russians out of the war does not seem a good strategy. Apart from any moral obligation to an Ally you just get the full might of the German army transferred to the West in 1916/17 rather than 1918.