Germans were stupid as well…they insisted on counterattacking to recapture lost territory when they should have just redug in. They lost massive casualties to this. However, I am not a German general and the German philosophy of quick counterattack carried through WWII and seemed to do them well mostly.
I’m trying to recall the incident, but it turned out a lot of British shells weren’t even good as fragmentation vs. infantry. A few demolitions guys in the 1920’s were running tests and had some of the shells up on poles to test their effectiveness in airburst. While they were setting up the shells went off by accident. These ‘fragmentation’ shells actually were designed to throw steel balls like a cannister round. That didn’t work and the demo experts were amazed to find they were alive because the balls were thrown with such little velocity that they didn’t even break the skin.
My apologies to Mr. Laffin. I was thinking of Dennis Winter.
I have no solutions but I believe the war was won by indirect means rather then the “showy” advance at the end.
The Royal Navy basically starved out the Germans making it impossible for them to continue the war for any length of time, hence their "last gasp"offensive close to the end.
Before anyone gets all moral, remember that the Kriegsmarine were attempting the self same thing to Britain with U boats and surface raiders.
A couple of points, everyone keeps on about quickly taking advantage of breakthroughs and rapid advances.
As though the allied generals were completely oblivious to the necessity of this.
For much if not most of the time this was for the allies impossible.
The culprits ?
The artillery, not only had it churned up and cratered the terrain, not just in no mans land but to the rear of each sides frontlines.
But it had also destroyed the historic network of field drains (Some apparently going back to Roman times ) .
The result was mud, flood and saturation.
Even without barbed wire entanglements, this alone was enough to reduce allied attacks to snail pace.
But as I say even with the benefit of hindsight I can’t offer any alternative solutions as to how the war could have been won quicker and more humanely.
What about a concentrated program of sanitation, steady supplies of clean water and clothing, and a determined effort to eliminate dysentery, trenchfoot and other diseases?
If only someone had discovered that a chemical first synthesized in 1874, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) was an effective insecticide, the troops on both sides might have at least been spared the lice endemic to the trenches, and the diseases transmitted by the lice.
Probably already been answered (I’m writing this on my iPad in the air port, so haven’t read all the responses), but it’s really not all that hard. You use smoke, don’t use preparatory bombardments for days on end (thus giving the enemy time to figure out just where you are coming), don’t send your troops in a full on charge, and instead you move your platoons from cover to cover, in staggered formation (thus reducing their exposure to artillery or machine gun)…and you make sure you have your freaking logistics set up so you can support your initial gains by moving troops up to leap frog your gains. Use combined arms to concentrate your attacks and hit the enemy as they try to reinforce.
All things considered, WWI didn’t HAVE to be the total slaughter it turned into. Sadly the generals weren’t flexible enough mentally to do anything more than the same stuff that didn’t work before…as if beating their troops heads against the wall, or throwing enough warm bodies into the sausage grinder would bring ultimate victory.
-XT
I’ve long considered that a major issue was training. All sides had the bad habit of sending soldiers into battle after a very brief learning period. It may not have been possible to do any really complex training given the circumstances, but the deficit never seems to have been made up.
To me, the big problem of generalship was the mismatch between between technology and tactics. They overstated the impact of technology except the ones which were most important, despite many examples, and decided they needed new tactics, but never developed anything. To a lesser degree, the same thing happened to Germany in WW2. By the time they got into a war, nobody in the had any clue what they were doing (save maybe Hindenberg and Ludendorf).
Under the circumstances, it’s not surprising they had nothing to do except big human waves. But it’s still their own fault for not having developed counters. And indeed, it was not impossible to counter trench warfare: it wasn’t actually all that effective for anybody. But they refused to give any ground whatsoever, even if it would mean victory soon after. Some claim it was political, that the French government simply couldn’t countenance any retreat under any circumstances. But that doesn’t entirely explain things and I’ve never seen any such order, and if the generals on their own decided it they were idiots.
So yes, there was a lot of stupidity, but it was a slowly building pile of idiocy, not one single giant stupid decision. It started in a bit of laziness and self-confidence. It found fertile soil in the political developments which plagued the Kaiser’s top staff and France and Britain’s overconfidence. It burst onto the scene with the obdurate trench warfare, and finally died when fresher, more aggressive and more mobile American forces forced the issue late in the war.
No, obviously we didn’t win the whole war. But it’s not at all obvious that Germany would have lost otherwise. Despite terrible suffering, the German army was still extremely strong in the field and inflicted a lot of casualties. The war simply would not have ended when it did, and perhaps not in the way it did. The straw which broke the German back was that they realized they had stabbed America in the front* and that we had a vast industrial base and effectively endless numbers to kill them with. They now faced aggressive, angry people who wanted to kill them dead and go home, and were equipped as well as anyone, and who didn’t use the damn trenches.
And that’s when they realized they’d have to give up, though not before a lot of mess was made which led to WW2, etc.
*Although technically the Lusitania may have been a valid target.
Having looked at the Wiki article on Shrapnel shells, I’ve discovered that this distinction is crucial. As it turns out, a “shrapnel” shell is NOT a fragmentation shell. The former was an upgraded version of the cannister or grapeshot rounds used in the nineteenth century. It’s purpose was to carry a load of steel or lead balls a certain distance before releasing them, allowing greater range and tighter dispersion than if the balls were shot directly out of the artillery piece. Under the section “Technical Considerations” it says “They depended almost entirely on the shell’s velocity for their lethality : there was no lateral explosive effect.”
:eek:
A fragmentation shell, in which an internal charge explodes the casing into lethal fragments, is an entirely different proposition.
A lot of the generals and general staffs of that period believed that fighting spirit could and would overcome any technology…and they continued to believe that if they only fed enough troops into the gun, this fighting spirit would eventually overcome. Also, as smiling bandit says, training was key. The majority of the allied troops started the war (IMHO) at lower levels of individual and unit training than the Germans did…and this made a huge difference once the war started. And they never got their troops up to scratch either, because once the war started it was throw troops into the fire as fast as you could get them equipped and sent to the front.
The Germans, on the other hand, never did get their production and industry into gear fully, and really couldn’t compete in any case with the sheer production of the allies…especially once America joined the fray. As with WWII, the key was strategic production, and Germany and her allies just weren’t in the same ball park.
-XT
This has been discussed up thread. The bulk of the posters recognise that the tactics both sides were using in 1918 - essentially what you are describing - were effective in breaking the front line. Note that this did not mean low casualty rates - they just somewhat lower and actually achieved more reliable results - and they did not provide a solution to the problem of break-out and exploitation. Where the argument got heated was as to whether the French and British could or should have sat doing nothing from 1915 to 1917 until they had the right doctrine and sufficient resources, particularly heavy artillery, to launch a single, effective, and final, offensive. I was arguing that this was never an option - politically the French could not just sit back for years leaving a significant part of their population and industry under German control, without attacks in the west Russia would have been knocked out of the war earlier releasing yet more troops to be defeated when the offensive is launched, and without the experience of 1915, 16, and 17 the correct doctrine would not have been developed. Others did not agree!
I don’t think any of the commanders believed this after 1914 and even in 1914 this was primarily a French doctrine based on a misreading of the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war. They all tried to find a “technical” solution - poison gas, massive artillery barrages, tanks, mines, etc. The trouble was they didn’t work as hoped. All sides emphasised “fighting spirit” in the troops but that is and has been standard in armies from Rome to the present day. Troops need to get up and move forward under fire whether on the Western Front in 1916, Normandy in 1944, or Afghanistan in 2011, and this will always be necessary however much artillery or air power is available.
There is an argument that in 1918 the one general who had not fully grasped that, however brave the individuals, it was artillery that won battles was Pershing. Some of his pronouncement on AEF doctrine in 1918 - with his emphasis on the infantryman with his rifle driving the enemy from his trenches - sound like British and French Generals in 1915 and the problems the Americans had, and the casualties they suffered in battles like Château Thierry read exactly like the British difficulties on the Somme two years earlier.
Training was obviously important but two points. The long service regulars of the 1914 BEF were superbly trained - at least as good as the German conscripts - there just weren’t enough of them, read up on the “Kindermord” during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914. Secondly, focusing on the British that I know more about, although the were examples of inadequate training in 1916 it was not a case of “throw troops into the fire as fast as you could get them equipped and sent to the front”. Remember troops only spent a fraction of their time in the front line and of that fraction only a small part was in a major attack. Much of the time out of the line was taken up in training in the ever changing tactical doctrine. There were variations throughout the BEF. Some commanders (Plummer at Army level, Monash at Corps etc) were noted for the effectiveness of their training - some a lot less so. Given the sheer size of the BEF by 1917-18 and the massive expansion in officer corps this was hardly surprising.
Obviously a shrapnel shell would only be effective when fired from a gun - not tied to a pole! - but whether fragmentation or shrapnel the point was the same: they’re designed to kill infantry in the open and were hopelessly ineffective against defenders sheltering in deep dug-outs.
As this is a recurring meme, it is a pity WW1 is so badly understood (and probably taught, I guess) across the Atlantic.
The US military role in WW1 was insignificant, but they brought with themselves the promise of a steady supply of troops and materials. If really WW1 was a stalemate till that point (which in fact wasnt as clear cut as that), and the US entry finally tipped the balance in favor of the Allies, that’s it, not fantasy stories about American ubermenschen.
The US were not ready for WW1 when they entered it, they asked for six more months of training before fielding any troops. And, even then, they had huge casualties in their very first battles. In fact, if you compare the US casualties to the French casualties at this time, you’d realize that the French had stopped using the all out assault tactics of the very beginnings of the war, while the US were doing exactly that. It took the US some time to catch up with the European armies that had shed those tactics years ago.
My favorite quote from War Games: “The only way to win is not to play.”
Serious question: during the course of the war, were there any ongoing or serious attempts by either side to negotiate a peace? I do not recall ever reading about such attempts.
It seems to me there was a certain inevitability about how the war played out given the technology and manpower of the time. I wouldn’t fault the generals. It’s the political leadership that should realized that the stalemate of mutual destruction was a losing proposition.
German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg made a good-faith request to both President Wilson (back when he US was neutral), and the pope to mediate an end to the war. It failed for several reasons:
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The British knew things were dire, but never so much that they lost their imperial confidence. Lloyd George came to power knowing that the Germans would starve before the British, and that his own personal political ambition, as well as his ambition for social reforms (at least for those who hadn’t starved or been blown up), depended on clear victory, not a mediated peace.
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The Americans were the last people who wanted peace: we were making too much money selling war materiel to the British and French.
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There wouldn’t have been a lot the Vatican could do if it wanted. It had lost a war to Italy only recently, and wouldn’t want to do anything that could be constured as beneficial to the Austrians. Traditonally, the Vatican always protects itself first, and only then strides out to do Christ’s good work.
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Bethmann-Hollweg was a political weakling who didn’t build a powerful peace coalition with the Socialist and others in Germany. And either due to his German arrogance, or squeamishness at the level of hatred he have to overcome, he never approached the French. When his peace intiatives failed, he was pushed aside by the de-facto military dictators of Germany, who then shipped Lenin to St. Petersburg, reopened unrestricted submarine warfare, and shot their wad on the last-ditch Operation Michael.
Can you fill me in a little more? Not being familiar with the powers of the German Chancellor, I’m not sure how seriously the offer was made or how seriously the offer was taken. Was there any discussion with the Kaiser or the cabinet – did Germany even HAVE a cabinet – or was this more along the lines of a personal initiative that might have got some official backing if it had gone anywhere? What was the Chancellor’s authority to speak on behalf of Germany?
And as far as direct communications between the warring parties – was it limited to communiques through the press saying, more or less, “Surrender or die”?
I’m unclear about this board’s rules for posting threads from other MB’s, but this discussion, if allowable, covers your points
According to that, it was Wilson’s initiative, before the US got into it, everyone rejected it except Germany, and their stated terms for peace included keeping Belgium.
So it would seem nobody tried to make peace through any other means than battlefield victory.
I blame them. A little conflict called the American Civil War 50 years before WWI showed that a frontal assault on modern weapons was suicide.
The most innovative weapon of the war was poison gas, which might possibly have won the war for the Germany, had they stockpiled enough and waited for just the right conditions. Though how they could have done so without testing it I dunno.