I’ve heard many times about the horrors of so-called “trench warfare” and how thousands of men would be lost in an offensive that gained a few yards, if anything.
My question is, if this type of warfare is so defense-oriented, how was Germany (and Austria-Hungary) ultimately defeated? Was there some change in technology?
I checked a few WWI websites this morning, but wasn’t able to find anything.
Thanks in advance.
I’m sure some World War I expers will weign in on this, but it mainly boiled down to the fact that there more troops from the Allies than the Central Powers.
The Allies benefitted from the U.S. entering the war, just because it added some fresh soldiers into the fray.
The British and French were able to keep their troops in order also, although the French did have a large scale mutiny. But by 1918, the German and Austrian troops were ready to go home.
The only major technological advance that made a difference was the introduction of tanks. The air battles make for great movie scenese however.
Air actually counted more for recon duty. When a trench was thinly defended, because troups were being snuck out to another line, this was vital
The final assualt under General Ludendorff in 1918 nearly ended the war in Germany’s favour.
The intent of this attack was to try force the French to sue for peace with reserves brought over from the Russian front before the arrival of US troops.
As it was they were eventually held at the river Marne just a few miles from Paris.
The series of attacks had begun in late March and April but by the time they were halted in late July the US troops were in action and had played an important role in stopping them.
See at the end of this page,
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/6916/ww1.htm
The Germans had started their series of attacks from near the Hindenburg line and had ground to a halt near Paris, from which a combined assault by the British,French and Americans, under a more united and coordinated command structure turned them round.
Having been demoralised by their failure and using up precious men and material, the final straw probably came with the largely British (for that read Australian and Canandian) divisions, assisted by the French on one side at Amiens and the relative ease with which they overcame previously almost impregnable defenses, the Germans knew that the game was up for them.
What was differant about that last allied attack was the way that differant types of unit, from differant nations were controlled and coordinated.
First there was the use of aircraft to report targets back to artillery and to observe the requiremnts of the men on the ground.
Next was the mass use of tanks, and finally those troops worked with the artillery in using the rolling barrage which prevented the Germans from defending their positions from the allied troops.
The Germans had taken five months to make their gains, and these were rolled back in less than a month.
It was the use of the lessons learned through nearly 4 years of fighting and deploying all of this in one unified method of attack that finally did it.
Try out a websearch and look up Second battle of the Marne 1918, and also Amiens 1918
here’s one I found
http://212.67.202.71/~johnwhal/timeline/amiens1918.htm
You could also look up the main protagonists such as Marshall Foch and this one on General Haig
As casdave pointed out, it was the belatedly learned lessons of tactics and strategy (with the infusion of U.S. troops) that finally made the decisive turn.
Prior to the summer of 1918, the generals continued to believe that with enough artillery preparation, they would be able to walk over the defending positions. (They were aided in that belief by the early war use of siege mortars against Belgian fortresses.) Somehow they never quite noticed that their own troops were being successful in digging in deep enough to survive artillery barrages, then come out to defend against the following infantry and did not draw the obvious conclusion that their opponents could/would do the same.
Tanks and gas had each been tried in earlier years, but the predictions about how successful they would be (and the way in which they would be successful) was not understood or correctly planned for, so gains made with those weapons were never successfully exploited.
In the final months of the war, the rolling barrage (in which the infantry followed the exploding shells across no man’s land, leaving no time for the defenders to re-man their positions when the barrage ceased), the successful deployment of tanks (to support and be supported by infantry), and the newly created notion of strategic bombing (in which aircraft were used to destroy rail lines and bridges between the front lines and reserve formations, leaving the reserves in no position to help), were all finally combined with the presence of the U.S. troops to overwhelm the German lines.
By November, 1918, every European participant (and several of their colonies) was utterly exhausted. Anyone who could come up with an advantage was likely to win–even if it was only by getting to dictate a truce rather than a total victory. The presence of U.S. forces simply changed the ending from one of resigned truce to the ability of the allies to declare victory.
Another factor was economics. The British and the French simply had deeper pockets than the Germans and could afford to prolong the war longer (especially with the Americans joining in). By 1918, the German economy was in ruins, military supplies were running low, starvation was widespread, and there was talk of revolution in the air.
Do you folks think that the insistence of Americans having their own men under their own commands was important? I imagine that Pershing spent the first three years of the war feeling free to sit in Washington and criticizing the idiot tactics of the combatants and felt free to use his own. I do know that he absolutely refused to allow Americans to be replacements in French divisions. This seems very wise in view of how awfully the Allies wasted their own troops and troops from colonies. Respecting your all’s opinions from other threads, what do you think of the American command?
I always thought he was rather busy in a wee country called Mexico. Don’t know how much sitting around in Washington he did. 
Well, it’s not exactly my area of expertise, but from the sections of Carlo D’Este’s Patton biography which deal with the Great War are fascinating. The US army (and Patton in particular, who had a surprisingly eventful time as, IIRC, a battalion commander) seems to have grasped the nature of mechanised warfare more quickly than any other participant. (Wish I could remember the exact quote from Rommel - different era, I know - about the American army, something like “They started off knowing less, but learned faster than any other country”)
Thanks for all of your enlightening responses.
I could go on and on… but instead, I’ll direct you to this thread, where the subject is exhaustively discussed.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=80513
I believe it was 2 million fresh troops in France. This was one hell of a “last straw” for the Germans who were already being worn down a bit faster than the Allies.
It was my understanding that Pershing’s tactics were the same as the tactics the Allies has tried at the start (infantry rushing across no man’s land into trenches and defeating the enemy), but that it worked due to the Germans being far more exhausted than the Americans.
I think that Allied blockades had a lot to do with the defeats of the Central Powers. Actually, it becomes difficult to tease the effects of the blockade from the simple economic devastation of warfare. The thing is, Europe as a whole was devastated by warfare. Workforces lay dead. Farmland turned to chemical-soaked mud. Raw materials directed away from economic development towards weapons; steel that could have been used to make farm equipment ended up on the bottom of the ocean or in splinters strewn across No Man’s Land.
Now compare the plight of the Central Powers to the Allied Powers. While each of the Allies (even, in theory but not in practice) Russia, had access to the outside world, the Central Powers really didn’t. In this way, the United States played a vital role even during the long period of neutrality. American food, clothing, and economic assets could flow (relatively) freely to Britain and France (and to the east coast of Russia which didn’t help the Czar too much due to the country’s undeveloped expanse). Furthermore, neutral countries which might have been happy to trade with the Central Powers couldn’t even if they wanted to; the British didn’t let ships to the German coast, and the multi-national Allied forces controlling the Mediterranean put the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires in a similar situation.
Economic deprivation created a lot of social upheaval. Austria-Hungary dissolved into nationalist factions. The Bolsheviks won Russia (after a struggle which ultimately lasted almost as long as the Great War itself). Germany was torn apart by left versus right struggles which were to ultimately destroy the Weimar Republic decades later. Plenty of Allied countries were crushed and defeated for at least a time; they are remembered as victors only because of the side of the table they occupied at the peace conference.
A novel way to view the First World War is that it was actually a multitude of wars fought within each country. On one side were the logistical soldiers of each country - the planners, hospital administrators, factory managers, and agriculturalists who struggled against the ubiquitious enemy of Poverty and Destruction. When the war ended, the only countries who had not yet succumbed were on the Allied side.