This will always be a hypothetical question, of course. But my question to any military expert in our forum is this: if you replaced the soldiers in the WW1 trenches with modern soldiers, with their modern rifles and night vision goggles and other equipment (but without modern air support and artillery), would they be able to break through heavily defended trenches?
Most WW1 attacks I read about seemed so hopeless, because of all the rows of barbed wire soldiers had to get through, under heavy machine gun fire. Which makes me wonder if better (more modern) equipment or tactics would have made a difference.
Are you leaving in modern armor? If so, it’s a cakewalk for the modern army types.
I’m guessing here of course but, IMHO, the modern army, even without modern armor, planes, and artillery would have a much easier time of it. Modern communications alone could be a decisive advantage. In WWI it was difficult for an advancing unit to control or use artillery. Today, with cell phones and GPS, the accuracy, thus the utility, of WWI artillery would go up by a factor of ten. A modern army has a number of weapons, TOWs for example, that could reduce most any WWI strongpoint. Modern Hummers, APCs, trucks, and the like would give a tremendous advantage in moving men and material around. The firepower a modern army also would be a major factor.
If you simply replaced all the WWI soldiers in one trench with modern soldiers with M-16s, I should think that those modern soldiers would be able to throw an enormous amount of lead at the WWI soldiers in the other trench.
The German rifle of WWI (the Gewehr 98) could fire 15 round/minute. The M-16 can fire somethign like 800 rounds/minute. The modern soldiers could keep the heads of the WWI soldiers down while they crossed No-Man’s-Land.
I wonder if the bounding overwatch tactic was developed before WWI.
I doubt it, because all the descriptions of WWI trench warfare that I’m familiar with, consisted of all the attackers getting up at once and rushing the defenders position. Maybe I’m wrong.
Yea, they would probably do a manuever to go around the trenches if they could.
Another thing to consider is modern body armor. Just the helmets alone would give a tremendous advantage.
Also, if they have all of their equipment, they would be much more protected against various chemical weapons that were hell in the trenches.
I guess the most likely scenario they would use would be small squad assaults on defensive points at night (especially with explosive weapons, frag grenades, RPGs, etc), eventually collapsing a flank on a trench, then infiltrate it and use their automatic weapons to sweep through it. Rinse, wash, repeat.
The key elements of the trenches were machine guns and barbed wire to keep the other guys from attacking, and trenches to keep yourself safe from the other guy’s machine guns and artillery. Modern infantrymen are no more immune to machine gun fire and barbed wire than WWI infantrymen.
What broke the trench system was mechanized warfare. Tanks are immune to machine gun fire and can drive over barbed wire. Your tanks advance over the trenches and silence the machinegunners. Then your infantry can advance. But you need infantry to protect the tanks, since tanks are very vulnerable to infantry. But once you’ve broken a hole in the trench you have to exploit the breakthrough. You have to have march the infantry forward. Marching forward is easy. The hard part is keeping the soldiers supplied with food and ammunition, and keeping the tanks supplied with fuel and ammunition and repairs.
The reason modern soldiers never seem to get bogged down by trenches is not that modern infantry is so succesful, it’s that armor and airpower make trenches obsolete. A modern rifle platoon would be cut to pieces assaulting a WWI trench, even with assault rifles and body armor. But they would never do such a thing, they’d call in an airstrike or for armor. The reason they kept trying in WWI is that there was no alternative method.
Well, if they charged in head on, yes. But they aren’t going to do that.
Like I said, they’d probably go in at night and use ranged explosives on a flank, then sweep through the trench. With night vision, it would be easier for them to get into range for their weapons to accurately disable a section of the enemy line. Troops wouldn’t be able to do that very easily in WWI, but each soldier is basically carrying a more effective weapon than a WWI machine gun. Once a squad gets into the trench, the story changes.
Easy? Not really. Barbed wire is still as effective today as it was then, as are machine guns. But a lot has changed in infantry tactics and weapons. Squads are smaller and carry more diverse weapons, packing more firepower. They utilize stealth and communication much more effectively. Whereas WWI infantry generally utilized the artillery barrage/mass charge in trying to overtake trenches, there would be much more finesse involved these days.
Even in urban warfare, which is close quarters and generally regarded as the most deadly fighting, a well equipped US infantry platoon is very effective and efficient. Now, we are talking about a enemy in fixed position with archaic weapons and outdated tactics.
Late in the war, the Germans developed the modern infantry assault, bypassing strong points and exploiting weaknesses. Their last few assaults were very successful. The analogy was to “flow like water,” rather than to batter against defended positions. I wish I had more detail; I beleive the attack was codenamed Kaiserslacht.
So, yes, trenches were already obsolete, even to stop infantry attacks, by the end of WWI, and a modern infantry army (the Germans) had indeed learned to cross (or bypass) them.
Oh sure. As Trinopus posted, static defenses were obsolete well before WWII. In 1940 the Germans dropped glider infantry in the supposedly impregnable and well defendedBelgian fort of Eban-Emal and took in a matter of a few hours.
Here is a quote from the site: "Glider-borne operations had also been a phenomenal success for the German invasion of the low countries when their fallschirmjager took the supposedly impregnable fortress of Eban-Emal in a daring Coup de Main assault. "
Plus a whole lot of helicopters and artillery you said I can’t bring. So, I will bring a bunch more of stuff like this.
But the real benefit is that every tenth or so guy in this division has a radio, and they are networked in command and tactical groups, by commanders. I can put one guy up in a 1917 style airplane, and have better intelligence than the entire German High Command about the disposition of their own troups, in real time.
No, we aren’t dumb enough to charge their trench. We just annoy them until they decide to charge our trench, which we ain’t gonna be in, on account of we ain’t that dumb, either. Then we attack their command and control.
Thank you all for those very interesting answers. One thing I didn’t get, Hermann, what’s the “bounding overwatch tactic”?
Oh, and I meant a modern army without their tanks and Hummers of course. I didn’t consider radio and other communication equipment, only after your answers I realized what a big difference they would make. Only: didn’t they have radio in 1914?
kip70 – I’m sure a military Doper will correct me if I’m wrong, but bounding overwatch means moving your force in separate pieces. One section provides covering fire while the other moves a short distance, and then the roles reverse.
Not in planes, and maybe a few among the upper echlons, but not for general infantry. Apparently, radio was mostly(if not exclusivly) used for ships and zepplins.
As noted above, by 1918 the Germans had worked out special trench storming tactics that were much more effective than the “human wave” assaults that had resulted in such massive casualties. They even developed the world’s first submachine gun, the MP18 for just such attacks. So given much better communications and coordination, night vision, automatic rifles and light machine guns, grenade launchers, RPGs and light mortars, it still might not exactly be a cakewalk but the attackers could almost certainly break through. (I presume that the OP means that the defenders don’t have comparable technology to counter them.)