Would modern tactics have ended World War I quicker?

Great Debates
41

If you could send modern generals back in time, with their casualty-averse philosophy, I think the bulk of them would decide to stay on the defensive. If the enemy is willing to throw a million men away, let him.

Another thing I wonder about which is probably stupidly risky is forcing the war to go mobile again. WWI started out as all the experts said it would, with a speedy advance and a mobile defense. Then things got bogged down when the Germans were stopped in the Battle of the Marne. The French probably couldn’t afford to do this given how close they were to Paris, but I wonder if the Germans might not have profited from pulling up stakes and going back to within a few miles of the German frontier bordering Belgium and see if they could get the Brits and French to also pull up stakes and pursue them? Once the bulk of neither side is dug in, maybe they get things moving again.

Also, the war wasn’t a stalemate anywhere but the Western Front, where massive forces faced each other in a relatively small geographic area. Perhaps the Kaiser shouldn’t have been such a pussy about his very expensive navy and engaged the British directly for control of the seas. Then he could have landed forces at will anywhere in France or even take the war to Britain.

It seems to me that both sides were reluctant to take any risks except to throw young lives away. Forget a modern general, I bet Douglas MacArthur would have had an Inchon up his sleeve if he’d been in charge.

42

Have there been any appreciable improvements in infantry tactics since WWI that aren’t wedded to technological advances? It’s hard to combine arms when you don’t have any arms to combine.

43

They had basically all the pieces for combined arms except the communications to coordinate it. They had air, artillery and ground, even mobile forces in the form of cavalry that was just waiting for a break through to be used. Mainly the trouble was they couldn’t coordinate well enough to exploit any breakthrough they did make, giving the entrenched enemy time to rebuild lines or counter attack and retake positions, rendering any tactical accomplishment moot.

But yeah, there have been tactical doctrine developments that aren’t wedded to technology, at least wedded to the high tech battle field we have today. There were developments in doctrine that advanced tactics even in WWII…or even between the beginning of WWI and the end for that matter.

44

There’s been a lot of improvement to project management since WWI. They had barely just invented Gantt charts. So if you could go back to like 1900 and teach allied corporations/govt. all that boring technocratic managerial stuff that would be a big advantage, one imagines. Dunno if that’s enough lead time though.

Modern military training is probably superior to what they did back then too.

Can you elaborate? Seems to me most of it relied on improved tank, airplane, and radio development. I was looking at infantry tactics and it’s hard to find things that don’t predate WWI. Center peel retreat, maybe? Or maybe something like button hooking and pie slicing for room/house clearing. I don’t know the history of those. They’re more like tricks than doctrinal developments.

From my StarCraft 1 nightmares of Terran vs. Terran stalemates where each side carves the map in half with rows of sieged tanks and missile turrets the answer is obvious: build battle cruisers and yamato everything! That, or a bunch of d-matrixed dropships for the doom drop. Dunno why they never thought of that.

45

Clever, but it doesn’t address Germany’s strategic goal: knocking France out of the war. Short of the absolute annihilation of the French army, the only way to do that would be to advance far enough into France (taking Paris for example) that the French government would sue for peace rather than risk being ousted.

ETA: in all probability, the French would have learned to keep a trench line in reserve against a German readvance.

Seriously, Germany with regards to France was like a dog chasing a car- what would it do if it actually caught it?

46

Yeah, I figured it was a harebrained idea but given how many harebrained ideas they tried that cost the lives of millions I don’t feel so bad for suggesting it.:slight_smile:

47

The Brusilov offensive in 1916 didn’t use any significant new technology. Its tactics could have been used in 1914 or 1915.

48

Short sharp artillery bombardments are actually very difficult to accomplish effectively. One of the reasons that other armies went for mass of fire.The Russians invested heavily in artillery to cover their deficiencies in infantry.

49

That lesson should have been learned from the American Civil War.

50

No commander anywhere thinks it’s a good idea to send waves of suicide attackers against entrenched enemy positions. It’s much better to outflank the defenders, cut off their supply lines, attack from behind, and so on.

The only problem is that on the Western Front in WWI there was no way to outflank the enemy, the defenses ran from Belgium to Switzerland. There was no way to cut off the supplies of the troops at the front. There was no way to land troops behind enemy lines because each side, even after Jutland, had a fleet in being that could wipe out any attempt to reinforce the beachhead. The amphibious expeditionary force would be cut off, unable to communicate, and destroyed.

Note that the massive amphibious attacks in WWII happened either early in the war, when the Germans were picking off countries like Norway and Greece, or late in the war, when the Allies had utter and complete naval supremacy both in Europe and the Pacific. Trying the same thing in WWI would have been suicidal.

So the ONLY option is frontal assault on the enemy’s prepared defenses. Or, to sit there and do nothing while the enemy gets stronger and stronger. So of course they knew these assaults would be costly, so they planned on massively superior attacking forces. The problem was that even extremely large force imbalances weren’t enough. The attackers always had a problem of speed and communication, while the defenders could communicate back to headquarters and reinforcing troops could be rushed to the area via rail.

Attackers broke through the lines regularly, it wasn’t like they charged and all got slaughtered and did nothing. The problem was that once you’ve breached the enemy lines, what next? The attackers have been cut to pieces while breaking the lines, are running out of supplies, and can’t communicate back to HQ for emergency reinforcements. And now defending reinforcements are showing up, the attackers have not idea where to do next or how to coordinate with other successful attacking forces, and are now on the defensive. And so new trench lines are established around the attacking forces, who have gained a few miles or so but were unable to do anything else.

But of course the failures of the past are learned from, and the next assault won’t make the same mistakes as the past failed assault, they’ll have more troops and more artillery support and new tactics and new weapons, and so on, so this time we have a shot at making a serious breakthrough.

The problem is that the Anglo-French front and the German front were roughly at equal strength. For the Allies to really crush the Germans they’d need an overwhelming advantage, which they never had until the very end.

51

That’s the thing though, once you realize that being able to land troops anywhere is crucial, why not commit your naval forces to gaining naval superiority? When Hitler wanted to invade Britain he decided he had to destroy the RAF first and he committed to doing it. He fell short, but not by much, and the failure didn’t doom the war effort, so it was worth trying anyway. Why didn’t the Kaiser commit that navy he spent all that money on to wipe the British fleet from the seas?

52

Because he thought he’d probably lose, and Scheer thought much the same, saying after Jutland something to the effect that he came to the thing as a bride to the marriage bed, and that the High Seas Fleet could not risk another general engagement with the R.N., save on the most favourable terms, and that its best course was to remain a fleet-in-being.

53

Exactly. The British fleet was far superior, and would win in an all-out battle, barring a lucky fluke. And then the remaining British fleet could do whatever they liked, having achieved naval supremacy–land troops anywhere, shell anywhere, and so on.

The German fleet in being meant the British fleet had to be kept stationed at Scapa Flow ready to respond if the Germans dared to poke their heads into the North Sea. The Germans could never commit the resources needed to expand their fleet during the war, everything and more had to go to what really mattered, the front in France. The German fleet couldn’t win against the British, and couldn’t venture out of the protection of coastal batteries, but they kept the British fleet on constant alert, never knowing what the Germans might do. The money on those German ships was already spent, and so even though they could never hope to win against the British they at least contributed by their potential threat.

Of course the Kaiser would have been ecstatic if the German fleet had blown the British to smithereens, but that wasn’t going to happen, which is why the German navy always concentrated on submarines for asymmetrical warfare.

The WWII German air force was a match for the RAF, even with radar and the advantage of fighting over home soil. The WWI German fleet was not a match for the Royal Navy. Sending them out to fight is equivalent to sending waves of soldiers through the trenches and barbed wire to suicidally attack the dug-in machine gun nests and artillery, which is what we’re trying to avoid here. The German navy couldn’t possibly win on offense, so they stayed on defense, waiting for an opportunity.

The German navy achieved the respectable goal of preventing Allied amphibious attacks simply by existing, something they could never have none if they had attacked the British fleet and been destroyed.

54

That’s what I don’t quite understand about the fleet-in-being thing. Since even after Jutland the RN was quite a bit superior to it, how come they couldn’t just drive up to the port(s) where the remnants of the German fleet were parked and shelled them to bits ? Hell, they could even have coordinated with the Russians for a one-two punch.

As **Lemur **says, an amphibious landing somewhere around Denmark would have broken Germany’s back right quick.

55

For fear that if something went horribly wrong, the Germans could destroy the Grand Fleet, and negate the entire advantage of a fleet-in-being.

56

Also coastal batteries are superior to ships. They can be heavier, more ammo, much heavier armor, and usually don’t sink when you put a hole in their hull. Sending your ships within range of the batteries protecting the ports is the naval equivalent of charging over barbed wire against machine gun nests.

57

More accurate too, not sloshing about all over the place.

58

minefields and submarines, which were seen as coastal defence vessels at the time.

59

Actually mines and torpedoes - whether on submarines or destroyers. Mines in narrow waters limit where your big ships can go and the torpedo gives a small craft the the ability to destroy - or at least cripple - the biggest battleship. A problem made worse by lack of any ability to detect a submarine under-water and only limited ability to detect and fight a small, fast surface vessel at night. It was these factors that led to the distant blockade during the First World War with the Grand Fleet sitting up in Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles north of Scotland rather than patrolling up and down off the enemy ports as the Royal Navy had done with the French during the Napoleonic Wars. It was just too dangerous to take your big ships into the Baltic or Heligoland Bight and it was realised in the years immediately before the War that the same objective - blockading German trade and bottling up the German fleet - could be achieved by standing off and sweeping down from the north to cut them off from their bases if they did dare to come out.

In fact in the years before the war there was an argument in the Admiralty as to whether battleships should be built at all or whether Britain would be better defended at less cost by flotillas of numerous destroyers and/or submarines with only a limited number of battle-cruisers out defending the sea lanes of empire and showing the flag. Ultimately Britain stuck to out-building Germany in battleships as it was judged just too risky to trust defence of the homeland to new weapons systems and an untried theory. In the Mediterranean on the other hand, where the stakes for Britain were less high, Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty had already accepted that Britain could not afford to out build Austria (who were rapidly building their own fleet of dreadnoughts) as well as Germany and he was ready to replace the big ships at Malta with torpedo craft. The belief being that the flotillas of small craft could stop the Austrians exiting the Adriatic to threaten British interests elsewhere in the Med. The plan was controversial but given the massive cost of building the latest super-dreadnoughts like the fast 15 inch gun Queen Elizabeths there seemed to be no choice.

60

Should have commented on this bit: Don’t believe it! Even without the High Seas Fleet an amphibious landing on the German/Danish coast would not have ended the war any quicker. Until the German Army was broken landing troops from the sea would have been a waste of time. All the advantages that the defence had over the attack in WW1 would have been just as strong as on the Western Front but with the added problems caused by reinforcing and supplying by sea. How many troops could be landed and supplied across the width of the North Sea and how fast can the numbers be built up? The answer is “a lot less than the Germans could move by rail to contain and destroy them.” You would have ended up with the same conditions - trenches, barbed wire, machine guns and artillery (always the artillery!) - and the same inability to breakout and exploit. Check out Gallipoli in WW1 and Anzio in WW2 for the problems of associated with amphibious operations against an organised defence.

Yes, amphibious operations in WW2 worked but the island hopping ops in the Pacific were against limited forces that could not be reinforced and Normandy was against a German army worn down and fully committed in the East. Even then, across the narrow waters of the Channel rather than the North Sea, with overwhelming Allied air superiority, and the bulk of the British and American armies available for the operation, it was not a foregone conclusion.