WWI: Why did the general keep throwing their troops into meatgrinders?

[Dissonance]

@GreenWyvern

Winston Churchill saw the problems with trench warfare right at the start. In Dec 1914, he wrote to the Prime Minister:

@Churchill

I think it quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines in the Western theatre. … Without attempting to take a final view, my impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change—although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point. …

On the assumption that these views are correct, the question arises, how ought we to apply our growing military power? Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?

He put his energy into creating the tank, even though he was in charge of the Navy not the Army, and even though the views of everyone else in authority were negative about tanks.

I think the stereotype of stupid, unimaginative WWI generals is pretty justified on the whole.

Winston Churchill was imaginative, but used his imagination to come up with some extremely stupid ideas. The letter to the PM that you quote had absolutely nothing to do with tanks. The entirety of the letter (bolding mine on the part left out) and its context is:

I think it quite possible that neither side will have the strength to penetrate the other’s lines in the Western theatre. … Without attempting to take a final view, my impression is that the position of both armies is not likely to undergo any decisive change—although no doubt several hundred thousand men will be spent to satisfy the military mind on the point. …

On the assumption that these views are correct, the question arises, how ought we to apply our growing military power? Are there not other alternatives than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders? Further, cannot the power of the Navy be brought directly to bear upon the enemy? If it is not possible or unduly costly to pierce the German lines on existing fronts, ought we not, as new forces come to hand, to engage him on new frontiers, and enable the Russians to do so too?

He then went on to restate his scheme for capturing a German island as a preliminary to entering the Baltic and landing a Russian army on the German coast. This was the same scheme that had been resolutely opposed by his admirals since the beginning of the war.

While this bit of foolhardy idiocy of his wasn’t carried out, he was able to force through an equally foolhardy idea of his to seize the Dardanelles with the intention of then taking the Bosporus to open the Turkish Straits for traffic to Russia. Several hundreds of thousands - 302,000 on the Allied side to be exact - of men were spent proving the folly of Churchill’s brainchild at Gallipoli. He had equally foolish ideas in WWII; one plan of his, Operation Catherine was to heavily modify three Revenge class battleships with bulges, sail them into the Baltic and interdict German shipping. Thankfully much like his plans for the Baltic in WWI this wasn’t carried out, but much like Gallipoli in WWI he was able to force through the landing at Anzio against the sound military advice of his generals.

[treis]

@XT

None of the Europeans learned a damned thing from the Civil War (I don’t think many even noticed or sent observers) or any of the wars between then and the onset of WWI, and none of them were able to modify their tactics or doctrine to take into account the new weapons (or even the old ones…just quick reloading aimed rifle fire alone was a huge change).

That’s not really true. The Prussian tactics in the Franco Prussian war were markedly different from the Civil War and were about what you would expect. They flanked extensively and relied on artillery to defeat the French. WWI started the same way with similar tactics. It was only after the initial invasion was stopped that the battles changed from maneuver to trench warfare. The reason for the difference was that armies were much bigger and technology further multiplied that force. They were so big that there were no flanks to attack. It was an entirely novel situation and it took some time to come up with the right tactics.

[Lemur866]

In the American Civil War, sure you could have trench warfare. But there never was a situation with an unbroken line of trenches that could not be flanked, manned by an essentially unlimited number of soldiers.

In the ACW, you could always flank a line of trenches, or just besiege an isolated strongpoint. With no supplies and no reinforcement, their position was hopeless.

Nobody wanted to just have frontal attacks, but there was no other choice because in WWI there was no way to flank the enemy because the fortifications extended from the North Sea to the Alps, and those fortifications were manned by millions of men. And those fortifications could always be reinforced and resupplied from behind by the entire productive apparatus of the nation.

Stalemate trench warfare wasn’t an inevitable outcome of the particular military technology available at the time, take for instance the Russian front. There never was anything like the continent-spanning defensive works there. Over in the east the space was much larger and therefore the manpower per kilometer of front was much lower. Yes, trenches and fortifications were used over there, but there never was anything like the fortifications that marked every inch of the western front. In the east there was still always room to maneuver around the opposing army, there was no way to make the front so strong that any advance in any place could be stopped.

And of course they tried all sorts of ways to get around this, Churchill’s famous championing of amphibious assaults behind enemy lines are a perfect example. But a moment’s thought shows how foolish such an idea would be. You land troops on some beach in Germany, and what happens? Your men on that beachhead can never be reinforced and resupplied and communicated with like the forces that are coming up to push them off the beach.

So what’s the alternative? Just sit there on the defensive and hope the enemy attacks you so the correlation of forces is in your favor? Except Germany is on French soil. Are you just going to give up? The front lines become the new border between France and the German Empire? After so many millions of lives have already been given, now it will be for nothing?

And also note that the first months of the war were horrifically bloody, but were absolutely not a stalemate. Germany crashed through Belgium and northern France, and came within a whisker of taking Paris. If they had just kept the right wing a little stronger the push might have succeeded, and then the lesson of World War I wouldn’t be “defense always wins, pointless trench warfare stalemate war of attrition meatgrinder that lasts years”, it would be “first to mobilize and attack always wins in a short decisive knockout victory”.

And when the Germans tried again a few decades later, they succeeded with that exact result.

[Bert_Nobbins]

For first-class demolition of the many myths about WW1, I strongly recommend John Terraine’s ‘The Smoke & the Fire’.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Smoke-Fire-Myths-Anti-myths-1861-1945/dp/0850523303

Brilliant book. John_Terraine was a much respected historian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Terraine

[GreenWyvern]

@Dissonance

Winston Churchill was imaginative, but used his imagination to come up with some extremely stupid ideas.

I honestly don’t understand why some people have such an intense and (it seems to me) unbalanced hatred for Churchill.

Churchill was the scapegoat for Gallipoli, but the fact is, if it had been done properly from the start, as he wanted to do it, it would very likely have been successful and would have made a huge difference to the war. He was blamed for the incompetence and delays of the commanders on the spot, but he really had no control over that. Kitchener and Hamilton were entirely responsible for the landings and the employment of the infantry, and some of the admirals made serious mistakes.

At Anzio General Lucas failed to advance and hold the heights which would have made all the difference, and there were other personality conflicts and problems among the generals. It should not be forgotten that if it were not for Churchill the Allies would never have landed in Italy and captured Southern Italy in the first place.

Nothing is ever certain in war, but on the whole Churchill’s contributions to both WWI and WWII were very positive.

[DrDeth]

@Dissonance

This is serious hyperbole. Wars both before and after WWI were quite as horrible and gruesome as WWI. The battles in the Russo-Japanese War were hardly distinguishable from WWI battles. The US Civil War saw extensive use of trench warfare, and the body count from battles lasting a day or two could be frighteningly high.

Yes, the Civil War did see some trench warfare and the casualties could be very high. But the trenches didnt last for 4 years.

[DrDeth]

@Lemur866

Nobody wanted to just have frontal attacks, but there was no other choice because in WWI there was no way to flank the enemy because the fortifications extended from the North Sea to the Alps, and those fortifications were manned by millions of men. .

Sure. DON’T ATTACK. of course you do some probing from time to time to keep the foe on his toes.

But just sit and defend and wait for the Germans to starve.

[Damuri_Ajashi]

ISTM that trench warfare was not all that different than seiging a castle. You had a bunch of range DPS in highly defensible positions and you sustained high casualties trying to breach the wall. Why wouldn’t the general see trench warfare as much of the same dynamic?

[Fotheringay-Phipps]

I’m not an expert on these matters, but ISTM that the two sides had different primary motivations for the attacking strategy.

The Allied powers had to attack because from their perspective the Central Powers were occupying part of their territory, so the status quo was unacceptable.

The Central Powers had to attack because they knew time was not on their side, and their military strategy relied more on a quicker victory.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Dissonance

This is serious hyperbole.

It is not hyperbole unfortunately. To be sure war is a miserable business and I doubt there is much difference to the soldier shot in the face in 1917 than in 2017.

The difference between WWI and prior wars was the length of time soldiers would be engaged in a battle. Prior to WWI most battles started in the morning and were ended at night. Some battles would go several days but I am hard pressed to think of a battle where the soldiers were under continual bombardment for a week or more at a time.

Further, the trench warfare of the Civil War was a pale shadow compared to the trenches in WWI. First of all the artillery was on a whole other level both in lethality and volume (literally over a million shells landing in a small area over the course of a week…the scars on the land can still be seen in Verdun). Second, in WWI leaving the trench was an almost sure way to die so soldiers would sit in the trench with their dead comrades who were rotting. The trench also was often the latrine. Add in epic amounts of flies and vermin to the mix.

Then add other fun things like poison gas and rain. Certainly every military copes with rain but due to the heavy bombardments giant craters would fill with toxic sludge. Toxic from the explosives, toxic from poison gas, toxic from decomposing corpses and toxic when used as a latrine. These things were everywhere. In the Battle of Passchendaele the churned up ground made for exceptionally muddy conditions. So much so that soldiers would get stuck and, literally, slowly sink down to their deaths over the course of hours. Often if someone tried to help they’d get stuck too so soldiers would just pass by within feet unable to help.

Add in insane casualty counts not seen before or since (except, perhaps the firebombing of some cities in WWII and of course the nuclear bombs). IIRC France lost more people in a few years in WWI than the US has in all its wars combined. And France is not as big as the United States (population wise). Defending soldiers often had to cope with the dead piled so high it was hard to shoot the people coming from behind the pile.

Again, it is entirely possible to find horrid situations in any war but the unrelenting, never-ending horror of the western front in WWI stands out.

[Lemur866]

A bit of a sidetrack, but I just can’t help but share this photo which sums up the insanity of WWI:

As for the strategy of “don’t attack”, just sit on the defense and wait for the Germans to starve.

How exactly is that going to work? What will make the Germans starve? The reason the Germans were eventually on the verge of collapse when they finally surrendered is that they were under constant unrelenting pressure from the Allied advances. Sure, the allies lost more men attacking than the Germans lost defending. But the Allies had more men. The logic of attrition favored the Allies. The entirety of German’s economic output was being eaten up on the western front.

But without the attacks, what happens? The German soldiers sit in their trenches, and nothing happens. What’s going on on the Eastern Front while the western allies are sitting around doing nothing? Russia collapses even sooner, which means resources from the east are now switched to the west.

Sure, you could just declare peace and proclaim the existing lines the new border between France and Germany, and millions of people don’t get killed in 1917 and 1918. But that is France surrendering.

[shiftless]

They kept sending them because they kept going. Those millions of young boys on both sides had no idea what they were getting into until it was too late. Their heads were filled with tales of glory and honor. I want to blame the generals but they were only doing the pointless job the governments and the people wanted. All those governments were willing to destroy the cream of their youth rather than risk, what? That’s my question.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Dissonance

If by spending lives and losing 30,000 a day is taken to mean deaths rather than casualties than this is was hardly common in WWI and a rather extreme outlier. The first day of the Somme was the bloodiest single day in British military history and the deaths were 19,240 out of a total of 57,470 casualties.

An outlier it may have been but it was not alone.

The Fist Battle of the Marne was the first major engagement of the war between France and Germany (I think) and lasted about five days:

Over two million men fought in the First Battle of the Marne and although there are no exact official casualty counts for the battle, estimates for the actions of September along the Marne front for all armies are often given as c. 500,000 killed or wounded.[24] French casualties totalled 250,000 men, of whom 80,000 were killed.

SOURCE: First Battle of the Marne - Wikipedia

In 1918 the Nivelle Offensive had similarly bad results (not as bad but still bad):

In 1919, Pierrefeu gave French casualties from 16–25 April as 118,000 of whom 28,000 were killed, 5,000 died of wounds, 80,000 were wounded, 20,000 of whom were fit to return to their units by 30 April and 5,000 were taken prisoner.[30] In 1920, Hayes wrote that British casualties were 160,000 and Russian casualties 5,183 men.[31] In 1939, Wynne wrote that the French lost 117,000 casualties including 32,000 killed in the first few days but that the effect on military and civilian morale was worse than the casualties.[32] In 1962, Nicholson the Canadian official historian, recorded German losses of c. 163,000 and French casualties of 187,000 men.

SOURCE: Nivelle offensive - Wikipedia

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Lemur866

But without the attacks, what happens? The German soldiers sit in their trenches, and nothing happens. What’s going on on the Eastern Front while the western allies are sitting around doing nothing? Russia collapses even sooner, which means resources from the east are now switched to the west.

So, if you were a general in charge in WWI you’d just keep feeding those men into the grinder every day?

I think I mentioned it before but it bears repeating:

Carlin used the example in his series of trying to imagine someone ordering the “Charge of the Light Brigade” over and over and over again. Granted the charge of the light brigade was a result of muddled orders but still…imagine repeating that order near endlessly. Every time with the same results (the annihilation of the brigade).

You have to keep doing that because you can’t just sit around?

What is really surprising is that the troops kept jumping into the grinder fully knowing the results. They just saw what happened to the guys before them and the guys before that yet they went anyway. It wasn’t till the Nivelle Offensive that French troops started to mutiny against more of these futile attacks.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Urbanredneck

For example:

1. Soldiers quit marching shoulder to shoulder.
2. They started wearing helmets.
3. They quit wearing uniforms that made for easy targets.
4. They would also use “creeping barrages” of artillery which would move just ahead of the infantry.
5. They learned to use duck and cover tactics to use available cover.
6. Since machine guns were so effective they created snipers and other special units designed specifically to take them out.

It has been noted that the armies at the outset of WWI looked more like an army from Napoleon’s era than a modern army and by the end you started seeing armies that were prototypes of WWII armies (using combined arms tactics, infiltration tactics and so on).

Still, things like the “creeping barrage” and tanks and such were of limited use.

First, the doctrines for their use were not well rehearsed so often a creeping barrage would get too far ahead of the advancing troops (these things required tight coordination). On occasion it did work though and it was great and delivered the goods and the attacker did well. The problem was they could not advance the artillery in a timely manner to keep it going. Eventually the troops got out ahead of the artillery and they were back to square one and probably under counter-attack. The Germans had defense in depth so they could absorb and sap the energy of an attack till it puttered out and then rain death right back at the, till recently, attackers.

Same problem with tanks. They were horribly unreliable and slow and just could not keep up with the rigors of a long advance. They were great for the first push but supply and repairs just could not keep up well enough to keep them going.

[Corry_El]

@Whack-a-Mole

It is not hyperbole unfortunately. To be sure war is a miserable business and I doubt there is much difference to the soldier shot in the face in 1917 than in 2017.

1. The difference between WWI and prior wars was the length of time soldiers would be engaged in a battle. Prior to WWI most battles started in the morning and were ended at night. Some battles would go several days but I am hard pressed to think of a battle where the soldiers were under continual bombardment for a week or more at a time.

2. Further, the trench warfare of the Civil War was a pale shadow compared to the trenches in WWI. First of all the artillery was on a whole other level both in lethality and volume (literally over a million shells landing in a small area over the course of a week…the scars on the land can still be seen in Verdun).

3. Second, in WWI leaving the trench was an almost sure way to die so soldiers would sit in the trench with their dead comrades who were rotting. The trench also was often the latrine. Add in epic amounts of flies and vermin to the mix.

4. Then add other fun things like poison gas and rain.

5. Add in insane casualty counts not seen before or since (except, perhaps the firebombing of some cities in WWII and of course the nuclear bombs). IIRC France lost more people in a few years in WWI than the US has in all its wars combined. And France is not as big as the United States (population wise). Defending soldiers often had to cope with the dead piled so high it was hard to shoot the people coming from behind the pile.

6. Again, it is entirely possible to find horrid situations in any war but the unrelenting, never-ending horror of the western front in WWI stands out.

Only one of those things was unique to WWI. The others either were new things in WWI to some degree (among major wars, as has been mentioned episodes of the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars resembled WWI) but continued in WWII, or else weren’t really new.

1. This was just as true or more in WWII.

2. The increased lethality of artillery, steel high explosive shells fired from steel guns with modern breech and recoil mechanisms*, was a major difference, maybe the biggest one (even than wider use of machine guns) between WWI and gun powder era warfare before it. In the American Civil War small arms inflicted a much higher % of casualties than the Napoleonic Wars, but the % dropped drastically replaced by artillery (though also mg’s) as main killers in WWI. However again, this was generally true of WWII also. Tanks and a/c had more influence on battlefields in WWII but weren’t big % killers (casualties from strategic air campaigns are really a different topic to one discussing ‘generals throwing their troops into meat grinders’).

3. Nothing about unsanitary conditions in WWI stands out much from previous warfare or WWII, if you look for the most horrifying situations in each.

4. Extensive use of poison gas was unique to WWI among major wars, at least until long after WWII and depending whether wars like Iran/Iraq are considered ‘major’. The effect of rain and mud certainly wasn’t.

5. This isn’t true. As a demographic historical fact France and Britain both lost more men in WWI than WWII, true. But that’s not true of Russia or Germany. It’s not necessarily true of casualty rates as %'s of engaged armies either if we don’t cherry pick the biggest pile ups of casualties in WWI and compare them to the general level in other wars.

6. As has been pointed out, the western front wasn’t all of WWI; warfare was considerably more mobile in other places (though also stalemated in a small area for most of the 1915-18 Italian front). And the western front had special circumstances of constrained geography and mobilization of large armies compared to previous history on that front. But again in WWII fighting in the same area bogged down into a fairly WWI-like situation from late August '44 to around February '45. And the other big difference that time was how heavily the Allied outnumbered the Germans compared to most of the time in 1914-18. Naturally they’d be better able to eventually make breakthroughs, and were held up in part by logistical limitations in the first place. The 1940 campaign in Europe was very different than WWI, the 1944-45 campaign was different but not as different. And warfare in Italy in 1943-45 settled into long stalemates also.

*though obsolescent black powder filled shells, even of cast iron, and guns without recoil mechanisms were used in WWI fairly extensively. The French particularly used loads of 1870’s-80’s vintage heavy artillery because they’d somehow gotten the idea pre-war that the Model 1897 75mm did away with the need for much heavy artillery; finding how mistaken that was they had no choice but to extensively use much older heavy pieces till they could provide modern heavy pieces in numbers later in the war.

[drewder]

@DrDeth

Sure. DON’T ATTACK. of course you do some probing from time to time to keep the foe on his toes.

But just sit and defend and wait for the Germans to starve.

They were waiting for you to starve as well. Had the uboats been a bit more successful the British isles would have done so. The UK hasn’t been able to feed itself in over a century let alone with a high percentage of their people gone to war.

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

[Stringbean]

@Lemur866

A bit of a sidetrack, but I just can’t help but share this photo which sums up the insanity of WWI:

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-y2NU8TSX6-w/WFIlpadqxMI/AAAAAAAAMDg/KMEfflgZ4MgXvgXz0IrF6UL8fCAzDrw3gCLcB/s1600/german_cavalry_2.jpg

Also thisone and this one.

Something about seeing horses wearing gas masks just puts the icing on the cake of horror that was WW1.

[Whack-a-Mole]

@Corry_El

1. This was just as true or more in WWII.

What battles in WWII had the same level of sitting in a trench with your dead and shit and piss and rats and flies? Not just that it happened but how long did they have to endure those conditions?

3. Nothing about unsanitary conditions in WWI stands out much from previous warfare or WWII, if you look for the most horrifying situations in each.

Remember the western front was mostly static so you got to stay in the same shithole for a looong time. You can find similar horrors in WWII. Can you find ones that lasted as long and for as many people as it did in WWI (the western front was pretty big)? Was there anything like the moonscape created by artillery and poisonous gas in WWII that matched WWI that soldiers lived in?

4. The effect of rain and mud certainly wasn’t.

Armies dealing with mud is super common. Nothing new there. What is new in WWI and not repeated is soldiers dying in mud that acted like very slow quicksand. A story is related in “Blueprint for Armageddon” where soldiers passed some poor guy stuck in the mud a bit past his knees in the morning and when returning in the evening he was up to his chest or chin (I forget) and begging for someone to shoot him. Did that happen in WWII? Or any other war you can think of?

5. This isn’t true. As a demographic historical fact France and Britain both lost more men in WWI than WWII, true. But that’s not true of Russia or Germany. It’s not necessarily true of casualty rates as %'s of engaged armies either if we don’t cherry pick the biggest pile ups of casualties in WWI and compare them to the general level in other wars.

The eastern front in WWII was unreal in the number of troops it consumed. The Allies experienced nothing remotely close to it. At the outset the Soviets were positively mulched by the Germans but quantity has a quality all its own and sheer numbers and willingness of the Soviets to spend those lives won the day (and they eventually got they act together and got good generals).

Germany was overrun in WWII in a way that didn’t happen in WWI (they surrendered before that happened). Add in strategic bombing.

So it is no surprise Germany and Russia suffered more casualties in WWII but that only tells us that Stalin and Hitler were both willing to sacrifice every last person in their country in pursuit of their goals. It does not tell us that conditions were worse.

That said Stalingrad was unusually bad.

[Dissonance]

@GreenWyvern

I honestly don’t understand why some people have such an intense and (it seems to me) unbalanced hatred for Churchill.

It’s not intense nor unbalanced hatred for Churchill. I don’t hate the man at all. He is without doubt one of the greatest statesmen of the last century. That doesn’t change the fact that he would come up with entirely unrealistic pet projects that led to disasters when his general staff couldn’t talk sense into him.

@GreenWyvern

Churchill was the scapegoat for Gallipoli, but the fact is, if it had been done properly from the start, as he wanted to do it, it would very likely have been successful and would have made a huge difference to the war. He was blamed for the incompetence and delays of the commanders on the spot, but he really had no control over that. Kitchener and Hamilton were entirely responsible for the landings and the employment of the infantry, and some of the admirals made serious mistakes.

Bullshit. The plan for Gallipoli was flawed from the start and should never have been carried out. He isn’t the scapegoat, he pushed forward with a horrible plan and tried to wash his hands of the affair when it predictably didn’t work.

@GreenWyvern

At Anzio General Lucas failed to advance and hold the heights which would have made all the difference, and there were other personality conflicts and problems among the generals. It should not be forgotten that if it were not for Churchill the Allies would never have landed in Italy and captured Southern Italy in the first place.

Wow, claiming credit for the Italian campaign as a positive thing is rather incredible. I’d assume you are familiar with Churchill’s soft underbelly of the Axis turning out to be a tough old gut. I hate to break it to you, but Lucas was the scapegoat at Anzio. He wasn’t a particularly good general, but him taking the Alban hills wouldn’t have made “all the difference”. The landing was conducted with insufficient strength due to a lack of landing craft in the Mediterranean Theater but Churchill insisted it be carried out nonetheless. I’d recommend giving Carlo D’Este’s Fatal Decision: Anzio and the Battle for Rome a good read. Major General Penny, commander of the British 1st Infantry Division who was anything but a fan of Lucas put the foolishness of the notion that Anzio was a great missed opportunity quite well - “We’d have had a night in Rome and two years in POW cages.”

The disaster that was the Dodecanese Campaign was also carried out at Churchill’s insistence in the face of any military logic.

@Whack-a-Mole

It is not hyperbole unfortunately. To be sure war is a miserable business and I doubt there is much difference to the soldier shot in the face in 1917 than in 2017.

The difference between WWI and prior wars was the length of time soldiers would be engaged in a battle. Prior to WWI most battles started in the morning and were ended at night. Some battles would go several days but I am hard pressed to think of a battle where the soldiers were under continual bombardment for a week or more at a time.

Try reading up on the Russo-Japanese War. As I said, the battles were hardly distinguishable from the battles of WWI.

@Whack-a-Mole

Further, the trench warfare of the Civil War was a pale shadow compared to the trenches in WWI. First of all the artillery was on a whole other level both in lethality and volume (literally over a million shells landing in a small area over the course of a week…the scars on the land can still be seen in Verdun). Second, in WWI leaving the trench was an almost sure way to die so soldiers would sit in the trench with their dead comrades who were rotting. The trench also was often the latrine. Add in epic amounts of flies and vermin to the mix.

Try giving E. B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa a read, or the memoirs of any number of soldiers from WWII, then come back and say this. Unburied bodies, your foxhole being your latrine and endemic amounts of flies and vermin were hardly unique to WWI. Just a couple of quick quotes from it:

“The men digging in on both sides of me cursed the stench and the mud. I began moving the heavy, sticky clay mud with my entrenching shovel to shape out the extent of the foxhole before digging deeper. Each shovelful had to be knocked off the spade, because it stuck like glue. I was thoroughly exhausted and thought my strength wouldn’t last from one sticky shovelful to the next.
Kneeling on the mud, I had dug the hole no more than six or eight inches deep when the odor of rotting flesh got worse. There was nothing to do but continue to dig, so I closed up my mouth and inhaled with short shallow breaths. Another spadeful of soil out of the hole released a mass of wriggling maggots that came welling up as though those beneath were pushing them out. I cursed and told the NCO as he came by what a mess I was digging into.
‘You heard him, he said put the holes five yards apart.’
In disgust, I drove the spade into the soil, scooped out the insects, and threw them down the front of the ridge. The next stroke of the spade unearthed buttons and scraps of cloth from a Japanese army jacket in the mud—and another mass of maggots. I kept on doggedly. With the next thrust, metal hit the breastbone of a rotting Japanese corpse. I gazed down in horror and disbelief as the metal scraped a clean track through the mud along the dirty whitish bone and cartilage with ribs attached. The shoved skidded into the rotting abdomen with a squishing sound. The odor nearly overwhelmed me as I rocked back on my heels.
I began choking and gagging as I yelled in desperation, ‘I can’t dig in here! There’s a dead Nip here!’
The NCO came over, looked down at my problem and at me, and growled, ‘You heard him; he said put the holes five yards apart.”

The mud was knee deep in some places, probably deeper in others if one dared venture there. For several feet around every corpse [and there were thousands of those], maggots crawled about in the muck and then were washed away by the runoff of the rain. . .The scene was nothing but mud; shell fire; flooded craters with their silent, pathetic, rotting occupants; knocked-out tanks and amtracs; and discarded equipment - utter desolation.

The stench of death was overpowering. The only way I could bear the monstrous horror of it all was to look upward away from the earthly reality surrounding us, watch the leaden gray clouds go skudding over, and repeat over and over to myself that the situation was unreal - just a nightmare - that I would soon awake and find myself somewhere else.

I existed from moment to moment, sometimes thinking death would have been preferable. We were in the depths of the abyss, the ultimate horror of war. . . Men struggled and fought and bled in an environment so degrading I believed we had been flung into hell’s own cesspool.

A large and unknown number of Japanese all over the ridge had been killed during the early counterattacks. They had been covered with soil as soon as possible. And Japanese were still being killed out front. Infiltrators also were being killed all along the ridge at night. Our men could only spade mud over them.

The situation was bad enough, but when enemy artillery shells exploded in the area, the eruptions of soil and mud uncovered previously buried Japanese dead and scattered chunks of corpses. Like the area around our gun pits, the ridge was a stinking compost heap.

If a Marine slipped and slid down the back slope of the muddy ridge, he was apt to reach the bottom vomiting. I saw more than one man lose his footing and slip and slide all the way to the bottom only to stand up horror-stricken as he watched in disbelief while fat maggots tumbled out of his muddy dungaree pockets, cartridge belt, legging laces, and the like. Then he and a buddy would shake or scrape them away with a piece of ammo box or a knife blade.

We didn’t talk about such things. They were too horrible and obscene even for hardened veterans. The conditions taxed the toughest I knew to the point of screaming. Nor do authors normally write about such vileness; unless they have seen it with their own eyes, it is too preposterous to think that men could actually live and fight for days and nights on end under such terrible conditions and not be driven insane.

@Whack-a-Mole

In the Battle of Passchendaele the churned up ground made for exceptionally muddy conditions. So much so that soldiers would get stuck and, literally, slowly sink down to their deaths over the course of hours. Often if someone tried to help they’d get stuck too so soldiers would just pass by within feet unable to help.

Hemingway rather famously described the Battle of the Hurtgen Forest in WWII as Passchendaele with tree bursts.

Again, it is entirely possible to find horrid situations in any war but the unrelenting, never-ending horror of the western front in WWI stands out.

Again, this is simply not true.