Do you have cite for this?
This is ordinary mud we’re talking about here, not some sort of magical super-quicksand.
First I think your answers now clearly tend to distinguishing WWI in the social/political history of the western Entente countries. That might be valid. Distinguishing it in the characteristics of warfare per se, overall, not as valid.
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Consider Japanese forces on the defense in WWII, more horrific suffering on average. Also in fact defensive stands on the Eastern Front, both sides at various times, were quite horrible.
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You’re exaggerating if imagining the opponents on the Western Front in WWI stayed in exactly the same positions for the whole time. The Front shifted, just not a lot for the most part. Also the flip side of highly static warfare, which also persisted for many months on various WWII fronts, was improved creature comforts. Not all trenches were hell holes, and the Germans in particular did a lot to create relative safe and comfortable places for troops behind the very forward output lines, the complements of which were rotated. The Anglo-French didn’t do as elaborate a job of that, but troops weren’t sitting next to rotting corpses for months, that happened during active periods of days.
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Sure, all kinds of wars through history. The mud point is the weakest one.
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But again if we’re speaking of the evolution of warfare, we aren’t specifically speaking of just the western part of the Entente/Allies. Warfare in the 1940’s was often quite similar to that of 1918. The organization and equipment of 1940’s and 1918 infantry divisions in most armies was quite similar, etc. There was a big evolution during 1914-18 in that regard. But warfare of the '40’s often resembled especially the second half of WWI, because there hadn’t been enough change in technology that it wouldn’t often.
Simply, it didn’t happen. They threw their troops into an endless set of variant meat grinders. They invented tanks, chemical weapons, rolling barrages, storm troopers, and so on. Specific attacks were often launched for specific purposes, such as drawing enemy troops away from other parts of the line.
Would you want to be the general who went into the staff meeting and suggested, to the people who thought the war would be over by Christmas, that they ought to just hold the line for the next four, five, maybe eight years, and hope that the blockade would eventually cause a collapse of German morale and mutiny in the ranks of the Wehrmacht? \
Sure.
From Dan Carlin’s podcast, Blueprint for Armageddon V:
Also:
It is not difficult to find stories about this with a quick Google search if you want more.
See post #44 above.
Did that happen in WWII?
The mud in Paschendel was absolutely worse than almost any battle I’ve heard described (the spring mud on the WW2 eastern front was certainly a factor but I’ve not heard descriptions of mass attacks there in conditions anything like Paschendel, due the mobile nature of the war)
There is a reasonable case to be made that it was the mud that doomed the offensive more than anything else. The mistakes of previous western front offensives had been largely solved, it was the weather conditions that were the deciding factor (the German offensives the following year only succeeded when the weather was agreeable to offensive actions)
You have a bunch of industrial giants within close proximity to each other and whose many homelands could not be neutralized to any significant degree to stem the flow of men or supplies to the warfront. Machine guns and better than ever cannon was just the icing on the bad, bad cake.
What the hell was the kaiser thinking anyway? I don’t see how Russia was remotely worth it to fight anyone at all much less thru four years of an on and off again slaughterfest against the rest of Europe. Even in a situation where France is taken quickly that just leaves them with a never ending insurgency fed by the UK that they also have to trade against in a naval war they are not going to win.
While it’s fashionable to berate the generals for being stupid and hidebound, and largely correct, it bears emphasis that they were trying to achieve breakthroughs – or simply trying to be seen as “doing something” to support their allies – by using a very cheap, easily replaced resource.
Their citizens.
It’s obvious to us in hindsight that that was their most precious resource, and it was obvious to parents and civilians and some politicians at the time. But none of those people got to influence the decisionmaking very much. So the generals broke the back and the heart of a generation, devastated Europe culturally and spiritually as well as economically and demographically, and got some medals.
One reason the British threw men into death was that the French were close to collapse. The British needed to demonstrate to the French that they too were willing to take massive casualties: they weren’t just suggesting that the French keep fighting on French soil while the English watched and cheered.
The suggestion, repeated above, that tanks won WW1 is, of course, ridiculous, on a par with the suggestion that the Americans (or the Canadians, or the Australians) won WWI.
WWI was won by the collapse of the Germans, caused by the economic failure of Germany, caused, as much as anything, by the economic blockade, enforced, as much as anything else, by the English navy.
The German army was still strongly embedded in secure defensive positions: they were not supported with food, ammunition or weapons. They had already lost the war, but held on in hope of a political breakthrough – in particular they really wanted the USA to come in on the German side. When the Americans came in on the English side, all hope was gone. The political and economic collapse of Germany while the soldiers were still in a strong defensive position contributed to the “knife in the back” theory, that the German soldiers would have won the war if it hadn’t been for treachery at home.
The siege of Leningrad.
Yes, though on a smaller scale (in terms of men deployed). There are battles in the tropical areas of the Pacific theater, where disease and mud took a terrible toll on the combatants involved. (Burma, New Guinea, Bataan, for example) The Japanese nicknamed Guadalcanal “the Island of Death”.
Towards the end of the island hopping campaigns, the Americans resorted to the tactic of sealing the Japanese inside the tunnel complexes the defenders dug out on Pelileu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa. Sitting in the dark, slowly suffocating or starving. Just as gruesome as slowly sinking into the mud of Flanders, IMO.
I have no idea what the conditions were like in mainland China. Are there many English language operational history books covering that theater that someone can recommend?
But with the odd exception that is not how WW1 generals thought. They weren’t (usually) attempting to make sure their opponents expended their human resources before they did. They were attempting to achieve a tactical victory over their opponents on the field and break out of the stalemate.
And they continued to as the OP said “throw their troops into the meatgrinder” long after it was obvious that that victory was not going to happen.
Thank you for sharing that link - that’s a fascinating and informative channel.
Apart from anything else, it really puts the trenches into perspective when you see, for instance, the spectacle of the Austrians getting more than half a million of their men killed *simply from freezing to death *, by marching them I’ll-equipped into the mountains in the middle of winter.
Maybe a better question is how did generals manage to maintain a “meatgrinder” for the duration of the war? That is to say, after you send a quarter or half million or so soldiers to their death in a overwhelming display of tactical, strategic and organizational ineptitude, how do you prevent the remaining millions from rioting and mutinying en masse?
Some did, the French went on strike basically at one point and of course the Russians killed their leaders and left the war.
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Good propaganda and control of the media.
After the initial German advances, Germany only had to defend the territory it had already taken. A successful defence would eventually end in a negotiated peace which would be in Germany’s favour. The Western Allies were obligated to try and recover the occupied territory - politically, they could not allow 90% of Belgium and the French industrial heartland to be enemy held without any attempt to drive the Germans back.
For most of the war, the Allies were the attackers, and the Germans attacked mainly to improve their defences. (At one point the Germans even retreated from part of the front to form a better defensive line.) Their 1918 offensive was a desperation move driven by Germany’s deteriorating strategic position, while Verdun was a mutual idiocy of both French and Germans to out-grind their opponent.
The big problem for the Allies was that evolution in artillery and machine guns had swung the balance heavily in favour of the defence once the trench lines were established in France. For the most part, it wasn’t a case of just throwing men into a grinder over and over and over. Both sides regularly introduced new weapons and new tactics to try and break the stalemate.
Eventually, the armies on both sides figured out what to do - the 1918 German offensive used tactics similar to the WW2 Blitzkrieg of bypassing strong points to penetrate into the rear areas (quickly petering out due to poor German mobility and supply capability), while the British counter offensive used very much improved artillery and infantry co-ordination, communications, and supply to finally get the breakthroughs and mobility that had been the goal from the beginning.