Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
Imagine moving several day old roadkill. Some of us have done that. Imagine acres of that churned up with wire etc. NFI how many soldiers fell to illness but it seems a miracle to my modern sensibilities that any could fight or do anything else.
Also we are still waiting for a reasonable movie treatments of the Russian/Austrian/Italian/Turkish fronts in WWI.
John Buchanan's "Mr Standfast" would make a fine WW1 film if ever filmed.
"So rapidly the power of your initial attack runs out. And then the counter-attacks, as inevitable as the rising sun, start. Your opponents can shell you from nice, prepared positions, while your artillery now has to move forward to support you. Their troops can ride railways to staging posts close to the front lines, advance through well-maintained communications trenches directly to you, while your troops have to advance over open group, under artillery fire, in order to support you."
The cause of the WW1 stalemates was not artillery, but asymmetrical mobility capabilities on the attacking and defending sides of any offensive. During the war the various armies, as stated in the article, got really good at the first phase of an attack: breaching the enemies front line. They were not always good at this (see Somme, 1916) but they got there through refining their use of primarily artillery. However, what they could never solve during the war years was the problem of what to do to push an attack forward, and this was caused by mobility problems. The attackers had very limited options when it came to the attack, and it was almost entirely men walking forward. This limited both speed and endurance. No many how many men you had if they all start walking from the same place they can all only walk so far before they need to sit down for a bit of a break. There was no way to expedite this process because the technologies that would allow it either did not yet exist (reliable and powerful ICE) or could not be pushed forward fast enough (railways). The limitations of a person moving forward on foot meant that at some point the initial impetus of the attack was going to end while reinforcements caught up, and that is where the problem was.
While the attackers were struggling forward on foot the defenders could use a fantastic technology: railways. Reinforcements could be rushed in from almost anywhere to counter the attack that was developing. Then when they arrived at the railheads they could move to the front line and begin launching counter attacks near their own sources of supply and against an enemy that had just walked themselves into exhaustion. This advantage was most strongly felt in the very well developed and confined areas of Western Europe where both sides (Germany 15, 16, 17, Entente 18) would be able to move around troops very quickly. On the Eastern Front this advantage was less apparent because of the less developed transportation systems which put the two sides of an attack on more equal footing.
Artillery was really good at solving the first problem (tactical breakthrough) but really bad at solving the real problem, how to continue an attack. This problem was just made worse by the long artillery preparations of 1915-1917, because the various armies were broadcasting to everyone where precisely they were going to attack, giving them a very long time to prepare. These preparations could not prevent an attack from occurring, or it being initially successful, but it could always prevent an attack from transitioning from battle of attrition to battle of movement.
This turned into a bit longer of a post than intended, and I do want to reiterate that I do like this article and I think its only flaw is that it does not follow its own logic one more step.
I can't imagine how supremely frustrating the ever-evolving trench stalemate was to tacticians. Each time you think you've got a break, you encounter situations like running naked into a field of barbed wire!
Does anyone know of a good source regarding that leap-frogging tactical evolution in WW1? I saw the field of barbed wire and immediately thought: What if we had a big roll of connected-by-chains railway sleepers, that we could push over the barbed wire? I'm sure there's some huge hole in my extremely poor 21st century viewpoint there, but the idea of smart commanders fighting against each other's innovations is very intriguing.
Suggested readings: (this is a mix of books and articles)
* The Infantry Cannot Do with a Gun Less: The Place of the Artillery in the BEF, 1914-1918 by William Sanders Marble
* The Dynamics of Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War by Timothy T. Lupfer
* The Marne and After: A Reappraisal of French Strategy in the First World War by Douglas Porch
* The Evolution of British Strategy and Tactics on the Western Front in 1918: GHQ, Manpower, and Technology by Tim Travers
* Operational Art and the German Command System in World War I by Bradley John Meyer
* Not Glamorous, But Effective: The Canadian Corps and the Set-Piece Attack, 1917-1918 by Ian M. Brown
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-great-war-by-pe...
Just this week, I basically trolled by asking why the War of 1812 was so boring. Some people didn't get the joke, of course, but in the end a professor of history wrote a fascinating analysis of British naval strategy in that era and how effective it was, and I learned a lot.
Each of these techniques had the potential to dramatically shift the balance of the war:
Air attacks could have taken out the counter artillery batteries. (Look at what planes Germany threw over the channel.)
Tanks could have carried the advance much faster (and did in the later stages of the war) and, more importantly, made counter attacks so much more difficult.
Motorization, in particular the use of light mobile infantry (e.g., German Kradschützen) could have enabled quick lateral movement of troops. Instead of trying to breakthrough over maybe 5km of the front, mobile units could have fanned out to attack the first line from the flanks over a range of tens of km.
All these "wonder weapons" did exist in WW1 but were not deployed in large formations (except for tanks). I think the main reason was that there simply was no large industry supporting the armies with these systems when the war started.
> Next time we’ll take a look at the solutions that actually did disrupt this trench stalemate and consider the degree to which such solutions could have been implemented any earlier than they were.
Some of the faults I see with this way of thinking:
A. The pieces of modern 'combined arms' forces, like tanks and war planes, were not advanced to the point where they could achieve the 'combined' part. The entire reason why these weapons work so effectively in modern doctrine is that they operate together with infantry. Tanks of this era were brand new, extremely experimental weapons. They moved at the speed of a 100+ year old tractor. This is not a weapon yet capable of being deployed en masse and just winning the war like that.
B. To suggest that these weapons were 'capable' of winning the war, but just weren't deployed correctly or in enough numbers is to project incompetence on to military leaders of the past. Clearly they did try these things, and they did not work. There was no reason to expect that if tanks with 1918 level technology didn't achieve much success, then they should have just tried throwing more at the equation, or to expect modern combined arms doctrine to just spring out of their minds fully formed.
C. It's been touched on in the (very good) original post, but the land of the western front, torn up by artillery and barbed wire, was not the suitable environment for mechanized warfare to be developed. Doctrine can't spring forth from nowhere to solve a problem. It has to accompany these changes in military technology under conditions that allow commanders to experience what this technology is and isn't good at, and 100 year old trucks were certainly not going to be great at blitzing across crater-strewn Flanders.
D. You suggest this all may have been a matter of no ready-to-go industry existing for these new weapons. I would argue that if there was ever a thought they had a solution involving these tools, the massive armament industry of WW1 could easily have been brought to bear upon making them.
Now I am really, really far from a military aircraft history guy. So I don't feel super comfortable commenting on the air theory, but from my limited reading I believe the problem to be one of engine design and general new-ness of these things as weapons themselves (just like tanks).
The Wrights flew their powered plane in the end of 1903. WW1 is almost exactly 10 years after that. Again, it is unreasonable to expect the technology to be at the point to support modern doctrine. These were brand new, and engines were simply not both strong and light enough to create the kinds of war planes you'd see in the next 30 years.
To summarize though, again, I think the most salient point is really just that people of the past are often not as illogical about these things as you might expect. They wanted to end the war. If there was even a sliver of a chance of any of these weapons being 'the' breakthrough, they would have pushed the technology as far as it can go to find it. The fact that they did not, is evidence enough. If the solution was simple, it wouldn't have been a stalemate.
I think the main problem here is that new doctrines are hard to develop during wars. The German Stoßtrupp doctrine is a succesful example, btw. The various forms of artillery support are another. But these doctrines were developed around existing tools.
If you look at the planes of 1917 or 1918, you find surprisingly sophisticated tactical and strategic bombers. A Schwerpunkt attack under local air superiority would have been very difficult, logistically and tactically, but the planes existed.
Regarding the tanks, you just have to look at the FT17 - it came too late for the French but it was exactly the right tool and could have been built by the Germans as well. The relatively low speed doesn't really matter once the enemy's first line is breached, a few dozen of these tanks would effectively prevent any counter attack and could immediately pressure the second line. They would also draw a lot of artillery fire and massively reduce the value of the indirect artillery pieces that dominated the battlefield.
At the same time, every army could have fielded motorized infantry with motorcycles (afaik only the US did). Such troops would obviously be useless in the first wave of the attack but they could push through a breakthrough and outflank counter attacks. The technology and equipment did exist, but here I think the contemporary doctrine would not allow for such relatively autonomous and expensive small units.
One cannot seriously discuss the advantage new technology will bring without considering the opposition's response, which often quickly nullifies the initial advantage, e.g. gas -> gas masks, submarines -> convoys.
Needless to say, 100 years of experience in warfare has provided several examples of trying to destroy a country primarily through a bombing campaign, and the number of times this can merely be argued to be successful can be counted on one hand. The number of times it has been unquestionably successful remains at 0.
[1] I just re-checked the quotes in J. F. C. Fuller's "The Conduct of War", and the general he quotes gives the timeframe of less than a week, after air superiority has been won, specifically advocating that the war would be won before the enemy has mobilized.
In fact, as Wikipedia puts it "The Battle of Kursk was the first time in the Second World War that a German strategic offensive was halted before it could break through enemy defences and penetrate to its strategic depths. Though the Red Army had succeeded in winter offensives previously, their counter-offensives after the German attack at Kursk were their first successful summer offensives of the war." [my emphasis] The sources given for these observations are not Soviet ones.
So the more you emphasize the role of the Luftwaffe at Kursk, the more you support my case!