The Germans soon became known for effectively mounting nighttime incursions behind enemy lines, by sending highly trained soldiers to attack the trenches of opposing forces at what they perceived as weak points. If successful, these soldiers would breach enemy lines and circle around to attack their opponents from the rear, while their comrades would mount a traditional offensive at the front. The brutality of trench warfare is perhaps best typified by the Battle of the Somme in France.
British troops suffered 60, casualties on the first day of fighting alone. German soldiers lying dead in a trench after the Battle of Cambrai, With soldiers fighting in close proximity in the trenches, usually in unsanitary conditions, infectious diseases such as dysentery, cholera and typhoid fever were common and spread rapidly. In the wake of the Battle of the Marne —during which Allied troops halted the steady German push through Belgium and France that had proceeded over the first month of World War I —a conflict both sides had expected to be short and decisive turns longer and bloodier, as Allied and German forces begin digging the first trenches on the Western Front on September 15, The trench system on the Western Front in World War I—fixed from the winter of to the spring of —eventually stretched from the North Sea coast of Belgium southward through France, with a bulge outwards to contain the much-contested Ypres salient.
Mihiel and Nancy, the system finally reached its southernmost point in Alsace, at the Swiss border. In total the trenches built during World War I, laid end-to-end, would stretch some 35, miles—12, of those miles occupied by the Allies, and the rest by the Central Powers.
As historian Paul Fussell describes it, there were usually three lines of trenches: a front-line trench located 50 yards to a mile from its enemy counterpart, guarded by tangled lines of barbed wire; a support trench line several hundred yards back; and a reserve line several hundred yards behind that.
A well-built trench did not run straight for any distance, as that would invite the danger of enfilade, or sweeping fire, along a long stretch of the line; instead it zigzagged every few yards.
While war in the trenches during World War I is described in horrific, apocalyptic terms—the mud, the stench of rotting bodies, the enormous rats—the reality was that the trench system protected the soldiers to a large extent from the worst effects of modern firepower, used for the first time during that conflict. The greatest danger came during the periods when the war became more mobile, when the soldiers on either side left the trenches to go on the offensive.
German losses per month peaked when they went on the attack: in in Belgium and France, on the Eastern Front, and again in the west; for the French, casualties peaked in September , when they risked everything to halt the German advance at the Marne.
Trench warfare redefined battle in the modern age, making artillery into the key weapon. Thus the fundamental challenge on both sides of the line became how to produce enough munitions, keep the troops supplied with these munitions and expend enough of them during an offensive to sufficiently damage the enemy lines before beginning an infantry advance.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On September 15, , the venerable Wall Street brokerage firm Lehman Brothers seeks Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, becoming the largest victim of the subprime mortgage crisis that would devastate financial markets and contribute to the biggest economic downturn since the This was a strategic offensive that relied on the strength of the tactical defensive.
The French and German armies grappled for the next ten months in the longest land battle in history: the Battle of Verdun. From a German perspective the battle, at least as originally conceived, had but one purpose: to kill as many French soldiers as possible. This was attrition, conceived in its purest form.
The casualties were enormous, although fewer than one might expect from such a battle. Ultimately some , soldiers from each army were killed or wounded.
The battlefield conditions were barbaric. Troops were fed mechanistically into an ever-grinding machine of fire, steel, mud, and death. French troops felt that the battle was a futile waste of lives. They expressed what they felt was the obvious lack of value placed on their lives by bleating like sheep being led to the slaughter as they marched into the Verdun salient; a bone-chilling foreshadowing of the widespread mutinies that would wrack the French army in The situation for German forces was hardly better.
Whereas French forces were rapidly and aggressively rotated in and out of the front, ensuring that troops did not have to endure more than a few days at the hellish front, German units were frequently left at the front for weeks on end.
Nevertheless, the Germans very nearly pushed the French to the breaking point. Contrary to popular belief that the Somme was purely a reaction to Verdun, the battle had in fact been agreed upon as a joint Anglo-French battle in December , months before the German attack at Verdun changed the strategic dynamic of the Allied forces.
Although initially planned as another French-led battle, the Battle of the Somme became the first British-led effort. This was in large part due to the fact that the French forces were worn down in the fighting around Verdun. The only problem was that the British army, and its leader, Douglas Haig , did not feel ready to attack. Verdun was the longest battle on the Western Front in , but the Somme was the bloodiest; it sent nearly twice as many men to their graves in half the time as at Meuse Mill.
In many ways the Somme was the archetypal Western Front battle. Many of the persistent myths and stereotypes of the First World War come from the battle or are at least attributed to it. For many Britons, the war is symbolized by the Somme; it was a microcosm of the mud, blood and horror that the war is remembered for.
The battle, however, was never meant to be led by the British. Its initial form, roughly sketched out at the Chantilly Conference in , foresaw forty French divisions supported by twenty-five British. This version of the Battle of the Somme was quickly chewed up on the banks of the Meuse. By the time the battle actually began, the French contribution was a mere twelve divisions, and it was the British army that acted as the senior partner. This not only marked an important change in the relationship between the two allies Britain could thereafter rightfully demand more independence , but it was also a chance for the British army and its new commander-in-chief, Douglas Haig, to establish their reputations.
General Henry Rawlinson , at the head of British Fourth Army, had tactical command of the battle. Haig and Rawlinson viewed the goals at the Somme differently. Rawlinson sought to maximize the chance of success for his largely unbloodied forces. This meant lowering the expectations for what any one attack could accomplish and relying on firepower rather than manpower to overcome stiff enemy defences. The reasons for this are complicated, but are in large part due to the pressures of command at the strategic level.
If the Somme was a tactical success, if it could point to the capture of some notable town, ridge, hillock or village and was not too costly, he could justifiably consider his work to have been successful. For Haig, whose position meant tackling the often diametrically opposed demands of subordinate officers, superiors in Whitehall, and the strategic imperatives of his allies especially France , a minor tactical success could mean a strategic or political defeat.
If his allies or political masters felt he was not doing enough to further their strategic goals he could well find himself on the chopping block. This pressure often led strategic commanders to overreach the tactical capabilities of their armies.
At am on 1 July , some 55, French and British troops went over the top in the initial wave of the assault across a sixteen-mile front, signalling the start of the Battle of the Somme. In the southern sector French and British troops advanced rapidly, captured their objectives, and solidified their positions at minimal cost. To the north, British formations were mown down, capturing very little and sustaining heavy casualties. With concentrated machine gun fire, effective pre-sited artillery barrages, and barbed wire emplacements that were frequently still intact, the Germans in the northern part of the battlefield easily repulsed British attacks.
Forced to march over open terrain due to the communication trenches already clogged with the dead and dying, they made easy targets for German artillery and machine guns, which sometimes engaged British infantry at ranges of over half a mile. It is easy to understand why the First World War is seen as futile when recounting incidents like these. By the end of the day, British forces had suffered 56, casualties, including 19, dead.
Despite gains in the southern sector, the overall result fell crushingly short of the success Haig and Rawlinson had hoped for. The French, able to resume the attack the next day, eagerly did so. The British required time to recover physically, morally, and spiritually. Of course, the Battle of the Somme was far larger than the events of a single day. The French and British continued to attack vigorously through to December. All told the battle claimed around 1. The Somme set the stage for the string of impressive battlefield successes the army achieved in and Tanks were first used at Flers-Courcelette on 15 September , forever changing the face of warfare.
French troops twice broke through the German lines and for a brief moment found themselves with no immediate obstacles between their position in the fields of Picardy and Berlin. However, these local successes — the result of a relentless, methodical, operational hammering at the German lines — led to nought. If the Allies were to beat Imperial Germany, it was going to have to happen some other way.
If we take a step back and examine the whole of on the Western Front, the picture is somewhat mixed. Germany lost twice as many men on the Western Front in as it had in ; Britain lost several times more men than the size of the entire British Expeditionary Force in Despite these high casualty rates, neither side achieved their stated strategic objectives. The French and Germans suffered roughly equal casualties, and French morale was not broken. On the contrary, despite the heavy pressure at Verdun, the French were able to take part in the Battle of the Somme, eventually sending more men to fight there than Britain did over the course of the battle and inflicting far more casualties on the Germans than they suffered themselves.
These strategic shortcomings were not without their repercussions. Haig managed to survive through to the end of the war, but both Joffre and Falkenhayn lost their jobs. Joffre was promoted to a position in which he had no real authority over French operations the traditional way of gracefully moving a military commander out of the way.
In their places, Robert Nivelle took over for France Nivelle had risen to prominence after retaking Fort Douaumont in October , while the team of Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg took over for Germany. Faced with continued encirclement, a biting blockade and struggling allies, German war-leaders needed to knock at least one of the Great Powers out of the war as quickly as possible to stand any chance of even a conditional, negotiated victory. Hindenburg and Ludendorff chose to continue operations in the theater of war where they had earned their fame: the Eastern Front.
Russia was by far the weakest of the three major Entente powers and Germany had already pushed Russian forces deep into their own territory. Such an attack would require concentrated manpower from an already-overstretched German army. To help free up men for the coming offensives, Hindenburg and Ludendorff withdrew forces to the so-called Hindenburg Line Siegfriedstellung around the Noyon Salient in France in early This new line of fortifications both shortened the length of the frontage Germany had to man and was well protected by concrete bunkers and well-planned out defensive arrays.
These further economised on manpower and were quite difficult for the Entente powers to break through. In the short to medium term the Hindenburg Line solved a number of important strategic and tactical issues the Germans faced in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of the Somme. For the Allies, needed to be better than Haig wanted more than ever to have a truly independent hand in operations, and he sought to pursue independent battles in the British sector.
Before British battles had been part of broader French efforts and under some level of French strategic direction. Haig got his wish although not in the way he had hoped thanks to Robert Nivelle, under whose stewardship the morale of the French army finally cracked. Nivelle succeeded Joffre as commander-in-chief, in large part because of his highly optimistic view of the war. He was convinced that if the French made another successful push like they had on the Somme, the end of the war might be in sight.
He chose the Chemin des Dames as the area of attack. Experienced French and English instructors taught them about trench warfare at schools in the rear. Then the troops were sent to quiet sectors in the front lines to become familiar with conditions there. No matter how realistic their training was, nothing could have prepared the Americans for the devastation of the western front.
Four years of war had left the battlefront so churned up by shells and trenches that it looked like the surface of the moon. Poison gas had killed much of the vegetation. In Flanders, Belgium, where the 30th Division fought, the land was flat and low, and the trenches were often knee deep in water.
When it was rainy, a wounded man might drown in the mud. By , the western front trenches ran in a four-hundred-mile line through France and Belgium from the North Sea to the Alps. Each set of trenches consisted of several lines: a main line and up to four lines behind it. The trenches were usually about four feet wide and about eight feet deep, but in some places they were much shallower. Soldiers reinforced the sides with sandbags, bundles of sticks or logs, or sheet metal. All trenches were dug in a zigzag pattern.
The section facing the enemy line was known as a fire trench. The zigzags, intended to keep shell fragments from spreading very far, were called traverses. All along the line were strong points, sometimes built of concrete, where machine guns were placed. Short trenches, or saps, extended about thirty feet toward the enemy line. These led to listening posts where sentries could listen for enemy troops sneaking up at night. All across the front, fifty feet of barbed wire entanglements protected the trench.
The line trenches were connected by zigzag communication trenches. Every night, small groups made the difficult journey along these trenches to the rear for supplies. The network of trenches could be very confusing, especially in the dark. For this reason, all trenches had names or numbers, and maps showed every intersection, fire trench, dugout, and wire belt.
The Germans had had four years to improve their trenches. By , their line was made up of concrete-reinforced bunkers, often several stories below ground, with electric lights and elaborate barracks. Their positions had been chosen carefully, and they were defended by machine guns, barbed wire, and artillery.
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