[HN Gopher] Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
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Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
Author : cassepipe
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-09-18 08:45 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
| dustintrex wrote:
| One random omission from the no man's lands in both _Wonder
| Woman_ and this blog: dead bodies. The mortality rates for
| frontal assaults were incredibly high, and there was no way to
| collect the bodies of the dead, so the corpses would just rot and
| in a year or two you 'd have skeletons all over the place.
| h2odragon wrote:
| "the corpses would just rot" ... glosses over a lot. Not
| objecting, but I can't help dwell on the thought some.
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| That was shown pretty realistically in the "1917" movie.
| wffurr wrote:
| And in the Tolkien movie.
| billfruit wrote:
| Perhaps a better description of the same can be found in
| 'Goodbye to All That'. I don't have a copy at hand, but I
| remember it having detailed description of the trenches.
| cassepipe wrote:
| I think that this movie showed, besides showing the germans
| as barbaric/unloyal (they rescue a german pilot that ends
| stabbing one of them) missed a lot of what made WWI, WWI. The
| images are beautiful but WWI seems to only provide a backdrop
| for a save-private-ryan story. I recommend the not very well
| known Kubrick's Paths of Glory (with Kirk Douglas!) instead
| billfruit wrote:
| Yes, also the single take gimmick in "1917" was needlessly
| restrictive. It sort of prevented the camera from freely
| looking at the scene, by the need to have the principal
| character always in view.
|
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Excellent discussion here. I find Quora to be even better for
| this sort of thing. Almost anything you want to ask, multiple
| people have already asked it and elicited lengthy, erudite
| answers from people who know what they're talking about.
|
| 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_.
| bloopernova wrote:
| What was the top speed of tanks towards the end of WW1? Did it
| improve much from the 1 to 3mph I've read from some quick
| Googling?
|
| 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.
| cageface wrote:
| I thought the Great War by Peter Hart did a good job of telling
| the story of the rapid advances in weaponry and tactics over
| the course of the war. It's grim but fascinating reading.
|
| https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-great-war-by-pe...
| walshemj wrote:
| The whippet was around 8MPH and the tanks for plan 1919 where
| designed for 15-20
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| On your first question the major problem was not necessarily
| speed, which did improve a bit for example the French Renault
| FT could make a bit over 4mph, but instead endurance. They were
| never able to solve the range and reliability problem given the
| technology at the time. This meant that even light tanks like
| the FT only had an operational range of about 40 miles.
| Breakdown rates were also incredibly high, and during the final
| offensives of the war in 1918 the British rapidly ran into a
| situation where they had to deemphasize the use of tanks simply
| because they did not have enough that were running.
|
| 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
| bloopernova wrote:
| WOW, thank you! I honestly didn't expect more than a snarky
| link to Wikipedia or something. Do you have a favourite
| charity? I'd like to say thanks by donating a few bucks to
| them, if that's OK with you?
| sakex wrote:
| Great read thank you. I can't wait for next part
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| I like this article a lot. Attacks a lot of popular myths about
| the war (maybe a bit too much strawmannirg but it is just a blog)
| and also their representations in pop culture. However, I think,
| while being really close to being correct does not quite take
| things far enough. The article blames the trench stalemates of
| the war on artillery, but that is just another symptom and not
| the cause, and the author comes so close to it with this:
|
| "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.
| ninja3925 wrote:
| Great comment! After reading this, you may wonder: why didn't
| the armies try to bomb railroads to prevent reinforcement from
| being rushed to the front? It turns out, they tried very hard
| but the technology was just too rudimentary. The French made a
| bombing units of Voisins bombers but they could only carry
| light payload (130lbs for the Voisin 3). The Brits got the
| Handley in 1916, which was bigger and quite successful (this
| doc has a ton of details on British bombing: https://www.airuni
| versity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_...). If you squint
| hard enough, you can start seeing the emergence of patterns of
| WW2 warfare by the end of WW1. Fascinating.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Also, rudimentary repairs of damaged/destroyed rails are
| relatively fast. Proper rail construction is slow, but if
| you're just aiming at something that a train can just slowly
| pass through, and doesn't need to last years, you can get
| away with much more.
| choeger wrote:
| While that article rightfully points to the operational
| advantages of the defender (coordinated counter attacks with
| unhindered artillery support) it leaves out some of the options
| that could have changed the situation: Air force, tanks, and
| motorization.
|
| 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 Kradschutzen) 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.
| Tyr42 wrote:
| I do agree, but he does call it out as "part 1" and he is going
| to discuss the options that could have changed the situation
| next week.
|
| > 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.
| 7sidedmarble wrote:
| This is not only the territory of dubiously useful
| counterfactuals, but also doesn't square with the actual
| history of the day.
|
| 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.
| WesleyLivesay wrote:
| This is a great response. I often describe this as the 'video
| game tech tree' problem. It is very easy to know where to put
| time/resources when you know what the next step of the tech
| tree is and how it will help solve problems. At the time it
| is far more difficult to know which of the many possible
| options will result in a tool/outcome that will be the
| solution to the current problems.
| choeger wrote:
| This has nothing to do with contemporary officers being
| incompetent or illogical (Although precisely this kind of
| officers seems to exist in each war. At least at the
| beginning...)
|
| 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.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I am no expert on air warfare either, but, in support of your
| arguments here, I think it is worth pointing out that in the
| early years of WWII, despite the much-advanced air-warfare
| technology, neither Germany's bombing of Britain nor
| Britain's bombing of Germany had the effectiveness that was
| expected. It is true that Germany made effective use of
| airplanes in its early invasions, but it did not save them at
| Stalingrad or Kursk.
|
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| In the interwar period, many leading air power theorists
| were of the opinion that an unrestricted bombing campaign
| of your enemy's cities would cause them to collapse in a
| matter of weeks [1].
|
| 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._
| choeger wrote:
| You should read up on modern (not Soviet) accounts of the
| battle of Kursk. The effect of the Luftwaffe was huge.
| mannykannot wrote:
| As it failed to stop the Red Army's advance to and into
| Germany, that is beside the point here.
|
| 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!
| choeger wrote:
| You really ought to read up on the matter. Kursk was, on
| the onset, impossible odds. Yet the Wehrmacht inflicted
| _massive_ casualties with relatively small own losses. If
| I am not mistaken, the level of destruction was not
| reached on a battlefield again until the first US-Iraq
| war. Of course the German offensive didn 't succeed, but
| the Russian counter offensive didn't, either. The whole
| thing was a total strategic Soviet success, but
| operationally and tactically it demonstrated the value of
| a mechanized, combined-arms firepower doctrine.
| mannykannot wrote:
| And why ought I read up on the matter? Am I going to find
| out, contrary to what I have been led to believe, that
| the Germans' mastery of a mechanized, combined-arms
| firepower doctrine saved them from the Red Army?
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