What could generals have done prior to the invention of the tank that would turn the war back into a war of motion like summer 1914? Or was attrition genuinely the only thing that could have worked given what was at their disposal?
Really, the generals in WWI were not stupid. They weren't fighting in the trenches because they liked it, or because they lacked imagination or the capacity to adapt to innovation. Quite the opposite in fact, as John Terraine sets out in White Heat, the pace of technological change and tactical innovation in WWI was unprecedented either before or since.
And indeed, its wrong to suggest that tanks were the reason the deadlock was finally broken. As I have set out here, tanks in WWI were largely ineffective.
The reason that the deadlock could finally be broken was mainly due to advance in artillery.
It was artillery that caused the formation of the trenches in the first place. As Erwin Rommel makes clear in Infantry Attacks, once an attacking force had gained an objective, they had immediately to dig themselves in as deeply as possible if they wished to remain there alive in the face of the ensuing retaliatory bombardment. The other options were to run away or to stay there dead.
The main problem facing the generals was that the trench fortifications were very hard to demolish with artillery as it was in the first half of the war, and they were impossible to assault without an artillery preparation of almost unimaginable scale to demolish trenches and cut the wire.
At the beginning of the war, artillery would unlimber on a hill over here and fire using direct line of sight on the enemy on the hill over there. Pretty much in the same way artillery had operated for a long old time, although their breach-loaded recuperating weapons were incomparably more lethal. The big problem with this is that your guns are themselves vulnerable. So better to site your guns behind the hill and shoot over it, in whats known as indirect fire. Essentially you place your guns in defilade and rely on spotters to report and adjust your fall of shot. Now it’s important to note that WWI wasn’t the first time indirect fire was used. It had been used before in the Anglo-Boer and Russo-Japanese wars to great effect but WWI was the first time it was used on a massive scale by all combatants.
You can take this one step further and for each gun, fire a number of rounds at different elevations and see where they fall. Once you have done this, you will have a fair idea of what coordinates to dial in to hit a specific location on map. This is called registering fire.
The main problem is that if you are using a very large number of guns, its going to take a very long time to register them all. For example, at Loos, the British spent 3 weeks - Three. Whole. Weeks. - registering their guns. And since being shelled is hardly an exercise in the inconspicuous, the enemy are pretty well bound to notice that something bad is going to happen sometime soon in that particular area.
This was an utterly massive problem because it meant that achieving any level of tactical surprise was impossible. The enemy was given plenty of notice - sometimes a month or more - to move up reinforcements to shut down any potential break-ins.
Then came the advent of predicted fire. This meant calibrating each individual gun and each batch of ammunition. Very detailed maps accounting for elevations and depressions were compiled and complex tables of data involving wind-speed, humidity, and temperature were used to compute, with incredible accuracy, exactly what coordinates to dial into a specific gun in a specific location to hit any specified spot on the map. And so finally a degree of tactical surprise could be achieved. Concurrent with the use of predicted fire was the adoption of ‘hurricane bombardments’ which is to say a very highconcentration of guns firing a very intense bombardment over a short period of time.
For example, at the Somme, the BEF bombardment lasted for 8 days but with relatively few guns per mile of front. For Op Michael, the German bombardment lasted for 5 hours and fired almost 200 shells a second, and at Amiens the BEF bombardment lasted just 45 minutes, the shock being so complete, the Germans did not return fire for a full five minutes after the attackers had left their jumping off points.
Additionally we have the development of counter-battery fire. This involved identifying enemy batteries and suppressing them.
One way of doing this was Flash Spotting. This involved several observers recording the azimuth of a gun flash. The azimuths were plotted as lines on a map and where the lines intersected, was the location of the enemy gun. Sound ranging did a similar thing but with microphones being used to triangulate the enemy guns rather than the flash. These techniques meant that the vast majority of enemy batteries could be identified, and at the moment of attack, suppressed or annihilated. A particularly effective technique against German artillery who tended not to have secondary locations for their batteries.
This is still a gross over-simplification of the application of artillery in WWI, but the point is that by late 1917, trench systems were no longer the un-breachable obstacles they had been. They could be smashed in and smashed through at will and without warning.
The rub is that the generals couldn't pull these technological innovations out of their arses by the spring of 1915. The methods and technologies involved took years to come to fruition. There is simply no way it could have occurred earlier without the benefit of crystal balls to see into the future.
What could generals have done prior to the invention of the tank that would turn the war back into a war of motion like summer 1914? Or was attrition genuinely the only thing that could have worked given what was at their disposal?
^ the answer on the Eastern Front should help in terms of why mobile warfare was feasible elsewhere but not in the West. The one about tanks should address their role in the war in the west.
Until either side could build up a significant mass of forces, adequately supported both in terms of logistical support (supplies of ammo, transport, rail an road networks to the front) and terms of firepower (operationally with artillery, tactically with machine guns, mortars, hand grenades, and the training to utilize them effectively), no. The density of forces on the Western Front was an average 2-3.5 rifles per yard of trench in the West; during 3rd Ypres in 1917, the German concentration of forces opposite the British was c. 7 per yard of front. Neither the British, French or German armies possessed sufficient reserves to attain enough mass to breakthrough. Together, the British and French might have tried to breakthrough in 1916 on the Somme, but the Verdun campaign reduced French forces and made this unfeasible. They might have also tried in 1917, but the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line freed up more reserves, while Nivelle's plan for a breakthrough was unfeasible, and it's failure ensured that the Germans could focus their forces in the West solely on preventing the British from forcing a German withdrawal from the Belgian coast.
The Germans achieved a 'breakthrough' in March 1918 thanks to the substantial mass of forces they were able to attain by the Bolshevik withdrawal from the war. Even still, although the British retreat was often chaotic, they were able to wage rearguard actions which bloodied the Germans.
The Allies were able to sustain their offensives from Summer 1918 onwards thank to the superb logistical network that the British and French had developed, but this was the result of those previous years. The French and British were able to carry out broad front, 'Methodical Battle'-type advances all along the line (Foch's Bataille General) largely thanks to the American divisions arriving in Europe, which freed up the French and British divisions in the Allied Reserve for use in offensives, and by shortening the amount of line the French Army and the BEF had to hold, due to the presence of the AEF in the Allied lines. But of course, the US did not join he war until 1917, and it's forces were not ready until summer the following year. With now three major armies, each with sufficient reserves and firepower to carry out attacks, the Allied armies could sustain multiple major set-piece operations, which steadily ground down the German Army.
In this respect, the Allies never technically achieved a breakthrough, as this was not their aim. Rather than punch a hole in one area and rush through into the German rear, a series of coordinated attacks wore down German manpower and morale (already weakened by the attrition of the previous months and years) until the German Army was facing an impending collapse along a broad front, rather than in one sector. By November 5th, with the Allied armies in the North nearing the Scheldt River, the Westheer was disintegrating.
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