Was there a big difference between how ww1 was fought on the Western front beetween 1914 and 1918?

by Profitsloth

After the battle of The marne the germans dug down and trench warfare began. But with the introduction of land ships, stormtroops and sub machine did the way of fighting change? Eg it became more mobile.

DuxBelisarius

But with the introduction of land ships, stormtroops and sub machine did the way of fighting change?

For one thing, none of these factors really contributed to the conduct of comparatively more mobile operations in 1918. The only SMG to see significant use on the Western Front was the Bergmann MP-18, and only about 15 000 of those were produced before the Armistice. By 1918, the British and French could technically boast tank forces of c. 1000 and c. 3-4000 respectively, but these had short ranges, mechanical reliability problems, and low speeds (even the Whippet and Renault FT-17 weren't that much faster than the Mk. V). Moreover, the Germans conducted their quite mobile offensive operations in spring and early summer 1918, without any significant tank support whatsoever. Finally, "storm troop" tactics had developed in their earliest form in the French and German armies in early 1915, and were finally being applied in significant strength by 1917, but these alone were not sufficient to significantly increase the tempo of operations in 1917.

In reality, looking at the 'Hundred Days Offensives' (more like 124 days, but English-speaking historians tended not to count the Second Battle of the Marne as the beginning), it took almost 4 months for the Western Allies to push the Germans back almost 100 kms. As Jonathan Boff and David Kenyon have noted regarding 1918, in their work on 3rd Army in 1918 and the British Cavalry respectively, most engagements were of a shallow depth, between 1000 and 3000 yards, and primarily involved infantry-artillery-air cooperation. Gas, Tanks and Cavalry did see significant use in major set-piece operations, like 2nd Marne, Amiens/Noyon-Didier and the Battle of the Hindenburg Line, but neither tanks nor cavalry were available in sufficient strength to increase the tempo of every assault and create the opportunity for a true return on mobile warfare, which was largely confined in 1918 to brief spells of the first German offensives (Michael, Georgette and Gneisenau) and the period of the end of October to November 11th, which saw the French 2nd Cavalry Corps get behind the Germans in Flanders, and the British Cavalry Corps do the same near the Scheldt. The French 1st Cavalry Corps was awaiting a similar mission for the Franco-American offensive in Alsace-Lorraine, but this was scrubbed by the Armistice.

The Offensives of both the Germans AND the Western Allies owed much to both sides possessing significant reserves of manpower and the logistical support to back them up, at least to a point. The Allies had American divisions arriving, which took up space on the frontline and in the Inter-Allied Reserve that in turn made French and British divisions available, while the Germans had the arrival of almost 50 divisions from Eastern Europe, which in turn provided immediate reserves or allowed for better divisions to be released from elsewhere. The Germans committed their divisions immediately to costly offensives on (comparatively) narrow fronts, whereas once the Germans had been halted, the Allies were able to commit to a series of set-piece operations along a wide front, which steadily overwhelmed the German defense system (which itself was only a modified form of the elastic defense-in-depth used in 1917).

The fighting in 1914 was actually far more mobile and fluid than in 1918, but the casualties were significantly higher, logistical support and communications for the armies was much less well developed, and the firepower both sides possessed was not as great as it would be in the final year of the war.

WildeWeasel

u/DuxBelisarius has answered at length some aspects and is more knowledgeable than I am on the matter, so I'll talk to another.

The Germans shifted their tactics during the Spring 1918 offensive to what could be seen as more mobile, although temporarily. Their main tactical shift was the use of the stormtroopers to bypass hardened defenses in order to wreak havoc in the Allied rear, hitting communications, supplies, and artillery. The oncoming larger infantry forces behind the stormtroopers would mop up any defenses they had passed. However, their success was also bad for the capability of the German army. Being at the fore of the charge, the stormtroopers suffered disproportionately higher casualties. By moving their best soldiers from the regular army into elite stromtrooper units, the Germans whittled away their best soldiers while making gains. The 1918 Spring Offensive gave the Germans their deepest gains since 1914, but they'd lost quality, irreplaceable troops. The Allies could replace their losses and counterattacked, while the Germans could not replace their most experienced men lost from the spring. Some historians think the inter war German commanders took from the brief tactical success of the stormtroopers and designed the blitzkrieg operations to open WW2 from it.