Firstly we need to understand why the deadlock happened

• The Western Front is quite constricted. The theatre of operations only stretches from Ypres to Verdun, and advances in logistics, canned food, medicine and hygiene meant that million man armies could be deployed en masse and kept in the field indefinitely. Thus, in a small area, there were anything up to 8 million men at arms facing each other. Enough to make for a continuous and uninterrupted siege defence with no flanks, meaning any assault had to be frontal.

• The lethality of artillery had increased dramatically since the Franco-Prussian war. The French 75mm field gun could fire as fast as a bolt action rifle. A battery could saturate a 4,000 square meter area with 75,000 shrapnel balls every minute meaning that if you wanted to hold a piece of ground and stay alive, you had to dig in, otherwise you would hold it dead.

• Barbed wire effectively shut out cavalry, the traditional arm of exploitation and pursuit. While shrapnel firing field artillery was very good at killing men in the open, at the start of the war, it was very bad at cutting barbed wire and destroying fortifications, meaning huge numbers of guns were required for any assault which could consume literally millions of rounds of ammunition in a matter of hours. The logistical challenge for the attacker was thus exponentially greater than the defender – the former would have to move everything forward with no roads or railways, while the defender could reinforce on interior lines. One further issue with artillery was that it took a long time to get the guns sighted in – the process of registering each gun gave the enemy plenty of notice of what was occurring, robbing the attacker of the element of surprise.

• Lack of command, control, and coordination. Without radios, it was impossible for a General to find out what was happening in the attack. Reports would come in via runners, gallopers, carrier pigeons and whatever telegraph cables hadn’t been cut by artillery fire. The General had to make sense of a series of inaccurate, and often contradictory reports all of which were out of date by the time they were received. And once received, the difficulty in communicating new instructions to the front was almost insuperable. Attacks therefore had to be made strictly according to a carefully timetabled and choreographed plan, with any variation spelling disaster. Of course, after the initial attack, everything would go pear shaped. No plan survives first contact hence the law of diminishing returns. However successful the first stages of the attack, subsequent operations would degenerate into a series of expensive attritional slug-fests.

The history of the western front was therefore the history of how the armies attempted to overcome these problems.

One of the options favoured by the British was to take the ‘indirect approach’ and circumvent the western front by opening a new front elsewhere. Hence the campaigns in Salerno and Gallipoli. Both of which achieved little except the diversion of precious resources at huge cost in blood, treasure, and national prestige. The problems of the western front simply reappeared on the new fronts, but with exponentially worse logistical problems.

Extensive plans were also made to stage amphibious landings in Belgium to outflank the front (particularly as part of Third Ypres) but these plans never came to fruition.

The deadlock was eventually broken by tactical and technological innovations including but not limited to

• High explosive was better at wire cutting than shrapnel, so production was switched to more HE.
• More heavy guns were deployed to better destroy fortifications.
• Instantaneous fuses improved the wire cutting potential of HE.
• Flash spotting and sound ranging were developed to locate enemy batteries which could then be destroyed or neutralised
• Improvements in the ability of artillery to hit targets without registering fall of shot meant that bombardments could be shorter, more effective, and consume far less ammunition.
• Creeping barrages - attacking infantry would advance immediately behind a curtain of artillery shells which would suppress the enemy until the attacking infantry were literally on top of them.
• Better infantry/artillery cooperation through the use of SOS flares to target any holdups or enemy strongpoints, or retard or advance the barrage.
• Aerial spotting. Aircraft equipped with radio transmitters could observe the battlefield and communicate with artillery to better coordinate the attack.
• Tanks were useful in the initial stages of attacks, though they quickly broke down or were destroyed.
• Combat Air Support – the use of aircraft to directly support the attack using bombs and machine guns.
• Improvements in infantry firepower including the use of squad automatic weapons, hand grenades, rifle grenades and the Stokes mortar.
• Devolution of tactics to the platoon level to allow for small unit flexibility to overcome enemy strong points.

Probably more important than any of the above though was the vastly improved staff work and logistics capabilities that allowed the entente armies to switch the axis of attack in a matter of days, and open a new battle in a new sector without getting bogged down in a series of expensive attritional slug-fests.

Though the problem of command control and communication was never adequately solved – it would take the invention of the man-portable radio to do that – all of these innovations combined meant that enough momentum could be sustained to keep the defender permanently off-balance and constantly reacting to the latest crisis. A style of operations that could be called ‘rolling attrition’ which would eventually lead to victory.