Just finished listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, The Blueprint for Armageddon, and can’t believe the sheer waste of lives most of it was. Seriously, trying to storm a fortified machine gun position like it’s a medieval castle is insanity. So, my question is, had one side (let’s say Germany because they lost the war) implemented somewhat modern small unit tactics throughout the conflict, how would that have changed the course of the war?
I understand that radio comms play a huge role in today’s unit maneuvers and it was in its infancy at the time, as were aircraft and other vehicles. But could a modern approach to tactics really have made much of a difference in the end?
Okay...there are a lot of misconceptions about the Western Front in WW1, and the fact that the "Lions led by donkeys" thesis remains prevalent in popular history doesn't help that (in fact, that idea was debunked decades ago in professional historical circles).
So, the first thing you need to understand is that the trench war was the worst-case scenario that any of the planners could have imagined (and, in military journals, they were trying to figure out how to deal with it since 1905, when they witnessed it in the Russo-Japanese War). And, until late 1917, anything more than a break-in to the lines was a physical impossibility.
Here is a picture of what they actually looked like: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Aerial_view_Loos-Hulluch_trench_system_July_1917.jpg (the British lines are on the left). Between those trenches is barbed wire - and I'm talking about this: https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/149604018855112449/
Breaking in was relatively easy - the problem was translating that into a breakthrough. It could take several hours to send back word that a break-in had happened and get the necessary materiel moved up to the front line and across no-man's land...and by then, the enemy would have retaken and refortified the position. Early efforts to use telephone lines for quick communication were aborted fairly quickly - not only was there a problem of soldiers in the trenches clotheslining themselves on telephone lines improperly installed, but the need to bury them underground where artillery impacts couldn't reach them allowed the Germans to listen in to the vibrations and hear every call (and the signals corps discovered this when German troops started greeting incoming British units by name).
So, that was the tactical problem. But, there was a logistic problem as well - in 1915, the British army swelled from a small professional force to an army of millions of men. It takes around two years to fully train a soldier. So, when the Battle of the Somme starts in 1916, a lot of the units going over the top were only halfway through their training. They weren't ready for combined arms tactics.
That said, this doesn't mean that combined arms tactics weren't being used by the professional army in August 1914. The British cavalry, who contrary to popular image were actually the early adapters of the British army, used combined arms tactics to soften up enemy positions before driving the soldiers from them with a cavalry charge - they were so good at this that in 30 engagements, they lost ONCE (and it was the one time they didn't have a chance to set up their normal combined arms tactics). As you might be able to guess, my MA thesis was on the British cavalry and its doctrine.
Now, the British (unlike the French, Germans, and Americans) were well aware of this problem, and did a lot to mitigate it. If you were a British infantryman, you would spend between 4-7 days on the front lines per month. After that time, you would be rotated out to support positions, training, and leave. As a result, they had far fewer problems with personnel than the other armies, which in some cases suffered full-on mutinies from exhausted soldiers.
By 1917, the British army is using combined arms tactics, some of which were truly sophisticated. Trench raids, for example, would use artillery to first clear a section of the enemy front line, and then create a box around it, preventing enemy soldiers from returning and re-fortifying. The Canadian Corps used the German doctrine of always counter-attacking against them in "bite and hold" tactics - they would take a part of the German front line, fortify it, wipe out the German counter-attack, and repeat.
So, by 1917 the human wave tactics are basically a thing of the past. What is left are fully trained armies using squad and combined-arms tactics. The biggest problem wasn't that a modern approach to tactics wasn't being used - it WAS. The problem was that the trenches provided a nigh-unsolvable tactical dilemma that made progress by either side impossible, no matter what they did.
If you want a good book on this, I would suggest Gordon Corrigan's Mud, Blood, and Poppycock - it dispels a lot of the myths of the WW1 Western Front.
