Many WWI battles to me seem to be characterized by the use of: (i) tactics which generally seem to place almost no value on human life (e.g., massive human wave attacks, trench warfare, sitting in trenches waiting to be gassed or blown up by walking artillery fire, etc.) by (ii) generals who seemed to be content with trying the same failed strategy/tactic over and over again hoping for a different result (i.e., little emphasis was placed on innovation or creativity, and it seems like there was a general agreement that the only way to win the war was to simply send more young men into the meat grinder than the other side).
I've posted a different version of this question on /r/HistoricalWhatIf asking how WWI would have been different if one side had WWII generals with knowledge of WWII tactics. But my question here is more about the mindset of the high-level strategic decision-makers, level of development of military technology (and the level of understanding of the capabilities of these technologies by such decision-makers), and why things turned out the way they did.
I can think of a few possible explanations for the high casualty numbers during The Battle of the Somme and other major battles during WWI (and would love to be corrected if I'm wrong). First, it's possible that the generals and other high-level decision-makers were simply closed minded and more concerned about their social standing than they were about preserving the lives of their men and military success, which led to a general skepticism towards trying new tactics and a general reluctance to entertain creative ideas or embrace technological developments to their fullest. One example of this kind of behavior that I can think of was the pushback against the deployment of the earliest tanks by generals/officers in charge of cavalry units who didn't want to see their elite units become obsolete.
Second, the fact that many of these pieces of modern military technology were in their infancy (e.g., tanks, planes, etc.) may have meant that the proper tactics (e.g., combined arms tactics) to take full advantage of what were, at the time, cutting-edge developments simply did not exist yet. So it wasn't that the generals were hard-headed, egotistical, and didn't care about their men, it's that they didn't know how to use these new fangled pieces of technology.
Finally, it's possible that there really wasn't a better way to fight these battles at the time. Maybe trench warfare and human wave attacks really were the only viable option given the circumstances. And although the precursors to modern military technology were around, perhaps they hadn't reached a sufficient level of development/reliability for modern tactics to be utilized, or perhaps more time was needed to refine the tactics to achieve the sort of results we saw in WWII.
I'm guessing that the answer is likely some combination of all of the above, but would love if someone with more knowledge about the topic could give a more concrete answer about what was actually going on behind the scenes. Thanks!
OK. So the first thing you have wrong is thinking that the casualty rates in the Great War were somehow anomalously high.
Wars are incredibly devastating and brutal things. This is a simple truth and I find it somewhat odd that people think the Great War was somehow an anomaly in this regard. To quote John Terraine in The Smoke and The Fire
No one questions the Duke of Marlborough's claim to be considered a 'great captain' - despite the fearful losses of Malplaquet. The Duke of Wellington, in Spain and at Waterloo, presided over scenes of awful carnage -bad enough at Waterloo to bring tears to his eyes. Many of Napoleon's battles were sheer blood-baths. General Robert E. Lee, often considered an outstanding military genius, never hesitated to accept heavy casualties in the pursuit of victory. The Soviet marshals of 1939-45 were undismayed by the veritable massacre of their men in the same quest - but nobody hounds their memories as the generals of the Great War have been hounded.
The actual casualty rates of WWI were unremarkable. They were equalled and exceeded before and have been equalled and exceeded regularly since. Even the casualty numbers, in absolute terms, were easily exceeded by the second war.
Its simply a matter of perception, particularly in the English speaking world, that the Great War was somehow unique in its horror and carnage, and that's simply because it was the war in which the English speaking people played the largest role - that of engaging and defeating the main body of the main enemy on the main front of a general war, and therefore paid a price commensurate with that role.
The second thing to note is that “little emphasis was placed on innovation or creativity” is fundamentally not the case, on the contrary, the war saw innovation at a pace and scale not seen before or since.
A few of these are listed below:
The war saw the rise and demise of the airship as a strategic bomber, the invention of the incendiary round and the development of systematic air defences including searchlights and anti-aircraft guns.
* The war started with the largest armies having a handful of fragile aircraft suitable only for reconnaissance and ended with specialized strategic bombers, air superiority fighters, close air support machines, and reconnaissance aircraft equipped with cameras and radios, as well as the first instances of aerial re-supply to keep the momentum of an attack going.
* The creation of the world's first independent airforces
* The introduction of flamethrowers and chemical weapons, as well as the development of effective countermeasures.
* The development of the aircraft carrier, and the first widespread use of submarines for economic warfare.
* The invention of the tank and armoured warfare, and the first widespread use of motorised logistics.
* The implementation of squad automatic weapons. 1914 saw the British army with 2 machine guns per battalion. By 1918 these had been centralised into a Machine Gun Corps to able to provide direct and indirect fire, while platoons had up to two machine guns each.
* The invention of the hand grenade and rifle grenades in the format we now them.
* The invention of the mortar, in pretty much the same shape and form it exists today.
* Electronic and signals warfare, as well as the implementation of electronic countermeasures.
* The development of instantaneous artillery fuses, the ability to fire 'off map' without prior registration of the guns, flash-spotting and sound-ranging to identify and then suppress enemy batteries.
* The use of creeping barrages and box-barrages to suppress the enemy until the advancing infantry were on top of them, and to smash-up counterattacks; and 'Chinese-barrages' to tempt the enemy into exposing himself in the belief an attack was imminent.
* The implementation of all the above into a thoroughly modern doctrine of combined-arms warfare, with the effective administration of some of the largest organisations ever seen in human history up to that point.
There are of course a lot more innovations, far too many to list here, but the point is that these innovations didn’t happen by osmosis so the stereotype of the luddite cavalry General is not true.
There was indeed no “pushback against the deployment of the earliest tanks by generals/officers in charge of cavalry units who didn't want to see their elite units become obsolete” As a case in point, Haig (a cavalry man) eagerly pushed for the use of tanks for the first time ever on the 15th September 1916, and then just days later sent an emissary to London to demand one thousand more
It was never the case that the Generals didn't like tanks. It was just that they could never have enough of them, and the ones they did have simply did not have the capabilities of WWII tanks. The same applies to aircraft.
In short, the Great War was neither particularly long, nor particularly lethal and saw the development of modern combined arms warfare