The Western Front in WW1 is defined in historical memory by trench warfare,
where the front lines barely moved for nearly 3 years and millions of men struggled in the
muddy and bloody network of trenches and wire that stretched for hundreds of kilometers.
But in August 1914, the war didn’t start in the trenches, as armies clashed in the open
and tried to outmaneuver each other in mobile warfare. So why exactly did trench warfare begin?
When the First World War began in summer 1914, both Germany and France envisioned
sweeping offensives that would see their massive armies surround and crush their
enemies in the field. But after just weeks of fighting and maneuvering in the open,
mobile warfare all but disappeared until 1918,
replaced by a grinding positional war based on dense and deep networks of trenches and dugouts.
Now, trenches were not unknown before 1914 – in fact they’d been used since antiquity and
even more in more recent conflicts like the Crimean War, US Civil War,
Boer War, and Russo-Japanese War. But the network of trenches that the French,
British and German armies dug in 1914 was unprecedented in its scale, complexity,
and resistance to attacking forces. So why exactly did trench warfare begin in 1914?
Both France and Germany had ambitious plans for mobile war in 1914, and part of the reason trench
warfare began is because these plans failed. The German Schlieffen Plan envisioned a quick German
victory over France in the west, before moving east to deal with a slow-mobilizing Russia.
Most of the German army was to move through Belgium, into France and pass west of Paris,
enveloping French forces and crushing them against the Franco-German border. But at first,
the French didn’t realise this. Instead, they tried to act on their own war plan,
Plan XVII. This offensive would see most of the French army smash straight through the
Franco-German border and into Germany, sweeping the enemy before it. Both of these war plans were
about mobile warfare and decisive battles – and both of them failed in August and September 1914.
in Alsace and Lorraine stopped French attacks and inflicted extremely heavy losses – on
August 22 alone, more than 20,000 Frenchmen were killed. As Plan XVII was failing spectacularly in
the Battle of the Frontiers, French commanders also realized the massive threat to the north.
The German army had numerical superiority on its right wing, and pushed French and British
troops out of Belgium before closing on Paris. The French though, were able to
shift their forces to face the new danger, and defeated the Germans at the Battle of the Marne.
Once the initial war plans failed, both sides tried to outflank the other in what became
misleadingly known as the Race to the Sea. Even as the armies were sending forces further north,
the front lines began to harden. By October 1914, a network of trenches stretched nearly
unbroken from the Swiss border to the Channel, a front line that would only
deepen over the next three years. Mobile warfare lasted just three months in 1914,
to be replaced by trench warf are once the grand offensives failed. Why those offensives failed,
and why new offensives had little chance to break the deadlock, explain why trench warfare began.
The arms industry developed deadly new technologies in the years leading up to 1914,
and when these new weapons were used on a mass scale for the first time,
the results were devastating. So devastating that they helped force entire armies to take
shelter in trenches. The weapons of 1914 made the open battlefield far
more deadly than the last European great power wars in 1870 or 1866.
The deadliest weapon of all was artillery. The French 75mm was considered the best
field gun in the world, and rightly so: thanks to its hydraulic brake system,
it could fire in bursts of 15-30 rounds per minute for a limited time, as opposed to about
5 rounds per minute for the Prussian C64 field gun of 1870. 1914 field guns had ranges of 7
to 11,000m – far beyond the 3500m of 1870. And the Germans especially had heavy artillery that
could fire even heavier shells even farther. The shells these modern guns fired were also
more powerful than in previous wars, thanks to advances in chemical explosives like melinite.
Small arms had also become more deadly. British Lee-Enfield, German Mauser and French Lebel
rifles all had superior ranges and rates of fire thanks to smokeless powder multi-round clips – up
to 15 rounds a minute per rifle. Modern machine guns like the Maxim, Vickers, St Etienne could
fire 500 bullets every minute, 5 times as many as the multi-barrelled mitrailleuse of 1870.
Military experts knew of these developments before the war. They observed it on a smaller scale,
like in the Russo-Japanese War, and noted it in their field manuals:
“Bullets can still kill a man at 2000m. At ordinary ranges,
they go through several men.” (Legrand-Girarde and Plessis 21)
What the generals were not sure of was how this would influence
fighting – would it help attackers or defenders? A few theorists thought it
might lead to a defensive stalemate, while others, especially in France,
felt that a vigorous attacking spirit would prevail as it had for the Japanese in some
battles in 1904-05. French Captain Billard was a supporter of the attacking spirit in 1913:
“War is not so much about capability as it is about courage; science will always yield
to devotion and firmness. Above all else, every trooper must be inculcated with this
spirit of ultimate sacrifice which will later reveal itself in the offensive.” (Loez 95)
However, events in August and September showed the new weapons made attacking in
the open a deadly business, as French officer Charles de Gaulle experienced first-hand:
“Suddenly the enemy’s fire became precise and concentrated. Second by second the hail of bullets
and the thunder of the shells grew stronger. Those who survived lay flat on the ground,
amid the screaming wounded and the humble corpses. In an instant it had become clear
that not all the courage in the world could withstand this fire.” (Hart 50)
While the armies fought in the open, men died in droves. After just 5 months of
fighting in the West, France had lost 265,000 dead, Germany about 85,000,
and Britain about 30,000 from its much smaller army – and most of these were
lost in August and September, before trench warfare began. (Stevenson 92-93)
These losses were proportionally heavier than any other year of the war, and unsustainable. The only
escape was the relative safety of the trenches, as French officer Pierre Dupouey observed:
“The fire of the [German] heavy guns is admirably precise and well regulated. The other day I saw
six shell craters in a 30m diameter circle; and these shells came from more than 7000m away. But
however accurate their fire, a trench gives shelter untouchable by artillery. Well dug-in
infantry can only be dislodged by infantry, and properly by enemy bayonets.” (Hart 77)
Another problem that ended mobile warfare and ensured trench warfare would be around
for the long haul was how to fight. Given the superiority of defensive firepower
and the early trench systems, armies struggled to sustain any kind of success,
with infantry or artillery, and especially coordinating the two.
Gunners struggled to fight in unfamiliar situations. In mobile war, they often fired
against visible targets, but in set-piece battles and when faced with trench systems,
crews found themselves attempting to hit targets at ranges greater than they had trained for,
and with indirect fire. This required much more information which in 1914, was difficult given
the problems in command and control. Aerial reconnaissance helped, but aircraft were still
rare and crews could move, camouflage, and dig in to hide their guns from prying eyes.
As for the infantry, assaulting an entrenched enemy was risky business and mistakes often
occurred. Regulations did foresee tactics that took into account enemy firepower,
like moving forward in shorter bursts with smaller groups,
but officers often had difficulty coordinating their troops and assaults often took place in
denser formations, which then withered under defensive firepower. The Germans
made this mistake at Ypres in October, as British Captain Henry Dillon witnessed:
“A great grey mass of humanity was charging, running for all God would let them,
straight on to us not 50 yards off. […] I have never shot so much in such a short time,
and could not have been more than a few seconds and they were down.” (Hart 73)
But perhaps the main challenge was coordinating the two main combat arms in a way that would
ensure artillery support arrived in the right place at the right time to help the infantry
attack through enemy trenches. There weren’t enough liaison officers to communicate the
needs of the infantry to the nearest batteries, and overly-eager infantry
officers didn’t always wait for support before launching an attack. French Captain
Alphonse Grasset recalled the suffering of his men in the absence of artillery support:
“My Company was sustaining heavy losses. Evidently its action was
hampering the enemy who concentrated the combined fire of his infantry,
artillery and machine guns on us. […] among the men lying on the ground one
could no longer distinguish the living from the dead. […] we had no support from
our artillery! And yet there were guns in our division and in the army corps, besides those
destroyed on the road. Where were they? Why didn’t they arrive? We were alone!” (Hart 43)
French commander-in-chief Joseph Joffre even put out an explicit
warning to his infantry officers not to attack without artillery support,
after he’d received reports of units doing just that. He chalked it up to a misunderstanding
of the doctrine of the offensive, though lack of training played a key role too.
Another factor that enabled trench warfare was the problem of command
and control. The armies that took the field were larger than ever before: once mobilized,
the German army numbered about 2.3 million men, and the French 2.9 million. How such
vast armies would receive and act on orders in a timely manner, and whether the commanders
could manage such masses of men, had caused many doubts among military thinkers before the war.
And indeed, commanders did struggle to direct their armies – in particular the Germans,
who needed to move the farthest and the fastest. 1st and 2nd Armies lost touch on the right wing,
and Von Moltke ended up accepting 1st Army’s swing to the east after the fact,
rather than approving or countermanding the order quickly. Joffre admitted that many generals simply
couldn’t handle the troops well enough, and relieved scores of generals in fall 1914.
Part of the problem was that the technology to quickly communicate orders over long distances
to massive moving formations wasn’t equal to the task. There weren’t enough telephone
lines or telephones, and what equipment was available was often cut by shelling.
French General Gascouin was among those frustrated by shortages:
“A few km more of telephone wire would have been worth more to me than the all the blathering
on about combined arms and the unity of hearts between infantrymen and gunners.” (Linnenkohl 176)
Wireless telegraphy was still primitive, and voice radio was not effective until after the
war. French intelligence was able to intercept German messages sent by wireless en clair,
without code, by German units desperate for orders, ammunition, reinforcements, or to
find out where their neighbors were.g The Allies also suffered from difficulties communicating,
as liaison officers were few and far between. British General Horace Smith-Dorrien was left
completely in the dark about the whereabouts of neighbouring French forces near Mons in August:
“I had been given no information of the somewhat serious happenings in the French
army on our right, which I learned years later, namely, that it had been forced back,
and was already some 9 miles south of Mons with a gap of at least 9
miles between the right of our II Corps and the left of the French XVIII corps,
thus leaving us in a very vulnerable, indefensible, and salient position.” (Hart 53)
Communication was often reduced to mounted messengers relaying notes
to headquarters or the nearest working telegraph or telephone station – not
an effective enough system to implement complex war plans.
Historian Larry Addington summed up the dilemma:
“Like the fictional Dr. Frankenstein, the general staffs of Europe had created monsters that they
could scarcely control and whose movements at a distance were difficult to gauge.” (Addington 105)
Mobility and logistics were another issue. The only way for the infantry
to move forward was on foot, and the artillery could only move with horses,
which could only be worked so hard and were extremely vulnerable to
enemy fire. Simultaneously, the defender, who was operating within his own lines,
was able to reinforce the threatened area much more quickly by taking advantage of the roads
and rail networks in his own rear. The essence of the problem was that the attacker’s poor tactical
mobility could not overcome the defender’s greater operational and strategic mobility.
Another reason why mobile warfare was replaced by trench warfare in 1914 were supply problems:
attacking armies struggled to supply themselves with food,
fodder, ammunition and reinforcements, while defending armies could do so much easier.
The key aspect here is the railway. As soon as a formation moved forward into enemy-held territory,
it began to move farther from its own railheads. Since armies were not yet
motorized, that meant the main body of the attackers moved only as fast as a marching
infantryman , and their supplies only as fast as a horse-drawn wagon. The defender,
though, could shift his forces and supplies much faster by rail.
This problem helped cripple the German Schlieffen plan, since the plan demanded more than was
humanly possible of under-supplied troops. German soldier Wilhelm Heigl described the hardships:
“Day after day we have to march and there is not a lot of time to rest. In the last couple of days we
have marched nearly 80 kilometres! We heard that a comrade in 6th company has shot himself because
he could not bear it anymore. You can’t imagine what we have to go through." (Schaefer and Doyle)
German troops marched 30-40km a day with 26kg packs, and received inadequate resupply and
reinforcement, forcing them to scavenge for vegetables in French fields. The
vital heavy artillery also fell behind the infantry it was meant to support.
The issue was made worse by delays in taking over captured French and Belgian railway lines.
Meanwhile, French defenders used their shorter interior lines to quickly shift troops around,
most notably at Marne in September 1914. When the race to the sea began,
the same transport issues prevented the Germans from getting enough troops around
the Allied flanks and the fighting hardened into positional warfare there as well.
Another logistical issue was shell production. The general staffs had not anticipated such a
heavy rate of fire for the artillery in pre-war planning, and the guns fired much of the existing
shell stocks by September. This contributed to the start of trench warfare because the armies simply
didn’t have enough shells to attack early trench networks with the necessary weight of fire. French
state factories, for example, could only produce 10,000 shells a day in 1914 – far too little for
their 3500 guns in the field. The situation was so critical that Joffre demanded daily reports
of shells fired, and placed strict limits on shells per gun per day. German pre-war stocks
had also been used up within the first 6 weeks, when they had been expected to last 6 months.
CONCLUSION
So, by fall 1914 trench warfare dominated on the Western Front. The initial plans
for decisive mobile war failed, and attempts to break through the very first trenches also failed
because armies faced insurmountable problems: lethal firepower that favoured the defender,
inadequate infantry, artillery, and combined arms tactics, deficiencies in command and control,
and logistical shortcomings. The result was that from August to October 1914,
that now famous network of trenches crept from around Nancy to Verdun, along the Aisne,
and finally through Belgium to the sea. These defences defeated every attempt to break them,
whether by the Allies on the Aisne and in Champagne or by the Germans at Ypres.
German soldier Paul Hub complained about the
impossibility of breaching British trenches in Belgium:
“The terrible digging continues. Every day brings new horrors. […] It’s impossible to
get rid of those Englishmen. They’ve dug one trench behind another.” (Palmer 32)
Ironically, the trenches were not meant to be permanent. Commanders hoped that
entrenching would buy time and free up forces to launch new offensives that
would return to mobile war. A British officer in Belgium expressed this desire in November:
“I am getting awfully bored by the trenches and am feeling fearfully tired. I hope we
won’t be in them much longer. I wish they would order the advance.” (Strachan 279)
Millions of men would share that officer’s frustration,
boredom and disgust with trench warfare. The deadly orders to advance though,
would keep coming for another three years before the riddle of trench warfare could be solved.
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