Why were attacks so futile?

The stereotypical battle scene of World War One is infantry emerging from its trenches (a.k.a. "Going over the top") and being slaughtered by machine gun and artillery fire in futile attacks.

As long as troops stayed in their trenches, they were relatively safe. Once they emerged above ground, there was nothing protecting them from artillery fire (guns at the time could fire at a very fast rate, roughly 10 times as fast as the top rate of muzzle-loading cannon of a century before. Similarly, machine guns could fire roughly 600 bullets per minute (10/second), and were typically well braced so that rapid, accurate fire could be sustained. The defending troops had the advantage of cover, while their trenches were protected by barbed wire.

Clearly advancing against an occupied enemy trench was suicidal barring heavily disproportionate numbers. During the first half or so of the war on the Western Front, it was generally hoped that artillery could neutralize the defenses (a kind term for cutting the wire and killing most everyone in the trench), but this hope usually proved vain. It was less that artillery was theoretically incapable of doing this, but that to do so required far more shells, and more accuracy, than any side had in 1915 or 1916.

There was another, perhaps even more important, reason attacks did not work: communication was done by wire telephone and telegraph. A front line, and areas behind the front lines, would be wired for communication. However, once a side attacked, it was no longer possible to communicate except by sending men running back and forth, which took hours. Thus, the attackers would be unable to communicate back effectively, and the attacking generals could do little but sit and hope for the best, while the defending commander was actively receiving reports, sending reinforcements to where they were needed, and so forth.

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If attacking was so hopeless, how did the Germans manage to take nearly all of northeastern France during August, 1914?

Short answer: Because the French squandered their military advantages through a suicidal war plan.

The French were wedded to the "doctrine of the offensive" despite the fact that the American Civil War had shown repeatedly that entrenched troops were very costly if not impossible to defeat through a frontal assault, and more recently the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 had shown that there was no quick way to break out of static warfare, the French were wedded to the notion that their superior "élan" (morale and offensive dash), combined with rapid fire light artillery, would prove superior.

Part of this doctrine involved not training the men in defensive warfare. Roughly 50 years after Robert E. Lee, the outstanding Confederate General of the U.S. Civil War, declared that the shovel was as important a weapon as the rifle, most French soldiers were not given digging tools!

The French war plan was known as Plan 17. It involved an offensive into the German center. In contrast to the Schlieffen Plan, the French Plan 17 was more a statement of attitude than an exact plan: armies were expected to attack, with other units, including large numbers of horse cavalry, held in reserve to exploit any breakthroughs that developed.

Unlike the Germans, who effectively doubled the size of their army by incorporating reserve forces into their line, the French General Staff considered their reserves to be worthless. This was a reflection of the far-right political views of the French general staff, which considered that being a civilian made one worthless, even if that person had only recently been in the army. This assumption proved to be fatally incorrect: reserve units fought just about as well as main line units, particularly in a defensive setting. Because the German army had doubled in size while the French army had not, nowhere did the French forces outnumber the German forces. In the course of several days roughly 20% of the French army was destroyed in futile attacks. Meanwhile, because the French field army was thus smaller, the French left their northern (Belgium) border completely undefended. Not until the Germans were near Paris had the French Army deployed enough soldiers to its left to fight with anything resembling parity.

In other words, the German attack was so successful because it was not resisted. When the French had sufficient troops to resist the attack, the German attacks failed just as the French ones had.

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Apart from the beginning and end, did World War I consist entirely of trench Warfare? No. Trench warfare was only the norm on the Western Front, as well as the fairly short line between Italy and Austria-Hungary (most of their borders being mountainous and impassible to large formations). This was due to the large concentration of soldiers packed into a relatively small space. (A front of 475 miles, bordered on one side by the ocean, and on the other by the armed neutral Switzerland, with each side having a density of roughly 1 man per foot.) On the Eastern Front., there were not enough soldiers to hold a solid line in force. The war there was more characterized by scattered outposts, flanking maneuvers, and large advances and retreats, and even by the use of cavalry, which proved all but worthless in the west. We hear more about the Western front for several reasons. For one thing, it is where all British, French, Italian, and American forces fought, as well as the majority of German forces. Furthermore, it is where the first offensive of the war took place, where the German army was finally (partially) defeated. Lastly, this multi-year trench warfare on such a large scale was unique to World War I, so it naturally is what the war in known for.

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Were there effective trench warfare strategies?

Yes. The most successful of these were "bite and hold" operations (perfected by the British), and "infiltration attacks" (perfected by the Germans).

Bite and Hold was based on the fact that infantry could successfully advance if they had sufficient artillery support of the right kind. Artillery had proven itself a failure at annihilating an enemy's defenses, but there were 3 tasks which artillery could perform well:

Cutting the barbed wire. This was possible, but it required a large number of shells. Keeping the enemy infantry's heads down until your own soldiers were on top of them. This was done with what is called a "Creeping barrage" in which the aiming point of the artillery SLOWLY (about walking pace) moves backward, and the troops advance very close to it, typically around 50 yards or even less. Obviously, it is catastrophic when artillery rounds fall short. They didn't have the skill to do effective creeping barrages until roughly halfway through the war. Preventing the enemy from reinforcing its attacked positions. This was accomplished by a "box barrage", in which shells would be fired continuously all around the perimeter of the attack area.

If the above 3 things were all done adequately, and there was some degree of surprise, and there were no significant other mitigating factors (like 6-foot-deep mud), the attack could be carried out with reasonable success: more casualties would be inflicted than taken (though a lot of casualties would still be taken. If everything went perfectly the ratio was still roughly 3:1), and the line would advance a bit.

This sort of attack could work, but there were limitations:

It required LOTS of artillery shells. This quantity of shells was not really available until 1917 or 1918.

The range of field artillery was limited.

Artillery was, for all practical purposes, immobile during a given battle. It took a long time to limber up, move forward to a new position (probably over uneven ground that had been chewed up by previously fired shells, plus trenches, put into place and secured.

There was no good way to quickly communicate back to the artillery to tell it where and when to shoot once the troops were attacking.

Thus, a set-piece attack with a limited objective was possible, but a grand operation and on-the-spot improvisation was not. Many otherwise moderate successes were squandered because the generals, still wanting a "decisive breakthrough," had the attacking troops push on beyond the effective range of their artillery, where the soldiers were decimated by German defenses and counterattacks.

Eventually the allied generals figured this out, after a given planned piece of territory was taken, the troops would stop and dig in within the range of their own artillery, beating off any counterattacks. These limited, set-piece attacks were known as Bite and Hold operations, and were done with much success during the second half of 1918.

By 1918 both sides had artillery of sufficient quantity and skill that they could crush troops occupying a single trench line. The defense had gone to one of "depth," with individual strong points (often within larger trenches). German infiltration tactics involved sending small groups of heavily armed and specially trained men known as Storm Troopers (The Nazi SS of World War II were also called Storm Troopers. They were named after these elite soldiers of World War I. The Storm Troopers of World War I were not political than the rest of the regular army.) forward, with order to bypass any strong points, instead pushing on and trying to get to behind the main lines.

Again this form of attack, used during the German attacks in the spring of 1918 known as the Ludendorf Offensives, met with limited success. The Germans were able to push the Allied line back, though despite a numerical advantage they took more casualties than they inflicted, and they were stopped short of their goals in all cases.

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