The+Western+Front

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WWI on the Western Front The Great War, as it has since become known, was fought by the world’s most industrialized powers over a relatively small area of ground. Fronts existed at the Gallipoli Peninsula, in the Dardanelles, between the English Channel and Switzerland inside the northern border of France, and along the northeastern border of East Prussia and Austria where they met Russia. It was, thus, a brutal war fought in a narrow band of territory almost entirely within the European Peninsula. What, then, makes it a global war – a "world war" if not its territorial reach? I contend that the war was fought by global powers, albeit in a small area of Europe, who controlled vast resources worldwide in terms of economies, people, and technology. Since this was the first truly "total" war, all of these societies had to bring as much of their total resources to bear on the war effort as was possible in order to survive, and then had to increase their resources while depriving the enemy of his in order to even conceive of a victory. Thus, while it was a limited war in terms of territory, in terms of its impact on history it was truly global.

Germany’s declarations of war on France and Russia, while not the real catalysts of the war, made it an inevitable reality – one of the very few in history. Between the declaration of war on Russia on August 1, and the declaration against France on August 3, the Germans began to move to make their carefully laid war plans come to fruition. August 2, when Germany’s ambassador to Belgium demanded that Belgium allow the German army to cross Belgian territory saw the opening gambit of the Schlieffen Plan.

The Schlieffen Plan, developed in the very early 20th century, and put into its 1914 form by German Chief of Staff General von Schlieffen in 1905, solved a peculiarly German problem. General von Schlieffen assumed that in the event of a war, Germany would have to fight France and Russia at the same time. Since France was expected to mobilize fastest, von Schlieffen decided to deal with France first with the bulk of his forces, then return to the East and defeat the Russians later. He assumed the French would not expect Germany to cross through neutral Belgium. The French expected that violating Belgian neutrality would anger Great Britain and bring that major power into the war against the Germans. Germany further assumed that France would mass its army on the French borders with Germany – especially the areas bordering Alsace and Lorraine, which Germany had taken in its 1871 war with France during German unification. Thus von Schlieffen determined to wheel the German Army’s main offensive force through Belgium and surround the French Army between Paris and Alsace-Lorraine, then force them to surrender. Following that encirclement, von Schlieffen then planned to send the bulk of Germany’s forces back to the East by train to deal with the Russian forces, who were expected to take at least six weeks to reach the front in any organized fashion.

The Schlieffen plan depended on a very precise timetable, and very specific strategy if it was to work – and one of the primary new technologies of the time: the railroad. To move up to 4 million men from various muster points around Germany to their divisions was extremely complex. Moving the entire force to the proper places on the front, with all of its equipment and guns, in time to begin marching in concert with the rest of the force required carefully laid train schedules. It meant dozens of trains through each station every hour, and their passage had to be carefully coordinated to be certain that no accidents occurred. It was this complexity that General von Moltke, the newest Chief of the German General Staff, used to argue that the plan was irreversible. The army’s chief of transportation is on record saying that, had the order been given, the system could have been changed within 24 hours and an invasion stopped. This point is moot, however, since Moltke refused to accept this idea and kept the plan moving forward.

As the Germans moved forward, the French fell directly into the trap laid by Schlieffen. The French high command refused to believe that the German army would cross Belgium and risk the entry of Great Britain into the war. They therefore concentrated their troops on the borders of Alsace, Lorraine, and the Ardennes forest, with the belief in mind that they would allow the Germans to use the bulk of their forces on the German right, thus opening a soft spot in the Ardennes and Alsace/Lorraine. When they heard that some German troops were crossing Belgium (they still did not realize it was the bulk of the German army), they felt that was good news, because it meant the German left was even softer than expected. They were walking right into the bag Schlieffen had designed.

By late August, the German advance was so successful, and the French army in such disarray, that it seemed the Germans would quickly overrun Paris. They came within 14 miles of the city, and some German soldiers could even see the Eiffel Tower from where they stood. However, the German army was behind schedule, and the Russians had mobilized on the Eastern front, and invaded East Prussia, earlier than expected. Moltke was under pressure to move troops to the East. To save time, and because they believed that the French were already in the bag (as, in fact, they were), the Germans decided to forego Paris, and move for the quick kill. In the turning process, the German army of the far right opened up a gap between itself and the next force over. The French and British exploited this gap in the battle of the Marne, late August, 1914, and stopped the German advance.

Once the advance stopped, both sides began the defensive war that lasted until 1918. As they moved to outflank each other in a "race to the sea," they dug trenches within which they could hide from the machine guns and other weapons that now guarded either side of "no man’s land." The Western Front became a narrow band of land rife with shell craters and trenches. Soldiers spent their days and nights in these dirt forts, sometimes sleeping, sometimes eating, sometimes dying, always uncomfortable. When it rained, the trenches were pools of mud. When it was dry, they were dusty traps. There was no telling when the enemy would rise up, come "over the top" and run the three hundred meters or so through your machine gun fire, and across both their and your barbed wire to come raining down on you in what amounted to hand-to-hand combat.

The war on the Western Front was mostly a defensive war. It was characterized by new weapons – principally the machine gun, explosive shells, poison gas, and long-range guns – which were primarily defensive in nature. Thus attacking soldiers with late 19th century weapons which they could carry on their person ran headlong into emplaced defensive weapons that took advantage of the latest industrial technology for mass slaughter. Quite literally, they ran headlong to their deaths. On a single day in 1917 – the first day of the British offensive during the battle of the Somme, 60,000 of Great Britain’s young men fell to German defensive fire which had survived 5 days of the heaviest shelling ever created by humans to that point in history. Single battles saw the deaths of more people than entire wars had caused in the past: Verdun, one million dead on both sides; first battle of the Somme, 1.2 million on both sides.

By the end of the war, total death counts on all fronts combined reached from nine million to thirteen million. Twenty percent of France’s young men of military age had lost their lives, and thirteen percent of German young men. The question remains just how many of those who perished might have brought scientific breakthroughs, or solved intractable political problems, written great novels, or created new businesses. We’ll never know, because they were mowed down in the prime of life, before they had time to make a mark on the world, or even, for most, start a family.

The war on the Western Front became one of "attrition" – with no forward motion, the fight was a stalemate. The only way that either side could see to win it was to bleed the other side to death – to keep killing and killing until, with luck, you killed more of the men on the other side than they did of yours. This vicious strategy was really begun in 1916, with the longest battle of the war: Verdun.

The German attack on Verdun was calculated to bring the French army out in great numbers. The choice of Verdun was made simply because it was critically important to the French sense of nation and self. It had been the site of the proclamation of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, and the site of numerous battles in European history. Its cultural importance, in the First World War, outshone its strategic importance. But the German General Staff was counting on the cultural significance to draw the French, and keep drawing them, no matter what the cost. Germany expected its technology and the supposed superiority of its troops to cause the deaths of 3 French soldiers for every German killed. The goal was to win the war not through gaining territory, but through the creation of so much death that the French would be unable to continue to supply their army, and would have to give in or be overrun. This turned out to be an error. The death ratio of Germans to French was much closer to one to one. After a year of back and forth over a narrow front barely ten miles long and two miles deep, each side had lost 500,000 men, and Verdun had been turned into rubble. No territory had changed hands, and the war continued in a stalemate situation.

To take the pressure off of Verdun, the British launched the offensive of the Somme in 1917. This battle, although lasting only 3 months, was to take even more lives than Verdun. It was also to be so characteristic of the war that it can be used here as an example of how things did, and didn’t, work on the battlefield. The Somme was the site of the introduction of at least three new weapons. The first of these was the explosive artillery shell. The British army used many thousands of tons of these, and used sappers to tunnel under the German trench lines to set deep mines as well, in a 5 day bombardment that was by design the greatest rain of steel and fire the world had ever seen. The British commanders told their soldiers that after such a bombardment, no Germans would be alive, or at least, none would be capable of fighting. They told the troops they would be able to casually stroll across "no man’s land" and jump in to claim the German trenches without fear.

In reality, the Germans simply retreated into deep underground tunnels which were hardly habitable, but in which they survived rather well. They then took the silence at the end of five days as the sign that the British attack was coming, and emerged to mount their machine guns and hold off the British with a blistering defense in which, as mentioned above, 60,000 people died on the first day.

In all, at the battle of the Somme, 420,000 British, 330,000 French, and 550,000 German soldiers met their deaths.

To counter the German defenses, the British also created the tank, and a small single-person wheeled, armored vehicle. The tank, though it did well against barbed wire and machine guns, was slow, hard to steer, fell into holes, and was easily attacked by another German innovation, the flamethrower, which literally roasted crews inside. The single-person armored vehicle was easy to push forward on relatively normal terrain, but in no-man’s-land, where the craters, trenches, puddles, and barbed wire made straightforward progress impossible, it was useless. The user had to back out or turn around, exposing himself either way, to move in any direction other than forward.

Verdun, then, established the character of the war – its massive casualties, and the Western Front’s answer to stalemate, the battle of attrition. The Somme became the benchmark for all Western Front battles, with horrendous front line losses caused by over-dependence on untested technology, and overconfident predictions of victory by commanders with no understanding of how to use that technology to their advantage. During the Somme, the French commander kept a force of mounted cavalry in the rear at all times, ready to take advantage of a breakthrough he was sure the infantry would create. He then expected, 19th century style, to ride through the gap into the rear of the enemy, causing a route. It is unclear how he expected cavalry to be effective against foot soldiers with machine guns dug into trenches effectively 8 to 10 feet below the level of the rider and his cutlass. His vision simply shows how far behind the technology most military thinking was at the time, on either side.

By all accounts, the war on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 was a bloody, senseless waste of human life. Nearly all belligerents at some point in 1917 tried to find some way to end the standoff, but none was able to find a way to withdraw and maintain national stability or honor, and so the war went on, with no meaning, no goal, and no end in sight.