Essay Why Western Front End Up As Stalemate

History Prep 2/4/15

Why did the Western Front end up in a stalemate between 1915 and 1917?

In August 1914 after the murder in Sarajevo of Franz Ferdinand of Austria, 2 main alliances set off to war. 2 of the nations of the Triple Alliance, Austria and Germany went to war against the Triple Entente, Britain, France and Russia.

In this essay, we will focus on the development of the events on The Western Front where Germany faced France. All the powers had thought and planned their war strategy very accurately.

Germany had decided to march through Belgium and then proceed on to Paris from the North at high speed; their plan was to defeat France in 6 weeks. As they knew that France was allied with Russia they had to attack as fast as possible to avoid a double engagement from the East and West.

France’s strategy was to regain their lost land, Alsace and Lorraine using well trained troops which could fight and move quickly and then cross the Rhine and march to Berlin.

Neither of these plans were successful; the 2 nations were forced to fight a position war defending their trenches without the completion of any invasion. The war was not over in weeks, it lasted more than 4 years and 10 million soldiers and 9 million civilians died.

When the Germans arrived in Belgium they faced a tougher resistance than expected, as the Belgian army held them back for 10 days. The British Expeditionary Force marched east and fought bravely in a battle at Mons. The French invasion through Lorraine was a disaster, 300,000 soldiers died attacking well defended machine gun posts.
The remaining French fled back to France to hold back the Germans attacking the capital. Another difficulty the Germans encountered was that Russia had arrived in the east of Germany a lot earlier than expected; half of the army in France was forced to retreat and defend the East of Germany.

In spite of all these difficulties, the Germans arrived very close to Paris. In the Battle of the Marne, which was one of the biggest ever fought, the French managed to pull back Germany to the River Aisle where trenches were dug. The 2 armies moved North trying to gain a tactical advantage, as none of them managed to do this, both reached the sea at the same time. The 2 armies faced each other on The Western Front from Flanders to Switzerland creating a stalemate.

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The trenches proved to be the best way to stop the enemy advancing and even if the 2 parties tried to use their most powerful weapons, they were pointless. The armies tactics in the trench war were to attack the enemy’s trench with a large number of men and force the enemy to retreat. This tactic lead to so many lives lost because the well defended machine guns would result in soldiers dropping dead very easily in no mans land.
The shelling fire by long distance guns did not prove very effective. In the Battle of Verdun, the Germans fired 23 million shells, killing 315,000 French soldiers and destroying the entire city but it didn’t allow them to break the front. The artillery technology at the beginning of the war was still not developed enough to defeat the enemy’s army because the shooting accuracy was poor. In the battle of the Somme, the Germans had already planned the defence from the English artillery attack and were able to move the troops forward in dugouts 12 metres deep. In this case the artillery was not powerful enough to penetrate the defences.

The first tanks were used in The Battle of the Somme, the problem was that most of them broke down even before starting to fight and most of the rest got stuck in the mud.
Aviation could have been the ideal weapon to attack the trenches, however the planes were small and lacked power that they couldn’t carry heavy bombs.

The defences proved to be much more effective than the attacking weapons.

The machine guns were formidable defence weapons but were useless for attacking, this was because in the Great War, the guns were very heavy and difficult to transport in a fast attack. The machine gun had to be operated from a protected area.

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The strategies of the general on 2 sides were careless of the loss of human lives. Most of the times mass frontal attacks resulted in thousands of life losses. Generals overestimated the weapons of the army, most of the lives lost were because of misjudgements of generals, they were sending thousands over without thinking of the aftermath. At the Somme, the main mistake of General Haig for France was that he thought that the Germans would have been weakened by the shelling and so he ordered 200,000 men to go overboard and advance, they found themselves exposed to enemy fire and after the first day, almost half of the army was gone.

Tanks in the first years of the First World War had just been invented, they were designed to travel through heavy mud and be well protected from machine guns. The tanks the first years were slow and didn’t have powerful and accurate artillery.
Another technology invented in the World War I was the biplane, these were small propeller planes designed to fly over an enemy’s trench and spot any tactics that were planned. This was a good idea but these planes were very slow and very loud so the enemy could spot the biplane very easily. These planes were very light so they didn’t have any protection and was very easy to obliterate it in seconds.

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The artillery in WW1 was the key weapon and the development of new strategies made possible by technology innovations were the key to solve the stalemate. The need to identify the position of the target drove massive developments in the areas of survey and mapping, communications, lookout from above and lookout from the ground, mathematical and physical techniques using flash lights and sound waves.
By 1918, the precision of fire hitting the enemy first time became very high, it had been greatly developed from 1914.
More accurate shells were built, gas shells were created, this gas compressed in the shells was normally chlorine gas which is very reactive and could kill many men in a few seconds.
Al these innovations allowed to use the artillery differently.

The creeping barrage was an artillery tactic developed by the British army during WW1. The idea was that shelling would progress across no mans land to the enemy trenches whilst the soldiers followed the shell fire across no mans land at a safe distance. This was a revolutionary tactic that mean that the Germans had no time to come out of there dugouts after a shelling before the British and allied soldiers overran them. The armies could fire comfortably shells a couple metres above their infantry in a creeping barrage.

This tactic effectively broke the stalemate that had developed in trench warfare as previously the shell attacks would stop before the attacking force even got out of there trenches meaning they were still in no mans land when the enemy left the shelter of their dugouts.

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WWI was a global war, The Western Front was probably the key area for the defeat of the Germans. Trench Warfare changed the course of the war. The stalemate after the first year disadvantaged the Germans who had initially the strongest army, the alliance between France, England and Russia allowed France to be supported against the massive German army.

All armies were not prepared for the trench warfare: they had inadequate strategies and wrong offensive weapons. Guns were too heavy and big to be transported during the attacks and the reduced mobility made the weapons more effective as defence than to attack.

Technological developments increased the capabilities to attack the enemies in the other trench and were decisive for the victory of the war.