Everyone's Plan for 1915: Let's Get the Hell Out of These Trenches, Part I—Re-evaluation

Early French Trench

By Jean-Yves Le Naour, Author of 1915. L'enlisement

Editor's Introduction:  This article from the French Ministère des Armées describes—from France's point of view—how the major powers' high commands responded to the imperative of breaking free of the trenches, and how a worse blood letting than the 1914 campaigns resulted. MH

Part I: Searching for Solutions

The hecatombs of 1914 surprised and took aback [all] senior army command[s]. Once the front got bogged down, trench warfare turned out to be just as deadly as mobile warfare and did not enable any of the belligerents to gain a decisive upper hand. So how could you do away with the trenches and win this war as quickly as possible? 

At the end of 1914, it was no exaggeration to say army command was in disarray. Six months earlier, in August 1914, they went into war full of confidence fully believing in the illusion of a short war and with their heads full of Napoleonic dreams. War was first and foremost a matter of courage, guts, momentum, it was an affair of horse flesh, cavalry charges with sabres out and furious onslaughts by infantry with their bayonets mounted. They were to become disillusioned very quickly and discover that this 19th century model belonged to the past.

Early German Trench

Right from the first clashes, the French understood that they had entered the industrial war era, an era of fire-power that made the canon the King of the war and forced the infantry to dig in if they were to withstand the shock without being wiped out. So between October and November, a trench line was formed over 700 km from the North Sea to Switzerland transforming the mobile war into a siege war.

The situation was virtually the same on the eastern front. Even though they were beaten in East Prussia by the Germans, the Russians caused great problems for the Austrian and Hungarian forces and pushed their troops right back to the Carpathians, but here again, the offensive stalled: the lack of ammunition, logistic shortages and the truce called by general winter blocked the situation until spring. So the question that was tormenting army command at the end of 1914 was: how to put an end to this trench warfare? How to overcome this stalemate? How to do away with the barbed wire, artillery barrages and the firing of machine guns that promise defeat to anyone crazy enough to attack? Both camps reflected on how to go beyond this new form of warfare that was still poorly understood, in the search for a new method or a new front that would unblock everything.

Early British Trench

With the experience of small or large scale offensives, that of the Germans on Calais for example, it soon transpired that defence was superior to offence. Even if you put in every resource you have, sacrificing thousands of men to take the enemy trench, they will just fall back to another second line trench a few hundred metres away and you have to repeat the whole operation again. Also, at the end of 1914, some generals and politicians came to understand that if massive and fruitless deaths were to be avoided in 1915, it was necessary to stand back and take a good look at the map of the war. Two considerations were driving these far-sighted individuals who observed the stalemate on the western front: resume the mobile war and since you cannot defeat the strongest, attack the weak.

This debate was the same in France, Great Britain and Germany. In Berlin, in fact, there was always a fear of fighting on two fronts—Russia and France—and so as not to split up its forces, the German army had designed the Schlieffen plan which was to quickly overrun France before turning back to fight against Russia, a war that would be longer since it was such a huge country. But The battle of the Marne scuppered this plan. Yes France had been invaded but it had held steady and the German army found itself in the situation it dreaded.

Source: Chemins de Memorie

Tomorrow in Part II Jean-Yves Le Naour examines the new strategies of the various combatants and their results