Exhausted, the two sides proceeded to take up position behind a continuous line of trenches and defensive works. The huge numbers of casualties suffered in the movements of the summer and autumn of were a direct result of the industrialization of the war.
By the end of November the French Army alone had lost nearly a million men, of which , had been killed, and ten per cent of its officers had been put out of action. With Germans losses as high as those of the Allies, the offensive could only be considered a major strategic failure.
The offensives which took place in Northern France are indicated in bold type. In the autumn of , despite their huge losses, neither of the great armies massed on the Western Front was in a state of dislocation; although measures would have to be taken, and on a large scale, if they were to adapt to the huge war looming on the horizon. The Germans occupied large portions of France and Belgium, controlling major economic resources such as the Belgium coal basins and the largest coal field in France, the Pas-de-Calais coal basin which alone supplied half of the "black gold" required by French industry.
In tactical terms, the German Army took great care to install its defensive line on high ground, however slight, notably in Flanders. For the French the objective was to reclaim, at any human cost, the territory occupied by the Germans; and this they had to do alone up to the end of and the arrival of the "new" British Army of volunteers. Throughout most of the war of position, from the end of to late , the commanders in chief of the Allied armies on the Western Front, Marshal Joffre for the French and Field Marshal French and later his successor General Haig for the British, were convinced that a war of attrition was the only way to drive the Germans out of France and Belgium.
The result was a series of attacks, ranging from localized actions to massive assaults, in various sectors along the front. The quantity of human and material resources committed to these attacks was of a size never before seen in the history of war. And yet, until the spring of , all these attempts on the German lines resulted in tragic failure, the decisive breakthrough sought by the Allies never materializing.
At best, the Allies made some mediocre territorial gains in Somme and at Ypres but the cost to human life was horrific. At the end of , despite the failure in its attempt to weaken the French Army at Verdun, the German Army remained powerful and undefeated on the Western Front and continued to improve its strategy for defence.
Earlier in the year, in February and March, it executed a strategic withdrawal to a heavily-fortified and seemingly invulnerable line of defence that stretched from the North Sea to Verdun: the Hindenburg Line. Morale among German troops was high but, after the terrible reverse suffered by General Robert Nivelle on Chemin-des-Dames Ridge in April , the French Army descended into crisis with large-scale mutinies breaking out in the spring of The British Army, after a complete reorganization in early with the creation of a "new" army of volunteers placed under the command of Field Marshal Horatio Kitchener, suffered horrendous losses in the Battle of the Somme in July ; however the lessons learned from this blood-soaked failure were slow to filter through to operations on the ground.
As for American support, considered by the French and the British to be a decisive factor which would tip the balance in favour of the Allies, it was slow to materialize. The Americans were methodical in their approach to establishing their troops on the Western Front, choosing to observe and learn the rules of trench warfare before bringing a major force to the battlefield.
Within days of the closing of the Nivelle Offensive, some French troops began to refuse to do their duties; in some instances officers were harassed or even shot by their men.
It shaped Entente actions on the Western Front for the rest of the year. The soldiers complained about the poor tactics in recent battles and refused to go over the top in badly thought-out and executed attacks they would still, however, defend their positions if attacked by the Germans. The soldiers also, however, used the occasion to address a range of long-term grievances, including the substandard food issued to French troops and the lack of adequate leave time to visit family especially in comparison to their British comrades.
It unleashed a surge of emotion that had been growing for years thanks to a range of pre-existing grievances. Nivelle, however, did not get a chance to rectify the situation. He made immediate efforts to organise better food and more frequent leave for the troops. Fearing what would happen if the Germans learned of the French indiscipline, the French became desperate for a British attack to ensure that the Germans were preoccupied elsewhere.
For the first time in the war, in Britain acted as the senior partner on the Western Front. The British launched a series of independent battles in , starting with the Battle of Messines June , and ending with the Battle of Cambrai in November-December What makes these battles so interesting is not only their methodology the British army was a much more effective force in than it had been in , but also the technological ingenuity of many of the attacks.
Messines Ridge, for example, saw one of the most successful mine attacks of the war. Starting in late and early , the British had tunnelled a series of mines down under the German positions in and around Messines. Nineteen mines dug under the British positions were detonated from about am on, at which point British artillery opened fire on German positions and British troops surged forward. They captured Messines quickly and suffered only moderate casualties.
Tactically it was a notable success, but it still lacked the substantial strategic effect that Haig desired. He hoped to win his big strategic victory in the Ypres salient that summer. Douglas Haig had advocated for an independent British attack in Ypres to clear the Channel ports since becoming commander-in-chief at the end of Such an attack would best suit British interests and would make it more difficult for the Germans to launch further naval raids against British shipping.
The paralysis of the French army in gave Haig the autonomy he had long sought and opened up the possibility for a large-scale offensive in the Ypres sector. This battle, the Third Battle of Ypres, would be better known as Passchendaele, named after the ultimate goal of the battle. The planning for the battle followed lines similar to those of the Battle of the Somme.
Haig wanted an ambitious strategic victory and was willing to set distant goals for his troops to meet.
Whereas General Herbert Plumer , commanding the British Second Army, had recommended an advance of just over 1. As had happened on the Somme, this greatly thinned the British artillery concentration, making it more difficult to effectively neutralise German defences and protect advancing infantry with a sufficient barrage.
Ultimately, the battle faltered and eventually ended. Some consolation could be found in the better casualty ratios the British achieved British and German losses were more or less even, which was an improvement over their performance on the Somme. As with the great battles of , the casualty ratios are not necessarily an absolute measurement, strategically speaking. The size of the German population meant that it could ill-afford to trade losses with the Entente one-for-one, especially with the entry of the United States into the war in April , which tipped the demographic scales against Germany.
The Third Ypres also kept the Germans from being able to launch an attack against a French army still recovering from the Nivelle Offensive and internal mutinies. Ultimately, it was hardly the great success Haig had desired. The final notable offensive of the year occurred in Cambrai. Above all else the battle remains synonymous with the tank. Cambrai offered the first glimpse of the possibilities tanks offered when employed en masse previous uses in and during the Nivelle Offensive had largely been unremarkable for both technical and operational reasons.
The results were stunning. Supported by advanced infantry and artillery tactics, the tanks punched through the German lines and advanced up to eight kilometres in the most successful sectors of the attack. The advance was uneven, however, and lead units came under considerable flanking fire as they pressed home their advance a recurring theme in attacks on the Western Front.
Ultimately, the British failed to capture their main objective Bourlon Ridge , lost over a third of their tanks on the first day alone out of , and had their spectacular advance reversed by German counter-attacks over the proceeding days.
Utterly unbeknownst to the high command sitting on either side of the Western Front trenches, would be the last year of the First World War. Of the two sides, the Germans were more keenly aware of the seriousness of their predicament.
Worse yet, the United States had joined the war on their side earlier in April They led one last-ditch gamble to try to win before their armies were ground out of existence by the sheer weight of the industrial, economic, and demographic superiority of their opponents.
The brunt of the offensive fell on Portuguese and British forces stationed north and east of the old Somme battlefield. The Germans hoped to drive these troops northwards, away from the main body of the Allied forces and into the sea. Ludendorff hoped that if he could defeat the British Army, he could negotiate a peace favourable to Germany. Initially it looked as though Operation Michael might work. At the same time, he privately told General Fayolle, commander of the Reserve Army Group of over fifty divisions, that if it looked like the Germans were going to be successful, he should fall back to Paris and leave the British to their fate.
Quickly abandoning his strategy to push the British into the sea, Ludendorff instead began to attack wherever the Allied line seemed weakest. Instead of pushing northwest, he began attacking west, and even southwards. This diffusion allowed the battered northern sectors to stabilize, making them far more resistant to future attacks.
As Ludendorff continued to press on, he fought his army into a giant salient roughly pointed towards Paris. The salient was very difficult to supply, and stretched the line so that German forces had to hold much more of the line than previously, whilst also still maintaining spare troops to launch attacks.
Despite successfully overseeing the Battle of the Somme in , Foch had largely been side-lined in In April , however, he was returned to a position of high command, indeed the highest.
After frantically working to thwart German attacks for two months as Supreme Allied Commander, he finally recognised, long before anyone else, that the Germans had fought themselves into a remarkably precarious situation. The broadly south-western direction of the German advance had led them into an area without the adequate rail networks needed to keep their forces supplied and combat-worthy.
By continuing to pursue weak-points in the Allied line rather than aim at specific strategic objectives, the Germans had effectively marched cross-country rather than following pre-war travel and trade networks. This problem was exacerbated by the continued French control of Reims, the major rail hub in the Champagne region.
If the Germans could capture Reims, their logistical problems would be greatly reduced, and the will of the French to fight might finally be crushed. Foch recognised the necessity for the Germans to attack south in the region of Reims.
He decided that it was the perfect opportunity for a counter-attack to wrestle the initiative away from the Germans and finally give beleaguered Allied forces time to rest and regroup. The Germans would be allowed to advance into a salient east of Reims, thus exposing a vulnerable flank.
The French would drive aggressively into this flank, forcing the Germans either to quickly retreat or to suffer enormous losses in casualties and surrender.
His single-minded aggression, which had proved costly in previous engagements, was perfectly suited to leading an all-out counter-attack on the flank of the advancing German force. On 15 July the Germans proved Foch right by launching a major attack east of Reims that became known as the Second Battle of the Marne. Foch won back the initiative for the Allies and was made a Marshal of France for his success.
After the Second Battle of the Marne, the Germans no longer were on the attack and seeking victory, but on the defensive, trying to stave off defeat. Two days after it finished the Allies launched one of their most successful operations of the war: the Battle of Amiens and the Battle of Montdidier.
The Allies were able to do this by attacking with a speed that the Germans could not match. This meant that the former German strategy of rapidly brining in reinforcements no longer worked. Instead of shoring up their numerical inferiority by judiciously moving reserves into the battle space, the Germans were now under attack everywhere at once. The reserves could not get to a battle before the battle had ended and moved elsewhere.
Demoralised and isolated, German troops began to surrender in staggering numbers. This problem was significantly worsened by the arrival of some 2 million American soldiers in France over the course of Led by General John J. Pershing , American forces were green and led by officers with little relevant pre-war experience. Trained by British and French advisors, they nevertheless fought the war firmly under the wing of the French army, receiving substantial support in the planning and execution of their attacks especially regarding the use of artillery.
The advance towards Paris of five of the German Armies stretching along a line from Verdun to Amiens was set to continue at the end of August The German First Army was within 30 miles of the French capital. However, the commander of the German First Army made a fateful change to the original directive of The Schlieffen Plan, making an assumption that the Allies were not in a position to hold out against an attack on Paris from the east. The original Schlieffen Plan directive had been for German forces to attack Paris from the north in an encircling manoeuvre.
Launching an attack east of Paris on 4 September the German First Army made progress in a southerly direction. However, the change to the Schlieffen Plan now exposed the right flank of the German attacking force. With no option but to make a fighting withdrawal, all the German forces in the Marne river region retreated in a northerly direction, crossing the Aisne to the high ground of the Chemin des Dames ridge.
It marked a decisive turn of events for the Allies in the early weeks of the war and Germany's Schlieffen Plan was stopped in its tracks. One of the famous events in the crucial defence of Paris is that Parisian taxis were sent from the city carrying French reinforcement troops to the fighting front. The Germans dug defensive trenches with the intention of securing the position and preventing any further possibility of withdrawal. This battlefield area witnessed the beginnings of entrenched positions and the change from a mobile war to a static deadlock between the opposing forces.
From this date the entrenchments would gradually spread along the whole length of the Western Front, would become deeper and more impregnable and would characterize the siege warfare fighting of the Western Front for the following three and a half years. The consequence of the Germans establishing entrenched positions on the Chemin des Dames ridge was that the Allied armies were unsuccessful in making a frontal assault on it.
They were, therefore, compelled to look for open ground on either flank of the German position. A French assault on the German First Army's exposed right flank i. During the late August battles in southern Belgium and northern France, as the French and the British Expeditionary Force were being pushed towards the Marne by the Imperial German armies, the Belgian troops in Antwerp had posed a threat to the German First Army of General von Kluck by attacking his rear columns.
The Germans decided to take Antwerp to dispel this threat. On 28 th September the German heavy siege guns shelled Antwerp's outlying ring of forts, which fell. Three brigades of British Royal Naval troops were sent to support the defence of the port and city on 6 October. However, on the day they arrived the Belgian government had already left the city. The order to evacuate the city was given for the next day, 7 October.
Most of the British and Belgian troops in the city left in a south-westerly direction and the Belgian coast at Ostend. The German Army moved in to occupy Antwerp two days later. Over the next few weeks from late September to the end of November the Allied and German Armies attempted to outflank one another, responding to each other manoeuvring their armies to make a stand or cover their exposed northern flank. Operationally it was not an intentional race to reach the French or Belgian coast before the other.
However, the fight to capture the unoccupied ground on each other's northern flank, the German attempt to capture more French ground and reach Paris, against the French determination to hold up their enemy's advance resulted in the movement of the armies in a north-westerly direction towards the coast. Battles took place as the armies sidestepped one another towards the French-Belgian coast and the Channel ports of Calais, Dunkirk, Ostend and Zeebrugge. Battles of the Ypres Salient By the end of the battles of movement in the first weeks of the war had been brought to a halt.
The fierce defence of strategic landmarks by the Allied forces resulted in a situation which became one of deadlock. Carefully selecting the most favourable high ground the Imperial German Army began the construction of a strong defensive line from early in The consolidation of the Front Lines consisted of trenches, wire defences, mined dugouts and deep bunkers, reinforced concrete emplacements and selected strongpoints, usually a reinforced farm, in an Intermediate, Second and Third defensive line.
Gradually the building and digging was carried on on both sides of the wire along a distance of approximately miles, creating a more or less continous line of trenches separating the warring belligerents along the length of The Western Front.
In , and both sides made attempts to break the deadlock with major battle offensives. The characteristics of siege warfare which developed on the Western Front in these three years created conditions never witnessed before. Instead of expecting to achieve objectives at a considerable distance from the start of an offensive, the type of trench warfare fighting created a situation where attacks were carried out in phases with short distance objectives and usually following a bombardment of enemy trench lines beforehand.
This strategy led to prolonged periods of fighting with success counted in gains hundreds of yards rather than miles. The human cost of casualties and dead in such a grinding type of siege warfare would be recorded in the thousands in the space of a single day. Over a period of these three years both sides suffered heavy losses in human casualties and aminals, expenditure in ammunition and equipment. In spite of this the Front Lines stretching from the Swiss border to the Belgian coast remained more or less in the same location with little ground gained by either side.
From 10 December the French launched their first offensive against the entrenched defences of the German Front in the Champagne region, the First Champagne Offensive 10 December - 17 March The fighting went on for four months, with Allied attacks also carried out against the German Front from the Yser sector in the Belgian coastal region to the Woeuvre heights south of Verdun.
The gain in ground for the Allies was very little, being up against a well-entrenched enemy and Allied casualties from the campaign were in the region of 90, The Battle of Neuve Chapelle 10 - 13 March was launched with the aim of capturing the high ground of the Aubers Ridge and in so doing, to create a threat to the German Army in occupation of the city of Lille.
Although the British broke through the German Front Line and captured the village of Neuve Chapelle, the German Sixth Army carried out counter-attacks and the British attack was halted from advancing any further.
The Battle of Hill 60 17 - 22 April was launched with the explosion of mines underneath the German positions on the relatively high ground of Hill 60, south-east of Ypres. This was the first operation carried out by the British Army to lay large mines underneath the enemy position in order to blow him out of his defences.
The fighting was fierce but the British successfully captured the hill. During the Second Battle of Ypres in the days following the close of the Battle of Hill 60 the ground was recaptured by the Germans on 5 May The Second Battle of Ypres 22 April - 25 May started on a warm spring afternoon with the trial of a new weapon of war in the Ypres sector: a cloud of poisonous gas.
After two attempts to release the gas earlier in the month, this was a cloud of chlorine gas released by the German Fourth Army, followed by an infantry attack.
The gas cloud was blown on a gentle breeze across two French divisions in the north part of the Ypres Salient. The German infantry advance behind the cloud was rapid, the Allied Front Line was broken and the way to Ypres was open by the end of the day. The battle for the defence of Ypres and the recapture of lost ground included more German gas cloud attacks against the Allied troops. The Second Battle of Ypres consisted of four battles starting with the surprise gas attack by the Germans:.
The following three battles were counter-attacks by the allied troops to try to regain the ground lost to the Germans.
The three battles were:. In May the Allies carried out an offensive north of Arras towards Lille. British attacks on the German line took place a little further north on the flat Flanders plain at Aubers Ridge and Festubert.
By the end of the offensive there were approximately , French casualties, 26, British casualties and 90, German casualties. In July the French carried out an offensive almost 3, feet above sea level on the rounded peaks of the Vosges mountains of Alsace. The offensive followed battles between the French and the Germans for possession of the peaks in deep snow and storms in the early part of Following a limited offensive to try to push the Germans out of the Fecht valley on the east side of the mountain range at Munster the French pressed on later in the summer to try to take the peaks and mountain road toutes around Le Linge.
Since the fighting there earlier in the year the Germans had reinforced their lightly-held positions by constructing an impregnable fortress of tunnels, trenches and bunkers hewn either out of the rock or supplemented by reinforced concrete.
The German line could not be broken and after the close of the battle the Front Lines on this peak remained static, and only a few yards apart in places, for the rest of the war. In the autumn of the French and British Armies carried out a second large-scale, two-pronged offensive against the German positions, which were by this time well-consolidated and proving increasingly more difficult to break into.
This would compel the German Second and Seventh Armies caught between the two attacks to pull back to the Belgian border in order to protect their road and rail routes in their Lines of Communication on the Douai plain.
The Champagne offensive gained a few miles of ground and captured some 25, German prisoners, but with German reinforcements brought into the sector from the Eastern Front, the French could not withstand repeated German counter-attacks.
French losses were over , casualties by the time the Champagne offensive drew to a close. The French managed to get onto the Vimy Ridge but did not succeed in pushing the Germans off this dominating ridge. The British attack achieved some success north of Loos and by the end of the first day they had passed through Loos village and reached the outskirts of the industrial, built-up town of Lens. Crucial time lost by the delayed arrival of the reserve divisions added to problems of command and control of the troops on the ground east of Loos, who had inadvertently headed south instead of east in the confusion of battle and the confusion created by similar pit-head landscape features in this mining area.
The pause in the attack gave the German Fourth Army time to bring in reserves to the area overnight who reinforced a new German Second Position located on higher ground with good views across the British attack area. The British did not succeed in making any headway against this Second Position and suffered heavy casualties on 26 September. A second British advance against the German Second Position failed with heavy casualties in early October as bad weather closed in. This is the term for a tactic whereby the defenders man the Front Line lightly, the attacker is initially allowed to gain some ground beyond his own artillery cover in the opening phase of an attack, and then he is counter-attacked by groups of well-placed defenders in second and third positions constructed behind the Front Line.
In the spring the Germans launched an all-out offensive before the Americans could arrive in large numbers. Later that year the Allies drove them back, using co-ordinated air-power, artillery and tanks. Thomas Edward T. By late volunteers for the armed forces in World War One had slowed to a trickle. The British Government was now forced to consider introducing conscription Tank Corps Officers, saw a new major offensive, the Battle of the Somme , fought with new weapons.
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