Its baptism of fire on the Somme on 1 July 1916 was to be notoriously bloody. The British Citizen Army was handicapped by rapid expansion and a lack of experienced cadres. However, it was not until 1918 that Ferdinand Foch’s (1851-1929) military genius used these modern operational methods to achieve strategic ends. From 1916 on this formed the foundation of a new “scientific” operational offensive system that allowed for increasingly effective penetrations into German defences. The other cornerstone of French battlefield tactics was close cooperation between artillery and infantry. For example, infiltration or “ storm troop” infantry tactics – sometimes dubbed “Pétain tactics” after the innovative commander who was to rise to command of the army by 1917, though often, if erroneously, attributed to the German army – were tested in 1915 and became standard practice in offensive operations thereafter. Through an iterative experimental process, tactics for fighting on the entrenched battlefield were conceived and tested in 1915. The French Army was obliged to take the offensive to liberate national soil. Consequently, German doctrinal developments in that theatre focused on localized fights for ground: adaptive defensive methods, based partly on increasingly deep and elaborate systems of field fortifications, partly on defensive artillery and machine-gun fire, and partly on dynamic infantry counter-attack tactics, resulting in so-called “positional warfare.” The eastern front offered the opportunity for large-scale mobile offensives and there offensive tactics based around powerful hurricane artillery bombardments, which would later be employed on other fronts, were trialled. German forces essentially conducted a strategic defensive on the static western front, punctuated with limited offensives. The costly consequences of the war were largely a product of the nature of large-scale attrition warfare, rather than a result of failure of leadership or military imagination.Įvery army faced the same problem, although with individual challenges.
#Battle of verdun battle strategies professional
Contrary to much popular and some historians’ perception, those who held high military commands were on the whole practical, professional soldiers who grappled with and solved the problems presented by a stalemated, industrial battlefield. In 1918 armies and their commanders applied these methods to fight the war to a decision. In 1917 these were inculcated into armies trained and equipped to fight modern “deep” battles. In 1916, “scientific” operational methods were deployed. Basic tactical concepts were tested in 1915. It took three cycles of warfare, three campaigning seasons in pre-modern parlance, to complete this transformation. Strategic focus shifted from the capture of territory to the attrition of the enemy’s army and war-making capacity. However, this transformation went beyond the tactical and brought about a change in operational systems – command, control, communications and intelligence. Some authors have suggested that this amounted to a veritable “ military revolution,” one that “combined industrial firepower and logistics with the fighting power and staying power that nationalism could generate.” A tactical “revolution in military affairs,” arising from the deployment of industrial weapon technologies such as machine guns, heavy artillery, aircraft, tanks and gas on the battlefield underpinned this development.
Although in most theatres, along the notorious western front in particular, armies were still fighting on roughly the same ground that they had occupied since entering the war, the intervening years had seen an unprecedented transformation in the nature, methods and objectives of warfare. The armies of 1918 were structured differently than those of 1914, incorporated new weaponry and operated according to tactical and operational doctrines which had developed over the course of the war.
0 kommentar(er)
