> So they would just lead mass charges into fortified positions with artillery and machine guns. It was the definition of a meat grinder.
I read something a while back that, while I'm not sure how accurate it is, got sort of seared into my brain. In medieval times, permanent fortified positions (castles and such) were of the utmost importance, and sieges were a major part of war. With the arrival of gunpowder, cannons could wreck walls and other fortifications, and warfare in the open field largely replaced siege warfare.
The single biggest military failure of WW1 (by both sides) was that the then-modern military doctrine told them to treat trench warfare as slow-moving open warfare, where it should've instead been fought as a slightly mobile form of siege warfare.
"Fighting siege warfare" means that both sides can expect to "win" by doing nothing and sitting in their defenses. It's unclear if this really applies to WW1 Western Front.
Perhaps Germany was in a position were it was happy to sit in their trenches and just endure, but France was not. France had to be able to compel Germany to come to terms and restore French territory (which we should also remember contained a good chunk of French industry). While the blockade of Germany was clearly effective, it's not clear to this day (and certainly would not have been clear to the western allies at the time) if the blockade alone could have compelled Germany to terms.
And certainly the western allies DID attempt to strategically outflank Germany. It just... didn't really work.
WW1 generals understood sieges. They generally understood what fortifications could and could not do. There's a reason the Belgiums kept building forts. There's a reason why Germany built ever bigger artillery. WW1 generals got to see the Russo-Japanese war 10 years ago. They got to see a 6 month siege of Port Arthur. They got to see the ridiculous causalities that modern weapons could inflict. But they also saw something - the attack WORKED. The costs were awful, but the Japanese achieved their goals.
> "Fighting siege warfare" means that both sides can expect to "win" by doing nothing and sitting in their defenses. It's unclear if this really applies to WW1 Western Front.
The problem with a siege isn't that you win by doing nothing, it's that the attacker always loses, hard, by trying a head-on assault. The really novel aspect of trench warfare is that you had both sides in a fortified highly-defensible position at the same time.
I think this is still true for the case of a conventional war. This can be checked in Ukraine right now. As far as I know, most of the losses of Russian troops at the beginning of the conflict are associated with hidden groups of Ukrainian soldiers who did not show up while the Russian tanks were making the initial march. And then, when supply caravans were heading to the front line, these hidden groups instantly attacked them from the side, and then hid again in the woods by the roads. Then the Russians changed tactics - no rush, but intense shelling of the front line with all kinds of artillery for several days, then a small advance, then a sweep, and then the cycle repeats.
The good news would have been that without encirclement, siege warfare would have been delightfully similar to peacetime. The bad news that this war would still be going on. Which would be good news again, because of all those other wars that could not have happened in the meantime.
I read something a while back that, while I'm not sure how accurate it is, got sort of seared into my brain. In medieval times, permanent fortified positions (castles and such) were of the utmost importance, and sieges were a major part of war. With the arrival of gunpowder, cannons could wreck walls and other fortifications, and warfare in the open field largely replaced siege warfare.
The single biggest military failure of WW1 (by both sides) was that the then-modern military doctrine told them to treat trench warfare as slow-moving open warfare, where it should've instead been fought as a slightly mobile form of siege warfare.