Which technological developments led to trench warfare?
What Technological developments led to the introduction of Trench Warfare during World War I? What tactical and technical developments were made on the ground during the war to try to break the stalemate which of these worked and why?
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The specific “increase of firepower” mentioned is smokeless powder cartridges. These were three times as powerful as blackpowder ammunition, and resulted in no visible and obscuring smoke on the battlefield. The development too of the machine gun and rifled howizter had never before been seen in warfare that predateding WWI (Of course artillery had existed before 1914, but siege howitzers and heavy artillery and shrapnel had never been deployed in such great concentrations and scale, and so rapidly been able to respond to attacking infantry at such distances). Soft infantry troops were unable to bypass defensive fortifications, and the natural inclination was to entrench and bide time until the other side attacked. At this point it was common to try to take advantage of the enemy weakness and launch a counter attack, as in the German’s doctrine of Elastic Defense, but other than recapturing trenches they had previously already owned, the attacking force was usually chewed up by the numerous reserve trenches behind the first one from which counter attacks were launched from.
The development of communications via morse code and radio allowed artillery battallions to be seated far behind the line and still offer immediate and coordinated support. Part of this development was also of hydraulic recoil mechanisms, high explosive shells, and rifling on guns to increase their effective range and accuracy. Hydraulic recoiling mechanisms allowed guns to fire and remain in position and concentrated on target – previously when fired, field guns rolled back on their wheels and had to readjust and reaccquire their targets. The high explosive shell increased the lethality of artillery against infantry enormously, allowing them to spread large amounts of damage over large areas, and spread shrapnel in a circular pattern for long distance rather than in a conical one. Part of the development in firepower – but not in mobility.
There did exist a period of mobile warfare in early 1914 where French and German armies danced around Belgium and the Alsace-Lorraine, but due to many questionable leadership decisions and delays, the Germans lost the momentum and were driven back at the Marne. Both sides, not having the strength to make a decisive breakthrough, entrenched for the long-haul. This existed for at least two years until the British development of the armored “Landship” came to fruition with the Mark I Tank in 1916. It was technology in its infancy however, and though in later parts of the century it would be instrumental to the blitzkriegs of France and Russia, most tanks at the time crawled like snails across No Man’s Land. In fact, the Germans found them to be rather unwieldy and cumbersome and dispatched them with some ease. It was the Renault FT-17 that truly set a new precedent for the modern tank, with a rotating turret, and small more mobile chassis, deployed in 1917. However, even with these new tanks, trench warfare was still the predominant method until the Spring of 1918.
Railways also played a large factor in the war, since armies had no other methods of transportation other than horses and their own feet. However, trains and tracks were extraordinarily susceptible to artillery fire, and thus an army’s mobility was severely limited by the train’s ability to function. This dependence on a limited and vulnerable method of transportation meant that the armies had little choice of direction, surprise, or speed.
One development was the land-mine, which rather than strewn across no-man’s-land (since their own men had to attack across the same patch of earth) were dug and buried beneath an enemy’s trench by a tunneling team. It was horrifying work, and resulted in many casualties as miners set off charges to kill and trap other teams that were trying to plant mines under them. Mines had little effect in the war, often not being utilized correctly, and didn’t have much of a place in the succeeding conflict 25 years later. Keep in mind, too, that these mines I’m talking about were truly enormous. They made craters hundreds of feet wide.
Another weapon, though not new but used en masse, was poison gas; Chlorine gas, Mustard gas, etc. First used in 1915, the gas proved to be a debilitating weapon of attrition rather than one that would make decisive breakthroughs as it incapacitated rather than killed. Eventually gas-masks became standard issue and the threat was almost entirely protected against.
The development of portable machine-guns, such as the Browning Automatic Rifle and MP-18, though hardly instrumental in breaking the trenches, found some limited successes (some weapons such as the French Chaucat, a portable Light Machine Gun, were failures and simply not designed for the rigors of the trenches) since the heavy MG08 and Vicker’s machine guns of the time were simply too heavy to be moved in the heat of battle. The development of short-barelled fire-arms was a necessity when it came to breaking into enemy trenches, as the bolt action longarms of the period were too unwieldy for close quarters combat – and only fired one round before needing to be cycled.
One such theoretical weapon developed was the Flamethrower, which was used to some effect in 1915 and 1918 to flush enemy troops out of trenches. Although they had limited range, could only fire for a few seconds, and left the operators of the cumbersome weapons exposed to fire. Grenades, too, though not new were supplied as standard infantry equipment, and were much smaller and deadlier.
Perhaps the most important facet in my opinion was the specific training of the troops. After serving for some time on the more mobile Eastern Front, a Prussian officer named Oskar von Hutier developed a code of infiltration tactics designed specifically to breach entrenched strongholds on the Western Front. It was the building blocks of what we come to now know as the German Blitzkreig. Rather than advancing at walking pace, firing artillery for days before an attack, and giving the enemy ample time to prepare; they fired short intense bombardments and had small groups of stormtroopers locate and spearhead through enemy weak spots, disrupting communications and artillery and other vital assets necessary for the trenches to operate. The regular army would follow up and destroy the isolated strong points that the stormtroopers had bypassed.
The strategy was enormously effective in breaking the deadlock on the West in 1918. Entire companies surrendered to just a handful of stormtroopers that had caught them by surprise. They rounded up prisoners right and left, and stormed across France, making territorial gains not seen since the early days of 1914. They were, sadly, repulsed at Amiens and forced to surrender, but the tactic would later be used to great effect in 1940 and on a larger scale.
At first, both sides had simply used human wave attacks to try to break enemy fortifications. They would essentially try to mass as many men onto the field as possible in hopes that they would terrify the enemy so thoroughly that they would break ranks or surrender, or that simply the more men that attacked, the more that would make it through. This tactic proved entirely wasteful and futile, and hundreds of thousands of men died in no-man’s-land, with some entire regiments losing half their men in a single attack.
There were also some rather “quirky” ideas for breaking the deadlock of the trenches. An issue of Popular Mechanics in 1915 or 1916 that I recall looking at boasted of an invention that looked like a medical gurney without the lifting arms shielded with a round cylinder that would allow men to roll across no man’s land on their stomachs and be safe from shrapnel and gunfire. Obviously this is laughable and unheard of; I don’t think the invention was ever deployed.
Also, to meet the need and demand of semi automatic battle rifles of the period, a prodigious inventor named John Pederson developed a system that converted bolt-action M1903’s into semi automatic low powered rifles via the attachment of something called the “Pederson Device”, which fired smaller cartridges than the standard .30-06. The device was introduced in small numbers in March of 1918, far too late in the war to gain any recognition or to turn any tides. They exist today as extraordinarily rare military collectibles.
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