The Development of a Stalemate on the Western Front

The Development of a Stalemate on the Western Front

The main reason trenches developed on the western front is due to the

failure of the Schlieffen plan, if it had not been for this elaborate

quick way to win the war by Germany, trench warfare may never have

developed in WWI. As the Germans were being pushed back from Marne

they had to dig trenches to protect themselves from the advancing

allies, and the allies mirrored them and did the same.

The conventional explanation offered by historians for the stalemate

on the western front (an area stretching from Belgium all the way down

to the Alps) is that by 1914 technology and industrialism had

overtaken military strategy and tactics, making them obsolete.

Supposedly machine guns and rapid-fire artillery had made the

traditional tactics worthless; linear tactics and cavalry charges were

things of the past by 1914, and also bad choices were made by

inexperienced commanders.

It makes one wonder had the British commanders really been clued up to

the art of modern warfare maybe the war might not have been so

disastrous in terms of casualties. Even theorists from previous

warfare had far more reason on their side.

On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 60,000 British soldiers

died due mostly to ignorance but also to the fact that the commanders

tended to attack the most strongly defended positions (which were

supposed to have been destroyed by a barrage of artillery lasting a

week), destroyed by shelling or not, this was still not a wise idea.

The British seemed to have, not only an enormous amount of faith in

their own ability but also the skill of hugely underestimating the

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...able them to break

through enemy lines. To achieve the element of surprise was extremely

hard in the First World War, as not only were the men watching no-mans

land almost 24/7, all attacks normally followed, a long artillery

bombardment, or were just generally predictable, and even when on

no-mans land, it was not easy to traverse due to large craters in it

due to artillery fire.

Compared to previous wars Britain had been in, it is not like any of

them, the warfare was completely different, and also Germany was an

equal opponent to them, with the same developing technologies, and a

bigger army. All in all, stalemate on the western front was a

combination of the failure of the Schlieffen plan, the incompetence of

commanders, the development of technology and the fact that they were

two very equally matched sides.