The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [150]
Figure 50 Trench System, from English Army Manual 1914
The Maxim gun, the first reliable machine gun, was a main instrument for trench defense. The machine guns of World War I, invented by H. Maxim (thus the name) in 1884, fired about six hundred rounds per minute (ten rounds per second), and were so heavy it took several men to move, maintain, and shoot them; however, they also decimated attacking troops. The Germans protected their machine guns until the Allied artillery stopped firing, then set up the guns to drench the advancing troops with bullets. The howitzer artillery piece, a defensive and offensive machine, fired a projectile at high angles while out of sight (behind a hill for example) for a long distance. New shells exploded in the air scattering great quantities of fast flying, hot, steel fragments (shrapnel) capable of killing numerous men in an instant. These new machines of war erased men’s lives by the millions as they advanced across the open, muddy, barbed wire covered ground of No Man’s Land.[177]
Following 1914, the Western Front settled into doomed and nightmarish Allied attacks against excellent defensive fortifications held by the Germans. During the next three years, the front hardly moved in spite of countless sacrifices by hundreds of thousands of troops. The Battle of the Somme, a combined British and French attack on German trenches in July 1916, lasted four and one-half months. When the ordeal ended, British casualties totaled approximately 420,000, French 205,000, and German 500,000; and, the attack failed to reach objectives set for the first day. At Verdun, a million men died, while positions hardly changed.[178] These battles were typical for the Western Front.
the Western Front
The French and British generals, such as Nivelle for France and Haig for Britain, kept frontally attacking the perfectly dug-in Germans. After achieving nothing, and scratching their heads for a moment or two, they demanded more men and attacked just as before, notwithstanding some minor adjustments (more men, more artillery). The next attack will do it, they promised their political overlords; nevertheless, the only difference was higher piles of dismembered dead. Alarmingly similar results hardly worried the military leaders. As shredded bodies and splintered bones piled up civilian governments in England and France began asking their generals embarrassing questions. The responding generals said the Germans were suffering many more casualties than the attacking allies; thus, with each offensive victory grew closer. Liars. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results, these generals qualify as insane. And the political leaders were stupid and timid. Of course, the politicians were being lied to, but they needed to dig out the truth. Widespread incompetence is verified by the politicians accepting the general’s statements without analysis while the grim reaper prospered.
Figure 51 Lack of Movement on Western Front
(Shaded Areas with arrows Show Changes in the Front)
This view of the war is not universal. Numerous historians now take a new view, saying the Allied generals did a good job of trying to cope with a new military situation. They point out the generals changed tactics, increased the bombardment by artillery, fielded new weapons, and perfected new artillery techniques. One technique, the walking barrage, involves falling artillery shells creating a literal moving box of explosions around the advancing troops, protecting them all the way to the enemy trenches. New weapons, like aircraft, helped in observation to better assess enemy capabilities. The invention of tanks, pushed by Winston Churchill, tested by the Royal Navy’s Landships Committee, and fielded in 1916 helped break the stalemate. Meanwhile, by 1918 the Germans invented a new assault technique called infiltration,