Why were offensives so hard in the first world war?

Why were offensives so hard in the first world war?

Because the technology and strategies of the time favored the defenses in almost every regard

Why?

Because that's the way it was

Huge progress in defensive technologies and artillery with relatively no progress in mobility

You try charging a Maxim and then tell us how easy it is.

I don't know how well he's received on this board but Dan Carlin's series on WWI was one of the most interesting pieces of media on the subject I've heard

the idea behind trench warfare was that at any given time you had 9/10 of your forces in reserve and only 1/10 in the trenches. The defenses built up around a trench were so strong that to properly assault them a massive bombardment was needed to destroy all the barbed wire/machine gun nests/strong points/etc. This bombardment completely telegraphed to the enemy exactly where an assault was coming so they had time to pour in a nearly endless supply of reserves, so until the technology improved to allow breakthroughs or one side lost the ability to fight it was impossible to get through

Stop talking about the meme historian and his "factual" "history" "lessons"

>Heavily fortified trenches
>Wide open no mans land full of obstacles and no cover
>Machine guns
>Lack of troops to backfill the ranks in the case of a failed attack

It wasn't until mobile tactics like creeping barrage and tanks entered the war that the front lines started moving again. That and the jolt of energy the from America's entry into the war

Kek so he's received poorly. Got it. Never said he was factual. Just interesting.

At least in the Western Front (which is what most people mean when they talk about WW1; for instance, you have a lot of offensive and counteroffensive action in the East or the Mid-East), for time out of mind, battle tactics and later operational activity was centered around a pretty simple precept:

>Always try to maneuver so that you can shoot/stab the other guy in the back before he does it to you.

And then, starting in the 19th century, armies got bigger by orders of magnitude. Some of it was to do with things like improved agriculture and medicine supporting larger populations,but you also had more wealth in general (so more could be diverted towards raising troops) and probably most importantly, you had better organization from governments, the state had the ability to tap more of the land's resources than ever before.

100 years prior to WW1, you had Napoleonic armies clashing at Leipzig in the low to mid hundreds of thousands, and that was the effort of multiple nations providing troops. By WW1, individual major powers could raise and outfit millions of troops.

Troops need space; you can't infinitely concentrate them, not only tactically (artillery and machine guns will eat you up), but also operationally, you just can only put so many supplies over a given track of road every day. So as armies got bigger, they also got more spread out. By WW1, you reached a critical mass, and the amount of space the armies needed was literally longer than the entire border between France and Germany; you had lots of backlog reserves.

And the old plan didn't work. There was no "back" you could get at. Just an unbroken front facing force from sea to the Alps. It took time for tactics to catch up to the point where offensive action became feasible again.

nice; I hadn't really considered the grand strategic aspect of it in addition to technology's affect on tactics

Communications was one of the biggest aspects that made successful offensives so elusive on the Western Front.

Break throughs were common in just about every offensive, but it took something like 6 hours for news of a breakthrough to make its way all the way up the command structure to the general who could allocate more resources to capitalize on that breakthrough, and another 6 or so hours for that command to work its way back down to the front and put into action. By the time those ~12 hours had elapsed, the defenders had already counterattacked and sealed the breach.

There was simply no good way to effectively communicate from the tactical to the strategic level in WW1.

DELETE THIS

>memere

Why didn't they just go around the trenches?

The trenches ran from sea to the Swiss Alps. There was no way around them.

Why didn't they just fly to Mt. Doom on the eagles?

Fucking ringwraiths riding Dragons.

on the water dummy

how did WW1 even happen people are fucking retards back then

Would WWI have been different if paratroopers would've been a thing?

Because ships going round would be shelled. Easy.
Now here's the real question: if they built the trenches up to the sea, why did they not flood and make a really long artificial river?

Why didn't the Germans just fly to Ville Paris on their eagles?

They tried it was called the race to the sea

Why didn't the Germans just use their eagles to fly over the trenches?

Do you know how difficult it was to do amphibious invasions? Hell, even in the much more technologically adept WW2, it was considered tough as balls and only done with overwhelming local superiority. Remember how bad Gallipoli turned out? And that was against the Ottomans, who were a significant pay grade down from the people tearing it up in the Western Front.

Let's not forget that to do an amphibious landing, you first have to get your fleet past the opposing fleet (and while the High Seas Fleet was not a match for the Home fleet, it was no joke either, and the possibility of elements breaking threw to chew up your transports or later your supply convoys was a very real one), and then hit whatever beach you've selected. It's not going to be completely undefended of course, and you'll have to go up the beaches where the enemy is dug in with heavier equipment, since you can't transport artillery in some sort of primitive LVT thing that they'll have improvised.

Normally, the firepower was equalized, at least in WW2, by significant air support. Which of course isn't going to happen in WW1. But let's assume you can get a foothold on the beach. There are, of course, left vulnerable to direct amphibious assault, so all reuspply and reinforcement will have to be done by the same little shallow drafted boats until you can capture one. Remember, in WW2, it took a bit under 2 months to go from D-Day until they were ready to break out. This is an era where the railroad is the primary and best method of strategic transport. In 2 months, the defender will have sent in a lot more reinforcements than the attacker possibly could transport over the North Sea, and you'll be lucky if they don't get counterattacked back into the ocean.

The entire idea is stupid.

let's give the United States their due props for the Pacific Campaign then

Well the thing that surprised me about the WW1 when I first starting researching it is that attacking troops generally took the trenches of they were attacking. It is just that the speed of the offensive was too slow and the amount of defensive weapons facing them was high. So by the time the attackers reached the other trench there wasn't enough of a reserve to hold back the counter attack.