What changed in between the 19th century and the 20th century that led to stalemate trench warfare in WWI? Why were decisive actions and breakthroughs so doable in the Napoleonic and American Civil wars but functionally impossible in the Great War? It doesn't seem like the technology changed substantially.
What changed in between the 19th century and the 20th century that led to stalemate trench warfare in WWI...
Benjamin Thomas
Landon Evans
Because the fastest these armies could move was at the speed of a marching man. Before, it was the speed of a horse, and after it was at the speed of a motor vehicle, but due to advances in infantry small-arms the cavalry –the fast-moving strike element of an army– ceased to be an effective fighting force on the relatively constricted Western Front.
Juan Garcia
Countries had a greater industrial capacity which allowed them to mass produce things like machine guns, barbed wire, artillery etc. Some of the technology from WW1 existed in the US civil war but there just wasn't as much of it. There were pretty significant improvements in technology as well, the majority of soldiers in the 19th century were still using muskets.
Countries were still becoming less agrarian throughout the entire 19th century as well, by WW1 there was just a lot more people that could be drafted.
Lincoln Bennett
>Huge manpower, thus more reserves
>automatic weapons, rendering classical charges near useless
>aircraft providing superiour reconaissance
>Immobile artillery becoming the undisputed queen of death
Hudson Cook
>It doesn't seem like the technology changed substantially.
what
Jaxon Wright
>Proliferation of the machine gun didn't matter
Kill yourself and never post again
Sebastian Martinez
>the majority of soldiers in the 19th century were still using muskets.
Idiot
Jayden Barnes
I meant muzzle-loaders but I'm still probably right.
Hunter Green
continental industrialisation
Levi Johnson
No, you aren't, breech loaders were standard issue by the 1860s, which is when everything important happened as far as industrial war goes
Samuel Brown
No they weren't. The Crimean and US civil wars are generally accepted to be the first "industrial wars". The "standard issue" guns in the US civil war were rifled muskets: en.wikipedia.org
Breech loaders weren't "standard issue" until the Franco-Prussian war.
Xavier Reyes
There were 19 different breech loader repeaters in use during US civil war you silly cunt, and Crimea was in the 1850s
Again
>1860s
>Crimea
Aiden Butler
Machine guns
No infantry can charge through machine-gun fire over open fields without taking massive casualties.
Tanks broke that stalemate
Jaxson Sullivan
>stalemate trench warfare
>ignoring Eastern front
Angel Peterson
Except there were big sweeping movements and decisive breakthroughs everywhere in WW1 except the Western Front. The Western Front was a unique situation where two opposing sides were able to dig in and hold an unbroken line between two impassable frontiers.
Brayden Davis
>There were 19 different breech loader repeaters in use during US civil
This doesn't mean they were standard issue, most soldiers were using rifled muskets.
>and Crimea was in the 1850s
Ya no shit my point is that you're wrong that "everything important" in industrial warfare began in the 1860s and it's another example of a 19th century war where muzzle-loaders were standard issue. The first two "industrial wars" of the 19th century used more muzzle-loaders than breech loaders.
My statement was that the majority of soldiers used muskets in the 19th century, if you count rifled muskets I'm almost certainly right.
Anthony Reed
>What is a Chassepot?
>What is a Tabatière?
The Franco-Prussian was the first industrial war, Crimea was a shitshow example of the exact problem Dreyse set out to solve and wasn't industrial in any way shape or form
Oliver Powell
Franco Prussian war was in the 1870s and I already acknowledged that's when breech-loaders became standard issue.
If your definition of an "industrial war" is one in which the soldiers use breech loading rifles then your opinion is likely at odds with any relevant historian on the 19th century.
Chase Gray
A number of things, but the biggest were simple demographic and wealth expansions, and what that did to military science.
A "Huge army" in the days of Napoleon was half a million men. By the time you get to the Western Front of WW1, Belgium alone could field 220,000 men at the start of the conflict. Countries like France and Germany were fielding multiple millions of men.
This creates problems that simply didn't happen in earlier eras of warfare. Almost all of 19th century and earlier tactics involved coming up with some way to get to the side or behind your enemy, and shoot them with more volume of fire than your opponent could retaliate with. You can't do that when the enemy's front stretches along the entire border of your countries, and there is no rear to break through to. Furthermore, logistical concerns become much more onerous; armies can no longer live off the land, and your biggest restriction to concentrating force is how much road and rail capacity there is in the area that you can bring supplies up through, whereas back in the day the usual limiting factor was how much wealth you had to procure what supplies you couldn't obtain through theft.
And now that armies are growing bigger than the point that you can supply them all at the front, that means you have colossal buildups of reserve forces, so even if you can somehow breakthrough in a field where you have no particular edge over your opponent, there's guys standing behind them ready to plug the gap.
Charles Morgan
It was a combination of factors.
Firstly, industrial age advances in weapons technology had vastly increased the firepower of infantry and artillery so that the "beaten zone" in front of an enemy position became extremely hazardous to cross. Crossing in a massed formation was impossible as the formation would be broken apart by fire.
Despite the advent of telecommunications, tactical command-and-control had not significantly advanced since the last century - lieutenants and captains still had to rely on verbal commands to their units. This made it very difficult to adopt the small-unit tactics necessary to cross beaten zones. The French and German armies both adopted regulations which nominally emphasized open-order drill but in practice officers feared that losing sight of their men would result in the attack faltering.
Secondly, although artillery technology had advanced, techniques for coordinating indirect fires with infantry had not been developed. This made it difficult to suppress fortifications to allow infantry to cross beaten zones.
The WW1 armies weren't stupid, and all of these problems were eventually addressed, but it took a lot of time and experimentation to figure out what worked in practice.
Levi Parker
>It doesn't seem like the technology changed substantially.
Magazine-fed rifles alone are a "substantial change" from the American or Franco-Prussian Wars.
James Butler
>The WW1 armies weren't stupid
Towards the beginning of the war you could definitely argue that to be the case. Especially with generals being extremely impractical with decision making and not adapting quick enough.
Hudson Jackson
Breakthroughs were entirely possible on the western front with the equipment armies had availible at the time, the tactics they used were just meme-tier in the beginning of the war.
Owen Lee
At most the French high command could be called wilfully stupid for insisting on Offensive a Outrance, and even that was based on evidence from the Russo-Japanese War that well-handled infantry could overcome a fixed fortification by maneuver and shock.
Aiden Sanchez
Actually your wrong about the ACW. It devolved into world's first official trench war around Richmond. Only way the South lasted into 1865.
The reason for this was the range of the rifles of the time and their accuracy.
Men could now hide in trenches and get several shots off at approaching Union forces before they made it to the line.
The first instance of this was at Fredricksburgh where the South just got behind a stone wall and slaughtered the approaching Union soldiers.
Lee figure out if you dig trenches you could do this anywhere so that's how he defended Richmond for the last few months of the war, but Grant just did human wave attacks until Lee gave up.
Isaac Rodriguez
it was more germany's collapse that broke the stalemate, ww1 era tanks were slow as fuck and didn't do much to turn the tide on their own.