Trench Warfare on the Western Front: Why the Stalemate Lasted

The Schlieffen Plan fails

• Germany's Schlieffen Plan gambled on beating France in about six weeks by attacking through neutral Belgium, then turning east to face Russia before it was ready. It failed because:
  • Belgium resisted longer than expected.
  • The British Expeditionary Force arrived to help.
  • Russia mobilised faster than Germany expected.
• In September 1914 the French and British halted the German advance at the Battle of the Marne, saving Paris and forcing the Germans to retreat.
• Both sides tried to outflank each other northwards (the "race to the sea") until two lines of trenches ran from the Belgian coast to the Swiss border in 1914.
• This froze the Western Front into a stalemate that would last nearly four years.

Life in the trenches

• Each side dug a system of trenches, with support and reserve trenches behind, linked by communication trenches.
• Between the two armies lay No Man's Land, an open strip of churned mud, shell holes, and barbed wire.
• Conditions were grim: waterlogged trenches brought trench foot (a painful rotting of the feet), along with rats, lice, and disease.
• Men lived under the constant threat of shellfire and snipers, the stress of which caused what was then called "shell shock".
• Attacking meant climbing out ("going over the top") into machine-gun fire across open ground, so defending a trench was far easier than capturing one, and both sides mostly stayed put.

Tactics and technology

• The weapons of this war favoured defence: the machine gun could cut down waves of advancing men, and artillery (heavy guns firing shells) and barbed wire made crossing No Man's Land deadly.
• Generals ordered massed infantry attacks after long bombardments (days of shelling), but this shelling warned the enemy an attack was coming, so it often failed to destroy the defences.
• New weapons were tried to break the stalemate:
  1. Poison gas, first used by Germany at Ypres in 1915.
  2. Tanks, first used by Britain at the Somme in 1916.
  3. Aircraft, for spotting and later fighting.
• Tools to defend a position stayed more advanced than the tools to capture one, so attacks cost thousands of lives to gain only a few miles of ground.

The war of attrition

With no breakthrough possible, both sides turned to attrition: trying to wear the enemy down by killing more of his men than you lost.

Verdun (1916)

• Germany attacked a fortress town it knew France would defend at all costs, aiming to "bleed France white".
• The French held, and between them the two sides suffered around 700,000 casualties.

Somme (1916)

• Launched by Britain partly to relieve Verdun.
• On July 1, the first day, the British army took 57,000 casualties, 19,000 of them killed.
• Months of fighting gained only a few miles.

Passchendaele (1917)

• Rain turned the battlefield near Ypres into deep mud.
• Another 250,000+ Allied casualties bought a similar tiny advance.

These battles show what the deadlock cost: huge numbers of dead for almost no movement of the front line.