Appearance
11.3 — The Mechanics of the Trenches
On 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the British Army suffered 57,470 casualties, of whom 19,240 were killed.
In one day. It remains the worst day in the history of the British Army.
The battle continued for another four and a half months and advanced the front line about ten kilometres.
Understanding why requires understanding a specific technical problem, and this chapter is about that problem, because "the generals were idiots" is the standard explanation and it is inadequate.
Why the defence dominated
Three technologies had matured and one had not, and the imbalance decided the war.
The magazine rifle. Accurate to hundreds of metres, firing ten or more aimed rounds a minute from a prone position behind cover.
The machine gun. Several hundred rounds a minute from one position, requiring two or three men. A single well-sited machine gun can cover hundreds of metres of ground and cannot be rushed.
Quick-firing artillery. The French 75, and its equivalents, used a hydraulic recoil mechanism so the barrel absorbed the recoil and the gun did not have to be re-aimed after every shot — raising the rate of fire by a large factor. Artillery caused the majority of casualties on the Western Front.
And barbed wire, which is agricultural technology applied to war: cheap, quick to lay, and it does not stop a man, it stops him at a fixed place while machine guns fire at him.
What had not matured was anything that could move across ground under that fire. The internal combustion engine existed and was not yet reliable enough for armoured vehicles at scale. Radio was not portable. Aircraft were fragile.
So the arithmetic was this. A defender in a trench, protected by wire, supported by machine guns and by artillery firing on pre-registered targets, faced an attacker crossing open ground on foot. Attacks failed. Everyone's attacks failed. This was symmetric.
And the communication problem is the one most often missed. Once soldiers left their trench they could not be contacted. Telephone wire was cut by shellfire within minutes. Runners were killed. Signal flags were invisible in smoke. A commander who launched an attack at 7.30 a.m. might learn what had happened by evening. He could not reinforce success or halt failure, because he did not know which was occurring. This, more than stupidity, is why attacks continued after they had failed.
What a trench system was
Not one ditch. A system in depth.
A front line of fire trenches, dug in a zigzag or bay pattern for the reason in the caption above.
A support line a hundred metres or so behind, and a reserve line behind that, connected by communication trenches running perpendicular so men and supplies could move without being exposed.
Dugouts — German ones on the Somme were dug into chalk to depths of ten metres and survived a week-long bombardment intact, which is why the machine guns were in action when the British attacked.
And in front, barbed wire in belts, and no man's land — anywhere from thirty metres to several hundred.
The daily reality. Rotation between front line, support, reserve and rest, typically a few days in each. Stand-to at dawn and dusk, the most likely attack times. Repair, digging, wiring and carrying at night, because daylight movement was fatal. Rats, lice, and standing water. Trench foot — a condition caused by prolonged immersion, which caused enormous numbers of casualties until routine foot inspection and dry socks were enforced.
And most deaths were not in attacks. The steady daily attrition from shelling, snipers and disease killed continuously in quiet sectors.
The attempts to break through
Every one was an attempt to solve the technical problem, and they should be described that way.
Artillery. The idea: destroy the wire and the defenders before the infantry crosses. The Somme preliminary bombardment fired over 1.5 million shells in a week.
Why it failed there. A large proportion of British shells were shrapnel rather than high explosive, which is ineffective against wire. Many were duds — British munitions quality in 1916 was poor. And the Germans were ten metres underground in chalk dugouts. The bombardment announced the attack, achieved less than expected, and cratered the ground so badly that the attackers had to cross it.
Gas. First used at scale by Germany at Ypres in April 1915 — chlorine, released from cylinders and carried by the wind.
It never won a battle. It depends on wind, which changes; both sides had it within months; and gas masks were effective within a year. Phosgene and then mustard gas were more dangerous — mustard is a blistering agent that contaminates ground and clothing and burns skin, eyes and lungs.
Gas caused around a million casualties and under a hundred thousand deaths, so it wounded far more than it killed — which was, in the grim calculation of the time, a military advantage, since a wounded man consumes resources.
Tanks. First used on the Somme in September 1916. Early tanks were slow, mechanically unreliable, blind, and unbearably hot and loud inside. They were used in small numbers before there were enough to matter.
By Cambrai in November 1917 and Amiens in August 1918 they were used en masse with artillery and infantry coordinated, and they worked — Amiens produced an advance of over ten kilometres in a day, which the German commander Ludendorff called the black day of the German Army.
Aircraft began as reconnaissance and artillery spotting, which was their most important role, and developed into fighting and bombing.
And the real solution was tactical rather than technological.
The German stormtrooper tactics of 1918: short intense bombardment rather than week-long, small groups infiltrating past strongpoints rather than assaulting them frontally, bypassing resistance and leaving it to follow-up troops, and devolving decisions to junior officers who could see the situation.
And the Allied all-arms battle of 1918: artillery firing from map data without registration so surprise was preserved, creeping barrages moving ahead of the infantry, tanks, aircraft, and sound-ranging and flash-spotting to locate enemy guns.
The methods that broke the deadlock in 1918 are the foundation of twentieth-century warfare, and the German version becomes the Blitzkrieg of 1940 (Chapter 11.7).
Other fronts
The Western Front dominates the memory and it was not the whole war.
The Eastern Front was mobile — vast distances, lower troop density, and armies that advanced and retreated hundreds of kilometres. Russian casualties were enormous and its supply system failed catastrophically (Chapter 11.5).
Gallipoli, 1915. An Allied attempt to force the Dardanelles and knock the Ottomans out, which failed at a cost of around 250,000 casualties on each side. Australian and New Zealand troops were heavily involved and it is central to both countries' national memory.
The Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire was defeated and then partitioned (Chapter 12.5), and where the Arab Revolt was encouraged with promises that conflicted with promises made simultaneously to France and to the Zionist movement.
Africa, where campaigns were fought in the German colonies, largely by African troops and porters, with very high mortality among the porters.
And at sea. The German U-boat campaign against merchant shipping nearly starved Britain in 1917 and was defeated by the convoy system. Unrestricted submarine warfare, and the sinking of the Lusitania with American deaths, is a principal reason the United States entered in 1917.
The Indian contribution
Around 1.3 million Indians served, and around 74,000 died (Chapter 6.20).
Indian troops were in France from September 1914 — the first Indian units arrived in time for the fighting around Ypres, when the British Expeditionary Force had been badly reduced, and Indian divisions held a significant portion of the line during the winter of 1914–15.
They also fought in Mesopotamia, where the campaign was largely an Indian Army operation, in Egypt, Palestine, East Africa and Gallipoli.
The conditions were particularly hard. Men from Punjab and the Himalaya in a Flanders winter, with correspondence censored, and with the specific problem that a wounded Indian soldier could not easily be sent home and convalesced in England instead.
India also supplied enormous quantities of money, food, and materiel, and the financial contribution was one of the grievances that fed the post-war movement.
And the political expectation was explicit and was disappointed (Chapter 6.20): substantial self-government was expected in return, and what arrived was the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms and the Rowlatt Act.
The cost
Around 8.5 to 10 million military deaths. Civilian deaths of a comparable order, including the Ottoman genocide of Armenians (Chapter 11.11) and deaths from famine and disease.
Around 21 million wounded, including very large numbers of permanently disabled and disfigured men — the reconstructive surgery of the period, and the tin masks made for men whose faces could not be repaired, are part of the record.
Shell shock, which was initially treated as cowardice — British soldiers were executed for desertion in cases now widely believed to have involved it, and the British government issued posthumous pardons in 2006 — and which is the origin of the modern understanding of post-traumatic stress.
And then the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, spread by troop movements and demobilisation, which killed an estimated 50 million or more worldwide. India suffered the highest absolute toll of any country, with estimates commonly in the range of 12 to 18 million deaths.
Where this shows up in your life
Every war memorial in Britain, France, Germany, Australia, Canada and India dates from this, and the practice of recording every name — rather than only officers — dates from this war.
The poppy, from the flowers that grew in disturbed ground on the Western Front.
And the phrase "the lost generation".
And there is a lesson about technology and tactics that generalises. New technology does not by itself change war; it changes the balance between attack and defence, and the side that works out the new combination first has a temporary advantage. In 1914 the defensive combination was mature and the offensive one was not, and four years and millions of lives were spent developing it. Chapter 11.7 shows the same technologies, recombined, producing the opposite result.
What the next page covers
The war ended in November 1918, and the peace made in Paris the following year is one of the most criticised documents in history. Chapter 11.4 covers 1917–18 and Versailles — how the war actually ended, why the German army's collapse was concealed at home and what that produced, what the treaty actually contained, Keynes's prediction about it, the redrawing of the map, and the honest question of whether a different peace was available.