3.6 Trench Warfare and War Technology

A continuous, immovable front stretched south from Flanders to the border of Switzerland. Troops dug ditches, 6 to 8 feet deep and 4 to 5 feet wide, to escape bullets, grenades, and artillery. Twenty-five thousand miles of these trenches slashed a muddy scar across Europe. In the Battle of the Somme River in 1916 a million men were killed in just four months of fighting. Only late in the war did new armored “landships” – code-named “tanks” – returned the advantage to the offense by surmounting the trench barriers with their caterpillar treads. The plight of Allied forces, pushed the United States to send troops quickly. When war was declared there were barely 180,000 men in uniform. The goal quickly became to send a million men to Europe by the spring of 1918.

Before the Armistice

European powers struggled to adapt to the brutality of modern war. Until the spring of 1917, the Allies possessed few effective defensive measures against submarine attacks. German submarines sank more than a thousand ships by the time the United States entered the war. The rapid addition of American naval escorts to the British surface fleet and the establishment of a convoy system countered much of the effect of German submarines. Shipping and military losses declined rapidly, just as the American army arrived in Europe in large numbers. Although much of the equipment still needed to make the transatlantic passage, the physical presence of the army proved to a fatal blow to German war plans. ¹

In July 1917, after one last disastrous offensive against the Germans, the Russian army disintegrated. The tsarist regime collapsed and in November 1917 Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik party came to power. Russia soon surrendered to German demands and exited the war, freeing Germany to finally fight the one-front war it had desired since 1914. The German military quickly shifted hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the eastern theater in preparation for a new series of offensives planned for the following year in France.²

In March 1918, Germany launched the Kaiserschlacht (Spring Offensive), a series of five major attacks. By the middle of July 1918, each and every one had failed to break through the Western Front. On August 8, 1918, two million men of the American Expeditionary Forces joined British and French armies in a series of successful counteroffensives that pushed the disintegrating German lines back across France. German general Erich Ludendorff referred to the launch of the counteroffensive as the “black day of the German army.” The German offensive gamble exhausted Germany’s faltering military effort. Defeat was inevitable. Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated at the request of the German military leaders and the new democratic government agreed to an armistice (cease-fire) on November 11, 1918. German military forces withdrew from France and Belgium and returned to a Germany teetering on the brink of chaos.³

By the end of the war, more than 4.7 million American men had served in all branches of the military: four million in the army, six hundred thousand in the navy, and about eighty thousand in the Marine Corps. The United States lost over one hundred thousand men (fifty-three thousand died in battle, and even more from disease). Their terrible sacrifice, however, paled before the Europeans’. After four years of brutal stalemate, France had suffered almost a million and a half military dead and Germany even more. Both nations lost about 4 percent of their population to the war. And death was not done.⁴

Notes

1. Michael S. Neiberg, Fighting the Great War: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.