“In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row”
-John McCrae 1872-1918
After WWI, the victorious nations held parades where uniformed veterans marched through grateful towns. Meanwhile, ten million of their fellows lay buried in Belgian mud, on rocky Turkish beaches, and battlefields between. Imagining a parade of these poor souls helps us appreciate the titanic devastation of the Great War. Marching four abreast, the British dead would form a line 269 miles long. Adding in their French allies extends the line another 340 miles. Including all dead soldiers, this dark procession stretches over 2500 miles. WWI redefined war as an activity that could not just threaten lives and nations, but civilization itself.
The Lethal Hardware
WWI was not the first industrial war. The American Civil War featured machine guns, aerial reconnaissance, armored boats, and exploding shells. However, technology advanced rapidly in the intervening decades. In WWI, the improved machine gun became the war’s single deadliest weapon. Unlike earlier models, new machine guns were self-reloading and self-cooling. These mechanical innovations allowed machine guns to fire over 400 rounds per minute for extended periods. The ultimate defensive weapon, the machine gun allowed a small number of defenders to quickly neutralize an enemy advance, creating the infamous no-man’s land between two entrenched positions. Their presence turned the age-old headlong charge into a suicide run. At the Somme in 1916, 20,000 British soldiers were mown down by German machine guns in the first day alone.
While the machine gun reaped its deadly harvest, millions of other soldiers were slaughtered by artillery fire. In the late 19th century, chemists like Alfred Nobel developed far more powerful explosive formulas. Industrial methods churned out these high explosives in massive quantities. As a result, single WWI battles could have more firepower than the entire American Civil War. WWI explosives ranged from the portable Stokes mortar, used for lofting shells from one trench to another, to massive fixed artillery pieces with ranges of many miles. Germany’s “Paris Gun,” loomed 150 feet high and fired shells nearly 100 miles, terrifying Parisians.
WWI featured airplanes for urban bombing campaigns and the tanks to demolish trench defenses. Dreaded U-boats roamed the seas, harassing battleships and merchant shipping. Most notoriously, WWI introduced the world to poison gas. Chemist Fritz Haber helped Germany weaponize chlorine and phosgene gas in 1915. Gas attacks were terrifying, with men drowning in air, their damaged lungs filling with fluid. Survivors received ghastly scars, burns, and blisters. While gas caused a terrible death, both sides quickly developed gas masks and warning systems that reduced the effectiveness of the slow-moving poison.
Total War
In past conflicts, a single decisive victory could end a war. However, war became a struggle of populations rather than armies. Defeating a nation now meant destroying its military, its ability to make war, and its will to fight. In the philosophy of total war, civilians are no longer truly non-combatants as they may produce food or supplies to support their military. The British blockade of Germany caused misery for civilians but was judged an effective strategy in defeating Germany. German atrocities against Belgian civilians aimed to suppress potential resistance.
The rise of national governments and national identity in the 19th century allowed countries to marshal the full resources of their populations for war. National governments became stronger as communication and transportation advances increased the frequency of interactions between a government and its citizens. Bureaucracies grew as industrialization and imperialism enriched and enlarged nations. At the same time, urbanization and the formation of new nations like Germany and Italy increased a sense of collective national identity. These forces improved the coordination of armies and economies. Conscription swelled armies to unprecedented size. In Britain, half of the 6 million men who fought in WWI were conscripts. Economic policy could also be coordinated towards military objectives. In Britain and America, government agencies oversaw labor laws and production objectives to keep armies well supplied. Finally, all the belligerent countries ran government propaganda campaigns to inspire all citizens to do their patriotic duty on the field, in the factory, and at home.
Cannon Fodder
In the opening battles of WWI generals applied tactics from the Napoleonic Wars to the modern battlefield with disastrous results. Before 1914, conventional wisdom held that a determined charge by professional troops could shatter enemy defenses. In Alsace, French cavalry and fighting spirit were nearly annihilated by German machine guns and artillery. Within a month, the French had taken nearly 250,000 casualties, losing many of their best trained men.
In September 1914, after the Germans were held back at the Marne the opposing armies raced north in a desperate attempt to outflank one another. When this failed, they dug in, creating the trenches that we associate with WWI. While these wet, cold, dank ditches were miserable living quarters, trenches did provide significant protection against enemy weapons. However, in trench warfare, battles could rage for weeks or months, as the armies grappled over yards of ground. The sustained nature of modern warfare led to massive casualty figures. The Battles of the Somme and Passchendaele raged for over three months each. Once the armies bogged down in Northern France and Belgium, the entrenched defenders held a major advantage that could only be surmounted with overwhelming force.
The tactics employed by generals on both sides had particularly high costs. The first approach of “breakthrough” relied on artillery barrages to pummel the defenders before infantrymen attacked their lines. Time and again, offensives followed the same pattern: the infantry would advance with artillery support, the defenders would retreat, the defenders would reinforce their new position quickly using railroads, the advance would bog down, and the defenders would counter-attack. By the end, the final battle lines were near where they had been before the offensive. In 1917, the Passchendaele offensive cost 250,000 British lives for a few miles of useless muck. In 1918, Germany launched Operations Michael and Georgette, which brought significant advances before inevitably stalling and depleting irreplaceable forces. The second approach of “attrition,” saw each side literally try to bleed the other to death. Attrition was a compelling approach in locations of symbolic importance. At Verdun in 1916, the French government demanded that the army hold the ancient fortress there, inspiring General Robert Nivelle’s famous quote: “they shall not pass.” German General Erich von Falkenhayn intended to grind down the French forces at Verdun, but German leadership demanded he seize the town. The bloodletting that ensued was appalling. Over nine months of fighting, 350,000 French and 350,000 Germans were killed or wounded, and Verdun was obliterated.
Conclusion
Sadly, WWI was not the war to end all wars, but the war that changed war. The scale of the carnage shattered the pre-modern world that existed before 1914. The military tactics and political order of that old world were buried in those bloody fields. From that deadly soil grew our modern age: an age of ideology, technology and terror.