AHC: A more mobile ww1

The European theater of ww1 was very static, which made the conflict last unneccessarily long and cost an unneccessary number of lives. My challange is to find a way to make the European theater of ww1 to be more mobile. How can we make ww1 move faster instead of getting stuck in the trenches.
 
German victory in the race to the sea maybe. It would provide a longer front possibly meaning more mobility.
 
There is the possibility that some sort of low-intensity conflict involving one or two major powers but not a pan-European war could shake things up in regards to tactics, then again, it took four years of war plus tanks to do that OTL.

But the thing with trench warfare was it was a response to the conditions of the time, artillery was more lethal than ever before and so were things like machine guns (which caused easily the highest casualty rates for the charges across no man's land), but there were larger political reasons for it as well. In that department, it all boils down to the Schlieffen Plan, Germany knew she would be drawn into a two-front war if she fought and stalemated the Western front on purposes so she could take the Russians out, the Russians being a slow-mobilizing but hugely-populated empire that would be a huge problem otherwise. The Eastern front of the war, and the Austro-Italian front, as I recall, were both rather mobile but the thing with those fronts was that most of the sides involved were the second-tier European powers with the exception of Germany.

No Schlieffen plan or (somehow) no Russian entry might do the trick, that would have to butterfly the original crisis and not threaten directly any Russian interests... though Czar Nick would still be a fool to drop his allies.
 
After a very bloody major loss or two Allied commanders seek a new way to fight? More rapid development and adoption of tanks as a useful weapon?

1. Eh, I don't know about that first one, things like the Somme were literally the worst losses for the British military in its history before or since that time. Add in additional disasters like Gallipoli and suddenly the Great War feels a lot more cynical if you're some unlucky front line soldier.

2. That would make sense, only question is how, it's a type of machine that hasn't been made before.

Edit: Also, I love your name and location.
 
Sir John French blames the failure of Nueve Chappelle not on a lack of shells but on poor command and communications and goals beyond the means of the forces employed. As a result commanders move closer to the front, Royal Engineers and Royal Garrison Artillery officers are promoted into command positions. The British then begin pushing the Germans back piece by piece with localised attacks aimed at making adjioning sections of the line untennable. By years end the British have taken a considerable amount of territory, making the war more mobile than in the much larger French section of the line, but not nearly as mobile as on the Eastern Front due to the huge concentration of men a weapons in such a small area.
 
You need to bring motorisation in earlier.

Motorised logistics would provide for greater movement from the railheads and allow reinforcements for an offensive to be brought in nearly as quickly as the reinforcements for the defence (which used railways). Increased motorisation would probably also mean that some cavalry units would have more of their weapons after trucks instead of horse carts, and perhaps more armoured cars.

However, you would probably need to scale down the sheer amount of forcesemployed to leave room for much manouvre in western Europe.
 
West Front chauvanists!

The Western Front (huge armies, very little space) was deadlocked, but the Eastern Front was quite mobile. Take a look at the 1915 campaign, for example....
 

Cook

Banned
It would probably help if you had more paved roads in the countryside.

Not greatly. A man cannot be expected to march 25 miles (40 kilometres) a day, day after day, and then go straight into an assault regardless of the condition of the roads and there wasn’t the motorised transport existing to move them in large numbers. And more to the point, while he’s marching around a flank at 25 miles per day, his opposite number is either taking a shorter route to get to the same destination and going the same pace or he’s in his own country where he can embark by train and get there before hand. This is the great flaw of the Schlieffen plan.
 
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