AHC: prevent trench warfare

with a POD after 1900, prevent trench warfare in WW1, while changing little else.
is this possible?

Hmmm. Tricky.

Here's one idea - no Plan XVII. The French hold on the eastern border whilst deploying large forces to meet the Schlieffen Plan as it cuts through Belgium (French high command knew all about it, but thought that the Germans couldn't mobilise enough men to make it work. Why they forgot about Germany's reserves is a mystery). Von Kluck panics at the sight of a million heavily armed men coming at him, the plan goes horribly wrong and the retreat is bungled. With the right wing mangled von Moltke calls in forces to protect the border and things rapidly go south on Germany's other borders. The war ends before Christmas, the French get Alsace-Lorraine back, the Russians get some chunks of Silesia, the Serbs survive having humiliated Austria-Hungary, a few piece of Africa become British and then its time for tea and crumpets all around.
 
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NothingNow

Banned
with a POD after 1900, prevent trench warfare in WW1, while changing little else.
is this possible?

Not without massive casualties on the western front, and criminal incompetence even Cadorna would have recognized. The tactics weren't there to deal with the concentration of troops and firepower, and restore mobility after the initial phases of the war.

You've either got to change basic strategy by at least one major power, or it's utterly impossible.

Cymraeg's got the best idea it seems, while more armored car support for the infantry and cavalry in the early phases might also do the trick.

Maybe someone invents the tank early. Which wouldn't be hard as the basic ideas were already out there, although it would slow down the advance (possibly very bad) as frankly, early tanks were slow and temperamental beasts.
 
And such a slowdown, I'd imagine still wouldn't turn away trenches, since the soldier's basic instinct is to hunker down and dig into the ground if he's expecting to stay in a place for even a few hours pretty much. You'll get heavily fortified positions eventually, but I think instead of fighting over a a few thousand metres of ground at most a time, there'll be a much wider stretch of no man's land, perhaps 20-50 kilometers, that is constantly in flux, where it is not the forward units but the rearmost ones which dig in and create those fortifications. The war, relatively speaking, will appear to be one of mobility, but you'll probably not have those massive and constant advances and retreats across half a country at a time that you may be after until the tank's reliability is fixed.

That said, early tank deployment also means that those mechanical issues are noticed and fixed sooner than later. Which means that mobility is restored sooner. Basically, trench warfare does occur, but with an early prototypical tank being discussed in 1913/14 (as an oversized and overarmed armoured car essentially), the issues might be fixed by early 1916. The war may not end any earlier, but I'd imagine that at the least you'll have grand campaigns covering fairly-sized stretches of terrain in one thrust.

War in 1915/16 won't look so much like WWII I think as the early stages of Korea - where massive offenses change things suddenly and completely until armies outrun their supply lines or hit a defensive line they can't breach, at which point the 'defending' side does the same, and the war goes back and forth like that.

Basically, WWI as we know it...but you end up leveling all of Belgium, northern France, and northwest Germany in the process, and someone will inevitably drag Holland into the war in the hopes of outflanking one side or the other.
 

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Have the French give up in 1914. It is somewhat possible if the Germans better use their reserves, kept their troops together up to the Marne, or move troops from the border earlier/not use the Ersatz divisions for an offensive in Lorraine! Much of this requires the Germans to behave in a more rational manner, so its unlikely unless we change some personalities.

Its hard to imagine the Entente doing anything on the Western Front that wouldn't have resulted in trenches, though these would be closer to the German border.
Perhaps the Russians occupying Berlin could change things, but they wouldn't be there before 1915 at the very earliest thanks to supply difficulties and the German fortress belt in the East.
 
A central problem with preventing trench warfare is technology. I know this sounds obvious but the scale of the problem technology presented in breaking the deadlock is frequently underestimated (particuarly by historians such as Alan Clarke). Basically, the technology of the early First World War (up until the end of 1917) was very clearly biased towards defence. Artillery could shred an infantry attack in No Man's Land but the problem was that it couldn't be moved up easily either to support an offensive. It was only when stormtrooper tactics were devised and tanks became more than gigantic shields that trench warfare could be broken.

How to prevent this? Simple. Somehow give the armies of the 1910s the will and ability to build tanks of a 1917 standard, just don't expect casualties to be lower.
 
Good point Teg. What strikes me as well is that the Western Front stalemate was already written on the wall during the siege of Port Arthur - hell, during the siege of Petersburg! Perhaps have someone like Churchill as a war correspondent at the Russo-Japanese war. He sees the horrible casualties at Port Arthur and then does some further thinking when he joins the Campbell-Bannerman Cabinet.
 
A big driver of stalemated trench warfare was the limitations of logistics. From very early in the war, both sides were perfectly capable of generating local breakthroughs in enemy defensive lines, but were completely unable to exploit them in a meaningful way. The defender could bring up supplies and reinforcements by rail, but the attacker (at least in the initial stages of exploiting a breakthrough) could only bring up supplies and reinforcements to the last intact railhead behind his initial lines: past that, his reinforcements had to walk and his supplies were dependent on horse-drawn carriages.

Improved tactics did help later in the war, partly by achieving breakthroughs on a larger scale and exhausting the attacker's forces less in the process of achieving the breakthrough, but also in the way that infiltration tactics allowed the attacker to disrupt the defender's command-and-control system and thus make it harder for the defender to know where and when to send their reinforcements. It also "helped" that by 1917 and 1918, the French, British, and Germans (but not the Americans, who had just joined the war) were all scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of war capacity, so there weren't a lot of supplies and reinforcements to send to stop a breakthrough.

WW2 was a much more mobile war largely because of motorization. Most countries were still dependent on horses and mules for the bulk of their last-mile logistics train, but spearhead forces were mechanized or motorized, specifically designed to be able to exploit a breakthrough quickly before the defender could respond.

If you could delay the outbreak of war for several years and simultaneously accelerate the adoption of motorized logistics, it'd go a long way towards avoiding the stalemate. It may not be enough, though, as the industrial base of the era would have been strained to produce trucks and gasoline in sufficient quantity to change the strategic environment, and without the negative example of WWI, the sheer expense of making the attempt would be pretty tough to sell.

Germany would probably be the best candidate here, since the problem supplying rapidly-advancing troops deep in enemy territory was always the biggest weakness of the Schlieffen Plan, and since if any of the European Great Powers had the industrial capacity to pull it off, Germany did. It would have meant, though, diverting resources from the Naval buildup, and considering the level of mental block the German political leadership of that era had about building up the Navy, it's pretty difficult to imagine them diverting resources on the required scale.
 
Tanks don't prevent trench warfare, they just force the deployment of anti-tank guns early on. To break trench warfare you need a method of moving firepower forward at double-digit mph speeds, which isn't likely to happen until at least the '20s.
 
with a POD after 1900, prevent trench warfare in WW1, while changing little else.
is this possible?

The technology of that decade prevented any other outcome. You would have to have a successful Schlieffen Plan and France is out of the war in 8-10 weeks.

Trench warfare happened everywhere at this time. Western Front, Gallipoli, Italian front, Balkan front and even the Eastern front on occassion.

The main thing to remember was that a trench was the safest place to be on a 1914-18 battlefield. Once a soldier was in the open he was mown down and torn to pieces by shrapnel and mortar fire.

The British army suffered higher casualties during the period of 'open warfare' in 1918 than it did on the Somme or Paschendaele.
 
This means either France or Germany develops its logistics very much less before the war, as WWI armies were exceptionally mobile where one side or the other had a logistical advantage (the Eastern Front), or where both sides were equally logistically vulnerable (East Africa, Balkans).
 
The technology of that decade prevented any other outcome. You would have to have a successful Schlieffen Plan and France is out of the war in 8-10 weeks.

Trench warfare happened everywhere at this time. Western Front, Gallipoli, Italian front, Balkan front and even the Eastern front on occassion.

The main thing to remember was that a trench was the safest place to be on a 1914-18 battlefield. Once a soldier was in the open he was mown down and torn to pieces by shrapnel and mortar fire.

The British army suffered higher casualties during the period of 'open warfare' in 1918 than it did on the Somme or Paschendaele.

It did not happen in Africa. On the other hand Africa was where everybody improvised, with uh, Calvinball warfare. Trench warfare in the West was the result of two enemies logistically equal, where logistics was either mutually non-existent or immobile there were quite dramatic advances possible (see: Eastern Front and East Africa). The Russians were logistically outmatched by Germany, as was Austria-Hungary, this is the real reason the Germans look so good relative to everybody else on that front, well, that and Tsarist problems with tactics.

A big driver of stalemated trench warfare was the limitations of logistics. From very early in the war, both sides were perfectly capable of generating local breakthroughs in enemy defensive lines, but were completely unable to exploit them in a meaningful way. The defender could bring up supplies and reinforcements by rail, but the attacker (at least in the initial stages of exploiting a breakthrough) could only bring up supplies and reinforcements to the last intact railhead behind his initial lines: past that, his reinforcements had to walk and his supplies were dependent on horse-drawn carriages.

Improved tactics did help later in the war, partly by achieving breakthroughs on a larger scale and exhausting the attacker's forces less in the process of achieving the breakthrough, but also in the way that infiltration tactics allowed the attacker to disrupt the defender's command-and-control system and thus make it harder for the defender to know where and when to send their reinforcements. It also "helped" that by 1917 and 1918, the French, British, and Germans (but not the Americans, who had just joined the war) were all scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of war capacity, so there weren't a lot of supplies and reinforcements to send to stop a breakthrough.

WW2 was a much more mobile war largely because of motorization. Most countries were still dependent on horses and mules for the bulk of their last-mile logistics train, but spearhead forces were mechanized or motorized, specifically designed to be able to exploit a breakthrough quickly before the defender could respond.

If you could delay the outbreak of war for several years and simultaneously accelerate the adoption of motorized logistics, it'd go a long way towards avoiding the stalemate. It may not be enough, though, as the industrial base of the era would have been strained to produce trucks and gasoline in sufficient quantity to change the strategic environment, and without the negative example of WWI, the sheer expense of making the attempt would be pretty tough to sell.

Germany would probably be the best candidate here, since the problem supplying rapidly-advancing troops deep in enemy territory was always the biggest weakness of the Schlieffen Plan, and since if any of the European Great Powers had the industrial capacity to pull it off, Germany did. It would have meant, though, diverting resources from the Naval buildup, and considering the level of mental block the German political leadership of that era had about building up the Navy, it's pretty difficult to imagine them diverting resources on the required scale.

There are several theaters in which WWII was not very mobile. Italy's one, there were several sectors of the Eastern Front where fighting was quite static and often mainly artillery duels. Motorization should also not be exaggerated, the WWI German army was more motorized than its WWII successor, and motorization mattered only after 1943. WWI armies were also more mobile than is generally realized, so this factor tends to be distorted in terms of both wars. For that matter the war in the Middle East itself was quite a bit more mobile than it is generally allowed for, given the advances and retreats by both sides.

A central problem with preventing trench warfare is technology. I know this sounds obvious but the scale of the problem technology presented in breaking the deadlock is frequently underestimated (particuarly by historians such as Alan Clarke). Basically, the technology of the early First World War (up until the end of 1917) was very clearly biased towards defence. Artillery could shred an infantry attack in No Man's Land but the problem was that it couldn't be moved up easily either to support an offensive. It was only when stormtrooper tactics were devised and tanks became more than gigantic shields that trench warfare could be broken.

How to prevent this? Simple. Somehow give the armies of the 1910s the will and ability to build tanks of a 1917 standard, just don't expect casualties to be lower.

Not exactly. As the Eastern and African fronts showed WWI armies were actually quite capable of mobile operations. As in WWII one of the most formidable conventional weapons was artillery. I believe the Mackensen Wedge approximates some of the WWII artillery techniques, while the Italian theater in both wars was exceptionally static and horrible due to things like attacking superior firepower holding the high ground. Trench warfare's also reappeared periodically in the 20th Century, Korea and Iran-Iraq are two examples of that.
 
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