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