How different would World War I be if the Europeans took inspiration from foreign wars?

In our timeline, the European powers in 1914 thought World War I would be a simple affair based upon the short wars that took place in Europe such as the Franco-Prussian War and developed their strategies accordingly. However, European nations had sent military observers to foreign conflicts such as the American Civil War and the Russo-Japanese War (two wars which foreshadowed the kind of fighting seen in World War I) and those observers wrote down what they saw. These wars foreshadowed what would be seen in World War I:

  1. Trenches (Both)

  2. Submarines (ACW)

  3. Barbed wire (ACW)

  4. Defending entrenched positions with machine guns and artillery (RJW)
The American Civil War, in particular, showed how quickly a small war could evolve into a much more fierce and deadly one.

However, these reports were dismissed out of hand, either out of the view that the ACW was too 'exotic' to base strategies of, or out of pure racism in the case of the Russo-Japanese War.

But what if the Europeans were more open-minded and looked to these wars for inspiration for strategies in World War I rather than wars which were happening in their own backyard? How different would World War I be?
 

Derek Pullem

Kicked
Donor
1,2 and 4 only work if you are on the tactical defensive - the Germans in Alsace-Lorraine arguably did all of this. Elsewhere everyone was too busy manoeuvring until after the Marne and then it took only six weeks to stabilise the trench lines. So all in all - not much.
 
Well Europeans did learn from all of this, that gust learned the wrong lessons, rosso-japanese war for example it dosnt madder that thousands of Japanese died to tranches, becuse they won, combined whith the limitless human ability to agnore evidence that dosnt fit into ones world veiw and that's how you got ww1.
 
There were some really pertinent lessons in the Balkans wars, but they were not asorbed fast enough. A couple more years and the French may have started moving away from their infatuation with shock attacks and suicidal artillery tactics.

The Germans had a similar problem with their light artillery.
 

Germaniac

Donor
The problem was more that the western military minds explained away the problems with their belief in the superiority of their forces. I think a great example of this is from Colmar von der Goltz, the father of the modern Ottoman army, and his analysis of the Ottoman army performance during the 1st Balkan War. He clearly see's the faults of the army being that they weren't German enough.

  1. The Ottoman "recruit army" did not have the time to develop the experience needed to conduct the operations designed for "superior" armies (assuming he is speaking about his own)
  2. the Unreliability and ineffectiveness of the Ottoman rail system to keep up with the [German Modeled] mobilization plans.
  3. There weren't enough of the well trained new officers in places of importance
  4. The current minister of war (Nazim Pasha who would soon be assassinated) not being among those german trained officers who could have led to victory.
Everything just comes off as... well it didn't work for them BUT IT JUST MIGHT WORK FOR US!
 
There were some really pertinent lessons in the Balkans wars, but they were not asorbed fast enough. A couple more years and the French may have started moving away from their infatuation with shock attacks and suicidal artillery tactics.

The Germans had a similar problem with their light artillery.

I think the French were moving toward having more heavy artillery at the divisional level, they had a plan to buy a lot of bigger guns in the 1914-17 period. However inertia has to be overcome.
 
Europeans should have noted the effectiveness of machine guns and barbed wire on defense, but really there was not that much else to learn from precedent. One assumes that the Western and Italian Fronts are what is discussed here; the Russian Front and the Near East saw more effective tactics. The reason the Western Front and Italian Fronts developed as they did was that the armies were much larger in proportion to the battle area. For the first time in history, both sides could mobilize enough troops to man the entire front.

This hadn't been true in the ACW, the Seven Weeks War, or the Franco-Prussian War.
 
Scale. Scale. Let's say it again, scale.

Equipping a continental army for new doctrine changes takes time and money. Especially when you are doing it every ten or fifteen years. Trenches, barbed wire etc were relatively local in ACW etc. There was still plenty of maneuver going on. With the Western Front you are packing a lot more people into a much smaller area. Note the Russian and Middle Eastern fronts stayed more mobile due to troop densities. Maybe they should have expected that, but look how fast rail roads were moving everybody, defensively and offensively. One of my favourites is training. Compare the BEF and the New Army. One made bolt actions rifles seem like machine guns and the other could find the pointy end of a stick. You can do more advanced stuff with a professional army. Conscript armies are more limited and take time and losses to get up to speed.

Like so many historical endeavors the people running the show were mostly neither geniuses or idiots. A lot of things were predicted, if poorly understood, but what can you do when you have been given a hammer and a bag of screws? It is important to remember what the professionals knew and what the public knew and were told before and after the war are two different things and there are lot of myths built up around incompetence in WWI.
 
They definitely took inspiration from these wars, and the idea of the difficulty of the attack was very much talked about before WW1. You get an issue, however, when you have to mobilize your population for total war, and then try to find an approach that works with the resources you have. The anarchronistic character of lance armed cavalry was not something that was unknown; finding a suitable replacement however took time.

I will say, however, that the US Civil War was probably not all that relevant to WW1 until late 1863. The lessons to be learned up until then were present in Crimea and to a lesser extent in 1848. Once you started seeing the power of repeating rifles and rifled artillery on the battlefield, it became clear that defensive combat was reigning supreme. Once you got trench warfare at Petersburg, that is when you can say a shift worth really looking into occurred. But most of the Civil War in the Western theatre was essentially combined arms riverine warfare, or raiding expeditions, which really didn't have that much to say.

The Russo-Japanese War taught what 30 years of colonial warfare had already taught; frontal assaults against barbed wire and machine gun emplacements leads to high losses. This was not a new revelation.

What it REALLY should have shown, though, that I think European observers missed, was the toll that modern industrial war takes on the political stability of the population. That war almost tipped Russia into full blown revolution, and the next war would end up doing so. But think about how WW1 ended: Austria-Hungary and Germany were basically brought down from within before their frontiers could really be breached, due to political unrest stemming from food insecurity. France's army nearly came apart at the seams, as did Italy's. The big industrial nations in WW1 had no conception of how to deal with the home front, and it showed. I don't count the US in that, although we too had our issues in both putting together an army, and in Wilson's often clumsy authoritarianism, but Britain did moderately well. But in general, the homefront was mismanaged to an epic degree in WW1.
 
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I think everyone was well aware of the advantage the defenders enjoyed, but were convinced that they can overcome it with the tools at hand. This of course turned out not to be true. So instead of having Konrad hit on the head by a falling rooftile giving him a stroke of genius to start developing infiltration tactics, you could give one of the great powers a reason to commit entirely on the defensive with everything they have. Perhaps some Austrian or German spies/observers get a clear picture of Russian mobilization timetables, forcing the KuK to fortify Galicia and Germany to adopt an east first strategy.
 

Deleted member 94680

The lessons of the ACW (power of the defensive, barbed wire, etc) were countermanded by the lessons of the RJW (human wave attack, spirit of the offensive, etc). One going against the other meant it was easy to ignore them both as ‘outliers’ and not truly representative of Great Power conflict.

Personally, I think the ACW has been “reverse engineered” to be relevant to WWI (an americentric “we did it first”, if you will) where it’s only unique and special if you ignore the Crimean War that predated virtually everything by a decade. The American Civil War was extensively studied by pretty much everyone and hardly sent shockwaves through the military world. The RJW was maybe not as well studied but the main shock was the “lesser” Japanese managed to defeat the “superior” Russians so handily. Tokyo’s victory was mainly put down to successful adoption of Western methods, naturally (given the preconceptions of the day).
 
In a weirdly horrific way they are right. In a war where machine guns and artillery is king rifles are mostly comforters. In broad terms infantry tactics would consist of getting close under artillery fire then getting into a trench fight with bayonets. Kind of sad really.
 
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