Is non-WWI warfare possible with the same technology?

World War I became a trench war where it became that for logistical factors. At Gallipoli the Ottomans were strong enough to blunt the landings, but not strong enough to outright boot them out altogether. At Salonika the attempt to drive into the Balkans from a rather poorly-equipped port did not favor the offense any at all. At a bare minimum. Along the Isonzo and the Trentino neither side was able to make great, sweeping gains until the Germans brought infiltration tactics and that brought tactical, not strategic, gains. On the Western Front the factor in 1914 was again logistics, and the stalemate that emerged was because both sides had more or less logistical parity.

In the Sinai, Palestinian, Mesopotamian, Eastern, and Balkans theaters there was plenty of mobile, fluid warfare. The Germans and Russians had the most mobile war in WWI, and the only one with battles that resembled in many ways more what we expect of WWII than WWI (namely capturing huge armies in dramatic maneuvers, as at Tannenberg, Premyzl, and so on), while the wars of Serbia against the Central Powers and Romania against the Central Powers were also ones of maneuver and dashing audacity.

Trench warfare is what happens when modern technology meets societies with precious little idea of how to employ it. It's why it recurred in WWII in the Siege of Leningrad, the Belarusian War from 1942-4, in the entirety of the Italian Campaign, in Korea after the UN drove the PRC to the current DMZ, in the Iran-Iraq War.....
 
Perhaps I should clarify, he was speaking on the western front specifically. You say britian staying neutral, but would that eliminate trench warefare due to tipping the scales, or somethinge else entirely. I suppose the question I should be asking is is there a way, without changing the technology or balance of the war to keep men on the western front out of the trenches?

No, not really. People forget that trench warfare was not just a WWI thing. There's the Crimean War, the Petersburg Siege, the Siege of Atlanta, the Siege of Port Arthur, all of which are pre-WWI examples. Then post-WWI there's the Italian and Leningrad campaigns, the Belarusian War from the end of the Battle of Moscow to Operation Bagration, there's Korea from 1951-3, there's the War of Attrition between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, there's the Iran-Iraq War.....

The Battles of Basra in 1982-8 were the most recent example of trench warfare. It's not a new thing, and it tends to reflect a stalemate of extremely lethal technology meeting inability to employ it accurately. Just as the trench warfare phase in the West reflected a combination of inexperienced troops meeting misjudgments about what firepower could actually do, and a great deal of political refusal to admit or face up to mistakes made on the part of the generals.
 
It really depends on the density of troops to the amount of front.

As others have pointed out on the Eastern Front, in Africa, and on other minor fronts things tended to be more fluid because there were either too few men or too much ground to properly entrench every mile of front.

On the other hand on the Western Front and at Gallopoli where the ratio of men to front were greater I don't think there is anyway to avoid trench warfare. The killing power of modern artillery and the machine gun just made it too effective.

More accurately the killing power of modern artillery and the machine gun colliding with the ideals of linear warfare was what made trench warfare more or less inevitable in the first go-rounds in the West. While in Italy and Gallipoli it reflected mutual weaknesses on both sides.

Trench warfare tends to reflect mutual weakness in modern terms. Look, for instance, at Korea where the UN forces had the power to draw the Chinese out of South Korean territory, but where the UN had no means to force the Chinese to total surrender, while bereft of the kind of overwhelming firepower used by the UN the PLA of course had no chance to throw the UN south.

Or in the Iran-Iraq War where Iran's army was undergunned and often denied the ability to replace its weapons, while the Iraqi army was fair on defense but completely and totally feckless on the offensive. The Battle of Basra reflected this, in that Iran never had the capability to actually crack Iraqi lines, but Iraq equally until 1988 lacked the capability to crack the Iranians, who proved to be by far more militarily capable for most of the war.
 
No, not really. People forget that trench warfare was not just a WWI thing. There's the Crimean War, the Petersburg Siege, the Siege of Atlanta, the Siege of Port Arthur, all of which are pre-WWI examples. Then post-WWI there's the Italian and Leningrad campaigns, the Belarusian War from the end of the Battle of Moscow to Operation Bagration, there's Korea from 1951-3, there's the War of Attrition between Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, there's the Iran-Iraq War.....

The Battles of Basra in 1982-8 were the most recent example of trench warfare. It's not a new thing, and it tends to reflect a stalemate of extremely lethal technology meeting inability to employ it accurately. Just as the trench warfare phase in the West reflected a combination of inexperienced troops meeting misjudgments about what firepower could actually do, and a great deal of political refusal to admit or face up to mistakes made on the part of the generals.

So then, if all were aware in totality of the coming structure of the war, the ineffectiveness of dated tactics in modern combat and the full capability of their available technology, would it still be an inevitability assuming nothing else changed much?
 

Cook

Banned
Well in the German's case it was because they knew they were beaten and were making one final push to try and break the allies. And it cost them.
They'd also developed new tactics, bypassing strong points and achieving breakthroughts in depth.
 
Top