Snake Featherston
Banned
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.....
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.....