Minimize casualties in WW1

Refferred to as the War to end all Wars, the tremendous bloodletting was on a scale unheard of in human history. From incomtent generals who wantonly sacrificed men to their deaths from Bloody Butcher Haig to the Blowhard Joffre. Was there any way tactics could have been developed to minimize the massive casualty levels without experimenting with beating one's head against a wall for 4 years hoping for a different result? Maybe not mass one's troops so tightly in theatres where an Offensive was obvious? Maybe limit one's objectives instead of all these grand plans that would deal a deathstroke on their opponents? Maybe a more numerous and better trained Red Cross? Maybe both sides could wait it out until the blockade starves either side into surrender or a game changing weapon could be developed and manufactured in enough numbers to tip the scales?
 
The problem is casualties per-se, but the complete lack of progress on the ground commensurate with these casualties. The mobile phases on the war in the west in 1914 and 1918 caused huge casualties, but the movement meant that such casualties were having major effects on the war.

As for how to do it, I think the operational/strategic mindset of 'one big push' and 'decisive breakthrough' had a negative impact on tactics. If someone had stumbled early on to the idea that trench warfare was akin to a siege and an offensive was to gain a position as precursor to the next offensive then operations of wide but shallow penetration could have been tried from the start and allowed progress on the battlefield commensurate with casualties.
 
Delaying WW1 by a few years seems like the simplest way to do this, but it might not count as the same war, and the alliance system would look very different just a decade later from 1914. Engineering advances could make tanks and planes more important in later WW1, and trench warfare might only be one phase of the conflict, followed by proto-blitzkrieg tactics.

WW1 was the missing link between the US Civil War-era militaries and WW2. Trench warfare and Gatling guns had featured prominently in US civil war battles like the Siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Petersburg.
 
The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 had machine guns, trenches, barbed wire, etc. Airplanes (and their contribution to recon and some bombing) and poison gas were not used, but it was WWI on a smaller scale. Given the technology of 1914-18, hard to see how the casualties are all that different - short barrages and infiltration tactics introduced earlier will help, but the reality is the only way to reduce casualties is not have the war.
 

Deleted member 1487

Refferred to as the War to end all Wars, the tremendous bloodletting was on a scale unheard of in human history. From incomtent generals who wantonly sacrificed men to their deaths from Bloody Butcher Haig to the Blowhard Joffre.
I'd contest that that is accurate. Haig was not a wanton butcher, he was an innovator who was dealing with the incredibly complex problem of mastering modern warfare in the midst of rapid technical changes, while building up multiple new armies/divisions, plus trying to satisfy civilian political demands and the demands of his allies begging for action to help take the pressure off of them. Joffre for all of his flaws had to deal with that as well, plus the demands to liberate occupied parts of his own country and rescue the civilians and industry therein. It is easy to armchair general and from hindsight say that these guys were idiots, but much harder to actually tackle the problems with the tools at hand with the constraints of the situation/office. Even later on with the rapid advance of tactics and the weapons/tools to match casualties were still extremely high. It is simply impossible to avoid suffering vast losses, especially when you have to attack, like it or not, to help your allies who are extremely hard pressed and to meet the demands of your bosses, the politicians who are concerned about losing their jobs.
 
Alright that's a concise argument but how do you excuse the bungled massacre at the Somme? 18k dead in one day. 62k casualties. And instead of cutting your losses, just sacrificed a whole generation of the cream of society for a maximalist fallacy.
 

Deleted member 1487

Alright that's a concise argument but how do you excuse the bungled massacre at the Somme? 18k dead in one day. 62k casualties. And instead of cutting your losses, just sacrificed a whole generation of the cream of society for a maximalist fallacy.
Incomplete training. Which was a function of the British agreeing to launch their offensive months early to help take the pressure off of France at Verdun and the Russians in Galicia. The broader strategy was predicated on the belief that German reserves were fully engaged, so one more offensive launched by the British would overload the Central Powers and the front would collapse due to lack of reserves. It made sense at the time given the intel, they didn't realize the Germans had triangularized their divisions and built new ones from the savings in men/regiments that switch created. Plus the losses on the Somme weren't exactly the worst it got for Britain, it was just memorialized (like the German Kindermord in 1914) due to the Pals Battalions, which meant when they suffered heavy losses it would hit a small geographic area exceptionally hard and really bring home the cost of war to the public that saw just about every male of a certain age range was killed or wounded in a very short time. The shock blew what happened out of all proportion to the rest of the what was going on in the war with all the other nations and what was to come.
 
An interesting article that points out how forward thinking the military establishments were in 1914.

A Service Ready for Total War? The State of the Royal Navy in July 1914
Matthew S Seligmann

The English Historical Review, Volume 133, Issue 560, 20 March 2018, Pages 98–122,

The image of Britain’s military leaders as conservative, reactionary, unimaginative, technophobic and resistant to change is all too well established in the popular imagination and memory. Britain, it is often said, always begins its campaigns with disaster on the battlefield because those in charge of the war effort, if they have thought about the art of war at all, are too preoccupied with fighting the last conflict to have taken any proper notice of subsequent developments. Consequently, being unprepared for future challenges, they fall at the first hurdle. Such shortcomings in strategic and tactical thinking, all too frequently revealed in the short wars of the nineteenth century, were, it is said, especially obvious when that most demanding of tests—modern industrialised warfare against a coalition of major powers—was faced in 1914.

The main victim of this caricature of disaster through thoughtlessness and incompetence, especially when it comes to the First World War, is the British Army. Books such as John Laffin’s British Butchers and Bunglers of the First World War proclaim in the most forceful terms that Britain’s devastating casualties on the Western Front were a result primarily of an intellectual failure—a failure of command, a failure predicated on a rigid adherence to outmoded tactical ideas and faulty operational thinking, which led to the unnecessary slaughter in the trenches. The bête noire of such historians is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the epitome, for some, of inflexible leadership and the rigid refusal to adapt to new circumstances. This ‘lions led by donkeys’ thesis has gained enormous popular traction; and yet, as numerous military historians have laboured over the years to show, the British army command, while certainly not without fault, was not the inflexible and hidebound organisation of this common portrayal. Indeed, the army that introduced to the world armoured warfare, gave prominence to close air support and perfected combined arms tactics was far from resistant to change, irrespective of any general perception to the contrary. It is also worth recalling that the Imperial General Staff was an organisation dedicated to learning and innovation, and had been created specifically to think through the problems of future warfare. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 it held an annual conference at the Royal Military College at which all the key figures in the Whitehall organisation met the leaders of the various home commands to discuss the key military developments and challenges of the day and then to assess possible solutions. An indication of the General Staff’s forward thinking can be gained from the list of topics examined at the final event of this kind, held in January 1914, at which the role of aerial reconnaissance, artillery organisation, machine-gun training and infantry fire and movement—all matters that would prove crucial during the First World War—were raised.
 
Don't declare war in the first place ;) Seriously it was bound to be a human carnage, even without the western front lock down. Machine guns by themselves got infantry casualties skyrocketing.
 

DougM

Donor
If you look at the end of the American Civil War when the technology changes were better understand and in more widespread use. In the theater that still had an effective Confederate Army you see the glues of what will become WW1 style warfare.
You see more clues of this in wars as we get closer to WW1. So frankly the Generals should have been working out solutions for these already known problems for a full generation at least. But the unfortunate tendency for an Army to resist change is very evident here.

Add in two noticeable changes in this war the rate of fire as a result of the large number of machine guns / the perfection of bolt action rifles and the airplane.

The problem was that starting at the end of the ACW and getting worse in each war thier after we sea most maneuvering coming when one side or the other surprises the other side and hits them in an unexpected location. Or with huge numbers. But if the two relatively equal sized army’s hit head on the results are not so good. But of course the aircraft and the ability to move troops (mostly via trains but trucks and cars start to add to this) means it is very hard to virtually impossible to truly surprise the other side. The best you get is one side seeing what is going on but not understanding what they are looking at.

So while the Generals were not intentional in the slotter they sure should have been trying to figure out how to prevent this for decades and didn’t. They also should have been paying more attention to the actual results of a given battle. This may mean smaller localized battles that they can keep an eye on if communications is so bad/slow that they can’t adjust to it. The way they let attacks continue so long after they obviously were not working as planned is crazy. So the generals hold the majority of the blame for various reasons from not developing tactics sooner to not calling off failed attacks sooner to the blatant contempt many of them showed towards thier troops
 
From Ancient time the Phalanx formation has been used. You line up your army on one side and I line mine up on the other side. I’m quite sure the injuries on either side would’ve been quite horrific.
Modern western armies lined up in similar fashion, usually 3 rows deep. The American civil war and the peninsular war in Europe had the forces in such array.
In the establishment of European Empires the natives lined up in their Phalanx behind shields of cow hides and got slaughtered.
There are always exceptions, Viking raiders, Rogers Rangers etc, however the pitched battle was a mindset even up to WW2 and Montgomery’s tactics.
WW1 was fought by pitched battle generals, modern weapons slaughtered the ground troops on both sides in line with what happened to the native armies a few decades previous.

There were innovative warriors available. The RNAS coordinated their aircraft and Armoured car units quite successfully.
Had Haig & co been more open to mobile warfare ww1 would’ve been over quicker & with less casualties.
 
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There is an interesting table in Gordon Corrigan's Blood, Mud and Poppycock which compares the dead per division on the Somme to that in Normandy in 1944.

89 dead per week per division on the Somme and 100 dead per week per division in Normandy, though I admit he talks of divisions and not number of troops involved.
 
Minimize casualties by having steel helmets and thin manganese steel trauma plates and pauldrons

Not enought to stop 8mm Mauser, but stop artillery shrapnel&splinters, the big killer in WWI
 
Delaying WW1 by a few years seems like the simplest way to do this, but it might not count as the same war, and the alliance system would look very different just a decade later from 1914. Engineering advances could make tanks and planes more important in later WW1, and trench warfare might only be one phase of the conflict, followed by proto-blitzkrieg tactics.

WW1 was the missing link between the US Civil War-era militaries and WW2. Trench warfare and Gatling guns had featured prominently in US civil war battles like the Siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of Petersburg.

Honestly though, the military doesn't learn this way. Without WWI, the UK doesn't develop tanks and all countries would continue to use aircraft in their "intended" recon role. We normally learn from our mistakes/experiences on the battlefield and rarely using forethought.
 
I think there are a lot of ways of looking at the failures of the Great War, but ultimately it seems to me the "blame the generals" thesis is over blown. War making is not the exclusive wold of generals (or even militaries), especially when speaking of total war it is the entire nation-state waging war. Thus a failure on the scale of an entire generation being lost on the field must be attributed to a much larger, deeper, and wider failure of the entire nation-state and its constituent elements. It isn't popular to suggest, but in a democratic society such a failure is shared by the entire demos as well as the politicians, generals, press, scientists, industrialists, academics, etc. etc...

I think the problems of WW I could be viewed from a perspective of information and communication in particular. The OODA loop concept would be one modern way of looking at this.

I must, however, question if this problem had actually been solved. Looking at the history of the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq for the US and the Soviet/Russian wars in Afghanistan and Chechneya indicates that multiple year long processes are normative even with the most modern methods of communication and information analysis. Changing tactics at the battlefield level is hard. Changing doctrine, training, organization, strategy, budgets, procurement, personnel management... Those are extremely difficult approaching impossible. For a nation-state to completely rethink the way it wages war requires vastly more, and to avoid the blood baths of WW I is not a problem that the military alone can solve.
 
When all you have is theory, it is a difficulty to accept that the only way to test it is by experiment. I hate to write it, but WWI was a vast experiment in Industrialized Warfare. I think many of the generals and the more astute politicians had an "understanding" that when the experiment finally happened, it would shatter a lot of theory and that the data results would be "horrendous". And incidentally, not even horrendous is adequate to describe the actual results.

But the question is how to avoid the results?

1. Negotiate a way out of the crisis before the war starts. Actually there was a concerted effort to do this effect, but thanks to the mechanistic war plan mobilization forces set in motion, the incompetence of the German Foreign Office and perhaps the Russians, the efforts came to naught.
2. Once the lessons learned start coming in. (Whatever we thought we were doing before? The butcher's bill is not worth it!) try again to negotiate a way out of it. Refer to 1 for why that RTL second effort did not work.
3. In the meantime, what is there to accomplish, but learn by trial by error? I do not criticize unless I see that the practitioners are not doing something new each time they jump off. It just so happens that the French and British would come up with a new artillery tactic and the Germans would adapt to survive it, or the Germans would come up with a new trench assault method and the British and French would adapt to resist it.

I'm not sure that if the Germans had not run out of draftable cohorts and the blockade had not collapsed their economy, especially the agrarian sector, that even with the Americans and tanks and air superiority that the fight in 1919-1921 would not have been as "horrendous" as 1918. And truth be known? Although WW II was much faster and a war of movement? It was worse than WW I for casualties per day.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that war has gotten worse in the killing metric, and the reason after WW II that we have not noticed it as much, is that the wars that have been fought have been mostly "colonial", mostly small scale and lopsided with one side being much stronger or "tactically proficient" (Vietnamese / Israelis) than the other.

I could also say that the lesson learned and applied is keeping the wars very small scale, limited and SHORT is mostly what foreign ministries are expected to do these days when these events/mistakes happen.

We should have nightmares about how close so many times we came to a major hot war during the cold war. Otto von Bismarck's saying about fools, drunks, and …

I would extend that one to the whole world. I don't think we have become wiser. We just have been a little more careful.
 
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Honestly though, the military doesn't learn this way. Without WWI, the UK doesn't develop tanks and all countries would continue to use aircraft in their "intended" recon role. We normally learn from our mistakes/experiences on the battlefield and rarely using forethought.
The scenario I laid out would still involve a bloody "learning phase" of trench combat, but the technological preconditions would be there sooner to change the war. Technology coevolves with military tactics to a large degree. Better engineering lays the preconditions for an accelerated learning curve.
 
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