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In 1916 during the fight on the Somme the Entente managed to amass a large advantage in artillery and men and flung them against the German lines, punching bulges into that German contemporary defense doctrine required immediate counterattacks to deal with. Regardless of what the actual numbers were in the end, there is a fair bit of dispute, the Germans suffered terrible losses in these hasty counter attacks due to British and French massed artillery that broke them up. Based on all the narratives about the subject I could find they were pretty pointless and unnecessarily costly and eventually led to the innovation of the elastic defense doctrine to cope with this increased Entente firepower advantage. But it was pretty clear early in the battle that the counterattacks would run into massed British artillery, as reclaiming the lines taken by the Entente were within range of these massed guns, so what if commanders basically dropped doctrine and just formed new defensive lines rather than throw their men wastefully against captured positions and watch them be slaughtered? What kind of savings in manpower would result and how much deeper would the Entente get and to what end had counterattacks been discontinued early in the campaign?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme
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