"Biggest Misconceptions About the First World War" Topic

"This year marks the centenary of the start of the First World War, a conflict that still rouses considerable debate and controversy. It's also a war that's shrouded in many myths and misconceptions — and these ten are among the worst…"
See here
link

Amicalement
Armand

Again? the caption "French Trench" should give some insight to the depth of this article. And please, what is it with the apologetics for the mediocrities that lead millions to slaughter without much gain?

Mediocrities? Not much gain? The Great War was the period of the greatest development in warfare ever known to man. The "mediocrities" oversaw the development of modern infantry tactics, developed artillery from a purely direct fire weapon to a sophisticated modern weapon, took aircraft and their use from rudimentary to sophisticated weapons of war, with huge developments in everything from aerial photography to the use of military radios, plotting of enemy positions via sound and flash techniques, and, essentially changed the way that wars were fought for good.

As for gain, we defeated the Kaiser and his rather unpleasant plans. What more could we do?

The problem was that the new weapons technology came in but it was not understood. Bolt action magazine fed rifles and machine guns meant that troops needed to be dispersed and fire supported to advance. Breach-loading rifled artillery with recoil absorption meant artillery could fire further and faster. Aircraft that could spot meant that surprise on the battlefield was difficult.

When your generals grew up with one technology and had to fight under a continuous evolving technology there will be problems (dead solders). Young officers do not have to unlearn what they learned in training and as young officers 30 years before. Even today there is a tendency to fight the present war with last wars solutions.

It took most ACW generals till the end of the war (and some not even then) to realise Napoleonic tactics didn't fit with the technology any more. We generally don't call them mediocrities for that reason.
Plenty of them were mediocrities for a host of other reasons, but Lee or Grant were as prone to attack into unendurable hails of fire as the also-rans.

Study history for long enough and it becomes plain that the idea that people in the past weren't as smart as we are, is faulty. They were smarter than we generally think, we aren't as smart as we like to think; so we're all about on par.

"French Trench" was a schoolboy error I agree.

Well, if nothing else this thread proves that the misconceptions are alive and well.

Dads army.

One of the best antidotes to the static trenches myth is Ernst Jünger's "Storm of Steel". He survived all four years as a German infantryman, and his recollection of the Western Front was that, far from sitting idle in trenches and bunkers, both sides were constantly trying to outsmart each other to find some advantage.

The biggest challenge to the issue of static trenches is WW2. We look to WW2 as an example of how 'movement' contrasts with 'static' in WW1. Somehow this gets translated into the fact that 'static' means worse casualties – if only generals had been smarter and more visionary, moving away from a seeming obsession with 'static'. But we do not take into account that we were not the Soviet Union in WW2. Had Britain and the USA played the role of the Soviet Union then we would be lauding the much better casualty rates of WW1.

War is a terrible terrible thing. The issue about debunking myths is not to explain away what happened in WW1 as less than it was. It is about understanding what the real issues were. If we don't do that then we make the same mistake of thinking that generals with flare and innovation win wars quickly and with minimal casualties. We only have to look at Iraq to see the fallacy of this approach.

Robert

In his book "The Smoke and The Fire", John Terrain makes the very same point as Robert above. He describes how British and Imperial forces, alongside the French, fought the main army of the main enemy for the best part of four years – as well as fighting on other fronts – and that this was something we only did for a few weeks in WW2 (ending at Dunkirk). I seem to recall British diarists recording how much worse than the Western Front they thought the weather and ground conditions were during the Italian campaign – especially the winter of 43-44. As Robert says, we did the job that the Soviet Union did in WW2; interesting how you never hear about "Butcher" Zhukhov, isn't it?

To put this into the context of numbers, Haig's army on the Western Front was, at its peak, around the same size as the entire British Army globally in WW2; it was five times the size of 21st Army Group in NW Europe in 1944-45, and ten times the size of the 8th Army at El Alamein. And the attrition rates for infantry battalions in 21AG from June 44 to May 45 (100% – 110% for regimental officers) were actually higher.