Initially the generals turned to artillery to break the deadlock. The tactic was simple: assemble artillery pieces, lots of them, pulverise the enemy’s trenches, possibly for days on end, and then send the infantry over to pick up the pieces. Unfortunately there were usually enough of the well-dug-in defenders, or enough men in reserve, to repulse an attack or recapture any ground lost by immediate counter-attack. Yet the high commands persevered through the slaughter of Vosges, Lorraine and Neuve Chapelle in 1915; Lozono,
Right; Heinz Guderian in his command half-track directing operations during the invasion of France in 1940. The operators in the foreground are working an ENIGMA cipher machine, a coding device that the Allies managed to break early in the war.
Above: British troops advancing behind an early Mark 1 Male tank, 1916. The wheels at the tank’s rear are an early steering device, discarded on later models. The first British tanks were deployed in penny packets and achieved little.
Verdun and the Somme in 1916; Arras, Chemin des Dames, and Ypres in 1917, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of their men’s lives. There were attempts at innovation with the use of new weapons, such as poison gas, but none had proved decisive. The Battle of the Somme provides a suitable example of the terrible vulnerability of human beings on the modern battlefield, and the fact that the machine-gun had reduced mobility to almost nothing. Despite a seven day preceding bombardment, the attacking British troops sustained some 60,000 casualties - perhaps 30,000 in the first hour - on the opening day of the battle. Over the four months of the Somme offensive, after an effort unequalled in British military history and the loss of over 400,000 men, British troops advanced no further than ten miles. Amongst the slaughter of the Somme, however, the British did introduce a new weapon, the tank.
World History
