Tactically it was a notable success, but it still lacked the substantial strategic effect that Haig desired. Which countries did Germany fight on the Eastern Front? The Hundred Days proved that the Western Front could in fact be won if the right methodology and technology were used. The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, London 2009, p. 80. It contains 132,0131 words in 229 pages. This was attrition, conceived in its purest form. In Belgium, the Lige and Namur forts, a complex series of reinforced concrete blockhouses and retractable artillery positions, proved to be no match for the heavy Krupp and Skoda howitzers with which the German army marched to war. Despite Russias collapse after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918, the Germans were still set to lose the war if it continued for much longer. Date accessed: June 28, 2023 Greenhalgh, Elizabeth: The French Army and the First World War, Cambridge 2014, p. 48. Trench warfare in World War I was employed primarily on the Western Front, an area of northern France and Belgium that saw combat between German troops and Allied forces from France, Great. Haigs forces failed to clear the Channel ports, but this was probably an illusory goal to begin with, if the recent experiences from 1916 were anything to go by. [1] Tactically, the Germans performed extraordinarily well during this period; France lost over 300,000 dead in 1914, making it Frances second-most deadly year of the war. Copyright: The content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. The Entente powers vacillated between policies of slow, methodical battles that gradually pushed back the enemy, and grand, general offensives that sought to win major strategic victories over the course of a few days, rather than several months. For much of the First World War, the Western Front remained almost static, with each side killing many of the other's men but otherwise making little progress. This weight of numbers contributed to the fronts impenetrability and the stalemate that developed through 1915. [24] Their success was variable. Verdun was the longest battle on the Western Front in 1916, but the Somme was the bloodiest; it sent nearly twice as many men to their graves in half the time as at Meuse Mill. History of Britain World War One - The Western Front by Ellen Castelow The opening engagement on the Western Front was the Battle of Mons on 23rd August 1914. Recognizing that it was unlikely to be able to prevail under such circumstances, Germany knew it would have to quickly overwhelm one of its enemies before turning to fight the other. Haig wanted an ambitious strategic victory and was willing to set distant goals for his troops to meet. [citation needed] General Henry Rawlinson (1864-1925), at the head of British Fourth Army, had tactical command of the battle. The reserves could not get to a battle before the battle had ended and moved elsewhere. American Expeditionary Forces in France passing British men resting on a roadside, Australian soldiers walking through the devastated Chateau Wood, near Ypres, British machine gunner explains the working of his weapon to Americans, Poison gas attack, Battle of Loos, 25 September 1915, Trees cut down during the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line, France 1917, The Schlieffen Plan and the French Plan XVII, Concentration Areas of Opposing Armies, 2 August 1914, The stablized Western Front and major offensives in 1915. As a Dominion of the British Empire, South Africa was obliged to join the fighting upon the outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914. At the personal order of the Kaiser, German generals launched a massive assault on the Allied line, using divisions of their most experienced infantry and cavalry. As had happened on the Somme, this greatly thinned the British artillery concentration, making it more difficult to effectively neutralise German defences and protect advancing infantry with a sufficient barrage. The Western Front was a meandering 700-kilometre frontline, running from the North Sea coastline to the Swiss border and passing through (at various times) Belgium, north-eastern France and southern Germany. Its quick advance was stopped by the Battle of the Marne. Operationally the Germans, under Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (1848-1916), stretched themselves perilously thin chasing after French and British troops in headlong retreat after the initial encounter battles in August. World War I - The Western Front | State Library of NSW Haig, Douglas Haig, Sheffield, Gary/Bourne, John M. To their south, French forces under Ferdinand Foch (1851-1921) and mile Fayolle (1852-1928) did better, capturing all of their objectives for the day with a loss of only 1,590 casualties. To an extent, however, this is misleading. If his allies or political masters felt he was not doing enough to further their strategic goals he could well find himself on the chopping block. 1915 saw a staggering number of battles on the Western Front, especially compared to 1916 when the combatants became embroiled in a pair of mammoth efforts within discrete geographical limits (the Somme and Verdun). [39] This did not, however, end the mutiny over night; it took months before the French were ready for another offensive action. By early 1915, many parts of the Western Front were thick with soldiers on both sides of no mans land. [12] After the dramatic success against Russia, the Eastern Front had some appeal, but Falkenhayn feared that further hammering of Russian forces into the Russian interior (which dangerously stretched German logistics) was no guarantee of victory. About 300,000 people were killed for the sake of moving the front line about 5 . [20] As was true of the battles in 1915, it was French-led, with British support. The Western Front, a 400-plus mile stretch of land weaving through France and Belgium from the Swiss border to the North Sea, was the decisive front during the First World War. Despite gains in the southern sector, the overall result fell crushingly short of the success Haig and Rawlinson had hoped for. [13] Such a peace would rob Britain of its operating bases in France and likely compel them to sue for peace in their own time (or at least remove the threat posed by the growing British army). The Western Front was a meandering 700-kilometre frontline, running from the North Sea coastline to the Swiss border and passing through (at various times) Belgium, north-eastern France and southern Germany. At 7:30 am on 1 July 1916, some 55,000 French and British troops went over the top in the initial wave of the assault across a sixteen-mile front, signalling the start of the Battle of the Somme. Allied Front after the German Offensives of March - July 1918 - - - - - - A The Battle of Ypres, April - May 1915. an edit I made of all quiet on the western front : r/ww1 - Reddit This was a long-standing problem in trench warfare: the initial break in was not too complicated for well-supplied troops to achieve. Western Front (World War I) - Simple English Wikipedia, the free Worried about the hurried manner in which these New Armies were trained and unwilling to commit his forces to combat before they were ready, Haig ideally wanted to wait until August. These battles, using sophisticated all-arms methodology, were so successful that they caused Ludendorff to have a serious mental breakdown (he later referred to 8 August as the black day of the German army, although careful examination of his writings shows that he had actually used the term to describe several different days at various points in his life). (1917 saw the reintroduction of unrestricted submarine warfare, which inflicted staggering losses on British shipping.) The technology used in the Eastern Front was more advanced than that used in the Western Front. The French offensives met uniformly with disaster. Because of this, they more committed to battlefield offensives and attempts to penetrate the front. Sbastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707), Helmuth von Moltke the Younger (1848-1916), Battle (sometimes Miracle) of the Marne. Priscilla M. Roberts. Nivelle was de facto replaced by Philippe Ptain as early as 29 April 1917, just as the first instances of unrest and mutiny were manifesting themselves. If we take a step back and examine the whole of 1916 on the Western Front, the picture is somewhat mixed. Germany lost twice as many men on the Western Front in 1916 as it had in 1915; Britain lost several times more men than the size of the entire British Expeditionary Force in 1914. A Case Study in the Operational Level of War, London 2006, pp. Rolland, Le Grve des Tranches 2005, p. 363. Stevenson, David: 1914-1918. The consequence of this was that Germany launched fewer major assaults in 1915. 2. This article looks at the war on the Western Front from 1914-1918, its major events, battles, and strategies. [58] In the end, the grotesque arithmetic of attrition eventually caught up with the Germans: they still had plenty of machine guns, shells, and artillery, but they no longer had the men to fire them. The rest of 1915 followed this pattern, with few exceptions. Around 230,000 South Africans served in the war effort during World War One. These strategic shortcomings were not without their repercussions. The First Battle of Champagne in many ways set the precedent (and a poor one) for the shape of offensives in 1915. Ptain had an enormous task on his hands and immediately set to work trying to quell the mutiny. For the first time in the war, in 1917 Britain acted as the senior partner on the Western Front. The Battle of Neuve Chappelle (10-13 March 1915) stands out as the only truly independent effort. Of the two sides, the Germans were more keenly aware of the seriousness of their predicament. The Western Front was started by the German Army invading Luxembourg and Belgium at the beginning of World War I in 1914 and gaining military control of many important industrial regions in France. 10 Significant Battles Of The First World War Trenches were long, narrow ditches dug into the ground where soldiers lived. The planning for the battle followed lines similar to those of the Battle of the Somme. 75% of all men who died in World War 1 were killed by artillery. The French and Germans suffered roughly equal casualties, and French morale was not broken. The French launched attacks in the Wovre and Les Eparges to no effect. This diffusion allowed the battered northern sectors to stabilize, making them far more resistant to future attacks. This would ensure that Germany could not defeat its enemies one at a time, but would be forced to split its forces between two distant theatres, thus spreading its forces dangerously thin. In the 1600s, Sbastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633-1707) famously sought to design and build an interlinking series of forts (which he called the pr carr) to shelter Frances eastern border from attacks that might come through Central Europe. Sheffield, Forgotten Victory 2001, pp. So the Western Front, which was generally this region right over here, was a much smaller front than the Eastern Front. He made immediate efforts to organise better food and more frequent leave for the troops. Both sides then dug defensive trenches, which . In the coming slaughter, more than 50,000 soldiers were killed in just one 24-hour period. Even the largest coordinated Allied battle since the Marne proved ineffective. As a result, the Allies were able to capitalise on the advantages conferred by imitative tactics and relative surprise; in just over three months they rapidly wore down the German army. Two days after it finished the Allies launched one of their most successful operations of the war: the Battle of Amiens and the Battle of Montdidier. Peace with Russia would free up millions of German soldiers who might be able to tip the balance in Germanys favour on the Western Front. Whichever side won there either the Central Powers or the Entente would be able to claim victory for their respective alliance. The French, able to resume the attack the next day, eagerly did so. Four imperial dynasties collapsed as a result of the war: the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the sultanate of the Ottoman Empire, and the Romanovs of Russia. World War I in Photos: The Western Front, Part I. The fighting had begun when Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914. The size of the German population meant that it could ill-afford to trade losses with the Entente one-for-one, especially with the entry of the United States into the war in April 1917, which tipped the demographic scales against Germany. The Western Front was much longer than the Eastern Front which made trench warfare impractical. ~4,800,000. When renewed French attacks were halted by the once-more cohesive German forces, Joseph Joffre (1852-1931), commander-in-chief of the French army, ordered troops to move to the far left flank and try to outflank the Germans from the north. The salient was very difficult to supply, and stretched the line so that German forces had to hold much more of the line than previously, whilst also still maintaining spare troops to launch attacks. How was the Eastern Front different from the Western Front? Had the German government insisted that it continue to do so, the Allies would have invaded Germany, an act that risked throwing the nation into civil war (a subdued form of which raged throughout Germany after the Great War ended). The Germans went from having nearly thirty fresh reserve divisions in August 1918 to fewer than four in October. In April 1918, however, he was returned to a position of high command, indeed the highest. [16] This horrific treatment, partially a response to overstretched German logistics but also based on the belief that German troops could handle it, severely sapped German morale and fighting power. [37] The failure of the Nivelle Offensive, then, was the straw that broke the camels back. Denizot, Alain: Verdun 1914-1918, Paris 1996, p. 85. Many battles became household names in Australia: Fromelles, the Somme, Bullecourt, Messines, Passchendaele, Villers-Bretonneux, Hamel, Amiens and Mont St Quentin. The French made a similar effort at the First Battle of Artois (16-18 December 1914). [10] The French had hoped to capture Vimy Ridge and Notre Dame de Lorette, dominating high ground north of Arras.

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