In World War I, great pains were taken to avoid combat in or directly around cities. Once a city was under the guns of the enemy, it typically surrendered. This was largely done for propaganda reasons…Neither side wanted to be the monsters that actually shelled a city full of non-combatants (though it did occasionally happen). Also, they didn’t want reciprocation later on. Some bombing took place, by zeppelin and by primitive bombers, but was largely ineffective and was more to signify that the defending nation couldn’t even protect its capitol.
Contrast that with the conditions of the average soldier on the ground, who faced insufficient clothing, sporadic food supplies, and the ever-present lice, corpse-eating rats, and mud. The mud was in fact so bad that there are verified reports of people sinking into it and drowning. To stick your head over the top of your trench was suicide, as enemy snipers would pretty much instantly take it off. Add gas warfare into that, and you have a near-perfect vision of hell.
The primary means of inflicting casualties was machine guns. When an attack kicked off, “went over the top”, the attacking soldiers would have to run 200-300 meters through mud, literally hundreds or thousands of decomposing bodies, and then try to get through the opponent’s wire before being machine gunned. More often than not, they would not carry the trench, and their bodies would just add to the morass of rotting corpses.
If they happened to make it to the trenches, then they would have to fight hand-to-hand to take them. This usually left the attacking force with so few survivors that the enemy in trenches further back could force them back to their original lines. Most huge battles involved moving the front about 300 meters over a period of 2-3 months.
The great myth of the day was “breakthrough”…That if you just threw enough bodies at the enemy, you’d eventually poke a large enough hole in his lines that your cavalry could get behind his lines and raise hell. What nobody took into account was that there simply weren’t enough bodies to throw, and that with modern weaponry, even if you did manage a breakthrough, the cavalry would be killed off instantly by just a few troops. This seems obvious to us now, and was apparently obvious to the troops in the trenches, but both sides were blind, led by generals who refused to stop fighting the Napoleonic wars.
It’s easy to laugh at them, until you look at what we ourselves do. Take the then-impossible concept of breakthrough (which never happened, even at the end of the war), and instead say “containment” or “pacification”. Or, for that matter, nation-building…Nonsense words that translate out to “car load lots of dead soldiers & civilians”. Alphonse Carr was right.
To be continued in this thread.
