ORIGINAL: Zovs
What rubs me wrong about Loki’s post is that if the militaries did study warfare and trench warfare and artillery and the effects of machine guns on moving troops then why did Verdun and the Somme occur with all this great military knowledge and why did 40k CW soldiers perish at the Somme?
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I think you are mixing up 'do we know the problem' with 'do we have a solution'.
The problem, the impact of rifle fire on large bodies of troops moving across open ground, was well known. And constantly reinforced by a sequence of wars from the 1850s to the Franco-Prussian War, and then the implication of the machine gun was undeniable after the Russo-Japanese war.
So everyone knew that relatively close order attacks across open terrain was going to lead to massive losses. [1]
But most armies at the time wanted to take the offensive - it was key to why they were going to be in a war (the British might be the exception here).
Various armies came up with solutions. In 1870, to some extent the Prussians solved the problem of the chassepot with better artillery (equipment and tactics) - just read about the rows of French dead at Gravelotte behind walls and in shallow trenches ... killed by shrapnel. In turn the French decided that this problem would be solved by enthusiastic attacks, the Russians to some extent that numbers would allow them to sustain an attack, the Germans sort of came to the view that operational competence would trump tactical problems (it had worked for them in 1870-1), the British that professionalism and training would make the difference.
And then they hit the reality of October 1914.
After that there was a search for a way around the problem. Gas, better artillery tactics, more controlled offensives (ironically the Somme was over-controlled), then by 1917 the slow move towards smaller unit tactics (& the tank).
Yes, there were fools aplenty at the top of various military systems, there were also bright people trying to solve an insoluble problem. And they knew - which is why I keep on referencing Gat.
[1] as an edit here, the Russians copied carefully and effectively the German infantry tactics from 1870-1 and applied them in the 1877 war with the Ottomans. The result was their infantry were slaughtered at Plevna. Now the Turkish infantry were nowhere as near competent as the French regulars had been in 1870 but rifles had improved enough to convert a border line successful tactic that the Prussians had used in 1866 and 1870 into a recipe for disaster.
ORIGINAL: Zovs
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I personally don’t think anyone had a clue, and the Germans almost pulled off taking out France but when the offense in 1914 failed or fizzled out then the trenches where dug the slaughters began.
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but this isn't true. The French managed to lose 40,000 men in the week 20-27 August 1914 and a total of 301,000 in 1914 alone (as a comparison they lost 252,000 in the whole of 1916 - the year of Verdun). The British lost around 1,600 in the defensive victory at Mons and the Germans some 3-5000. This was a relatively limited action for both sides, but the slaughter started early. The Germans refer to their losses at 1st Ypres (October-November) as the Kindermord as so many university reservists were killed.
; Julia Child
