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The Tactics on the Battlefield
In this chapter I am going to look at the tactics in fighting during World War One. There were many plans but usually the reality was quite different. In planned attacks, it was thought that the defenders would hopefully come off worse but this was never the fact. Technology now backed the defenders and tactics of attacking would now have to change. Naive generals kept on filtering men out to attack but they were usually brushed aside very easily. This was because the defenders had machine guns and just casually swept them round in an arc just killing anybody in its way. Trench warfare was know an a "War of Attrition" for this reason. The idea was that you kept on piling men out to attack. Even though you would lose a considerable number of men, it was hoped that the enemy would lose that little more and you would be victorious. This is why trench warfare counted for so many lives in the Great War. The order "Over the Top" meant that they had to run straight towards the machine gun fire.
The tactics used so far had just been absolutely ludicrous. A
shocking statistic is that nine out of every ten that braved the machine
gun fire was either killed or wounded. Men would form a line spreading
miles and just walk towards the machine gun fire. It would be an easy day
for the operators of these guns. They called these tactics!! In
the whole trench fighting, one in five was killed and out of the remaining
four, two would be wounded. Until
the end of the war, there was no break through by either side. Most of the
tactics just failed. At night, snipers crept in to No Man's Land putting
their lives on the line. There objective was to crawl across it to the
enemy's front line and listen in on conversations that the Germans were
having and find out their tactics... You will learn more about snipers
later. Also at night fall, soldiers would climb out of the trenches and
try and remove barbed wire. The idea was that before dawn, they would try
and invade the enemy . They would attack them with their bayonets at the
ready. By dawn, once the officers blew their whistles, it was time for the
men to go "Over the Top". They were just bombarded with fire and
most were killed like shooting fish in a barrel. It
was all good capturing the enemies trench but usually as it happened, they
lost it again nearly immediately and they had to start over again. |
