Fighting from long narrow ditches in which troops stood and were relatively sheltered from the enemy fire. Trenches were used in the Crimean War, and on a far larger scale in World War 1. After the first Battle of the Marne (1914) the retreating Germans dug themselves in N of the R Aisne, setting the pattern for trench warfare on the Western Front. Thousands of miles of parallel trenches were dug, linked by intricate systems of communications and protected by barbed wire. A network of trenches was dug along battlefield fronts stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, creating a stalemate in the fighting. To break it, various new weapons were introduced: hand-grenades, poison gas, trench mortars, and artillery barrage. Not until 1918, with an improved version of the tank (invented in 1915), was it possible to press forward over the trenches. Advances in land weaponry have made trenches obsolete.
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Trench warfare is a form of war in which both opposing armies have static lines of defense. Trench warfare arose when there was a revolution in firepower without similar advances in mobility and communications. Periods of trench warfare occurred during the American Civil War (1861–65) and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, and reached peak brutality and bloodshed on the Western Front in the First World War.
Background
Fortification is almost as old as warfare itself;
Although both the art of fortification and the art of weaponry advanced a great deal in the second half of the second millennium, the advent of the longbow, the muzzle-loading musket, and even of artillery did not substantially change the traditional rule that a fortification required a large body of troops to defend it.
Siege warfare
Most of the techniques used in trench warfare had existed for years in siege warfare.
Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars describes how at the Battle of Alesia the Roman legions created two huge fortified walls around the city.
Once siege engines were developed the techniques involved in assaulting a town or a fortress became well known and ritualised—the siège en forme. The attackers would then build a length of trenches parallel to the defences and just out of range of the defending artillery. They would then dig a trench towards the town in a zigzag pattern so that it could not be enfiladed by defending fire. Once within artillery range another parallel trench would be dug with gun emplacements. In order that the "Forlorn Hope" and their support troops could get close enough to exploit the breach, more zigzag trenches could be dug even closer to the walls with more parallel trenches to protect and conceal the attacking troops.
Development
The first development which was critical for trench warfare was the introduction of mass-conscripted armies during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. An example of an early fortified military line which stretched for many miles was the Lines of Torres Vedras (1810), which was built by the Portuguese under the direction of Royal Engineers of the British Army during the Peninsular war.
What made this tactic increasingly suicidal was the development of improved firearm technology in the mid-19th century. By the time the war drew to a bloody close in 1865, it had become a preview of the First World War, complete with trenches, Gatling guns, field fortifications, and massive casualties. The Battle of Petersburg near the end of the war with its trenches and static formations contrasts sharply with the early battles such as the First Battle of Bull Run where manoeuvre was still possible, and famous charges such as Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg revealed the military futility of a direct assault on an opposing line.
Two main factors were responsible for the change. Effective at double the range of the typical smoothbore of the Napoleonic era (and able to kill a man at over 1000 m), they enabled men sheltering in a trench or behind an improvised obstacle to hold a body of attackers at a much greater distance than before;
Other factors appearing after the end of the American Civil War played a part, as well. Artillery in one form or another had been a part of warfare since classical times, and from the rise of gunpowder until the development of trench warfare in the 1860s had been the major killing force;
Implementation
Although firearms technology and the conscript army dramatically changed the nature of warfare, most armies were completely unaware of the implications of these changes and unprepared for their consequences. At the start of World War I, most armies prepared for a brief war whose strategy and tactics would have been familiar to Napoleon.
However, as war broke out, German and Allied (mostly French and British) forces soon learned that with modern weapons even a shallow scrape in the soil could be defended by a handful of infantry. After the Battle of the Aisne in September 1914, an extended series of attempted outflankings, and matching extensions to the fortified defensive lines, soon saw the celebrated "race to the sea"—the German and Allied armies dug what was essentially a single pair of trenches from the Swiss border in the south to the North Sea coast of Belgium. Trench warfare prevailed on the Western Front from September 16, 1914, until the Germans launched their "Spring Offensive", Operation Michael, on March 21, 1918.
On the Western Front, the small improvised trenches of the first few months rapidly grew deeper and more complex, gradually becoming vast areas of interlocking defensive works. The space between the opposing trenches was referred to as "no man's land" and varied in distance depending on the battlefield. At the infamous "Quinn's Post" in the cramped confines of the Anzac battlefield at Gallipoli, the opposing trenches were only 15 metres apart and a bombing war was waged there incessantly. On the Eastern Front and in the Middle East, the areas to be covered were so vast, and the distances from the factories that supplied shells, bullets, concrete and barbed wire so great, that trench warfare in the European style often did not eventuate.
In the Alps the trench warfare even stretched into the 3rd dimension, on vertical slopes and deep into the mountains, up to heights of 3900 meters above sea level (the Ortler had an artillery position on its summit near the front line). The trench-line management and trench profiles had to be adapted to the rough terrain, hard rock and the harsh weather conditions. Many trench systems were constructed within glaciers like the Adamello-Presanella group or the famous city below the ice on the Marmolada in the Dolomites.
Defensive system
Very early in the war the British defensive doctrine suggested a main trench system of three parallel lines with each line connected by communications trenches. The point at which a communications trench intersected the front trench was of critical importance and was usually heavily fortified. The front trench was lightly garrisoned and typically only occupied in force during "stand to" at dawn and dusk. Between 70 and 100 yards behind the front trench was located the support (or "travel") trench to which the garrison would retreat when the front trench was bombarded. Between 300 and 500 yards further to the rear was located the third reserve trench, where the reserve troops could amass for a counter-attack if the front trenches were captured. however, in certain sectors of the front, the support trench was maintained as a decoy to attract the enemy bombardment away from the front and reserve lines.
Temporary trenches were also built. When a major attack was planned, assembly trenches would be dug near the front trench. These were used to provide a sheltered place for the waves of attacking troops who would follow the first waves leaving from the front trench. "Saps" were temporary, unmanned, often dead-end utility trenches dug out into no man's land. They fulfilled a variety of purposes such as connecting the front trench to a listening post close to the enemy wire or providing an advanced "jumping-off" line for a surprise attack.
When one side's front line bulged towards the opposition, a "salient" was formed. The concave trench line facing the salient was called a "re-entrant".
Behind the front system of trenches there were usually at least two more partially prepared trench systems, kilometres to the rear, ready to be occupied in the event of a retreat. The Germans often prepared multiple redundant trench systems; in 1916 their Somme front featured two complete trench systems, one kilometre apart, with a third partially complete system a further kilometre behind. In the event that a section of the first trench system was captured, a "switch" trench would be dug to connect the second trench system to the still-held section of the first.
The Germans made something of a science out of designing and constructing defensive works. They were also the first to apply the concept "defence in depth", where the front-line zone was hundreds of yards deep and contained a series of redoubts rather than a continuous trench.
Trench construction
Trenches were never straight but were dug in a square-toothed pattern that broke the line into bays connected by traverses. This meant that a soldier could never see more than 10 metres or so along the trench. Consequently, the entire trench could not be enfiladed if the enemy gained access at one point or if a bomb or shell landed in the trench; The side of the trench facing the enemy was called the parapet and had a fire step. The rear of the trench was called the parados. The parados protected the soldier's back from fragmentation from shells falling behind the trench. If the enemy captured the trench, then the parados would become their "parapet". The sides of the trench were revetted with sandbags, wooden frames and wire mesh. The floor of the trench was usually covered by wooden duckboards.
Dugouts of varying degrees of luxury would be built in the rear of the support trench.
To allow a soldier to see out of the trench without exposing his head, a loophole would be built into the parapet. The other means to see over the parapet was the trench periscope—in its simplest form, just a stick with two angled pieces of mirror at the top and bottom. In the Anzac trenches at Gallipoli where the Turks held the high ground, the periscope rifle was developed to enable the Australians and New Zealanders to snipe at the enemy without exposing themselves over the parapet.
There were three standard ways to dig a trench: entrenching, sapping and tunnelling. Entrenching, where a man would stand on the surface and dig downwards, was most efficient as it allowed a digging party to dig the length of the trench simultaneously. Sapping involved extending the trench by digging away at the end face. The diggers were not exposed, but only one or two men could work on the trench at a time. Tunnelling was like sapping except that a "roof" of soil was left in place while the trench line was established and then removed when the trench was ready to be occupied. The guidelines for British trench construction stated that it would take 450 men 6 hours (at night) to complete 250 metres of a front-line trench system. Thereafter the trench would require constant maintenance to prevent deterioration caused by weather or shelling.
The battlefield of Flanders, which saw some of the worst fighting, presented numerous problems for the practice of trench warfare, especially for the Canadians, who were often compelled to occupy the low ground. In most places, the water table was only a metre or so below the surface, meaning that any trench dug in the ground would quickly flood. Consequently, many "trenches" in Flanders were actually above ground and constructed from massive breastworks of sandbags (actually filled with clay). Initially, both the parapet and parados of the trench were built in this way, but a later technique was to dispense with the parados for much of the trench line, thus exposing the rear of the trench to fire from the reserve line in case the front was breached.
Trench geography
The confined, static and subterranean nature of trench warfare resulted in it developing its own peculiar form of geography. In the forward zone, the conventional transport infrastructure of roads and rail were replaced by the network of trenches and light tramways.
Battlefield features could be given a descriptive name ("Polygon Wood" near Ypres or "Lone Pine"), a whimsical name ("Sausage Valley" and "Mash Valley" on the Somme), a unit name ("Inniskilling Inch" at Helles named for the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers) or the name of a soldier ("Monash Valley" at Anzac named after General John Monash). There were numerous trench networks named "The Chessboard" or "The Gridiron" because of the pattern they described.
Enemy trenches, which would become objectives in an attack, needed to be named as well. Many were named for some observed event such as "German Officers' Trench" at Anzac (where a couple of German officers were sighted) or "Ration Trench" on the Somme (where German ration-carrying parties were sighted). The British gave an alcoholic flavour to the German trenches in front of Ginchy: "Beer Trench", "Bitter Trench", "Hop Trench", "Ale Alley" and "Pilsen Trench". Other objectives were named according to their role in the trench system such as the "Switch Trench" and "Intermediate Trench" on the Somme.
Some sections of the British trench system read like a Monopoly board, with names such as "Park Lane" and "Bond Street". British regular divisions habitually named their trenches after units, which resulted in names such as "Munster Alley" (Royal Munster Fusiliers), "Black Watch Alley" (Black Watch Regiment) and "Border Barricade" (Border Regiment).
Life in the trenches
An individual soldier's time in the front-line trench was usually brief; A typical British soldier's year could be divided as follows:
15% front line 10% support line 30% reserve line 20% rest 25% other (hospital, travelling, leave, training courses, etc.)Even when in the front line, the typical soldier would only be called upon to engage in fighting a handful of times a year—making an attack, defending against an attack or participating in a raid.
Some sectors of the front saw little activity throughout the war, making life in the trenches comparatively easy.
A sector of the front would be allocated to an army corps, usually containing three divisions.
During the day, snipers and artillery observers in balloons made movement perilous, so the trenches were mostly quiet. Consequently, the trenches were busiest at night when cover of darkness allowed the movement of troops and supplies, the maintenance and expansion of the barbed wire and trench system, and reconnaissance of the enemy's defences.
Raids were carried out in order to capture prisoners and "booty"—letters and other documents that provide intelligence about the unit occupying the opposing trenches. As the war progressed, raiding became part of the general British policy, the intention being to maintain the fighting spirit of the troops and to deny no man's land from the Germans.
Early in the war, surprise raids would be mounted, particularly by the Canadians, but increased vigilance made achieving surprise difficult as the war progressed.
Death in the trenches
The intensity of World War I trench warfare meant that about 10% of the fighting soldiers were killed. This compared to 5% killed during the Second Boer War and 4.5% killed during World War II. For British and Dominion troops serving on the Western Front, the proportion of killed was 12% while the total proportion of troops who became casualties (killed or wounded) was 56%. Considering that for every front-line infantryman there were about 3 soldiers in support (artillery, supply, medical, etc.), it was highly unlikely for a fighting soldier to survive the war without sustaining some form of injury.
Medical services were primitive and life-saving antibiotics had not yet been discovered.
Three-quarters of the wounds inflicted during the war came from shell fire.
As in many other wars, World War I's greatest killer was disease. Sanitary conditions in the trenches were quite poor, and common infections included dysentery, typhus, and cholera. Poor hygiene also led to conditions such as trench mouth and trench foot. Another common killer was exposure, since the temperature within a trench in the winter could easily fall below zero degrees Celsius. (32 F)
Burial of the dead was usually a luxury that neither side could easily afford.
At various times during the war—particularly early on—official truces were organised so that the wounded could be recovered from no man's land and the dead could be buried. However, this order was almost invariably ignored by the soldiers in the trenches, who knew that it was to the mutual benefit of the fighting men of both sides to allow the wounded to be retrieved. German soldiers began singing Christmas carols and soon soldiers left their trenches.
Weapons of trench warfare
Infantry weapons
The common infantry soldier had four weapons to use in the trenches: the rifle, bayonet, shotgun and grenade.
The standard British rifle was the .303-in. Early in the war, the British were able to defeat German attacks at Mons and the First Battle of Ypres using massed rifle fire, but as trench warfare developed, opportunities to assemble a line of riflemen became rare.
The British soldier was equipped with a 21-in. Imperial German soldiers generally carried the M1898 "Butcher-blade" bayonet, which was a deadly effective weapon in the open, but like the British bayonet, difficult to use in the narrow trenches.
Many soldiers preferred a short-handled spade or entrenching tool over a bayonet. They would sharpen the blade to a knife edge so it was just as effective as a bayonet, and the shorter length made them handier to use in the confined quarters of the trenches. These tools could then be used to "dig in" after they had taken a trench.
Since the troops were often not adequately equipped for trench warfare, improvised weapons were common in the first encounters, such as short wooden clubs and metal maces, as well as all sorts of short knives and even brass knuckles (see trench raiding).
Pump action shotguns were mainly used by American soldiers in the Western front. The US military began to issue pump shotguns specially modified for combat, called "trench guns". Descendants of the "trench gun" still exist today in the form of the combat shotgun and its cousin the riotgun. ANZAC and some British soldiers were also known to use sawn-off double barrel shotguns in trench raids, because of their portability, effectiveness at close range, and ease of use in the confines of a trench.
The grenade came to be the primary infantry weapon of trench warfare. The Germans and Turks were well equipped with grenades from the start of the war, but the British, who had ceased using grenadiers in the 1870s and did not anticipate a siege war, entered the conflict with virtually none, such that soldiers had to improvise bombs with whatever was available. By late 1915, the British Mills bomb had entered wide circulation, and by the end of the war 75 million of them had been used.
Machine guns
The machine gun is perhaps the signature weapon of trench warfare, with the image of ranks of advancing infantry being scythed down by the withering hail of bullets. The Germans embraced the machine gun from the outset—in 1904, sixteen units were equipped with Maschinengewehr—and the machine gun crews were the elite infantry units, these infantries were attached to Jaeger light infantry battalions.
The British High Command were less enthusiastic about machine gun technology, supposedly considering the weapon too "unsporting" and encouraging defensive fighting, and they lagged behind the Germans in adopting the weapon.
The heavy machine gun was a specialist weapon, and in a static trench system was employed in a scientific manner, with carefully calculated fields of fire, so that at a moment's notice an accurate burst could be laid upon the enemy's parapet or at a break in the wire. Equally it could be used as light artillery in bombarding distant trenches.
Mortars
Mortars, which lobbed a shell a relatively short distance, were widely used in trench fighting for harassing the forward trenches and for cutting wire in preparation for a raid or attack.
The main British mortar was the Stokes mortar, which was the precursor of the modern mortar.
The Germans used a range of mortars.
Artillery
Artillery dominated the battlefield of trench warfare in the same way that air power dominates the modern battlefield. In addition to bombarding the enemy infantry in the trenches, the artillery would engage in counter-battery duels to try to destroy the enemy's guns.
Artillery mainly fired fragmentation, high explosive, or, later in the war, gas shells.
Artillery pieces were of two types: guns and howitzers.
A critical feature of modern artillery pieces was the hydraulic recoil mechanism which meant the gun did not need to be re-laid (re-aimed) after each shot.
Gas
See main article: Use of poison gas in World War I
Tear gas was first employed in August 1914 by the French, but this could only disable the enemy.
Phosgene, first used in December 1915, was the ultimate killing gas of World War I—it was 18 times more powerful than chlorine and much more difficult to detect.
The first method of employing gas was by releasing it from a cylinder when the wind was favourable. Also, the cylinders needed to be positioned in the front trenches where they were likely to be ruptured during a bombardment. Later in the war, gas was delivered by artillery or mortar shell.
Helmets
During the first year of the First World War, none of the combatant nations equipped their troops with steel helmets. Once the war entered the static phase of trench warfare, the number of lethal head wounds that troops were receiving from fragmentation increased dramatically.
The French were the first to see a need for greater protection and began to introduce steel helmets in the summer of 1915.
At about the same time the British were developing their own helmets.
The traditional German pickelhaube was replaced by the Stahlhelm or "steel helmet" in 1916.
None of these standard helmets could protect the face or eyes, however.
Wire
The use of barbed wire was decisive in slowing infantry travelling across the battlefield.
Wiring was usually done at night in active sectors, and the screw picket invented during the war helped decrease the amount of noise working parties would create.
Aircraft
The fundamental purpose of the aircraft in trench warfare was reconnaissance and artillery observation. Aerial reconnaissance was so significant in exposing movements, it has been said the trench stalemate was a product of it. Reconnaissance aircraft would map trench lines (first with hand-drawn diagrams, later photographs), monitor enemy troop movements, and locate enemy artillery batteries so that they could be destroyed with counter-battery fire.
Other Weapons
The Germans employed flame throwers (Flammenwerfer) during the war but as the technology was in its infancy, its value was mostly psychological.
Mining
All sides would engage in vigorous mining and counter-mining duels. Specialist tunneling companies, usually made up of men who had been coal miners in civilian life, would dig tunnels under no man's land and beneath the enemy's trenches. The crater served two purposes: it could destroy or breach the enemy's trench and, by virtue of the raised lip that they produced, could provide a ready-made "trench" closer to the enemy's line.
If the miners detected an enemy tunnel in progress, they would often drive a counter-tunnel, called a camouflet, which would be detonated in an attempt to destroy the other tunnel prematurely.
The mining skills could also be used to move troops unseen.
The British detonated a number of mines on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
At 5.10 AM on June 7, 1917, 19 mines were detonated by the British to launch the Battle of Messines. As the Chief of Staff of the British Second Army, General Sir Charles Harrington, commented on the eve of the battle:
The craters from these and many other mines on the Western Front are still visible today.
Trench battles
Strategy
The fundamental strategy of trench warfare was to defend your own position strongly while trying to achieve a breakthrough into the enemy's rear. His major trench offensives—the Somme in 1916 and Flanders in 1917—were conceived as breakthrough battles but both degenerated into costly attrition.
Tactics
The popular image of a trench warfare infantry assault is of a wave of soldiers, bayonets fixed, going "over the top" and marching in a line across no man's land into a hail of enemy fire.
In 1917, the Germans innovated with the "infiltration" tactic where small groups of highly trained and well-equipped troops would attack vulnerable points and bypass strongpoints, driving deep into the rear areas.
The role of artillery in an infantry attack was twofold: firstly in preparation by killing or driving off the enemy garrison and destroying his defences, and secondly in protecting the attacking infantry by providing an impenetrable "barrage" or curtain of shells to prevent an enemy counter-attack.
Capturing the objective was half the successful battle—the battle was only won if the objective was held. The attacking force would have to advance with not only the weapons required to capture a trench but also the tools—sandbags, picks and shovels, barbed wire—to fortify and defend from counter-attack.
Communications
The main difficulty faced by an attacking force in a trench battle was reliable communications.
It was not unusual for a battalion or brigade commander to wait two or three hours for word on the progress of an attack, by which time any decision made based on the message would probably be long out of date. Consequently, the outcome of many trench battles was decided by the company and platoon commanders in the thick of the fighting.
Breaking the deadlock
Throughout World War I, the major combatants slowly groped their way towards the tactics necessary for breaking the deadlock of trench warfare, beginning with the French and Germans, with the British and Empire forces also contributing to the collective learning experience.
With the withdrawal of Russia from World War I, the Germans were able to reinforce their western front with troops from the eastern front.
The static trench battle was broken as the tank developed. While not effectively employed at first, tanks had tremendous morale effects on German troops in the closing stages of the war on the Western front.
The Americans played a major role in breaking through the trenches. General John Pershing saw trench warfare as useless and costly, and ordered the men he commanded to launch both direct and surprise assaults on the enemy trenches, using artillery and infantry fire to strike targets up close.
During the last 100 days of World War I, the British forces broke through the German trench system and harried the Germans back toward Germany using infantry supported by tanks and close air support.
The stunning victories by the Germans early in World War II using blitzkrieg showed that fixed fortifications like the Maginot Line could be bypassed.
Combined arms tactics (where infantry, artillery, armour and aircraft operate in close cooperation) made trench warfare obsolete.
This is not to say that entrenchment is redundant. At the start of the Battle of Berlin, the last major assault of World War II, the Russians attacked over the river Oder against German troops dug in on the Seelow Heights, which are about 50 km east of Berlin.
Post-1945 trench warfare
Trench warfare has been very infrequent since the end of World War I. When two large armored armies meet, the result has generally been mobile warfare of the type which developed in World War II.
However, trench warfare reemerged in the latter stages of the Korean War (1950-53) and in some locations and engagements in the Vietnam War (1964-75).
During the Cold War, NATO forces routinely trained to fight through extensive works called "Soviet-style trench systems", named after the Warsaw Pact's complex systems of field fortifications, an extension of Soviet field entrenching practices for which they were famous in their Great Patriotic War.
The most cited example of trench warfare after World War I was the Iran-Iraq War, in which both armies had a large number of infantry with modern small arms, but very little armor, aircraft or training in combined weapons. The result was very similar to World War I with trenches and chemical warfare used.
Another example of trench stalemate was the Eritrean-Ethiopian War of 1998–2002. The front line in Korea and the front lines between Pakistan and India in Kashmir are two examples of demarcation lines which could become hot at any time. They consist of kilometers of trenches linking fortified strongpoints and in Korea surrounded by millions of land mines.
Māori Pa
The Māori of New Zealand had built stockades called Pā on hills and small peninsulas for centuries before European contact. When the Māori encountered the British they developed the Pā into a very effective defensive system of trenches, rifle pits and dugouts, which predated similar developments in America and Europe.
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