Efforts to Break the Stalemate on the Western Front Essay -- Papers

Efforts to Break the Stalemate on the Western Front There are five main factors that are crucial in explaining the development of a stalemate on the Western Front. All the armies and navies of Europe faced each other across fortified front lines. The pre-war plans had succumbed to the technological surprise of 1914-15: that the withering firepower of machine-guns, cartridge rifles, and rapid-fire artillery favoured the defence. Infantry in deep trenches, fronted with mines and barbed wire and backed by artillery, could not be dislodged by frontal attack. Accordingly, military and political leaders spent the war groping for means of breaking the stalemate in the trenches. First, neutrals might be enticed to enter the war, perhaps throwing enough weight into the balance to provide victory. Second, new weapons, tactics, and theatres might break the deadlock or achieve strategic goals elsewhere. Third, more and more men and material might be squeezed out of the home economy to tip the balance of forces or wear down the enemy by economic attrition. The first of theses means determined much of the diplomatic history of the war. The second stimulated technological developments such as poison gas, tanks, and submarines, as well as the peripheral campaigns of southern Europe and the Middle East. The third determined the evolution of war economies and the character of what came to be called total war. In 1916 German strategists again turned west with the expressed intention of bleeding France white and breaking her army's spirit. The object of attack was to be the fortress of Verdun, and the plan called for substitution of ordnance for manpo... ...arose. The Schlieffen plan represented a pristine militarism: the belief that all factors could be accounted for in advance, that execution could be flawless, that pure force could resolve all political problems including the plan itself. By October 1914 all the plans had unravelled. After the German defeat in the battle of the Marne, the Western Front stabilised into an uninterrupted line for 466 miles from Newport on the Belgian coast south to Bapaume, then Southeast past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy, and so to the Swiss Frontier. Both sides dug-in, and condemned themselves to four years of hellish stalemate on the Western Front. I conclude that the most important three factors are none of them; they all are equally the same as they play their different roles in the development of a stalemate on the Western Front.