Were the WW1 generals idiots?

[al Roumi]

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

WWI general were no more idiots than US Civil War generals. Both wars were fought at a period of time when technology resulted in a vast increase in firepower, but before there was a corresponding increase in defense technology. The result was that soldiers were faced with overcoming massed machinegun and artillery fire with nothing but their uniforms to protect them. A lot of blame is placed on nations for not realizing the potential of armored vehicles to overcome the technology advances, but I think that is distorted by hindsight. The first tanks did not reach the battlefield until the end of 1916, by which time the war had already stagnated. Even then, the first tanks were extremelly unreliable and the designs were relatively poor. Tanks did not really even become successful until the end of 1917, only a year before the war was over.

In addition, the idea that WWI was somehow more of a bloodbath than WWII is itself ridiculous. According to Wikipedia, in WWI, Germany lost 2,050,897 men in battle. In WWII they lost 5,533,000. Russia lost 1,811,000 in WWI and 8,800,000 to 10,700,000 in WWII. The UK and US cannot properly be compared, as the UK did far less ground warfare in WWII than in WWI, and the US was the opposite. When you compare deaths (both military and civilian) as a percentage of the population of the combatants, WWI resulted in the deaths of 1.75% of the population, while WWI resulted in the deaths of 3.17% to 4.00% of the population.

Essentially, WWII was far, far more of a meat grinder than WWI ever was. The only difference was that in WWI there were a larger number of casualties in a smaller area. That results in a distortion effect on the perceived bloodiness of the events. By contrast, the Battle of Towton in 1461 resulted in the death of approximately 1% of the entire population of England, and that was in a single day. Yet when we think of the bloodiness of wars, no one ever ranks the Wars of the Roses up there with WWI, despite similar impacts on the population.

The commanders of WW1 looked stupid because they used inappropriate tactics -based on old situations: the old adage that military planners are always preparing for the last war they fought.

This raises an interesting point, as relevant today as ever before, the commanders at the end of a conflict in which a major new technological/strategic challenge was faced always have a better reputation than those who were in command at the start of it: eg Gen. Petreus enjoys a much better reputation than Tommy Franks... ok, not sure how far i can push that but...

[TinCow]

The commanders of WW1 looked stupid because they used inappropriate tactics -based on old situations: the old adage that military planners are always preparing for the last war they fought.

They're only inappropriate if there was an alternative that was more appropriate. WWI occurred at an odd period of time when firepower had been greatly increased, but mobility had not. Cavalry were no longer useful due to their vulnerability to modern weapons, but automobile technology was still extremely primitive and was particularly poor at handling off-road terrain, which is required on the battlefield. Amphibious and air technology were equally primitive, and did not allow for rapid flanking by large-scale coastal landings (see Gallipoli) or paradrops for similar reasons. As such, it was essentially impossible to move men quickly enough to flank an enemy position before the enemy could adjust their own forces to defend the threatened spot. You need look no farther than the Race to the Sea in 1914, to see this in effect. The result was stupendously long, heavily defended infantry lines that could only be approached directly.

Under such circumstances, without a technological ability to flank the enemy on any significant scale, the only real option was frontal assault. Given the amount of firepower that the enemy could put down, this in turn required attacks with huge numbers of men just to make sure that some of them got through. The only other option I see in such a situation is just not fighting at all... which isn't a strategy that tends to win wars.

When I think of stupid commanders, I think of people like Phillip VI at Crecy or Custer at Little Big Horn. Stupid commanders are those who had plenty of legitimate options about how to deal with an enemy that had a particular known fighting style, but simply chose to ignore those options and suffered defeat as a result. In WWI, most battles had no options except a frontal assault. It seems unfair to blame the generals for those failures when they did not have the ability to achieve victory by other means.