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The American Civil War demonstrated rather conclusively demonstrated that the rifle made the tactics of Napoleonic warfare obsolete for all time. Every European country had observers on both sides of the line, so when WWI arrived why were European Armies still prepared to make frontal attacks in formation against fortified troops with rifles and machine guns?
Trashing all WW I generals is a popular sport, but condemning their absense of tactical imagination overlooks how limited their options were. It is not possible to make a brilliant flanking attack when no flanks exist. The entire western front was entrenched, from the Swiss Border to the English Channel, the choice was between frontal assaults and no assaults at all. All of the thinking had to go into how to make an assault which overcame entrenched, multi layered defenses. Most of the war was experimentation toward that end.....super preparatory bombardments....the elan of the attackers....poison gas.....walking barrages...no preliminary bombardment in order to achieve surprise...tanks...storm trooper tactics.
None of the above was ever more than partially successful, but what else was there for the generals to do?
I think GS is ultimately correct, although its also true that all sides completely mistook the results of the American civil war. What they missed was not primarily the impact of massed rifle fire, it was the impact of trenches and fortications late in the Civil War. There were two reason for doing so I think. First, European general staffs were openly contemptuous of US armies, and thought therefore that there were no lessons to be learned from them (von Molte the elder was particularly scathing in his comments). Second, the true impact of fortifications occured from 1864 on and most of the attention on the Civil War was earlier, from the campaigns on 1863 back. That is the focus was on the mobile battles not the seige warfare later.
Of course there had been other indications about the effect of fortifications, notably the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese war. But these were far from Europe and largely ignored. The war that dominated the thinking of the general staffs was the Franco-Prussian war where decisive battles had been possible. This missed the very poor shape of the French army and its lack of use of fortifications in conflict. It also missed the role of the machine gun, trenches, and barb wire which did not exist in that war to any signficant extent and the huge increase in modern armies that made maneuver impossible.
While GS is correct that they had few options initially, that does not excuse the failings of the generals entirely. The continued to make basic mistakes such as keeping huge groups of calvary for breakthroughs that were clearly impossible by 1915, ignoring weather and poor living conditions of their troops (few generals spent much time in the trenches) which inflicted heavy losses, and ignoring technological breakthroughs. The British (who may have been the worse) forbade their troops from carrying wire cutters I believe, parachutes in planes, and refused to build mortars until Loyld George got personal funds to buy them. They were slow to utilize tanks, and well behind the Germans in their use of special shock tactics.
Much of this came from the fact that British officers had little to any technical knowledge. They were a historical anacharism with no understanding (or interest) in the modern age. One recent account of the conflict by a British historian, however, made an interesting point. That the writings of the professional staffs before the war actually did show an understanding of the power of defensive warfare. But they felt if warfare descended into trenches that their states would collapse, so the mentally shut out the knowledge and commited themself to winning offensively - because the alternative was too dreadful to consider.
The real anger at the generals was their disregard for their troops. Dining on fine china far from the battlefield while your troops get slaughtered in the mud of Flanders or die of trench foot will not endear you to the troops or the public - even if in practice it made little difference. Class differences between officers and enlisted ranks also played a role I suspect. But the real failing in WWI was not on the generals part. It was on the politicians part for not negoiating seriously after it became obvious no victory was possible by 1915.
Bascailly they arrived at warI with no other tactic rreaslly known. But that doesn't mean that any lessons were really l;earned.Look at WWII. Between the wars on lnad it wasthe bombers will always get thru and on sea it was the decisiove battle. That lead to making bombers and actaully forget about escorts which cost thursnads of lives plus actually beleieivng that technology could accomplish precision bombing. It also lead to countries most building battelehips and evenb liiting them in the washingtontreaty think that would limit the possibily of war. In the end all war are started on ideas that rarely are what is needed in the end and policies shift multiple times.
It wasn't all bad for the troops. I actually read recently how French troops were regularly rotated out of combat and even sent to the Mediterranean to rest up. A la guerre comme a la guerre
As far as tactics, they were primarily dictated by pre-war strategy. German strategy was the Schlieffen Plan, designed to destroy or at least cripple France in one single blow. A war of attrition was not in the interest of Germany who would be fighting on two fronts.
French plans were not specific and mainly involved countering the expected German offensive and possibly making a counterattack.
The American Civil War demonstrated rather conclusively demonstrated that the rifle made the tactics of Napoleonic warfare obsolete for all time. Every European country had observers on both sides of the line, so when WWI arrived why were European Armies still prepared to make frontal attacks in formation against fortified troops with rifles and machine guns?
Actually (after a few weeks of mobile warfare in 1914) the WW1 generals took up pretty much where the Civil War left off.
The Civil War (in the east at any rate) ended very much like WW1. Its last year was fought out along a line of trenches between Richmond and Petersburg -a little bit of the Western Front sent 50 years back in time.
This period was, however, too short to make much impact on the popular imagination. It was the earlier, and much longer, period of mobile warfare which people remebered. For WW1 it has been the other way round. The spell of mobile warfare in 1918 which finally ended it has been totally overshadowed by the long stalemate in the trenches which made up the previous three years.
It wasn't the rifle, or even entrenchment, that was the big change in WW1. Rifles were used in the Napoleonic War, even back to the Revolutionary War, with skirmisher and Jager units (but not in such numbers), and entrenchments had been used since the Bronze age. Europe had other wars between the civil war and ww1 certainly, and tactics changed based on the circumstances - fighting savages (Zulu wars), fighting guerella insurgenies (Boer War), fighting conventional warfare (Franco-Prussian War).
WW1 started out as a mobile war, and thus the old rules still applied. But the machine gun, and developments of more accurate and longer range artillery, made the difference when the war and the front lines became static. Massed assaults still worked against entrenched opponents with rifles, with heavy casualties - but you combine that with pinpoint artillery and, particularly, the machine gun, and you have problems. Gatling guns, developed during the civil war, were never used in combat.
As was said earlier, the entire french front, from the coast to Switzerland, was trenches. So the combatents really didn't have much of a choice. Instead they improvised, tried to adapt and change - gas warfare, rolling artillery barrages, air combat, the first tanks. It was learn as you go.
I'm with DD (and Paddy Griffith). The big difference in the Great War was high explosives and smokeless powder. Cannon became far deadlier and magazine rifles and machine guns now had reliablilty, range and flat trajectory.
The affect of the rifle musket in the American Civil War is overrated and American troops went to ground because, well, American troops like to go to ground, generally lacking the training, discipline and aggression to drive assaults home. Read Griffith and Hess.
Generals in the Great War were faced with great difficulties but by the end the Brits had worked things out. Which was why it ended.
I think it was the trench system and machine guns and not artillery that was central to the stagnation in the war. And, as GS noted, that you had a very high concentration of troops in a narrow front making breakthrough difficult. The Eastern Front in WWI (which gets little historical attention in the West) saw significant movement in large part because the troop density relative to space was much lower then on the Western front.
Most civil war history tends to focus on the battles of 1861 to 1863. Or on the campaigns of Sherman in Georgia. The trench warfare in Virgina gets little attention.
I think it was the trench system and machine guns and not artillery that was central to the stagnation in the war.
Keegan details the difference in tactics and operations between WW1 (The Somme) and The Napolenoic Wars (Waterloo) in his "The Face of Battle" (and also a bit in his "History of Warfare"). He indicated some interesting facts - Napolean had 20,000 rounds to use at Waterloo, The allies had 3 MILLION rounds to use in the first few days of the Somme offensive of various size. Also the rate of fire increased - by 1914 an infantryman could fire 15 rounds a minute, a machine gun 600, and artillery 20 rounds a minute. Compared to 3 or 4 rounds a minute in the early and mid 1800s.
He also attributes the high casualty list in WW1 as due to, ironically, the low death by desease (infant mortality as well as the illnesses in war that frequently took more lives than bullets and shell). You simply had more combatants in less of a space.
And the machine gun - his conclusion was it was simply equivalent to a mass volley during the napoleonic and civil war periods, just as deadly. The difference of course is that you only had a small team able to do what an entire regiment was capable of. Even so, interestingly enough, machine guns were useless without the proper operation, using it like a rifle to spray one point or another was useless. WW1 machine gun operators became MACHINE operators, similiar to operating a lathe or press, impersonal and mechanical. The key was to traverse the firing field (and placement for clear overlapping fields of fire) in a pre-determined manner. Keegan points out two contradictory facts - this was a return to the early 19th century volley fire principal (in contrast to the early 20th century when forces were starting to develop small fire team tactics), and that this was the first instance of industrialized warfare.
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