My first question: why is there a wooden fence inside a building?
For hiding behind while playing paintball
As ever so often, if anyone is interested in the gruesome reality behind the funny meme, theres An ACOUP series on just how that situation came to be so inescapable and how WW1 technology wasn’t really in a place to break out of the hell of its own making yet.
Summary
Weapons had gotten really good at statically hitting targets, but weren’t mobile enough to further support an advance. All you could do was break the first line with it, but by the time you got to the second line the defenders had rallied and pushed you back. The blasted mud and craters between the frontlines hindered moving up your artillery, tanks were in development, but too slow yet, planes were unfit for anything but spotting and the war effort ate most of the resources so there was little left for the development of new technologies. The only option left was to hope that one of your charges would manage to rupture the enemy line and open up space to bring in more troops and start disrupting supply lines. That lucky break always seemed just one more hard push away…
The only option left
Well, there was always the strategic option of maintaing a static western European front and winning the war elsewhere. e.g. overwhelming the Russian Empire and then concentrating your troops and using Stosstruppen tactics you’ve developed in the meantime. But keeping that front static wasn’t an option.
You mean on part of Germany? I believe the French and British were inflicting greater rates of attrition on the German front, so just in terms of manpower, they would have eventually overwhelmed the Germans… but the price in lives would have been so horrendous it was always going to come down whose political base collapses first.
Then again, it has been a while since I read the series, and I’m by no means an expert. Maybe the benefit of hindsight and modern analysis would show ways out of that dilemma that wouldn’t have been visible to the commanders at the time – the fog of war was very thick, as far as I can tell.
I’ll have to read that article you link above, it’s been a decade or so since I did any reading on technological revolutions in military affairs.
I now had the time to read it again and think about your comment more thoroughly.
The problem the stormtroopers ran into was that they would succeed at punching through lines, but they still couldn’t solve the issue that the defender had railways and prepared trenches to quickly deploy reinforcements and deliver ammunition, while the attacker’s logistics would be hampered by having to traverse the broken ground. They could secure ground, but not hold it, because the technology to back them up effectively wasn’t there yet.
Essentially, the meme’s approach would see the knights move in under the other guy’s covering fire, butcher the defenders, then get shot by enemies arriving by car while their buddy is still running down the hallway on foot to provide more cover.
Yeah, that sounds about right, I just started reading up on it a bit more and realize there’s a lot I don’t know about it.
Ain’t that how it usually goes with history? We climb on a hill of understanding to look at the mountains of the unknown beyond.
Middle Age at least had cavalry charges, this tactic died with the horses
Here’s how the pictured situation plays out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWS5MfJUbUg
