![]() ![]() ![]() Naturally, though, we need a jumping off point for the popular perception of trench warfare and if you’ve paid any attention to the thumbnail you already know what it is: the iconic no-man’s-land scene from Wonder Woman (2017).Ī quick walk-through of what I think are the key points in the scene here. Nevertheless, even within an unsolvable problem one may discern different degrees of quality, in part in the speed with which someone realizes that the problem is unsolvable and adjusts accordingly. I may run a B-side addendum to these posts on why I think Cadorna deserves this unique dishonor, especially given how stiff the competition in WWI is for terrible generalship.) On the other hand, as will soon become apparent, I think that, quite to the contrary of the popular perception that this or that easy solution was available, many WWI generals were presented by what was a fundamentally unsolvable problem, at least unsolvable with the technologies and armies they had to work with. (For what it is worth, I generally consider Luigi Cadorna, Italian chief of Staff 1914-1917, to have been the worst general I know of. If you are expecting a all-round defense of WWI generalship, you will not find it here while there has been a tendency of historians to revisit (fairly, I think) the tarnished reputations of many of the commanders of WWI, I think it is also broadly indisputable that the First World War saw more than its share of stunning command incompetence. One thing I should note I am not going to do here is discuss specific battles or specific generals. This is both to set the groundwork for the next post, which will discuss the ways that this stalemate was and wasn’t broken, but it also serves to handily dismiss some of the "easy" solutions that are often offered which don’t solve the actual problem but merely solve the imaginary one. ![]() This week, we’re going to look at the problem: both the popular perception of what the problem is and what the actual problem of trench warfare is. What I want to focus on here is the disconnect between the popular conception of how trench warfare actually worked and the actual conditions that produced trench warfare. Yet precisely because it was so formative, World War I, its generals, tactics, and battles are often shrouded in national myths and unquestioned assumptions. Nevertheless, the experience of the Western Front was extremely important the disaster of the First World War both broke and made nations. The Eastern Front, for instance, was always too large for this (though trench systems developed in areas of frequent fighting), while battles in Mesopotamia and the Levant always had the desert as a vast, open (but also logistically challenging) flank. ![]() Of course the war was much larger than that, and while trenches, machine guns and artillery appeared everywhere in the war, not all fronts devolved into the static trench warfare of the Western Front. That trench stalemate is, in many countries, synonymous with the war itself. This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. Part I: No-Man's-Land, the Trench Stalemate I added some imagery from the film for this introduction to Devereaux's article. In my opinion, that particular film has some of the best examples of trenches and no-man's-land ever captured in a Hollywood film. In doing so, he draws on the imagery and some of the practical details of the trenches incorporated into the 2017 film Wonder Woman. In his two-part in-depth analysis of trench warfare he looks at how the trench system came apart and how they were eventually broken. His articles have been published in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The National Interest, and numerous academic journals. Wonder Woman Navigating a Grim No-Man's-Landįrom: A Collection of Unmitigated PedantryĪuthor and publisher of A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, Bret Devereaux is an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. ![]()
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