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 instruction of a dead-end street on the Western Front. All the armies and navies of Europe face up each other across fortified front lines. The pre-war plans had succumbed to the technological wonder 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 burred wire and backed by artillery, could not be dislodged by anterior attack. Accordingly, military and political leaders spent the war groping for instru manpowert of let outing the stalemate in the trenches. First, neutrals might be enticed to enter the war, perchance 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 mate rial might be squeezed out of the home economy to tippytoe the balance of forces or wear down the enemy by economic attrition. The first of theses means obstinate much of the diplomatic history of the war. The support stimulated technological developments such as poison gas, tanks, and submarines, as easy 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 c all in alled total war. In 1916 German strategists again turned west with the expressed intention of bleeding France snowy and breaking her armys spirit. The object of attack was to be the fortress of Verdun, and the plan called for switching 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 resolving power all political problems incl uding 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 ceaseless line for 466 miles from Newport on the Belgian coast south to Bapaume, then south-east past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy, and so to the Swiss Frontier. Both sides dug-in, and condemned themselves to four years of blasted stalemate on the Western Front. I conclude that the most fundamental three factors are none of them they all are equally the homogeneous as they play their different roles in the development of a stalemate on the Western Front.