Why did the general staff in WWI think that sending waves of men into the machine gun meat grinder was a good idea?

Haig was not the only donkey as both sides had plenty of that trying to apply Napoleonic tactics against the machine gun.  Today, it is all bite and hold supported by very mobile hit and run artillery.

By the way, Korea showed us just how to withstand artillery.  We continue to see little enough best practice today in the Ukraine.

There Russia has inferior armor and inferior infantry tactics.  Proper tactics and artillery application and their numbers could actually tell even without bringing tanks up.  just saying.

Haig's sorry ass was bailed out by the Canada Corp who learned how.

Why did the general staff in WWI think that sending waves of men into the machine gun meat grinder was a good idea? It seemed like a lot of banzai charges without all the yelling.

Richard Lobb ·

Lifelong student of historyUpdated Oct 27

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haig, KT, GCB, OM, GCVO, KCIE, general commanding the British Expeditionary Force, 1915-1918.

July 1, 1916, the first day of the Somme, was exactly what you are thinking about. Rather than running into machine gun fire, British soldiers plodded into it in straight lines, moving slowly because each man was carrying 66 pounds of equipment.

It was terrible. The British had something like 15,000 casualties in the first hour.

Why order such a foolish attack? Because the high command, led by a blockhead named Douglas Haig, got it all wrong.

Haig had his defenders and still does. To hear them tell it, Haig had little to do with the planning and execution of the offensive. Indeed, General Rawlinson was directly in charge. However, Rawlinson had seen German firepower and favored the cautious approach of seizing a small amount of land as the basis for a further advance, a strategy called “bite and hold.”

Haig was having none of it and demanded a more aggressive approach, hoping for a breakthrough. Rawlinson backed down and accepted Haig’s strategy.

Haig was no detached overseer. The horror of July 1 is on his head.

Haig and the planners thought a massive artillery barrage would knock out the Germans, and the Tommies would walk in and take over. That’s why the soldiers were carrying so much — they needed ammunition and food to hold the trenches they expected to walk into.

Instead they met a hail of fire from thousands of machine-gun nests manned by Germans who had sheltered from the lengthy barrage, and then run to their posts when it lifted.

Some say the high command failed to appreciate the strength and depth of German defenses. The Germans had been there since 1914. The British had plenty of patrols probing the German lines before the attack, not to mention aerial reconnaissance. It is somewhat incredible that the British planners missed the strength and depth of the German fortifications.

British observation and communication was so poor that the commanders didn’t know what was going on and kept sending troops into the killing field. A corps commander, General Sir Thomas Morland, climbed an oak tree to watch the attack five km away - and couldn’t see anything.

Not all combat in WWI was that mindless. But enough of it was to justify the saying that as far as the British were concerned, the army consisted of “lions led by donkeys.”

In his book on the Great War (the first volume of which came out in 1923 and can hardly be termed “revisionist,”), Winston Churchill didn’t put it quite so pungently, but was clear about where the blame lay for the bloodbath on the Western Front. He wrote that the Somme and Passchendaele offensives were “as hopeless as they were disastrous.” Other strategies might have been tried, he wrote, “if only the Generals had not been content to fight machine-gun bullets with the breasts of gallant men, and think that that was waging war.”

Haig never forgave him.

War is hell.