Western Front (World War I)
|Part of World War I|
For most of World War I, Allied and German Forces were stalled in trench warfare along the Western Front. This picture shows a sentry of A Company, 11th Battalion, The Cheshire Regiment in a trench during the Battle of the Somme.
|| German Empire
|Commanders and leaders|
|No unified command until 1918, then Ferdinand Foch||Moltke → Falkenhayn → Hindenburg and Ludendorff → Hindenburg and Groener|
|Casualties and losses|
At the beginning of World War I in 1914, the German army started the Western Front by invading Luxembourg and Belgium. They gained military control of many important industrial regions in France. Their quick advance was stopped by the Battle of the Marne. Both sides then dug defensive trenches. The trenches eventually reached from the North Sea to the Swiss border with France. During the years between 1915 and 1917, many offensives were started from these trenches. Bothe sides used large numbers of artillery and thousands of infantry in these offensives. However, a combination of entrenchments, machine gun nests, barbed wire, and artillery stopped these advances. No major breakthroughs happened. New military technology, like poison gas, aircraft, and tanks were developed to try and get through these lines of trenches.
The deadlock is mostly due to both sides not allowing a single piece of land to give some kind of advantage to the enemy, even if there was little advantage. As the war continued and more blood was lost on both sides, the soldiers grew more and more tired of war and had begun to make large promises to the government. To keep the war effort going, they begun to say that they would kill soldiers who did not attack, saying that they were betraying the Army if they did not fight.
References[change | change source]
- "First World War 1914 – 1918". Australian War Memorial. http://www.awm.gov.au/atwar/ww1.htm. Retrieved 2006-12-05.
- "Canada in the First World War and the Road to Vimy Ridge" (in English). Veteran Affairs Canada. 1992. http://www.vac-acc.gc.ca/general/sub.cfm?source=history/firstwar/vimy. Retrieved 2006-12-05.
- Corrigan, Gordon (1999). Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914–15. Spellmount Ltd.. ISBN 1-86227-354-5.
- See The Royal Newfoundland Regiment
- "New Zealand and the First World War - Overview". New Zealand's History Online. http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/node/1216. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
- Uys, I.S.. "The South Africans at Delville Wood". The South African Military History Society. http://rapidttp.com/milhist/vol072iu.html. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
- Rodrigues, Hugo. "Portugal in World War I". The First World War. http://www.first-world-war.org/portu.htm. Retrieved 2007-01-26.
- Herwig (1997):423,442—The Austro-Hungarian 1st and 35th divisions arrived at the front in September 1918. They returned home at the end of October.