Trench Warfare & Static Defences
The Western Front in World War I has scarred the popular mind as the epitome of fruitless, static, attritional warfare. Lines of trenches or strong points in depth, protected by barbed wire and covered by powerful artillery, resist every assault, with the attacker suffering devastating casualties. The battlefield is churned into an almost uncrossable landscape of craters and mud.
Overloaded soldiers wallow helplessly around it, with no protection from random shelling or snipers. If a trench is captured it is soon recaptured and the line restored. Reinforcements can be fed in quickly to stop any breakthrough — but they cannot make progress through the beaten zone or ‘no man land’.
Unfortunately, this nightmare scenario was not rendered obsolete by the invention of the tank, but has recurred in many phases of wars since 1918 — for example: outside Madrid in 1936; at Cassino and Normandy on the Western Front in 1944, and at Leningrad and in many other places on the Eastern Front between 1941 and 1944; in the Korean War between 1950 and 1953; and most recently, in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.
Admittedly the tank can help an attack to make progress, and in some circumstances it can be a decisive weapon that creates a breakthrough; but it has often been as vulnerable to anti-tank guns as the infantry has been to machine guns. The tank’s greatest successes have been achieved against defenses that have not been well dug in or coordinated.
Victory and a successful defensive strategy is fundamental to survival. Fortunately defense tends to be easier than attack, since it usually needs less organization, less movement, fewer communications channels and smaller numbers. Moreover, a defending army is usually on familiar ground, where it has been able to take advantage of any natural protection that the terrain can offer.
The main problem for a defending force, perhaps, is to know just how static or mobile it should be. History is full of entirely static defense lines that have been defeated or bypassed relatively easily — the Maginot Line in 1940 and the Bar Lev Line in 1973 spring to mind — although some equally immobile fortresses have on occasion given an attacker a very tough time. In 1916 the Germans had to fight long and hard to reduce Fort Vaux at Verdun, while in South Vietnam in 1967 the Americans found the tunnels of Cu Chi — a different style of fortification — especially troublesome.
