Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/March 2016/Op-ed


 * By TomStar81

In 1916, Allied and Central powers fought two of the bloodiest battles of World War I. These two battles collectively left approximately 2 million soldiers dead out of the total 17 million estimated to have been killed in action during World War I.

This first of the two actions fired up in late-February 1916, when the Allied and Central powers clashed in the Battle of Verdun. This battle, which is listed as being among the deadliest in recorded history, commenced when the German Empire launched a major offensive against the French forces at Verdun, a city renowned for its sugared almonds. The Western Front strategy of attrition, which had been pursued since 1914, would make this a particularly bloody battle as the technology for mechanized assaults had not yet reached the front, while the automatic weapons and gas rolled out en masse would make this battle very brutal, and very long. Commencing 21 February, the battle of Verdun would not be complete until the French finally repulsed the Imperial German Army's attacks in mid-December 1916.

During the nearly 10 months that the two forces clashed, both the French Third Republic and the Imperial German Army would gear up and mass-produce artillery and so-called super-heavy artillery, along with the needed ammunition to inflict untold misery on both sides as the shells thinned out military ranks almost as fast both sides could get reinforcements to the battle. Compounding the problems at this battle for both the German and French forces would be the opening of the Battle of the Somme in mid-1916, diverting men, machines, and ammunition to what would become the most infamous battle of World War I, and the deadliest. The Battle of the Somme turned out to be shorter than the Battle of Verdun but resulted in more causalities inflicted during a smaller window of combat.

Although these two battles resulted in a huge number of causalities in the land war, they did not account for the loss of men at sea. In 1916 Germany would briefly resume submarine warfare before aborting U-boat operations roughly two months later. This would set up the largest naval battle of World War I, in which the Imperial German Navy's High Seas Fleet would take on the Royal Navy's Grand Fleet in the Battle of Jutland. This action would cost almost 10,000 sailors and would leave nearly 180,000 long tons of warships at the bottom of the North Sea, figures that wouldn't be seen again until the outbreak of World War II.

As the bleeding on the Western Front and naval theatre of World War I reached epic proportions due in part to new technologies, the inability of either side to gain an advantage resulted in ever more desperate attempts by each side on the Western Front to break through in hopes that a mobile campaign would once again reduce the military casualties, as had been the case in the early months of the war. To this end military engineers would resort to experimental and unconventional weaponry in an attempt to gain some advantage over their opponents.