6 - Combat and tactics

Summary

This chapter discusses the study of tactics and modes of combat during the Great War. During the first phase of the war, the underestimation of the effects of firepower was particularly significant: it explains the terrible losses of the first weeks of combat. The trench system, the tactical representation of the superiority of defence over attack, formed one of the major features of the Great War. The growth and diversification of armaments and soldiers' equipment explains the immense development of combatant tactics between 1914 and 1918. In the trenches, actual combat was intermittent and even at times unusual. Modes of combat during the Great War were profoundly transformed, reflecting the new technologies which would ultimately transform Western warfare itself. It was, once again, on the Western Front that these new methods were taken to their maximum degree and developed their full range.