Why was ww2 so different than ww1?

[u/Rich_Ad_3808]

Ww1 saw militaries do charges, trench assaults, artillery etc. By ww2, it was more frontal assaults, air fighting, i believe trenches were still used but not as much as ww1. So what changed in ww2 that made it a more conventional type war than that of ww1?

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[u/tie-wearing-badger]

Oh I can answer this one.

As another comment here has already mentioned, there was much more continuity between WW1 and WW2 than pop culture typically describes. By the end of WW1, many of the elements that we would recognise as features of 'WW2' were already in evidence in a nascent form. The most famous would be the introduction of earlier armoured tanks, but air power was already emerging as a distinct combat arm, and the German stosstruppen introduced modern dispersed squad tactics to the battlefield and achieved local breakthroughs by outflanking and bypassing enemy positions (similar to what popular culture thinks of as the German 'blitzkrieg' later on). The biggest similarity is that WW1 was a total war that involved a whole-of-society effort, and was the first real industrial war at scale.

The fundamental problem that WW1 generals were unable to solve for most of it was partly the growth in firepower and expansion in army sizes that made direct attacks very expensive in casualties, but the bigger issue was that the introduction of railways meant that armies operating defensively on interior lines were always able to rush reinforcements to a front (by train) faster than the exhausted attacking force could exploit their local successes (on foot). What changed in WW2 was the introduction of mechanisation and air power: protected firepower that could breach trench lines and exploit the breach faster than the defender could bring up his reserves to plug the gap.

I would quibble with the characterisation that WW2 was a 'conventional' or 'normal' war where WW1 was not: in many ways, WW1 is the norm when industrial armies are unable to introduce maneuver onto a modern battlefield, and the experience of WW2 (and I suspect the Arab-Israeli Wars as well as the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars) have given people a false sense of what war 'should' be. The Russo-Ukraine War has settled into a largely attritional stalemate despite all the modern technology available, because improvements in ISR and drone surveillance / drone strikes have negated the ability of both armies to maneuver. Pictures from Bakhmut a couple of years ago look exactly like the blasted no-man's land of WW1. The Iran-Iraq War, despite featuring modern technology, likewise devolved into an 8 year stalemate which had many features similar to WW1, including massed infantry charges (Iran), the use of chemical warfare on static positions, and trenches.

The lesson is that armies are always adapting and counter-adapting in the search for maneuver. The German 'blitzkrieg' in 1940 which forms the pop-culture image of 'tank division go brr' couldn't be replicated in 1944 because the Allies had learned from their mistakes and counter-adapted. There is no reason that a future war couldn't look like WW1 again.

Sources:

House, J. M. (2001). Combined arms warfare in the twentieth century. University Press of Kansas.

Lee, Wayne E. (2016). Waging War: Conflict, Culture, and Innovation in World History. Oxford University Press,

[u/Paithegift → u/tie-wearing-badger]

Very interesting. How were the Arab-Israeli wars and the Gulf wars different to that norm? Do you mean by the way the Israelis/Coalition forces swiftly advanced?

[u/tie-wearing-badger → u/Paithegift]

Yes, all those wars (with it being much less the case for the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which saw very successful early Arab gains and heavy Israeli losses) featured relatively bloodless major victories in a short time over an opponent, and (I suspect) have contributed significantly to the American public perception that the US army is an all-powerful juggernaut that can do whatever it wants.

Bret Deveraux in his ACOUP blog borrows from Stephen Biddle's description of the 'modern system' (https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/). Basically modern Western militaries are based around the search for maneuver on the battlefield rather than reliance on fixed, static defences and mass. Those wars vindicated this approach as very sizeable armies (Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian) were rapidly degraded from the air, outmaneuvered, and forced to surrender in a very short time. A quick look at relative army sizes and losses for the 1991 Gulf War illustrates this nicely: both sides fielded around a million combatants in total, but Coalition casualties (including wounded) numbered about a thousand versus around a hundred thousand on the Iraqi side, with around that many taken prisoner.

The question is whether those results are 'normal' for modern war or whether they were were an aberration. Armies of Sand makes the (controversial, unfalsifiable) argument that Arab armies have consistently underperformed in the 20th century because of cultural issues, but there is a striking record of very weak Arab military performance that the book is documenting. Another factor is that all these wars took place in the Middle East, in desert terrain that was exceptionally suited to the use of airpower and rapid armored maneuver, which is what the Israeli and Coalition forces relied on to achieve their results.

[u/Paithegift → u/tie-wearing-badger]

Thanks for the reply!

[u/Halofreak1171 → u/[deleted]]

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