Why did most of the combat on the Western Front in World War I take place in a relatively small area?
2 Answers
The huge struggle between France and Germany was the important conflict of the War.
Explanation:
Germany had to knock France out to accomplish its war aims which were to dominate Europe. To dominate Europe meant, because of colonialism, to dominate much of the world. If it successfully beat France then Britain would be in a difficult position and would have to negotiate or continue fighting like it did during the Napoleonic era.
If France were defeated there would at least be temporary peace. The fact that the fighting continued started to destroy the participants. First Russia, then at the end the Ottomans, and the Austro-Hungarians all fell apart. Compared to earlier wars the continuous line between the Alps and the Channel is a very large commitment of men and equipment.
World War One was largely defined by the deadlock that mostly characterized the Western Front. This was due to the paradigm imposed by the technology of the first decades of the 20th Century.
Explanation:
In the First World War, the essential problem for the Armies of Europe was that strategic and operational manoeuvre depended on railroads while tactical manoeuvre still depended on horse and foot. At the same time, the Industrial Revolution had also produced extraordinary new firepower (machineguns, breach-loading artillery, magazine fed rifles, etc.), but there hadn't been a corresponding increase in transportation or communications technology.
The new weapons worked all too well, but cars and trucks (to say nothing of armoured vehicles and aircraft) were in their infancy, field telephone networks were unreliable, and radios were mostly impossibly large and also unreliable.
Armies created zones of devastation, then attacked into them, but the ability to control their components in combat was limited. The paradigm of the trenches was that a successful attacker walked into the devastation zone, away from his rail heads and supply dumps, while the retreating defender fell back towards his. A losing defender could always reinforce faster than a successful attacker could exploit his success.
Western Europe was closest to the main population centres of Britain, France and Germany, and had fully functioning railroad nets and the rest of the transportation infrastructure. Huge armies could be rapidly assembled and supplied. In the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe, the support for large armies was much more difficult to achieve.
The deadlock only broke in 1918 as Germany and Austria grew weaker, and the Allies were fielded new technologies and capabilities. Key among these were newer and more reliable field-phone equipment and highly specialized railroad construction troops. The trench-cracking Allied Offensives of late 1918 resulted when their armies could finally exploit success faster than the Germans could prop up failure.
