All the combatants adapted their tactics as the unrelenting warfare threw up new challenges and created fresh opportunities for tactical or technological innovation. Every nation adapted and improved its technology and tactics as its experience of warfare intensified, though only the great powers could mobilise their economies to industrialise almost every aspect of armed conflict. Not every nation’s learning curve was the same: Italy’s doctrinal inertia appears to have partly stemmed from Luigi Cadorna’s flawed personality, while Romania’s recovery and success at the battles of Mărăşti and Mărăşeşti (July and August 1917) showed that French advice combined with native resolve could eventually turn bitter experience into battlefield effectiveness. While other armies did as well as they could with the tools and techniques they had available, the major powers also struggled with challenges created by their industrial limitations and cultural peculiarities and a great deal can be learned from comparing the experience of the three largest forces on the Western Front.
The Germans started with a technical advantage and an approach to artillery technology and doctrine that appears to have encouraged innovation from below. There is strong evidence to suggest that the policy of temporarily assigning relatively junior officers to operational roles typically filled by a more senior rank (such as Bruchmüller) enabled tactical innovation, but such a system did not appear to encourage continuity of development or dissemination of ideas. The problem was that the same flexibility often gave credit to senior commanders who oversaw the campaign (such as Hutier), instead of the officer responsible for planning the operations or introducing the technology, and arguably prevented the key innovator from being assigned a role that made the best use of his talents – some innovations were even ignored because they were seen as having originated on other fronts. The German army’s tradition of military patronage made them highly adaptable and able to continue innovating in peacetime but their habit of celebrating individuals and not processes meant that their major successes were limited to relatively few units and their strategic ideas often focused on purely tactical challenges.
The French started behind the Germans in almost every aspect of artillery development (except their superlative field gun) and were forced to make do with what was available; inevitably they paid a high price in casualties. As soon as they were able to introduce a reasonable quantity of suitable weapons, they rapidly disseminated new ideas and French commanders were generally happy to share their insights with other officers and to absorb the advances that originated from other armies. Nivelle’s over-confidence caused progress to falter in 1917 but by 1918 the French were fully capable of halting German offensives and then battering through almost any defensive system. As Foch noted after the war,
the Germans had more powerful guns than ours [in the first years of the war], but they, in their turn, failed because they did not use them advantageously. As a matter of fact, the offensive never recovered its full power until we had increased more than ten-fold the number of our heavy pieces and the allowance of ammunition of all kinds. We next learned to regulate our artillery methodically, and finally we perfected armoured appliances which could seek out and destroy the hostile machine guns.79
The problem was that the lessons of the Great War were almost entirely forgotten. French planners mistook success in 1918 as a vindication of their overall military system instead of as evidence of a need to review and understand how warfare was changing as a result of technologies and techniques discovered in the war. Instead of reviewing the impact of new developments, the enthusiastic adoption of flawed doctrinal panaceas ensured that France began the Second World War even less prepared than she had been in 1914.
The British had started with useful equipment but nothing in quantity. The Royal Artillery learnt fast, however, and by 1918 its crews were rather more effective than the Germans and the French at weaving new technologies into their general planning. The lack of a large pre-war military establishment was a weakness, and the British struggled to adapt to largescale warfare, but once the army demonstrated that it was capable of major operations, it also proved adept at drawing upon skills and technologies that the Germans failed to utilise effectively. Like the French, these innovations were rapidly disseminated to other units but, once the guns fell silent, the British army assumed that the operational challenges of the Great War were unique and discarded key elements in the adaptive ethos that made them the most effective artillery force on the Western Front.80
The story of the artillery in the Great War tells us a great deal about how organisations adapt in fast-moving conditions and, most importantly, how the efforts of the opposing armies served to rapidly neutralise their opponent’s attempts at innovation. All the generals of the Great War had to contend with expanding armies, new technologies and the unprecedented logistic requirements of modern war – and the way that each army dealt with these challenges was largely based upon the way in which their military culture approached innovation.81 The Great War saw increasingly sophisticated integrated artillery fire-planning in both attack and defence. Nevertheless, even with all the technical and tactical innovations combined, even when they were orchestrated as part of a coherent strategy, success in battle still depended on the infantry advancing into a grim and confusing wasteland strewn with strong-points, machine-gun nests and pockets of desperate men driven into a primeval need for revenge by the artillery fire they had just survived. Even the most efficient operational fire-plan could not completely overcome the fog and friction of warfare and thus only served to create a framework for success in the otherwise relentless chaos of battle.