If you’ve been in the armed forces, I want you to think back to what you and your comrades were like a few weeks into your initial training. You’ve got some skills, but they’re fresh, shallow, and untested. You’ve got a lot of enthusiasm, but no experience. If you’re lucky, you have leadership that’s at least been there and done that.
Now, imagine that one morning you get up, get on a train, and head off. You’re with friends, some of whom you’ve known all your life. The mood is almost joyous. This is it! This is what your weeks of training were for! You’re off on the adventure of a lifetime. You get to where you’re going, form up into ranks, and head off. As you go, you can hear machine guns and artillery ahead of you, but then someone starts singing “Yankee Doodle” or “America the Beautiful”*. The singing becomes a chorus as the entire unit, then the units on your right and left take up the tune. Yeah, you’re a little scared, but you’re surrounded by friends, both old and new, and you know that if you stick together, everyone will be OK. By the time you get to the battle, you’re all cheering and waving your guns in the air.
Then you get in range of the enemy.
Contrary to your training, staying close together and marching straight ahead is getting your friends killed. Holes are rent in the ranks as machine gunners and the artillery spotters get their range. Soon, your unit, newly formed from fresh faces that you’ve known all your life, is separated into the quick and the dead, and there are a lot of dead.
By the time this is all over, those that aren’t dead or broken beyond repair are well on their way to being hardened veterans
Just imagine that for a moment.
Now you know what happened when the German leadership threw what they considered their reserves, mostly half-trained recruits and ill-trained reserves, into the First Battle of Ypres. The Germans sacrificed an entire cohort of recruits and reserves to keep the British and French from turning their strategic flank.
Now, let’s flip that to the other side. You veterans out there, imagine the professionals you knew in the military. Like the American, British, and other western armies of today, the British army of 1914 was made up of a generation of skilled, blooded, and professional soldiers. After Ypres, that army was shattered.
The BEF incurred 56,000 casualties at Ypres, of which 8,000 were dead and almost 18,000 were missing. Also, consider that while the rest were wounded, a pretty good percentage of those probably never returned to the front. Remember that their strength at the beginning of the war was a maximum of about 125,000 men, and they had already fought through the meat grinder of the first three months of the war. In a battle that lasted about a month, they lost almost half their combat strength, and they had already been bloodied at places like Mons, the Marne, and the Aisne.
At its peak, the U.S. Army had about 180,000 soldiers in Iraq. Imagine that in the space of a few months of fighting, that force had lost almost all of its fighting capacity. Imagine that at Fallujah alone we had lost almost 60,000 soldiers and Marines. Imagine the experience and skills that would have been lost, not only to the fighting force, but also to our ability to lead and train the next generation. What impact do you think that would have on our ability to fight and to our casualty numbers while their replacements are coming up to speed?
The First Battle of Ypres closed the front to maneuver warfare. At a terrible cost, the British and French had succeeded in stopping the German juggernaut, rolling it back in places, and keeping it from attacking again. The Germans had paid an equally horrible butchers bill to take some land and keep the Entente Forces from pushing them away from what they had gained.
What they had all gained was a form of warfare that few, if any, of them knew how to fight. The next four years would be drenched in blood as the British and French tried to push the Germans back across the Rhein, and the Germans tried to hold onto their conquests.
The “Race to the Sea” was over. Now, the real killing would begin.
*Insert patriotic song of your distinct flavor here
