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Nicholas Powers

Mrs. shumate

English 2

11 May 2017

Pros and Cons of Trench Warfare

World War one was a brutal war. Both sides of the war used harsh weapons and same

strategies on how they could win the war. One thing they both built were trenches. There were

many types of trenches you could make but in all Trench warfare was primarily negative with

very little good things about it.

There are three main reasons that trench warfare was so terrible.The British

Expeditionary Force of the First World War did not fight a deliberately attritional war, despite the

heavy casualties and slow gains it experienced. Before the BEF launched a single trench-warfare

attack, senior officers argued for a methodical and clearly attritional operational approach,

accepting limited gains and slow overall progress to get a favourable casualty exchange

rate.(Harris and Marble). The British army had different views of the trench warfare. They were

not happy about the limited amount of land they gained but were okay with the heavy casualties

for germany. They also talk about what was wrong with the trench warfare when a bombing

would come and you had nowhere to run. A good thing when you were on the defensive side of

the attack and didnt have to leave the trench but if you were on the offensive side of the attack

the defensive could pick you off one by one (Harris and Marble). A con for trench warfare that it

states in this article is that most of the military leaders were not happy about the amount of land

gained throughout each battle. They barely moved 5 miles after every battle either pushed away

or pushed in. Another article stated In trench poetry on all fronts, descriptions of dead
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comrades are ubiquitous (eide). Even in the art of poetry in the war it shows how horrible the

war actually was and how death always followed you (eide). The soldiers in the trenches tried to

write poetry but couldnt escape the fact that the war was all around, with death following in real

life and in their poems.

The Soldiers in the trenches were not safe if their heads were to pop out to look because machine

guns and snipers were pointed right for them. The very nature of trench warfare, moreover,

proved diabolically conducive to facial injuries: "[T]he . . . soldiers failed to understand the

menace of the machine gun, recalled Dr. Fred Albee, an American surgeon working in France.

They seemed to think they could pop their heads up over a trench and move quickly enough to

dodge the hail of bullets." (Alexander). The Artists wanted to draw what they saw during the

war to show how mad it really was. The art work can help the reader understand better about

how trench life was like and what it really looked like. (Alexander). If you pop your head out a

bit too much the other side would shoot your head off right there. They are looking for someone

head to come up in order to shoot.

The trenches had to be sturdy in order to survive and most trenches werent but the

germans learned how to use the strategies of higher ground trenches. These opposing strategies

generally left the Germans on the high ground in reinforced trenches that utilized concrete and

stone. In contrast, the Allied positions in general were poorly constructed and waterlogged

because they were built in low-lying areas.(Hunsberger & berry). Early Allied braced trenches

were hastily constructed and consisted of little more than a series of interconnected holes in the

ground. Although originally dry, these holes crumbled and caved in as rainy conditions raised the

water table and flooded the trenches. (Hunsberger & Berry) The ability to make sturdy trenches

depended on where you dug the trench and also what the soil was like. If the soil is undrainable
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then it was almost impossible to build a good trench. But if the soil was drainable then you

would be able to make good trenches that was safe. ( Hunsberger & Berry) If the Trench was

built with good soil then the trench was very sturdy. The problem was with all the rain the the

soil that they dug-out would fall back in because of the rain and also the mud would fall and cave

in bunkers.

Trenches were a good idea for some cases but most the time the trenches were a failure.

Based on the information provided, It is very clear that trench warfare did more harm than good.
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Works Cited

Alexander, Caroline. "Faces of War." Smithsonian, vol. 37, no. 11, Feb. 2007, pp. 72-80.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=23921219&site=ehost-live

Eide, Marian. "Witnessing and Trophy Hunting: Writing Violence from the Great War

Trenches." Criticism, vol. 49, no. 1, Winter2007, pp. 85-104. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=32135576&site=ehost-live.

Harris, Paul and Sanders Marble. "The 'Step-By-Step' Approach: British Military Thought and

Operational Method on the Western Front, 1915-1917." War in History, vol. 15, no. 1,

Jan. 2008, pp. 17-42. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=27951944&site=ehost-live.

Hunsberger, Louis E. and Brock E. Barry. "World War I Trench Warfare: Geotechnical

Considerations." Civil Engineering (08857024), vol. 83, no. 9, Sept. 2013, pp. 67-70.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=99998652&site=ehost-live.