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Jim:
Take a deep breath and try reading my post again. Nowhere does it say the Generals were brilliant strategists or tacticians. What it (fairly obviously) says is that they were out of their depth. Faced with tremendous advances in firepower rates, weights, and accuracy, they were forced to rely on the only training and experience they had. Unfortunately that training was in the warfare of the 19th century. Your example of the Somme is apt: it is a description of fairly standard tactical employment of infantry in a period predating massed artillery, machineguns, or even repeating rifles. Its typical of a period where the bayonet was a primary weapon. Read about the Napoleanic or Crimean wars where men fought in open lines (such as the heroic Thin Red Line of Balaclava) and where the formation of a defensive "box" of men, standing entirely in the open, was a well regarded defensive tactic. That is the mindset the Generals brought with them. It didn't make them butchers or evil. It simply left them with nowhere to go. They were in a war in which the horse, the only effective means of mobility available, and the only means by which to return to the more mobile formations of the past, had been rendered obsolete (it was too "soft" and slow a target) by the advances in firepower. Short of surrender, what were their options? Do nothing at all? True, there would be no casualties, but I doubt Belgium or France were interested in ceding their countries to Germany. Sit back and wait for the blockade to strangle Germany? Not likely to happen soon; after all, it was only the massive expenditures of resources imposed by the constant high tempo of combat operations which gave it any effectiveness whatsoever. So tell us the solution, without relying on the benefit of hindsight, which so eluded some of the best military minds of their time.
As to your rationalization that Germany was the belligerent state ("as they had a stronger military force at the time than a lot of the other participants did") , how interesting. Let's see. That means that China would have been the belligerent state when invaded by Japan (China's Army was larger), and the US was the "belligerent" at Pearl Harbor and during Desert Storm because the US armed forces were clearly larger than either of our opponents' in those wars. My, you've certainly developed a simple means to determine whose fault any given war is. Just count the troops and whoever has more is "at fault"! In reality, the prelude to war is a complex weave of diplomacy, internal politics, conflicting national interests, and, usually, errors in diplomatic judgement. In MOST wars any attempt to affix "blame" is a meaningless, and ultimately self fulfilling, exercise.
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