Wiki defines a war of attrition as:
> A military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and material.
If WW1 is considered to be this, then why were there so many attempts to cross no man’s land. With the inventions of machines guns, the old techniques of large advancing armies was easily stopped, results in large losses from the attacking side.
Chemical warfare and shelling were obviously a major player in devastating front lines, but was this enough reason to send men across to capture land, why send men across at all when you know it will amount to a senseless loss of life and thus cause the very collapse that attrition describes.
Since the enemy dug bunkers, was large scale bombing pointless thus did sending men to their deaths become the only option to get small results?
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There weren’t, that just looks good in the movies. WW1 was not about throwing endless waves of corpses into no-man’s land, it was a war of *infrastructure* attrition – shell the shit out of the enemy line in the hopes that they’ll lose enough men and equipment that you can push forwards without getting your own force annihilated in the process.
You are looking at this only through the lenses of history, decades after the war. Nobody knew or wanted a long attrition war. They all were sure that they could win the war and you can’t win a war only be defense.
The technologies was relatively recent, some were developed during the war. What we know today was learned during the war, by the blood of the people that fought. They couldn’t really knew how the war would end up before the fact, only after. And it’s not like the margin here is huge. The German did come really close to reach Paris during their offensive.
Who in their right might will look how close they were from a Victory and think. Yep we need to never try that again guys. The Eastern Front also show that offensive operation and a more mobile warfare was totally viable at the time. It worked on the East, so it make sense that they kept trying on the West.
You also need to keep into consideration non military aspect. If you have two General in front of you, one is telling you that attacking is impossible and we should just stay on defense for several years in a war of attrition. While the second General tell you that he have a plan and he know that he can win an offensive operation that will shorten the war. Which on do you think will be the more popular solution?
There is also things like strategical position, logistical lines (railways), defensive positions, etc. Those could be important enough to take that it would be worth losing more men in an offensive operation. It’s also hard to tell your population that you don’t want to try to take back your own territory because it’s better to stay on the defensive.
We always prepare for the last war. Just like the people in WW1 fought in certain situation with outdated strategy, France did fought WW2 with WW1 tactics. It’s really hard to throw away what worked in the past, especially since you never know what will work now. We know now what would have worked because they tried all sort of tactics until they fought what worked. But until you fight out what work, you are stock with what worked in the past. In WW2 it was easier for the German to change their way from WW1, because they lost. They obviously did something wrong in WW1 to lose, so they tried their best to find the new way to fight the next war. But even in their own army there was a lot of disagreement about what would work next. They could have bet on the wrong strategy.
Well a war of attrition is not the same as a siege where you are just waiting on the other side to run out of food. Attrition is more of you just keep killing eachother until one side runs out of bodies.
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