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?
In: 4
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.
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