warfare outside the trenches in world war one?

Junco Partner

I was watching Passchendaele the other night. It's a film about the candian expeditionary force in WW1. Not a great film, a romance dressed up as a war film although the final battle scene is immense. What caught my interest was an early scene where the soldiers are fighting in a town. I was wondering was urban warfare a big part in the war as well as the trenches or was it a rarity. if anyone has any articles or websites that could let me read more about this as it really piqued my interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyHgS2H85PY

enfield

WW1 is generally portrayed as trench warfare but in the early stages it was house to house village to village. The trench system was an 'attrition' tactic to stop the Germans getting to Paris and keep the where they were,.
The distance between the trenches could vary between a few yards to a few miles. The men could be billeted in farmhouses, barns, halls, in tents etc, (They did not live in dug outs in the trenches all the time). In general they spent one tenth of their time in the trenches the rest of the time was in moving around (they spent a lot of time marching from place to place and could cover 30 miles in one night), supplying provisions, in rest, in training etc. There were no trenches at the beginning of the war.
Cheers.
Tom.

Stovepipe

You also have to understand that the actual entrenched/reinforced area was often little more than a few thousand yards wide and that trench systems often came within 50 yards or so of each other. In many cases, civilian life outside of the artillery's reach went on as normal. In the battle zone, movement above the surface was not normally possible, unless one was well out of rifle/machine-gun range. Both sides routinely shelled the enemy rear trenches and rear assembly/communications/stores/rest/artillery battery areas, as well as conduct aerial reconnaisance of same. Apart from that, men only came out of the trench to repair wire or rebuild earthworks and then only at night. Trench raids were frequently conducted but they were not popular as they often brought down retaliatory artillery fire. It wasn't until the last great offensives that men were able to move more than a few yards at a time on the surface. Urban warfare of the type seen in WW II was rare.

regards
Stovepipe

johnny_doyle

and for some, warfare was under the trenches.

Junco Partner

Thanks for the info guys , although I knew about the billets and how close the trenches were and the other stuff ,the l.c english curriculum's finest bore "how many miles to babylon" taught me all bout that, "birdsong" is a much better novel in my opinion and should be on the course instead.

dubtom

You've probably seen these already but worth sticking up here.
The first one,The First World War goes into great detail about how it started and all the countries involved. Brilliant docu.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-first-world-war/
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/world-war-1-in-color/

xflyer

After the failure of the German offensive in March 1918 and the Allied counterattacks. The war had essentially moved out of the trenches particularly in the last three months. So there was urban fighting and more conventional fire and movement warfare. The Germans were on the retreat through countryside and towns untouched by war. There was even close air support for the attacking troops.

But even during the trench warfare stage there were times when offensives or retreats led to fighting in towns and villages.

Trench warfare isn't the whole story even if it was emblematic of the war as a whole.