Attrition Quotes

“The British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In Britain, and in many parts of her former Empire, the blame for the death toll is generally laid on the incompetence and callousness of the Great War generals, especially the British generals. In France, they blame their politicians; in Germany, historians blame the Kaiser.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The late Barbara Tuchman, an American historian and the author of some fine books on the Great War, has written that while the human race has made great progress in many fields of endeavour - science, medicine, the arts - since the siege of Troy to the present day, it has made no discernible progress whatsoever in the field of government. She adds that nations will frequently adopt policies which are not only dangerous to their national well-being, but which are seen and known to be dangerous even before they are undertaken.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly than letting it continue.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the subsequent reactions of Austria-Hungary and Serbia, as a chance to start it.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Douglas Haig remained Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France until the end of the war but his reputation was blasted by the death toll on the Somme and took a further beating in 1917, after the losses of Passchendaele. Only now, more than 80 years after the Great War ended, has Haig's reputation begun to recover. This seems only fair, for many of the attacks on his character and reputation seem misguided. Haig was neither callous nor incompetent; he fought a long, hard and ultimately successful war with considerable skill.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“If the French Government had deliberately intended to inflict further torment and loss on their long-suffering soldiers they could hardly have done better than appoint General Nivelle to the post of Commander-in-Chief.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“German casualty returns did not include the less seriously wounded who were treated in their corps area. All British wounded were included in the casualty returns, even if they were treated in a regimental aid post (RAP) or at dressing stations and then returned to duty.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 600,000 men, killed,”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“No tactical or strategic gain was made on the Somme front that was worth the cost in lives. Even had the British and French achieved their breakthrough on the Somme, the Germans had plenty of room to manoeuvre and, unlike the French at Verdun, no national interest in staying where they were. During the winter of 1916-17 the Germans simply withdrew to the Hindenburg Line, east of the Somme battlefield, and it all had to be done again.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In all his battles, Haig never seems to have appreciated that there came a time when he had obtained or achieved all he could hope for and that to press on would either throw away his success to date or result in terrible losses.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The fate of Sir John French, who had failed in the previous September at Loos - but had not lost anything like so many men in the process - cannot have passed unnoticed by General Haig in the autumn of 1916.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“sometime in October 1916, Haig abandoned the notion of a breakthrough on the Somme and joined his peers in France and Germany in committing his soldiers to a battle of attrition.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and élan, instead of intelligence.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter of 1916, when he could have stopped after Flers, is a clear error.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“One can only wonder if the generals were serious ... or mad. In all but slaughter, the Battle of the Somme was over by early October, and to continue past that point was madness indeed, but this side of Haig's character, his stubbornness combined with a seemingly incurable optimism, is one that even his supporters find difficult to defend:”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“the aim of the Somme battle was no longer an attempt at a breakthrough to Bapaume but an attempt to write down the strength of the German field army and kill German soldiers - in other words, attrition.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The veterans of the Somme have gone now but while they lived they talked incessantly of the mud of the Somme, mud which permeated everything, clogged rifles, flowed like lava into dugouts and trenches, sucked off boots, drowned wounded men and horses and made movement either impossible or a tremendous physical effort. To fight on the Somme was bad enough; to also fight the mud of the Somme was simply too much.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In all but killing terms, the battle ended in the last days of September and the main reason it ended was mud.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The battle at Verdun can best be imagined as some monstrous ball game, in which two teams of giants push a boulder to and fro across impossible terrain. For months the Germans had pushed the French south, towards Verdun; now the French were pushing the Germans back to the north, towards their start-line positions of 21 February. The entry fee in this contest for a worthless piece of terrain was a great number of lives.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In all the odium the British generals have attracted, it should be noticed that it was the British, not the French or the Germans, who created the tank and brought it into action and in so doing changed the face of war.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The British Army was learning how to fight the 'all-arms' battle by this stage of the war; no longer would the brunt be left to the infantry.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“the credit for developing the basic idea into what became the first tank must go to Winston Churchill,”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“la Boisselle was not taken until 4 July, a gain of perhaps 220 yards in four days of constant fighting. The problem, as the Germans had found when attacking at Verdun, was that the defences had interlocking fields of fire.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“What Joffre wanted on the Somme was not a tactical battle. As he saw it, the attempt at a breakthrough had failed and now, as so often before, the task of breaking the enemy line would get even harder. Therefore, since it was probably impossible to break through the enemy line, the next best thing was to attack all along the line, and engage the enemy in a battle that would force him to remove divisions from the Verdun front”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916