Oceans of print have been expended on defining the difference, or lack of it, between all out war, under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and a war of attrition; in military usage, meaning the all-out-destruction of the enemy's forces at all most any cost. A sort of ethos of 'the last man standing is the victor'. It seems at first sight that it is highly improbable that two profoundly Christian, European countries could ever consider that a policy of attrition would be acceptable to its army commanders and, even less, to its population at large. But during the Great War there is clear written evidence that this was indeed the case. The two protagonist countries concerned were Germany and Britain, and their respective military commanders, General Falkenhayn and Field Marshal Haig. There are many earlier references to a ' war of attrition', e.g. General Schlieffen in 1909, but it is the memoirs of General Erich von Falkenhayn (1861-1922), Chief of the Imperial General Staff of the German Army, which indicate that he was the first to actually adopt, sometime in late 1915, the concept of a war of attrition as a defined military objective. Frustrated by the inability of the Central Powers to win the Flanders campaign in 1915 (the First and Second Battles of Ypres) by frontal assault, and bogged down by the almost universal paralysis of trench warfare, he was determined to catastrophically weaken the French Army in one fell swoop.
Falkenhayn believed that the destruction of the French Army could be achieved by drawing them into a situation where their determination to retain the possession of vital national territory would overcome any rational consideration of strategy or tactics. He stated that if the site were important enough 'They (the French) would throw in every man they have'. With the massed French army thus concentrated and exposed, Falkenhayn planned to employ an overwhelming deluge of artillery fire to annihilate them. He maintained, 'The forces of France will bleed to death'. Furthermore, he stated, by this action, 'England's best sword would be knocked out her hand'. The inevitable corollary of this would be that Britain could be summarily dealt with later, on both land and sea; the latter objective being achieved largely by unrestricted submarine warfare on Britain's vital marine supply lines.
Bearing in mind the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, and the legacy of the French province of Alsace/ Lorraine that that war had indelibly impressed on the French psyche, Falkenhayn elected to threaten the French border fortress town of Verdun and its highly fortified environs. His prime objective was not to capture Verdun, but use it as a pawn to draw the French into an ill-considered campaign to retain it at all costs.
Falkenhayn begins campaign of attrition
Falkenhayn launched his campaign in February 1916, and quickly seized the surrounding high ground and villages by the use of intensive artillery bombardments, followed up by an overwhelming infantry assault. Once dug into the surrounding countryside, and secure in the captured major French stronghold of Fort Douaumont, the Germans awaited the inevitable French counter attacks.
As anticipated the French threw in all the resources they could muster. But, after 10 months of gruelling trench warfare, whereby 90% of the French Army's infantry regiments had been rotated through the Verdun Sector, some several times, the campaign had brought attrition for the Germans as well as for the French. At the final accounting, the French had lost around 380,000 killed, wounded and missing and the Germans, 340,000. A pyrrhic victory indeed, and mutual attrition on a stupendous scale. If a number of men equivalent to the killed and missing from both sides (260,000), were to march in column, three abreast, it would take 24 hours for them all to pass a fixed point.
Haig adopts attrition policy
The conversion of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (1861-1928), Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, to a mindset of 'war by attrition' is even less explicable. Known as a conservative, religious, family man with strong moral convictions, it hard to see how he came to it. But, no doubt, such were the reverses and stresses of his long command of the war on the Western Front (48 months), a saint would be sorely tried to find the masterstroke with which to resolve the seemingly unending war and continual flow of casualties.
If we are to associate Haig with a firm belief in 'war by attrition', it has to be by deed rather than actual spoken word. Certainly, the reverses of the first Battle of the Somme, after all the expectations of 'The Big Push' and 'The Breakthrough', led him to continue the campaign long after it was evident to most of those involved that the human cost of continuing the offensive far exceeded any strategic or tactical purpose. Moreover, it was a stratagem that he repeated again to real excess at Passchendaele 1917 and, perhaps, to a lesser extent, in various battles right up to the Armistice in November 1918.
Haig did not freely use the words 'attrition', 'bleeding white' or ' bleeding to death' as did Falkenhayn and others. He preferred euphemisms such as 'wearing out' and 'at all costs' which had the same effect, if not the same clarity of purpose.
As far as the British were concerned, the results of this war of attrition against the Germans in the Somme and the Ypres Salient/Passchendaele were as spectacularly bad as were the outcome of Germans' efforts against the French at Verdun.
The complexity of the alliances and joint operations in the battles between the protagonist powers on the Western Front, make it virtually impossible to collate the precise numbers of casualties inflicted by one particular country upon another. Except, perhaps, in particular battles where the role of each of the protagonists was particularly well defined and recorded.
Conclusions
What is pretty certain, is that in the majority of the Western Front battles, with the exception of the final ones in 1918, the Germans/Central Powers almost always inflicted proportionately greater casualties on the British (and the French) than vice versa. So, if Haig was hoping to win the war by unilaterally 'bleeding the Germans white' he certainly failed in this objective.
Falkenhayn, on the other hand, did not have long to prove the efficacy of his new modus de guerre in the war on the Western Front. By mid-June 1916 he was relieved from his command and spent the rest of the war campaigning in Romania, Palestine and White Russia.
