Trench warfare

Trench warfare is a type of land warfare using occupied fighting lines largely comprising military trenches, in which troops are well-protected from the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery. The most famous use of trench warfare is the Western Front in World War I. 'Trench warfare' has become a byword for stalemate, attrition, sieges, and futility in conflict. Trench warfare proliferated when a revolution in firepower was not matched by similar advances in mobility, resulting in a grueling form of warfare in which the defender held the advantage. On the Western Front in 1914–1918, both sides constructed elaborate trench, underground, and dugout systems opposing each other along a front, protected from assault by barbed wire, mines, camouflaged trapping pits, and other obstacles. The area between opposing trench lines (known as 'no man's land') was fully exposed to artillery fire from both sides. Attacks, even if successful, often sustained severe casualties. With the development of armoured warfare and combined arms tactics, emphasis on trench warfare has declined, but it still occurs wherever battle lines become static. Field works are as old as armies. Roman legions, when in the presence of an enemy, entrenched camps nightly when on the move. In the early-modern era troops used field works to block possible lines of advance. For example: Although Napoleon Bonaparte started his military career in artillery, campaigning in the Napoleonic Wars generally emphasized movement rather than static entrenchment. But innovations in trench warfare became more prominent in the course of the 19th century. In the New Zealand Wars (1845–1872), the indigenous Maori developed elaborate trench and bunker systems as part of fortified areas known as pā, employing them successfully as early as the 1840s to withstand British cannon, muskets, and an experimental poison-gas mortar. These systems included firing trenches, communication trenches, tunnels, and anti-artillery bunkers. British casualty rates of up to 45 percent, such as at Gate Pa in 1844 and the Battle of Ohaeawai in 1845, suggested that contemporary firepower was insufficient to dislodge defenders from a trench system. The Crimean War (1853–1856) saw 'massive trench works and trench warfare',even though 'the modernity of the trench war was not immediately apparent to the contemporaries'. North American armies employed field works in the American Civil War (1861–1865) — most notably in the sieges of Vicksburg (1863) and Petersburg (1864–1865), the latter of which saw the first use by the Union Army of the rapid-fire Gatling gun, the important precursor to modern-day machine guns. Trenches also featured in the Paraguayan War (which started in 1864), the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).