If attacking was so hopeless, how did the Germans manage to take nearly all of northeastern France during August, 1914?
Short answer: Because the French squandered their military advantages through a suicidal war plan. The French were wedded to the “doctrine of the offensive” despite the fact that the American Civil War had shown repeatedly that entrenched troops were very costly if not impossible to defeat through a frontal assault, and more recently the Russo-Japanese war of 1905 had shown that there was no quick way to break out of static warfare, the French were wedded to the notion that their superior “élan” (morale and offensive dash), combined with rapid fire light artillery, would prove superior. Part of this doctrine involved not training the men in defensive warfare. Roughly 50 years after Robert E. Lee, the outstanding Confederate General of the U.S. Civil War, declared that the shovel was as important a weapon as the rifle, most French soldiers were not given digging tools! The French war plan was known as Plan 17. It involved an offensive into the German center. In contrast to the Schlieffe
