A trench system is made of three lines of trenches in parallel, covering a mile or more in depth. The front line trench is the combat trench, where the fighting is supposed to take place. Then there is the support trench, which houses units for work parties and counterattacks and so on. Then the reserve trench which houses more work parties and has units resting from front line duty. Units would spent a week or two in the trenches, then rotate into the rear for a while to rest and receive replacements.

As the war progressed everyone basically learned that the front line trench was rubbish. It would be destroyed, overrun, shot up, etc. There was no point in holding it with a lot of troops because they’d get wiped out before they could do much of anything. The Germans switched to a front line that was just fortified shell holes with machine guns. This was very safe against artillery because there was no trench to target. It was effective against infantry attacks because the machine guns could wreak havoc on men with rifles. The support and reserve trenches would be real trenches.

This system of fortified shell holes with supporting strong points from the support trench was “defense in depth.” The opposition could “overrun” the front line, but they’d still have pockets of machine gun nests on their flanks and behind them. Eliminating every single machine gun nest was extremely slow and so… that is how defense was achieved. Not with a single strong trench, but with a system that could absorb an attack, slow it down, and reduce it with machine guns.

[anecdote: during an offensive one officer solved the “eliminate all the machine gun nests” problem by taking a German prisoner and making him stand up on a stump in no mans land pointing out every nest. The officer would prod him with his pistol and demand more information, until all the machine guns were located and neutralized. Only then was the poor German allowed to get off the elevated and exposed position.]

The offensive solution to this system was with artillery box barrages, storm trooper infiltration, and tanks (to some degree). The real solution was to spend years besieging Germany and bleeding her dry so that by late 1918 there was no manpower, materiel or morale to fight. Attrition wins.

Infiltration tactics were basically sending small units of men, say a section (8 men) or platoon (40 men) through the fortified shell hole system at night. That way when the attack began, the men were miles inside enemy territory already and could ambush the strong points, etc. This was what the British began doing by late 1916. Germany gets credit for inventing it almost two years later because, they had a really cool name (storm troopers!) and the enemy always has cooler better stuff than you do. And the British didn’t like a system that gave all the initiative to young officers, particularly the officers later in the war who came from civilian life to fight only for the duration, can’t have those types ruining things for the career officers from good families, etc. etc,

The trench raid was the primary way of defeating the trench system. It begins with a creeping barrage and the box barrage. The artillery fires on the front line trenches until the time when the infantry assault elements are supposed to arrive. Then it lifts and moves to targets further back. It stays on those until the time when the infantry is supposed to arrive then, and then lifts and moves forward again. Creeping barrage. The box baggage was where the artillery fences the area being assaulted with fire along the flanks. This produces a sort of box, where artillery is firing along two sides and one creeping barrage at the back. The idea is that the area within the box will be dealt with by the infantry assault units while the artillery prevents reinforcements and counterattacks.

It is a brittle system because there is so little information flow between the front line assault units and the artillery. If the times scheduled for the advances don’t match with reality the infantry can fall behind the protective screen. When this happens, I.e. the creeping barrage walks too far forward for the infantry to keep up, then the enemy can come up from their dugouts and man their defensive positions. This is, obviously, very bad for the Poor Bloody Infantry.

Anyway, the short answer is that trenches were attacked all the time and clearing trenches was an important activity. There were night raids as well, which is a whole other thing. That’s where the hand to hand fighting comes into it. That’s an entire other subject, including how the armies had to invent modern hand to hand combat training.

These days if you’re in the military you’re taught basically two technica, one to incapacitate and one to kill. Then everything else you learn is a way to setup either of those two techniques. Guy standing up? Ok, get him on the ground and crush his throat. Guy has a knife? Get him on the ground, safely, and crush his throat. Guy has a bayonet? Get him on… and so on. The French system was based on crushing the throat. With thumbs. Very… brutal. I’m not sure how much it was used, but that is what was taught,

From what I read about the german infantery in WW1, is that most troops learned about the technics about effective hand to hand combat only on the frontlines, directly from the Frontschweinen (frontpigs, veterans). Who told them mostly, that what they learned in the drills with fancy bayonett swinging, they should forget and just use their sharpened shovel. Or a rock, or a grenade to hit with it. Anything.

By WW2, all those was integrated into proper infantery training. Improvised, brutal and effective.

But the modern german army, doesn't teach hand to hand combat at all anymore, except for officers, special forces or military police and as far as I know, also only in a very limited way.

On a tangent, but since you seem to be knowledgeable of these things: how did attacking troops deal with the barbed wire, and especially with their own barbed wire? Was there a way to take down their barbed wire prior to an assault? If so, could you guess the time of an enemy assault by monitoring the status of their barbed wire? Or could you even mount a preemptive attack when they took down their barbed wire?

(Actually, trench warfare by later WWI had developed significantly since the early war, it wasn't just sitting in trenches or sending mindless waves of troops over the top)

Oh and later, when the war was lost, it was of course the fault of the communist and socialdemocrats, who stabbed the army in the back and not of the glorious, heroic army. And there are still lots of people glorifying the Kaiserreich. I am glad its gone.

The Hague Convention of 1899 banned chemical warfare, with the US being the only ones to not have signed it.

Doesn't mean that the Germans weren't hypocrits, the complains about shotguns might have been rooted in wanting to point fingers back: https://youtu.be/fvrIVZn1jH8

The French used tear gas first, the Germans were the first to use chlorine. There's a big difference between these gasses.

One gives you trouble breathing and is used widely against civilian demonstrants, because it is very mild - the other one - the one the german army was first to use - kills or cripples your loungs in a horrible way.

But I rather leave this debate.

P.s. I tasted some tear gas, it is certainly not nice. But thats it. It doesn't actually harm you, unless you have a precondition. Chlorine on the other hand is just pure deadly poison

The comment I was responding to made what I interpreted as a false equivalence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_weapons_in_World_War_...

All sides started to develop these weapons before the war, and apparently it's the Germans who were capable of deploying these weapons sooner and with greater success.

What you present here nothing less than a one-sided propaganda. It reminds of French villages hundreds of kilometers far from any WWI front line, deep in the rear with memorials dedicated to "Innocent children fallen in the great war" followed by a list of some 10 to 15 male names.

Innocent children, the throat cutter sort, same as those from the other side.