I'm saying infantry foot soldier is the basic offensive arm of every nation in 1914-1918 with a training focused on markmanship and bayonet. The new modern weapons granted defensive nations advantages (artillery is the true decisive weapon of ww1). Armies used trenched elastic defense and the wole point was to recreate mobility by taking one position after the other (you create a hole in a line, you force the line to reconstruct and if it's impossible you take land cause the enemy withdraws). Grand tactic didn't really use mobile forces but to support infantry. It's not much the mobile aspect of WW1 is a result of the trench warfare, it is the trench warfare is a result of the use of infantry as main arm and mobile forces were there to support infantry.



Yes but they bled for nothing. The French front collapsed in 1940 cause french were making war with digged infantry divisions strongholds and choke points like in WW1. De Gaulle use of tanks at Moncornet/Abbeville was anecdoctal in the army. In the french forces most other tanks were exactly used to support infantry like in WW1. Real independent armored forces like De Gaulle asked for in his book "Vers l'armée de métier" was not really followed by old school ww1 generals above him. It was a completely new doctrine and solely used on the german side at that time.

Let's add of course in 1940 every infantry division from german to french still had horses for echelons all artillery divs were horse tracked too), what was different on the german side is this new use of panzer divisionen, infantry divisions were not there anymore to make the decision. Panzerdivisionen did had the main role and infantry divisions were there to keep the lines being created. That is what changed.







It's not cause there is movement you may caracterize this war about movements and forgetting the way people was doing war back then. Going back to the subject, SD mechanics don't apply much to WW1 cause of it. Wargame is a great genra for WW1 though.

Napoleon did go from France to Moscow, does that make that war mainly about movements ? Absolutely not. Napoleonic battles were about choice of battlefield and superiority of force and position. Never heard inherited cavalery charges from older wars were a definition of mobile war.







WW1 war is about pushing over trenchlines and raiding entrenched positions and communication lines. It's not cause you raiding with cavalery or camel you make your war about movements. It's just raiding.

To be back to the Sinai-Levant war, Bir-el-Mazar (1916) is considered a raid, same thing for Maghara Hills.

The battle of Maghaba is about entrenched ottomans fighting british dismounted cavalery forces.

The battle of Rafa is about entrenched ottomans being encircled by cavalery forces.

The battle of Gaza will be a british infantry fight protected with cavalery to avoid ottoman reenforcements. After that fight it will form later a serious entrenched defence from Gaza to Beersheba forming a stalemate from april to october 1917.

And it goes on with other Sinai-Levant battles.

WW1 is not represented about trenchs by mistake, trench is representative of this war cause doctrine did tend to use protected infantry in and out trenchs to make the offensive. If you want historical accuracy, you wouldn't seriously base a ww1 game about movement (except mainly infantry ones between two fixed positions).