Well, sides did win in the end, someone had to but, because of the primitive supply lines employed by all nations large gains were impossible to maintain. Any advance was limited.
Supply lines weren't really "primitive" by any stretch. Railroads allowed millions upon millions of rounds of ammunition to be shot off, miles of barbed wire to be carried up to the front, ensured a nigh endless supply of human grist for the mill, and could even mount their own artillery. Hooray for attritional warfare.
The thing is, attrition isn't ever an end in itself. One doesn't set out to simply grind down both forces to nothing. Instead, attrition is employed by the side that has either a quantitative or qualitative advantage in order to see that advantage tell more later on, when maneuver actually begins. It's a form of softening up the enemy, like a predawn artillery barrage. One can find in this basic philosophy of the counteroffensive the reasons for some of the German successes in 1914, most specifically in the Battle of the Frontiers, when the French Plan XVII was stymied by German troops in the Ardennes, first defending and then taking advantage of the new French weakness to attack. That also appears in the German success in Poland following the Russian offensive failure at Tannenberg and in the Carpathians, where they failed to wipe out the Austrians. As to advances being limited, I present to you the counterexamples of August 1914, summer 1915 (in Eastern Europe), winter 1917 to summer 1918 in the Middle East (specifically, the Levant, but also Iraq to an extent), and the Allied advances in late summer and fall of 1918 in both Western Europe and the Balkans.
It's not that gains were difficult to maintain, or even that the speed of advance was low - the key issues in Western Europe, I believe, were the massive increases of firepower and the ratio of force to space since the last war. Initially, and fallaciously, most observers believed that the firepower increase would aid the attacker by simply allowing him to concentrate vast amounts of destruction at one point on the enemy's line. This isn't really true. Firepower benefits the defense because that usual three-to-one ratio stays constant; if the defender can be shot at, he can shoot at you too, after all. And the
increased mobility inherent in the railroad benefited the defender by allowing him to move troops up rapidly to cover any breaches in the line. Hence the strategy of attrition: if the enemy no longer has troops to cover his holes, you can just plow on through the holes. The problem here was that aforementioned increase in the ratio of force to space. Now, with unprecedentedly large numbers in a relatively small space, firepower advantages on the side of the defensive are amplified (the defenders aren't abandoning their fortifications for open ground after all).
obliterate said:
I suppose when I say 'win' I mean a complete victory where the entire country is overrun like in WW2.
World War II's complete and utter destruction of the Nazi and Italian fascist states, along with their puppets and allies, is unprecedented in modern history. Prior to that time, states just
didn't get utterly annihilated. You don't have to completely wipe out the other side to win: as von Clausewitz said, all you have to do is make him do what you want him to do. That's the whole point of war.
It is true that the Western Allies didn't secure a "real" victory in 1918-9, mostly exacerbated by their perceived betrayal in offering a negotiated peace on the basis of the Fourteen Points and then ignoring both promises. That doesn't mean that they
couldn't have. The German Army would probably have disintegrated somewhat in the lack of an armistice, and fighting would definitely extend far into 1919, but the war would now be on German soil, and famine was nigh, if not already there.
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