27. The British Plan to Outflank the Western Front in WWI
World War I began with plenty of movement and maneuver, but after a few months, things on the Western Front stagnated into gridlock as exhausted armies dug in where they stood. By the end of 1914, millions of soldiers faced enemies across no-man’s land, hunkered in trenches that stretched for hundreds of miles from the Swiss border to the English Channel. Direct attacks on entrenched opponents typically resulted in advances of a few hundred yards, or a few miles at most. They produced little more than mutual attrition, with attackers suffering significantly higher casualties commensurate with their greater exposure in the open to concentrated machine gun and artillery fire as they traversed no-man’s land.
In 1917, the British planned Operation Hush, to take advantage of Allied naval supremacy, cemented by the Royal Navy’s strategic victory in the Battle of Jutland the previous year. It aimed to outflank the Germans with an amphibious landing on the Belgian coast, behind the German trenches’ northern terminal on the English Channel.
