Quote:
Originally Posted by Itse
I would argue that gas attacks were more a symptom and an icon of the general inhumanity of WW1 than something which altered things on it's own. WW1 in general was a rather mind-blowingly brutal war. There are not a lot of wars before or since where "bleeding the enemy dry" was considered a viable strategy on a national scale, and that's just a part of it.
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Gas, and attrition tactics, were employed out of maddening frustration with the impasse of the Western Front. Nobody went into the Great War with the intention or expectation that it would be any more brutal than wars in the past. But the technology of the time, along with the enormous armies made possible by mass conscription, gave heavy advantages to the defensive. Countries could take a punch like never before. They could take dozens of punches, it turned out. It was the Ali-Frazier of warfare.
Once the war was generating an unprecedented butcher's toll, the combatants became ever more desperate to break the impasse. Very quickly, they reached a point of no return where only total victory was acceptable. That's when the ghastly calculations of mass casualties took over.