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Tactical development on the Western Front in 1917
In 1917 the armies on the Western Front continued to change their fighting methods, due to the consequences of increases in fire-power, greater numbers of automatic weapons, the decentralisation of authority and the integration of specialised branches, equipment and techniques into the traditional structures of infantry, artillery and cavalry. Tanks, railways, aircraft, lorries, chemicals, concrete and steel, photography, wireless and advances in medical science increased in importance in all of the armies, as did the influence of the material constraints of geography, climate, demography and economics. All of the armies encountered growing manpower shortages, caused by the need to replace the losses of 1916 and by the competing demands for labour of civilian industry and agriculture. The consequences of dwindling manpower were particularly marked in the German and French armies, which made considerable changes in their methods during the year, with the object of simultaneously pursuing military-strategic objectives and limiting casualties.
The French army began the year with a return to the strategy of decisive battle, using the methods pioneered at the Battle of Verdun in December 1916, to break through the German defences on the Western front and return to manoeuvre warfare (ドイツ語:''Bewegungskrieg'') but ended the year recovering from the disastrous result. The German army attempted to avoid the high infantry losses of 1916 by withdrawing to new deeper and dispersed defences. Defence in depth was intended to nullify the Allies' growing material strength (particularly in artillery) and succeeded in slowing the growth of Anglo-French battlefield superiority. The British army continued its evolution into a mass army capable of imposing itself on a continental power, took on much of the military burden borne by the French and Russian armies since 1914 and left the German army resorting to expedients to counter the development of its increasingly skilful use of fire-power and technology. During 1917 the British army also experienced the manpower shortages that hampered the French and Germans and then at Cambrai in December, encountered the revitalising effect on the German army of reinforcements from Russia.
==Background==
Hindenburg and Ludendorff replaced Chief of the General Staff Erich von Falkenhayn at the end of August 1916 during "the most serious crisis of the war". On 2 September the new leadership ordered a strict defensive at Verdun and the dispatch of forces from there to reinforce the Somme and Rumanian fronts. Hindenburg and Ludendorff visited the Western front and held a meeting at Cambrai on 8 September with the army group and other commanders, at which the gravity of the situation in France and the grim prospects for the new year were debated. Hindenburg and Ludendorff had already announced a reconnaissance on 6 September for a new, shorter line behind the Noyon salient. On 15 September a defensive strategy was announced except for Rumania and ドイツ語:''Generalfeldmarschall'' Rupprecht (commander of the northernmost army group on the Western front) was instructed to prepare a new line, Arras–St. Quentin–Laon–Aisne river. The new line across the base of the Noyon salient would be about shorter and was to be completed in three months. These defences were planned with the experience gained on the Somme, which showed a need for much greater defensive depth and many small shallow concrete ドイツ語:''Mannschafts''-''Eisenbeton''-''Unterstände'' (''Mebu'' shelters), rather than elaborate entrenchments and deep dug-outs, which had become man-traps. Work began on 23 September, two trench lines about apart were dug as an outpost line ドイツ語:(''Sicherheitsbesatzung'') and a main line of resistance ドイツ語:(''Hauptverteidigungslinie'') on a reverse slope, ドイツ語:(''Hinterhangstellung'') behind fields of barbed wire up to deep. Concrete machine-gun nests and ''Mebu'' shelters were built either side of the main line, with artillery observation posts built farther back to overlook it.
On 31 August, Hindenburg and Ludendorff had begun the expansion of the army to and of munitions production in the Hindenburg Programme, necessary to meet demand after the vast expenditure of ammunition in 1916 (on the Somme in September, artillery shells and shells had been fired) and the anticipated increase in artillery use by the Allies in 1917. It was intended that the new defensive positions would contain any Allied breakthrough and give the German army the choice of a deliberate withdrawal, to dislocate an expected Allied offensive in the new year. Over the winter of 1916–1917, the wisdom of a deliberate withdrawal was debated and at a meeting on 19 December, called after the 15 December ''débâcle'' at Verdun, the possibility of a return to the offensive was also discussed. With a maximum of expected to be available by March 1917, a decisive success was considered impossible. Ludendorff continued to vacillate but in the end, the manpower crisis and the prospect of releasing thirteen divisions by a withdrawal on the Western Front, to the new ドイツ語:''Siegfriedstellung'' (Hindenburg line), overcame his desire to avoid the tacit admission of defeat it represented. The ドイツ語:''Alberich Bewegung'' (Alberich manoeuvre) was ordered to begin on 16 March 1917, although a withdrawal of on a front had already been carried out from in the salient between Bapaume and Arras, formed by the Allied advance on the Somme in 1916. The local retirements had been caused by the renewal of pressure by the British Fifth Army, as soon as weather permitted in January 1917, which had advanced on a front up the Ancre valley.
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