The French Battle for Vimy Ridge, Spring 1915

The unprecedented scale of trench warfare in the First World War posed a series of challenges to attacking forces. This article tracks the early French steps to develop a coherent doctrine for launching offensives against established trench systems, focusing on a specific battle in May-June 1915: Second Artois. This battle would be the first based on lessons learned and digested by the French army after its initial tentative efforts at trench warfare from December 1914 to March 1915. As such it provides an interesting starting point for an analysis of the French army’s development of trench tactics in the First World War and of the part this played in the general effort made by the two sides to find ways to break the post-1914 stalemate on the Western Front.