Can someone tell me what broke the stalemate in WWI? I'm not a stable genius like Musk is.
The German Spring Offensive of 1918, using the troops no longer required on the Eastern Front, was the main factor. Paradoxically, Germany was a victim of her own success.
Having been successfully worn down by the war, and by the blockades that prevented the Central Powers from importing useful quantities of materiel, the German lines had become dependent on a logistical support network that had grown up alongside the near stationary front, and when their forces succeeded in pushing the French and British forces back, their logistics were unable to keep up - mainly as a result of the broken ground that the war had made almost impassable to supply trains*. Their attempt to break the point of contact between British and French armies almost succeeded, but again this worked against the Germans, as it finally gave the Allies the kick in the pants needed to unify command, with the British for the first time in the war allowing a Frenchman, General Ferdinand Foch, to command British forces.
Unable to obtain the necessary ammunition, food, fuel or replacement troops, the advance faltered, and was pushed back; When it reached the old fortified front lines, the German Army lacked the ability to stop the momentum of their retreat, and couldn't reconsolidate the defensive posture that had kept them in France since the front solidified in 1914. The Allies, now bolstered by American men and supplies, pushed the Germans into a near rout, and it rapidly became clear that they no longer had sufficient strength and cohesion to prevent French and British advances.
The tank played a minor role in all of this; The first truly successful use of tanks at Cambrai at the end of November 1917 demonstrated that they could be effective in breaking enemy lines (particularly when used in close coordination with both infantry and air forces), but the successful counterattack by the Germans demonstrated also that, at that time, not much had changed since 1914, with breakthroughs being difficult to achieve, but impossible to consolidate. The ability to reinforce and resupply the line was always the main issue, and that ability always strongly favoured the defenders, who were falling back towards their supplies and reserves, and disfavoured the attackers who were leaving an impassable barrier of fortifications and shell holes between themselves and their logistics trains.
The Germans defeated themselves, by leaving their well established and well supplied fortified front line, at a time when their national ability to support the war effort was almost completely exhausted, and troops were desperately underfed, and low in morale. They pushed the Allies into a position of advantage, while capturing very little that was strategically valuable to either side. And when they were, inevitably, checked and reversed, their retreat turned into a rout.
Had they Germans not launched their Spring Offensive, they likely would have been forced to request an armistice by the end of 1918 or early 1919, due to the starving of their home front; But if they had done so while still occupying the mostly stable front line that they had held for four years, and while still in possession of large areas of France, the terms would presumably have been far less unpleasant to them than the actual terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and might even have been sufficiently tolerable as to avoid the need for round two, twenty years later.
The Great War saw a number of novel weapons that were expected to radically change the outcome (gas, aircraft, camouflage, tanks, etc.), but none of these really had a big enough effect to do that. The tank often gets more credit than it deserves, largely because it was very successful on day one at Cambrai, and that success came only a few months ahead of a general un-freezing of the lines that was directly attributable to the Spring Offensive. From the perspective of the newspaper reading Londoners, it was as though the new British secret weapon had dramatically changed the entire nature of the war on the Western Front, but really, that was more propaganda than reality. That the Germans tripped over their own dicks while successfully pushing back the Allies, was never going to fall so effectively into national myth.
*Horse drawn wagon trains, not railways, although both sides did use narrow gauge railways right up to the front at various places
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