Editing Scorched earth (section)

===World War I===
[[File:The German Withdrawal To the Hindenburg Line, March-april 1917 Q5216.jpg|thumb|upright=1|Ruins of the church of St. Jean in [[Péronne, Somme|Péronne]], blown up by the Germans in March 1917]]
On the [[Eastern Front (World War I)|Eastern Front]] of [[World War I]], the [[Imperial Russian Army]] created a zone of destruction by using a massive scorched-earth strategy during their retreat from the [[Imperial German army|Imperial German Army]] in the summer and the autumn of 1915. The Russian troops, retreating along a front of more than 600 miles, destroyed anything that might be of use to their enemy, including crops, houses, railways and entire cities. They also forcibly removed huge numbers of people. In pushing the Russian troops back into Russia's interior, the German army gained a large area of territory from the [[Russian Empire]] that is now [[Poland]], [[Ukraine]], [[Belarus]], [[Latvia]] and [[Lithuania]].{{sfn|Hochschild|2011}}

In late 1916 the British army set fire to the [[Romania in World War I|Romanian]] oil fields in order to prevent the Central Powers from capturing them. 800 million litres of oil were burned.{{sfn|Dologa|2020}}

On the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]] on 24 February 1917, the [[German Army (German Empire)|German army]] made a strategic scorched-earth withdrawal ([[Operation Alberich]]) from the [[Battle of the Somme|Somme battlefield]] to the prepared fortifications of the [[Hindenburg Line]] to shorten the line that had to be occupied. Since a scorched-earth campaign requires a [[maneuver warfare|war of movement]], the [[Western Front of World War I|Western Front]] provided little opportunity for the policy as the war was mostly a [[stalemate]] and was fought mostly in the same concentrated area for its entire duration.