Allan Mallinson - Too Important for the Generals: Losing and Winning the First World War

LIGHT DRAGOONS: THE MAKING OF A REGIMENT

THE MAKING OF THE BRITISH ARMY

1914: FIGHT THE GOOD FIGHT BRITAIN, THE ARMY AND THE COMING OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

A CLOSE RUN THING

THE NIZAMS DAUGHTERS

A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR

A CALL TO ARMS

THE SABRES EDGE

RUMOURS OF WAR

AN ACT OF COURAGE

COMPANY OF SPEARS

MAN OF WAR

WARRIOR

ON HIS MAJESTYS SERVICE

WORDS OF COMMAND

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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press

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Copyright Allan Mallinson 2016
Cover photograph: Chronicle/ Alamy Stock Photo
Cover design: Stephen Mulcahey/TW

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Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781409011002

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9780593058190 (tpb)

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La guerre! Cest une chose trop grave pour la confier des militaires.

(War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men,
usually rendered as
War is too important to be left to the generals.)

Georges Clemenceau,
Prime Minister of France November 1917 to January 1920,
quoted in Georges Suarez, Soixante annes dhistoire franaise (1932)

At no time, so far as I know, did it ever cross our minds that we could possibly not win the war, and we never knew how near we came to not winning it.

Guy Chapman MC,
Royal Fusiliers 191420,
in Vain Glory: A Miscellany of the Great War 19141918 (1937)

The Eastern Front

The Western Front

The Dardanelles

Battle fronts in mid-1916

For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection.

Pericles, Funeral oration at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, 430 BC

In July 2013, following the lead set by the government, the British army issued instructions laying out its approach to the First World War centenary commemorations Operation Reflect. Its aim was (and remains, until 11 November 2018) to mark the centenary of the First World War in an appropriate manner in order to commemorate the sacrifice of our forebears, learn enduring lessons, and educate ourselves and others.

This was something of a departure for the army. Hitherto it had steered clear of the First World War, perhaps because four years of stalemate seemed irrelevant to modern conflict. On the face of it, the campaigns of Marlborough and Wellington and the battles of the Second World War looked more likely to yield lessons in strategy and the operational art, while counter-insurgency campaigns such as those in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus were the obvious places to seek inspiration in the war on terror.

The army launched Operation Reflect with a conference in London in July 2014, followed in September by a weeks staff ride in France and Belgium in which 150 hand-picked British and French captains and majors, led by the general officer commanding the 3rd (UK) Division and attended by the chief of the general staff, his French opposite number and several German officers, studied the course of the war on the Western Front on the ground over which it had been fought. It was all very high-powered, with just about every name in the book of British military historians taking part in one event or the other.

The captains and majors, fresh from Afghanistan, and in many cases with previous service in Iraq, were soon in awe of the sheer size of the problem that the British army had faced in the Great War, expanding as it had from a relatively small expeditionary force in August 1914 to some two million by 1918, 90 per cent of whom had never been in uniform before.

The London conference, the staff ride and the exploitation conference at Sandhurst which followed two months later were not designed to answer the questions about British generalship posed by entertainments such as Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder Goes Forth. Even so, it seemed to me that professional sympathy for the magnitude of the generals task, with much talk about the learning curve (in truth, a flat line for far too long), made for a sort of fatalism among the officers taking part which was not unlike that prevailing in the army of 191618 something along the lines of: Although things should never have got to this pass, the war is where it is and can only be won by destroying the German army on the Western Front, and in the process, come what may, huge numbers of men are going to be killed.

Indeed, this seems to be the growing consensus among historians. In one of the most recent and purportedly authoritative studies of modern warfare, Professor David Woodward of Marshall University, West Virginia, writes baldly of a cruel truth that costly frontal offensives were the only way to win the war.

I profoundly disagree.

As I have recently explained, personal and institutional failures both political and military marked Britains preparations for the war, and its early conduct. There were two literally vital elements missing: strategy and generalship. In fact, personal and institutional failures marked the next four years just as much, the want of strategy and generalship exacting a terrible tactical price not least in casualties that still taints the ultimate allied victory of November 1918.

Whether and when Clemenceau actually said that war is too important to be left to the generals is unimportant; it is what he thought, and the words have force. While aphorisms can be trite, at the time of their coining they have not of course been dulled by use. One of the problems in writing about the First World War, a conflict unsurpassed in the variety and volume of its literature, is language. Of some words and phrases there is now no common understanding: used often and indiscriminately, they no longer have meaning. Yet this is not to deny their original aptness. Clarify the language strategy, attrition, knocking away the props and so on as well as the context, and the truth is once again revealed. In March 1915, Henry James, sick beyond cure that he had lived to see the war, gave an interview to the New York Times. One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply ones words as to endure ones thoughts, James told the young journalist sent to interview him in London, Preston Lockwood, a Rhodes Scholar who would later serve with the French and then the US armies on the Western Front: The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires... and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness.