Is only 1 view of the War now permissible?

[davidfegga]

I think that as with most arguments, the truth is somewhere inbetween. I was brought up on the war poets, Lions, Donkeys etc. Then many years later I picked up Gary Sheffield's "Forgotten Victory" Reading this made me see the war in a completely different light, and after that I would have argued "revisionist" history and "learning curves".

However as my reading and knowledge increased I realised it was probably not as clear cut as all that. While I don't particularly hold the Lions and Donkeys theory, I'm not 100% convinced by learning curves and the like.

Much as I've read recent books about the Somme, I still can't see that it had any bearing on the final outcome of the war. Two years later the allies were "Backs to the wall".

If we're looking at the British army, yes there were lessons learned, but there were times when this was at too great a cost. Haig wasn't a brilliant general, but then again, none of the French or German ones were either. As the for the argument that the British army was the war winner in 1918, well,that denigrates the French (in my opinion it was the French counter attack at the second battle of the Marne, that turned the war, not Amiens), it was as good as the rest certainly, but against an army that had worn itself out earlier on in the year still couldn't break through.

Dave

[Ian Riley]

Hedley,

I have put my responses into your quote for clarity, I hope, and to save on typing! If you want me to move them down and out (but not away)I will happily do so tomorrow. Unfortunately Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 'something bigger that I used to use' is not allowing me use of colour or indentation, possibly as I am inside a quote.

My basic points are that the training apparatus of the British Army and in particular the BEF, developed markedly during WW1 in response to the de-skilling of the Army and its absorption of millions of civilians. It must have been the most sophisticated and extensive training operation of its own and previous times; maybe the Pharaohs ran stone-rolling courses on a similar scale to deliver the pyramids on schedule give or take 20 years. Education: no national curriculum to speak of except the three Rs. Higher Education and Technical Education: making up as they went along I should imagine, every separate lecturer, with Technical Education, such as it was, probably responsive to the needs of local industry and much 'in house' anyway. I don't agree that this was all the responsibility of the 'man or officer' in the trench. I am not sure that anything is gained by comparing modern training definitions with the massive organisation developed in France and Flanders and elsewhere between from late 1915 onwards.

The matter of 'Is only only one opinion allowed' gets a more direct treatment in another parallel post in this thread.

Ian

Some thoughts:

Most organisations succeed despite senior management, rather than because of them.

Response: Not so in education unless you are blessed with a selection of classroom teachers at the higher end of the talent normal distribution. The one thing that I have always agreed with successive Education Secretaries on is that leadership is vital. Well-led departments do well but flourish even more with the leadership of a good headteacher. Luckily, I have now left all that behind!

We know this from our own day-to-day experience working for a living. Was the British army in 1914-18 any different? I was always impressed with Paddy Griffiths book which traced several war-winning innovations, not to senior management, but to ordinary blokes in the front-line doing their job.

Response: I don't see William Bragg with his sound ranging laboratories , Solly Flood as Director of Training collating opinions and directing the writing of pamphlets such as SS 143 on Platoon Training and reorganising the infantry platoon to make best use of its weapons, Cuthbert Headlam rewriting SS135 at GHQ, Brigadier-General Reggie Kentish at Third Army School (opinionated as he was), Major Sir John Keane RFA at Second Army Trench Mortar School as 'blokes in the front line' and all the organisations which they ran had been initiated and approved by higher command where judgements would have been made in response to enthusiastic suggestions from nearer the shop floor. They hardly turned up at wherever, commandeered a barn and a few cooks and a few pioneers and set up a research establishment or school (well not too often, I suspect). My reading is that these were monitored at the highest level. I think in one ridiculous week at the Berthen Trench Mortar School, John Keane had Plumer and entourage, Haig and entourage followed by the Prime Minister and the Minister of Munitions through his door. He may even have had Winston Churchill through the door in the same week but Keane's handwriting is not too good. Can't have done too much for the Officers' Mess tea and biscuit account and this was all in addition to his very regular visitors from Second Army HQ and from GHQ. The Second Army MGRA (Major-General John Headlam) was a regular visitor as was Curly Birch (but less so), Artillery Advisor from GHQ, especially when they were testing and trying to improve the reliability of the medium trench mortars, their firing beds and the fuzes they were using and not just developing and training gunners in heavy and medium Trench Mortar tactics and drills. Paddy Griffith may have been right that there was a lot of innovation from the shop floor but this will often be in response to identified needs and thus the solution to problems rather than 'blue skies' thinking.

Captain Livens was a man out of a trench (well an RE Special Company and actually a proper engineer to boot) with good ideas; he persuaded somebody with the clout to provide funding and staffing; this would not have been his company commander. In fact it he numbered Hubert Gough amongst his patrons and supporters according to Wi*****ia . Would this count as encouragement and support from higher command?

Some training schools did arise perhaps more informally at divisional and brigade level but it would appear that many developed their own syllabi and training methods. In the one that I have examined most thoroughly, schools were set up in the 55th Division under the close supervision of the GOC and a lot of effort, top down, put into ensuring that the party line was taken although clearly junior officers would put their own ideas forward for the actual implementation of training. The initiative was taken in an initial directive from the GOC of XIV Corps (Lord Cavan) to 55th Division when it was reformed in January 1916 in stating that various schools were to be established and that all levels of command were to be prepared to receive instruction, a recognition of the de-skilling of the BEF through 1914 and 1915. Jeudwine (GOC of 55th Division) had already, in almost his last directive to his previous brigade command (49th Brigade?) had stated to his battalion commanders that every battalion was to be a 'school'. When he arrived at 55th Division he sent back to his previous Brigade Major for a copy of this very directive and preached from it in his new command

The 'learning organisation'. This term has been borrowed from business management theory/MBA courses and applied willy-nilly to the British army in WW1. Now there is a vast literature on what 'the learning organisation' means ie flat, decentralised structures, egalitarian rather than hierarchial, the systematic management of the symbols and language of change, visionary senior management, an ability to innovate drawing on the talents of a diverse workforce, tolerance of failure ... . I could go on, but you get the picture - a 'learning organisation' is all the things the British army was not. So however else it succeeded it was not because it was a 'learning organisation' at least not in the sense that the term is more widely used.

Response: I don't think we should be viewing the training of five armies in France and Flanders nearly a century ago through the lens of early 21st Century training perceptions so I probably agree that we should not be using modern terms unless they are hooked in some way to the context of the early 20th Century. I think that this is a paradigm shift easily effected. If not, the BEF trained and it had organized to do so; would 'training organizations' in the lexicon of the DEF's Human Resources Department.

In fact that might be clue to the Army's attitude to training/learning compared with modern organizations in that training, at least in the Army, comes under an Operational branch, G3 Branch - Responsible for operations, including staff duties, exercise planning, training, operational requirements, combat development & tactical doctrine although there is another G7 branch that deals with some aspects of training not too clearly described in Wiki: The training branch will organize and coordinate training activity conducted by a Headquarters and also supervise and support subordinate units. In the organizations described in this post, I would guess that training is regarded as an administrative matter.

I presume that the modern perception is the sort of strategic long-term training ethos that the financial institutions employ today? Perhaps we should see the efforts of the British Army in the UK and the BEF in France and Flanders as well as in the more far-flung theatres as an early iteration in the training process you describe. Certainly, the modern training organization you describe (I use the early 20th Century British spelling - see Field Service Regulations, essentially written by Haig) would not have suited the de-skilled Army of late 1915 and 1916. It simply did not have the time to develop in that way as its principal modus operandi. It did leave itself the option of initiating smaller scale, short term and locally resourced training operations on an ad hoc basis However, until the Training Directorate at GHQ got a grip in early 1917, it was certainly diverse though attracting the attention of senior Generals. The British Army and the BEF in particular needed immediate inter-operability and I would say that the success of 1918 was partially attributable to formation staffs (army, corps, division, brigade) and supporting arms being able to talk the same language with the same operational procedures in mind throughout ('tis never perfect though) such that IV Corps seems to have been able, in the 100 days, to launch a Corps attack in 16 hours from the Corps Commander (Harper) pointing out divisional objectives on the ground to his commanders down to troops crossing the Start Line with a fire plan in operation (rather faster, I recall, than 1 (BR) Corps could manage in Germany in the 1980s with Ptarmigan phones, Clansman radio, armoured personal carriers and helicopters)

Do we have examples of intolerance of failure on the training front? Some of Livens's stuff appears to have had a less than long term future but he seems to have been tolerated by innovative senior officers. Obviously there were sackings for operational failure and some scapegoating ranging from Smith Dorrien's conversation with Wully Robertson "Horace, yer for 'ome" to the Downing Street directed firing of Hubert Gough (probably correctly but possibly for the wrong battle)

By mid-1917, someone relatively far up the generalship food chain (probably Major-General Solly Flood at GHQ) certainly made BEF training hierarchical (sort of): the publication of 'SS 152 The Training in the British Armies in France' set out the centralisation of formal training at Corps and Army Level with outline Syllabi and targets for student numbers per battalion or brigade etc. Formal Divisional schools seem to have disappeared by mid-1917. I say the hierarchy was put in place 'sort of' but the same document, I think and if not in an associated memorandum, left divisions with the ability to set up short term schools to meet identified needs particular to that division that could not be catered for through the official formal system. In addition, there was the backing of the Senior Officers' School at Aldershot (initiated by GHQ almost exclusively for Captains and Majors on active service thought fit for battalion command far as I can see - some research is needed). Reggie Kentish (finding himself as Commandant at Aldershot, possibly a result of his outspoken written comments on the Somme campaign) bolted on 'Training for Trainers' or a similarly titled course. Is that in the modern panoply of training jargon? There was also a staff course at Cambridge to supplement and enhance staff training in France and Flanders - again research is needed here.

Strategic success is sometimes the product of superior planning, analysis and control. But as Rommel once remarked 'no plan survives the first contact with the enemy'. But often it is the result of chance, luck, serendipity. Napoleon knew this when he expressed a preference for Generals who were lucky.

Maybe we won in 1918, not because we were smarter, or had learned more. Perhaps we won because we had more of everything - and the Germans had had enough?

Response: If we had more of everything, was this not the result of logistic planning at a high military and possibly political level from the attention paid from 1915 onwards to the production of munitions and the appearance, for example, of whole ordnance factories devoted to the repair of boxes, not some enterprise set up in a back street stable in Bootle but as a result of an identification of need and planning of the salvage organization on the battlefield fit for purpose?

The staff work in August 1918 to get the Canadian Corps from the north to the Start Line of the Battle of Amiens in total secrecy (for start of the 100 days campaign kicked of by the Battle of Amiens)would not have come about without consistency of method across all formations; a product of effective training I think rather than the input of lucky generals. Actually, I don't believe in 'lucky generals' but more in those who can calculate risk and perhaps have the nouse (rhymes with 'Scouse' and means common sense or sufficient brain) to multiply two probabilities together or do whatever the appropriate calculation might be, probably heuristically rather than on paper.

Had the Germans not 'had enough' through the, admittedly costly, operations at the Somme, Arras, Messines, Passchendaele and in our ability to stop (eventually) the Spring offensive operations of 1918. Perhaps 'withstand' would have been a better word. Isn't the idea of a success in war that the enemy should be persuaded that they have 'had enough'. Certainly the Germans seemed to be getting more from the BEF at this time in terms of high tempo attacks than from other quarters. The German machine gunners did not appear to have 'had enough'; BEF casualties, if I recall correctly, were not light in the 100 days but spread out over 100 days rather than the headline figure of 60,000 on 1 July 1916. Afternote: I see Dave's comment about the French contribution, the second Battle of the Marne, and will read more.

Edited 26 April , 2013 by Ian Riley

[Chris_Baker]

I await with interest the list of historians who are saying that war was a "Good thing" or who are quoting "Carrington, Pollard, Junger, Grenfell, Crozier etc".

The "victories of 1918 do nothing to justify what happened in 1916 & 1917" is an intriguing point, DJC. How would they have come about had the battles and developments of the earlier years not taken place?

[Dust Jacket Collector]

I await with interest the list of historians who are saying that war was a "Good thing" or who are quoting "Carrington, Pollard, Junger, Grenfell, Crozier etc".

Good lord, this is worse than being back at school! I don't remember where I came across those views but I have come across those & similar over the many years I've been reading about the War. Maybe I should have taken notes! You'll just have to take my word for it. Maybe that's why I'm still a Corporal & you're a General!

[Chris_Baker]

DJC, you made a strong assertion at the beginning of this thread in that current 'revisionist' historians are quoting the authors you mentioned and suggesting that war was a "good thing". Not only that: these historians were so influential that a howl of rage would come from their direction should anyone say different. I do not know of any that do either of those things - but I only know and read some of them. I'd like to understand which historians and which works you mean, in order to illuminate your assertion.

[Bernard_Lewis]

DJC - this is a Forum with quite a number of experts on particular aspects of the Great War. You are quite free to post your views/opinions and long may you continue to do so. But I think its only natural that those who have a different view will request you to (hopefully politely) elaborate on your statements.

I'm currently researching for a book and am diligently keeping notes of what I have dug out and where I got it from. Others may disagree with my eventual interpretation of the material but at least they can, if they wish, use the provided reference to look at the original material themselves. We are then dealing with fact based conclusions rather than opinions. Though we may still disagree...

Bernard

[Iain]

Gender:Male Location:Scotland Interests:Gunner 40303 Murphy RGA.YPRES BELGIUM, 1st Argyle & Sutherland Highlanders

Iain - I shall happily oblige in sending some Jack Johnsons and whizz bangs in your direction. You declare your interests to be Gunner Murphy, Ypres, and the 1st Battalion of the 91st Regiment of foot.

You could perhaps do the regiment the courtesy of spelling their name correctly Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders - Consider yourself whizz banged.

Tom

Sorry Tom I was of course refering to that little known and secretive unit the Argyle Street and sutherland road Highlanders!!!!

[Guest]

I think Argyll, was originally Argyle.

DJC

" I shall now go into a very deep bunker to await the barrage!! "

" Good lord, this is worse than being back at school! I don't remember where I came across those views but I have come across those & similar over the many years I've been reading about the War. Maybe I should have taken notes! You'll just have to take my word for it. Maybe that's why I'm still a Corporal & you're a General! "

DJC, you can hardly complain about the barrage, if you call it down upon yourself?

Mike

[Ian Riley]

Bernard (First three paragraphs and the postscript) - the rest is more general woffle as I have time on my hands.

I agree with your point regarding the ability to back up statements with sources but as a discussion forum I think we have to allow some latitude for "I seem to remember", "I think I have seen" which may prompt some one else to say "Yes, it's all in Professor Deep-Thought's book on the role of paper clips in Divisional HQs" or for me, the poster, to say I'll try to find the original reference if anyone is interested. If I can't (and I have flagged up my uncertainty, people are free to ignore what I have said until I triumphantly repost four years later with chapter and verse. When in the Forum, I see myself as in a sort of informal post-seminar discussion (of the coffee-room or bar type rather than formal Q&A). I would not like to see posts becoming full of the complete academic apparatus of referencing. This is a discussion medium that quite often rises to much greater depths (contradictory irony intended) when some indication of sources is necessary or it needs to be flagged up that tentative opinions are being expressed.

However I agree with Chris, yourself and others that DJC has made pretty strong very strong statements as his principal thrust and should really be prepared to provide a few examples. I think there are instances on this forum of over-reaction to some Donkeyesque posts (don't ask me to search) but I do not see such in formal publication (articles and books). You can't write a decent book without padding it out with copious references and a fifty page bibliography.

I think we need to be careful at 1000 or 10000 posts not to over-egg demands for evidence for those starting out and who must not feel that they have to stay forever in a deep bunker. DJC might possibly not have read much in the way of academic texts but clearly has much to offer in the valid area of fiction. However, it is just that: fiction. I am of the opinion that personal memoirs can be selective in retrospection (how annoying is it to have a couple of perfectly typed 1930s memoirs saying stuff like, from the 1930s, "I am throwing away some old papers but thought I would type up the more interesting bits" so I get the 'standing on top of a bunker seven miles south watching the Messines Ridge go sky-high' but absolutely no idea of how often he checked his soldiers' feet and boots.

Some published personal memoirs must have been subject to editorial requests for 'can you put in some more mud and blood and less supper at Skindles?'(no evidence I am afraid but I think that's the way the publishing world has always worked; they sell books not fact. Posthumous memoirs (often in the form of Some letters from ...and usually edited by a grieving parent) may well have suffered in different emotive ways, I suspect. I have a nice printed copy of such a memoir which closes with the subject's last letter home in June 1915, the strongly worded final sentence of which (regarding key aspects of personal motivation) has a jingoistic tone entirely at odds with the rest of the material. I suspect parental adulteration; unfortunately, the family seems to have lost touch with the original letters. [Anyone in the Dumfries area or wider come across the letters of Bryden McKinnell of the Liverpool Scottish on a dusty shelf of a municipal library]

Not on the Forum but thread on Facebook on Haig's funeral (posted by Custer) was illustrated throughout by examples from named sources and news items and served to show the huge respect in which Haig was held at the time of his death until the prospect of the Second World War loomed and Lloyd George cashed in his literary chips and it became unfashionable and perhaps risk starting a bitter argument to talk well of the Chief. I hope that DJC has the LG Memoirs on his fiction shelf.

If I recall (probably Lloyd George and the Generals) LG sent a scouting party round the BEF interviewing generals (probably under some other pretext) to try to identify a replacement for Haig. They were not very well received and despite the reputation for incoherence there were few if any indications of dissatisfaction with the C-in-C in post (though they probably did not get to Cliff Stockwell commanding 166 Infantry Brigade, Buffalo Bill, who clearly thought that Haig should be as fluently outspoken and as sharp-tongued as himself - private source - you will all just have to take my word unless I speak to the owner). None of this is being shoved into anyone's face as revisionism. It is, as Chris said, the result of archival research often made possible through the Internet and at other times, as risk of asthma from dust, the result of personal trips to archives with the digital camera if allowed.

Ian

PS I entirely agree that if you are researching for academic submission or publication you need to reference your notes as you go along; in fact the reference is probably more important that the substance of a lengthy note if short of time. I learnt this when I did my first MA essay. The remaining six (for 12000 word essays) generated about 25000 word documents, referenced as I went along, for each essay but the time spent on those was considerably less stressful that searching for the references for the first essay three days before the submission date

Edited 26 April , 2013 by Ian Riley

[centurion]

And looking at it from the other end so to speak an attempt to gauge the mood of the BEF in early 1918 from an analysis of soldiers letters carried out by censoring officers showed that the rank and file as a whole considered that whilst things had been tough, were tough and would probably continue to be tough they had got the measure of the Germans and were prevailing and had confidence in their commanders including the C in C. Their view of politicians was less positive.

[hazelclark]

Hazel,

Good point about second guessing! Regarding Shakespeare...

Therein lies the rub: this allows the director to place her or his own interpretation on the play. I doubt that Shakespeare himself intended all of his work to be unambiguous, writing in Tudor times with an a monarch hardly shackled by Parliament and Stuarts trying to make their mark south of the border.

Ian

PS

Apologies for the partial quote; I will reinstate it all if you wish and perhaps I should tomorrow morning since I have just made reference to second guessing

I suspect that everything Shakespeare wrote was ambiguous but no one has the right to claim that their interpretation is the only possible one.

Anyway, we are likely to get kicked off here for being off topic.

hazel

[Dawley Jockey]

Come on GWF members without an open statement there would be no room for debate and the world would be a worst place without a decent debate ....Pro's & Con's, For's & Against's, Revisionists or Disillusionists, Wolves or any other team in the country

Dave

[Guest]

the world would be a worst place without a decent debate ....

Dave

Of course it would. I'm more than happy for DJC to alter my opinion, but you can't do that from the bunker. I came to the GWF more or less a " Lions led by Donkeys " type chap. Since being on the Forum, my opinion has been very much altered by " decent debate "

Cheers Mike

[Dawley Jockey]

my opinion has been very much altered by " decent debate "

Cheers Mike

Well Mike, I have not been on the forum for as long as some but I have studied the First War now for 40+ years and although not in the Lion's led by Donkey's camp (well at least not since leaving School) I am still somewhere in between and probably at my age will always be.

I am always shocked when reading about crass comments by Generals/Field Marshalls like Snow's statement about the 46th NMD at Gommecourt "They showed a Lack of Offensive spirit" he for one did not know what the conditions where like or what he was talking about, just trying to cover his own *ackside.

Dave

[Ian Riley]

Well Mike, I have not been on the forum for as long as some but I have studied the First War now for 40+ years and although not in the Lion's led by Donkey's camp (well at least not since leaving School) I am still somewhere in between and probably at my age will always be.

I am always shocked when reading about crass comments by Generals/Field Marshalls like Snow's statement about the 46th NMD at Gommecourt "They showed a Lack of Offensive spirit" he for one did not know what the conditions where like or what he was talking about, just trying to cover his own *ackside.

Dave

Dave,

There's always time; you are quite a bit younger than me but then I was struck by Smith-Dorrien's moral courage to stand and fight at Le Cateau in the face of orders to withdraw when I read John Terraine at 14/15 (my age then - not a date) and the principle of leaving the crucial decision to the man on the spot (which I now realise was built in to Field Service Regulations by Haig and whatever co-authors he was working with). I did a bit more reading and learnt about the pressure and difficulties of command (especially when communication was so poor to the front line in an attack) and came to the conclusion that the swathes of generals could not all be idiots. At about 20/25 I started picking up the odd training pamphlet that made it clear that tactics were not frozen and that lines of slowly moving infantry were not a constant feature but with a realisation (from practical experience in the TA) that you can't run 300 yards or so with 80 lbs of kit and be expected to fight at the other end. Tactical solutions were not that easy to come by.

Snow caught it later in the debacle of the German counter-attack following Cambrai though there might be an modest element of scapegoating there; I need to read more. I would guess that crass comments are easily outnumbered by sound judgements. Who has not worked for a boss (even the best of them) liable to make the odd ill-informed comment; someone will have worked for Mr or Ms Paragon-of-Virtue but very few and I've made a few crass ill-informed comments myself in retrospect, luckily in a department friendly enough for people to kindly and generally tactfully put me right.

Ian

[Hedley Malloch]

Mike,

If I may reply briefly:

Education management: I worked in education for over 41 years in four different countries. During that time I had two good managers. As for the rest, I and all my colleagues had to learn to work around them.

The role of senior management in strategy development. Your list contains at least two outsiders: Bragg, a Prof at Manchester University, and Cuthbert Headlam, a Clerk in the Houses of Parliament. It is not at all clear what role regular visits by senior brass add to the process of the development of artillery or machine gun tactics - or whatever. You could have mentioned that, Maxse, the man who was later recognised as one of the most effective trainers in the British army was actually initially sacked by Haig for ... incompetence. So much for the talent recognition capabilities of the senior management of the British army.

"Response: I don't think we should be viewing the training of five armies in France and Flanders nearly a century ago through the lens of early 21st Century training perceptions so I probably agree that we should not be using modern terms unless they are hooked in some way to the context of the early 20th Century. "

I absolutely agree. 'The Learning Organisation' is a post-1990 idea. So why use it? The British army was good at the top-down management of training packages. It always has been. But so was Henry Ford, and so are firms like MacDonalds, the French Post Office and Holiday Inn. But these are not learning organisations - not in the sense the term is understood. They are good at some forms of the codification and transmission of knowledge from the top to the bottom. This is a form of knowledge management - and not a particularly advanced form since no organisation can exist without it. The learing organisation is something else altogether.

[Dawley Jockey]

Ian, I completly agree with you in regard to Smith-Dorriens moral courage in standing to fight at Le Cateau but wasn't he castigated for it by French at the time?

Dave

[Stoppage Drill]

French said in his First Despatch,( I have The Graphic Special No 1 print (price sixpence net).)

"I cannot close the brief account of this glorious stand of the British troops without putting on record my deep appreciation of the valuable services rendered by General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. I say without hesitation that the saving of the left wing of the Army under my command on the morning of 26th August could never have been accomplished unless a commander of rare and unusual coolness, intrepidity, and determination had been present to personally conduct the operation."

It was Dooglearse who tut the knife in, when he finally had the chance and Wully who brought the news.

" 'Orace, you're for 'ome"

[Dawley Jockey]

French said in his First Despatch,( I have The Graphic Special No 1 print (price sixpence net).)

"I cannot close the brief account of this glorious stand of the British troops without putting on record my deep appreciation of the valuable services rendered by General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien. I say without hesitation that the saving of the left wing of the Army under my command on the morning of 26th August could never have been accomplished unless a commander of rare and unusual coolness, intrepidity, and determination had been present to personally conduct the operation."

It was Dooglearse who tut the knife in, when he finally had the chance and Wully who brought the news.

" 'Orace, you're for 'ome"

Thank you SD for correcting me, I knew that Smith-Dorrien had been 'stabbed in the back' after his stand at Le Cateau but had got myself mixed up to who it was.

Dave

[keithmroberts]

Stoppage

I think you will find that Sir John French soon changed his tune. French relieved Smith-Dorrien of his command on 6 May 1915, He remained Commander in Chief of the BEF until the end of that year when he was in turn replaced by Haig. Robertson was at the time serving in France, and was indeed the messenger.

Keith

[nigelcave]

Haig could not have sacked SD, as has already been pointed out above: French was CinC at the time. Whilst he might have been full of praise in his despatches, he was less than enthusiastic in his later writing re the decision to stand at Le Cateau. Personally I do not see how SD had much choice - but that's another issue!

[salesie]

I wasn't going to comment on this topic until I saw the posts about "Luck" and "Britain had more of everything than Germany and the German people had had enough" (implying that Britain was lucky). You make your own luck in this world and merely writing off things as "lucky" or "unlucky" is naive at best and highly fatuous at worst - putting things down to luck only serves to diminish true achievement and/or excuse failure.

Britain outperformed Germany in all aspects of total-war (once it had woken up to the realities of it in 1915). Luck played no part and, as an example, here's a brief synopsis of British achievement and German failure in one, but vital, aspect of total-war:

The Hindenburg programme, took over from Falkenheyn's "regime" and totally militarised the socio-economic management of Germany in 1916, and was forced to print money to fund its policies (Germany being isolated from the money markets) - which, of course, led to even greater problems such as the hyper-inflation of the 1920s.

The withdrawal to the Hindenburg line is one example of the Hindenburg programme's attempts to manage the economy - this shortening of the line and going on the defensive in the west was not just a military move, it released men not just for the eastern front but also for the home front industries that were "starved" of labour. And, it wasn't just German men being transported from the front, there were also many men forced to leave the occupied territories to work in German industry and agriculture - Belgians etc. taken against their will and "exported" to Germany as forced labour (a pre-cursor for the next war).

In a way, the importation of labour into Germany i.e. soldiers returned from the front as well as forced labour from the occupied territories, had a certain logic to it: 1) Shorten the line by retiring to the Hindenburg line and go on the defensive in the west to release some troops for home service (as well as for the east). 2) Germany was a net importer of labour pre-war, and the acute labour crisis was caused by the allied blockade so why not "import" again, by force, from the external countries Germany did have access to (Belgium, France etc.} 3) Forced labour will alleviate many of the problems coming from internal German labour markets created by the Hindenburg Program's own policies (i.e. strikes etc.). (The forced labour move, could also explain why the failed German peace feelers put out in late 1916 contained an insistence that Germany retain, by annexation, the captured territories of Belgian and northern France?)

But this "logic" was deeply flawed: The real problem for both Hindenburg's and Falkenhayn's regimes was the acute labour shortage plus the raw materials famine; in other words, the effects of the blockade were two-fold, and both were inseparably linked, making the problem akin to having two diseases where the medicine to cure one disease made the other much worse i.e. transporting huge numbers of men to cure the labour crisis entailed using raw materials that industry could ill afford to lose, and the initial increase in war-material production going out was actually counter productive to the extra labour coming in, and visa-versa.

Germany was in strategic check, and the only way out was to break the blockade - and this strategic necessity applied equally to both Hindenburg's and Falkenhayn's policies; without breaking the blockade neither approach could possibly work, without breaking the blockade Germany was not in control of its own war economy at the strategic level, and thus any tactical/operational attempts to remedy the situation were mere window dressing.

Indeed, Wilhelm Groener, the General appointed by Germany's "new-order" in 1916 to head the Hindenburg Programme (also Ludendorff's successor in 1918), and sacked, as a scapegoat, in 1917 when the programme was clearly failing, said after the war that the German General Staff never truly understood the strategic and political realities of the war, never really took the consequences of failing to achieve their strategic objectives in battle seriously.

It seems to me that Wilhelm Groener's words were extremely insightful i.e. Britain had used, to great success, the blockade strategy in the Napoleonic wars, so was Germany so convinced in the omnipotence of its army in 1914-18 that it ignored such a vital strategic lesson of history, ignored an almost identical strategic move by Britain which actually made it possible for Prussia, an ally of Britain at the time, to free itself from Napoleon's grip? It seems that the quick-war fantasy, coupled with a grossly inflated belief in its own military prowess, was so ingrained within the German psyche that even when its army (its only truly strategic weapon) failed to win a quick war in 1914, it still ignored an important historical lesson stemming from Prussia's own rise to power i.e. Britain's ability to successfully blockade the continent of Europe.

It has seemed to me for quite some time now that the true "donkeys" of WW1 were the German High Command (the de-facto rulers of Germany); they couldn't see further than military solutions to geo-political/socio-economic problems, problems mainly of their own making and stemming from pre-war delusions of grandeur.

I could go on about how Britain out-performed Germany in all aspects of total-war but I won't, all I'll say is - Lucky? My A*se!

Cheers-salesie.

[Stoppage Drill]

Stoppage

I think you will find that Sir John French soon changed his tune. French relieved Smith-Dorrien of his command on 6 May 1915, He remained Commander in Chief of the BEF until the end of that year when he was in turn replaced by Haig. Robertson was at the time serving in France, and was indeed the messenger.

Keith

Dawley jockey inferred French "castigated SD at the time." Clearly that was not so, at least publicly. We have French's own words for it.

Although Haig was not positioned to remove SD, he manipulated matters, as he subsequently manipulated French's dismissal.

What everybody wrote later has to be seen as reputation salvaging.

[IRC Kevin]

My basic points are that the training apparatus of the British Army and in particular the BEF, developed markedly during WW1 in response to the de-skilling of the Army and its absorption of millions of civilians. It must have been the most sophisticated and extensive training operation of its own and previous times; maybe the Pharaohs ran stone-rolling courses on a similar scale to deliver the pyramids on schedule give or take 20 years.

Ian

Totally agree with Ian's point about the development of training and tactics as the War progressed. The way that infantry tactics evolved within 164th Brigade (part of 55th Division) has been a real eye-opener for me and by 1918, the methods used were sophisticated and not very different from those I was taught in the 1970's. Most of the surviving evidence is fragmentary and there's no doubt that so much of interest has been lost, but it's clear that by early 1917, both Brigade and Divisional commanders operated the practice of interviewing officers and ordinary soldiers about attacks and raids they'd participated in, with a view to improving planning for future operations. For example, Jeudwine spent the 7th May 1918 interviewing 'other ranks' about an attack on the Givenchy Craters that had taken place on the 26th April. It's also clear that ordinary soldiers in this Brigade by late 1917, were fully briefed for an attack to 2-3 levels above their own rank; had studied models and diagrams of the ground; rehearsed repeatedly over similar ground with spitlock trenches and were familiar with infantry weapons outside their own speciality, for example rifle and bayonet men were taught to use Lewis guns and rifle grenades. The men were also taught how to use German weapons, such as trench mortars and Maxim guns, with a view to using these against their former owners. A very different army to that of 1915. These changes didn't just happen overnight, and the gradual evolution can be seen in the unit I've been researching (1/4th King's Own) from August 1915 onwards, when they were part of 51st Division. These changes were 'command led', with the training structures being put into place at Brigade and Divisional level, though many of the lessons taught had been passed up the chain of command from a much lower level.

[Steven Broomfield]

Out of interest, kevin, the same type of questionnaire exists in other divisional records - I've seen them in the 56th Division's files for certain.