One can argue, in addition, that the debate has been conducted on two distinct levels. The more audible, and often much more superficial and emotional, debate has, over the years, been waged in widely read popular histories and memoirs and through the media, especially newspapers and television. The other, less emotional and – at times – seemingly almost private debate has been carried on largely by professional soldiers and academic historians. This second level of debate was initially conducted in the 1920s in the flood of unit histories published following the Armistice. There was a further period of discussion and analysis, virtually behind closed doors, in the 1930s and 1940s, when former commanders and staff officers of the BEF were invited to comment on draft chapters of the British official history. Finally, since the late 1960s, with the availability of major collections of private papers in various institutions and the declassification of an enormous quantity of official material in The National Archives, scholars have at last been able to move the debate onto more factually solid, dispassionate and objective ground – notwithstanding the fact that the media and general public are still largely bogged down in no-man’s-land amid the ‘muck and bullets’.

Unit Histories

The years immediately after the First World War saw the publication, in Britain and the Dominions, of numerous divisional, regimental and battalion histories. Most sought only to present a straightforward record of the deeds and leading personalities of the formation in question and to convey something of the conditions under which its officers and men fought. They therefore tend to be high in factual and narrative content – many being based substantially on the appropriate unit war diaries – and correspondingly low on analysis of operational methods or command and control factors. However, the majority avoid triumphalism and a fair proportion retain a degree of objectivity that, as Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman comment, has stood the test of time.² For example, the history of the 34th Division (published in 1921) contains a note by Major-General C.L. Nicholson – who commanded the formation from 25 July 1916 until the Armistice – on the reasons for the division’s failure to take Intermediate Trench, to the east of High Wood, in August 1916. He identifies these as being that both the objective and the division’s front line were under enfilade observation from High Wood; that the German artillery could therefore bring down enfilade fire on both trenches; and ‘last, but not least, the attacks, after that of the 3rd/4th August (owing to circumstances beyond divisional control) were carried out as isolated operations, and never as part of an attack on a wide front’.³ The history of the 56th (London) Division, which also appeared in 1921, similarly reproduces a report, written in late 1916 by Lieutenant-Colonel A.D. Bayliffe – the commanding officer of the 1/12th London Regiment (Rangers) – on ‘Lessons to be Deducted [sic] from the Operations on the Somme’. With the experience of the battle fresh in his mind, Bayliffe concluded that objectives should be clear and include well-defined landmarks; that attacks should always be delivered with sufficient weight – and never less than four waves – even against apparently inferior defences; that brigade headquarters should be sited as far forward as possible; that to maintain the efficiency of units, a larger ratio of experienced officers than was customary should be kept out of an attack, since the average replacement officer was ‘quite useless’ on his first appearance in a modern battle; that assault troops should stick as closely as possible to the creeping barrage; that there was a need for closer liaison between infantry and the heavy artillery; and that improvements must be wrought in the use of Stokes mortars and in tank-infantry co-operation. Tanks, he asserted, should have officers in charge ‘who have more experience and knowledge of the methods of infantry and artillery in war’.⁴

In the history of the 5th Division (another 1921 publication), the formation’s problems in the July fighting at Longueval are squarely attributed to Fourth Army’s tendency at that time to mount piecemeal attacks on a narrow front, enabling the Germans to concentrate most of their artillery fire on relatively small sectors. The authors point out that, on 5 and 25 September 1916, when the division took part in co-ordinated attacks on a broader front, it was much more successful. ‘We hoped’, they wrote, ‘that the lessons of these operations had been learnt’.⁵ The 25th Division’s history, which was being written even before the war ended, judged that success in the attack on Stuff and Regina Trenches on 21 October 1916 was due to ‘careful and thorough preparation’, excellent artillery support and ‘the increased confidence with which the troops advanced close up under the artillery barrage’.⁶ Cyril Falls, in his history of the 36th (Ulster) Division – published in 1922 – states that, on the Somme, the use of artillery ‘had not yet reached anything approaching the science of the following year … It was still, however, to cost thousands of lives before the factories could produce sufficient of the latter [i.e. artillery and ammunition], or the higher commands reach the ratio between infantry force and mechanical aids necessary to the prosecution of a given operation’. Falls also perceived, however, that other ‘external’ factors had caused difficulties. No explanations, he declared, ‘that can be found stand without ample tribute to the fighting qualities of the German soldier’.⁷ These remarks, nevertheless, indicate that Falls (later one of the official historians) was in little doubt that a learning process had clearly begun on the Somme. The author of the history of the 5th Australian Division shared this view: ‘The Somme Battle’, he remarked, ‘eventually had tactical results of the most far-reaching character – though they were not fully seen until over a year later …’.⁸

Disenchantment

It must be conceded that, despite the large number of veterans, unit histories had a relatively restricted readership and influence and, from the mid-1920s onwards, they were engulfed by a tide of works which stressed the negative aspects of the war and of the Somme and Passchendaele in particular. Professor Brian Bond has already presented a splendid survey of the so-called ‘anti-war’ literature of the late 1920s and 1930s in his book The Unquiet Western Front (2002).⁹ However, a few key points about such works should perhaps be re-emphasised here. Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929), Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man (1928) and Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), together with other works in this period, all stressed the appalling conditions faced by the front-line soldier and criticised commanders for their bloody-mindedness and remoteness from such conditions. Bond is anxious to highlight the paradox that some of those who appeared to be the angriest anti-war writers were not pacifists or conscientious objectors but brave, efficient and even zealous officers ‘who voluntarily returned to the front after recovering from wounds or illness’.¹⁰ Even so, at a time when the euphoria of victory and the headiness of the Jazz Age had largely worn off and the world was suffering from economic depression and the emergence of dictatorships, such works struck a major chord with a public which was now highly receptive to anti-war messages and strongly disinclined to see war in any kind of positive light. Indeed, the receptiveness of the British public to these eminently readable works, combined with the war poetry of Sassoon, Owen and others to encourage a mindset that now regarded the Great War with revulsion, and laid a firm foundation for the ‘mud and blood’ view of the Western Front. Again Brian Bond sounds a note of caution, venturing to suggest that the ‘anti-war’ writers have exerted more influence since the 1960s than they actually did in the 1930s. He contends that Owen’s poetry was comparatively little known in 1930, whereas Rupert Brooke was still enormously popular. Today, he adds, Owen is widely accepted as the ‘voice’ of the Western Front while Brooke’s poetry is out of fashion.¹¹

Even in the late 1920s and early 1930s, some former officers published accounts which offered a different, much less negative, view of the Western Front in general and the Somme in particular. In A Subaltern’s War, written just after the conflict but not published until 1929, Charles Carrington (who served on the Somme in the 1/5th Royal Warwicks and published his book under the pseudonym of Charles Edmonds) confidently pronounced that the Somme battle raised the morale of the BEF in France and Flanders:

Although we did not win a decisive victory, there was what matters most in war, a definite and growing sense of superiority over the enemy, man to man. The attacks in mid-July were more successful and better managed than those of July 1st. In August and September things went better still. When the tanks made their surprising appearance on September 15th, rejoicing knew no bounds; but the Germans were not yet badly beaten enough nor our skill great enough for us to make the best of our winnings …

Perhaps more interesting, and to the point, are Charles Carrington’s remarks, written many years later, in the Preface to the 1984 edition of his book. He declared:

It can only have been a very stupid, insensitive young man who did not concentrate his mind, sometimes during the long months of military training, on blood and wounds. We were pretty well prepared for the horrors of war by the time we came to face them, and though, for my part, I have never been able to work the Somme out of my mental system, nothing happened to me there which could be described as ‘disenchantment’ or ‘disillusion’. It was what I had bargained for.

He went on to say:

Why and how did the survivors of the Somme and Passchendaele persist in their solidarity, defeat the German onslaught in the spring of 1918 and break the Hindenburg Line in the final advance of hard and bloody fighting? They could not have reached their goal if they had at all resembled the woebegone weaklings with no confidence in their leaders who were described in the books produced by the school of ‘disillusion’.¹²

Official Histories

There were other sub-groups of published sources in the late 1920s and 1930s which, each in their own way, helped to shape our current collective view of the Somme. One of these sub-groups consists of the official histories of the Somme campaign. The first to appear, in 1929, was Volume III of the Australian official history – The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916 – by C.E.W. Bean. This is a monumental work, with well over 900 pages of main text. In all the volumes written by Bean on the AIF, his principal purpose was to record for posterity, and to extol, the fighting qualities and the independent spirit of the Australian soldier, leading him to produce highly detailed narratives of operations with much emphasis on the deeds of individual units, officers and men. As Peter Pedersen notes in his Introduction to the 1982 edition of Bean’s Somme volume, I Anzac Corps delivered nineteen attacks at Pozières and Mouquet Farm between 23 July and 5 September 1916, at a cost of 23,000 casualties. At home in Australia, Pedersen writes, ‘these losses were seized upon by both sides of the conscription debate, fuelling a controversy whose effects have been felt ever since. The strain affected the attitude of the Australian soldier towards the war and many believed that they had been uselessly sacrificed’.¹³ As might be expected, Bean, in 1929, was highly critical of the conduct of the operations at Pozières and Mouquet Farm, feeling that the strength and vitality of the Australian divisions had been largely wasted there and suggesting that, if the Australians had instead been kept fresh for the 15 September attack at Flers-Courcelette, the results would almost certainly have been ‘infinitely greater’.¹⁴

Bean roundly condemned the tendency of Gough’s Reserve (or Fifth) Army to order successive piecemeal and isolated attacks on a narrow sector, thereby attracting the concentrated weight of hostile artillery fire. In a 1944 letter to John Gellibrand – who had commanded the 6th Australian Brigade on the Somme – Bean described the operations of August–September 1916 as ‘springing from an impossible tactical conception – that of forcing a salient gradually behind an enemy salient on a strongly fortified front … giving a bang with the hammer every day or two to drive the wedge in another fraction of an inch’.¹⁵ Referring to Gough in the 1929 volume, Bean judged that the ‘Australian troops, who learned to hate the reiteration of attacks on narrow fronts, not unfairly attributed to him the responsibility, and their aversion to serving under him, which became pronounced the following year, dated from this time’. While acknowledging that Haig, in accordance with Field Service Regulations (FSR), was more often than not inclined to leave the detailed conduct of operations to the ‘man on the spot’ – in this case Gough – Bean also attributed blame to Haig as the overall ‘author’ of the piecemeal tactics which prevailed between 23 July and 15 September, the Commander-in-Chief having informed Gough and Rawlinson (the two army commanders concerned) on the former date that the battle was to be continued with the object of wearing down the enemy by a series of local assaults until conditions favoured a resumption of the wider offensive.¹⁶

Nor was Bean prepared to swallow the argument – advanced by some of Haig’s apologists – that the Somme offensive had primarily been intended to wear down, rather than break through, the enemy. This idea had been fostered, to some extent, by Haig’s Despatch of 23 December 1916 in which he called the Somme ‘The Opening of the Wearing Out Battle’, and by his Final Despatch in 1919, when Haig retrospectively claimed that the victory of 1918 had been made possible by the attritional battles of 1916–1917 and that the fighting on the Western Front had been ‘one great and continuous engagement’.¹⁷ Bean maintained, however, that ‘Haig looked back upon this battle with different eyes from those with which he had planned it’. Bean admitted it was true that, before the offensive began, Haig had foreseen that his first effort to achieve a breakthrough might not be successful, ‘in which case he might attempt to wear down the enemy to a breaking point and then again endeavour to create the break … The truth appears to be that, although Haig did believe attrition to be necessary, it was, in this battle, merely a subsidiary aim …’ Haig’s choice of senior subordinates was ‘far from perfect’ in Bean’s opinion and the ‘internal working of the British offensive was from first to last marked by a lack of co-ordination of which the fighting at Mouquet Farm was merely a single instance’.¹⁸ According to Bean, Haig’s leadership in 1916 was deficient in ‘quick imagination and sure judgement of subordinates’. Yet Bean was happy to praise Haig’s capacity to learn from his mistakes and to show ‘the moral courage to change his attitude when the need became clear to him’. It was possible, Bean predicted (rightly as it turned out) that history

will assign him a greater share than is yet recognised in the responsibility for the victories with which the war ended. It is difficult to conceive any factor more ominous to the Germans than the continued presence among their opponents of this resolute, unwavering soldier, deeply skilled in technique, but prevailing by qualities of character more than of intellect; cold and inarticulate, but with the strength to keep the British Government at arm’s length; punctiliously loyal to it, to his subordinates, and to his Allies.¹⁹

In these passages Bean pinpoints both the best and the worst of Haig, although his overall summary of the Somme contains only a very limited and inadequate analysis of the tactical and organisational improvements in the BEF that the 1916 offensive generated.²⁰

The two volumes of the British official history which covered the Somme – written by Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds and Captain Wilfrid Miles – appeared respectively in 1932 and 1938. Edmonds and Miles were much less overtly critical of the high command of the BEF than Bean, although Haig, GHQ and the army commanders do not totally escape censure. In a fine essay on Edmonds, David French suggests that loyalty to friends and contemporaries may partly explain why Edmonds tends to gloss over the shortcomings of the high command, Edmonds having served at GHQ during the war as one of Haig’s Deputy Engineers-in-Chief. He may thus have felt it necessary to close ranks with his old comrades in the face of civilian criticism at a time, in the 1930s, when large numbers of polemical and self-justifying books were being written by former participants and politicians, especially Lloyd George.²¹ In general, then, Edmonds and Miles emphasise ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’ factors when discussing the setbacks and losses suffered by the BEF in 1916. Attrition was inevitable, writes Miles, given the continuous nature of the Western Front, which made manoeuvre impossible, and also the ‘character and temper of the German resistance’.²² Other problems stemmed from the pre-war neglect of the army; the massive expansion of the BEF in 1915–1916, which meant that much had to be improvised and learnt in the field while fighting a skilled and implacable enemy; the inherent difficulties arising from the advent of new technologies (such as the tank); the loss of many experienced instructors and staff officers in battle in 1914–1915; political interference from Whitehall and Paris; and Britain’s junior position in the alliance in 1916, relative to the French – a fact which considerably restricted the BEF’s strategic choices and freedom of action.²³

It is true that, in his Preface to the second Somme volume, Edmonds – after mentioning the BEF’s shortages of heavy artillery and the inadequate training of the troops – does list some ‘internal’ factors, namely ‘the unevenness in the fighting value of the different divisions … faulty tactics, as exemplified by the terribly heavy losses … on the first day of the assault; and … the failure of the commanders of the higher formations to consult, or accept the views when offered of the forward leaders …’.²⁴ The differences and disagreements between Haig and Rawlinson before the 1 July, 14 July and 15 September attacks are also discussed although such disputes are never strongly underlined. The main text contains much detailed operational narrative but, unlike Bean’s history, has comparatively few comments upon individuals. As an example of how Edmonds and Miles gloss over uncomfortable facts, we now know that, on 24 August 1916, Haig – frustrated by the repeated failures of Fourth Army’s narrow-front and insufficiently supported attacks on Guillemont – left Rawlinson in no doubt of his displeasure, sending him what Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have called a ‘boys’-own-guide on how to command an army’. The only oblique reference to this reprimand in the official history reads:

Conferring with his corps commanders on the morning of the 25th August, General Rawlinson read a GHQ letter, received the previous evening, which emphasised the extreme importance of securing Ginchy, Guillemont and Falfemont Farm without delay. The Commander-in-Chief considered the task well within the power of the troops and artillery available, provided that the higher commanders, bearing in mind the standards of training which existed among the troops and subordinate leaders, gave their personal attention to the details of preparation.²⁵

Drafts of each chapter of the official history were sent before publication to hundreds of officers who had participated in the events being discussed, their comments being invited. The resulting correspondence can today be examined in the CAB 45 files at The National Archives. These files are full of interesting views – both critical and adulatory – from the individuals involved about their brother officers or the reasons why particular actions were successful or unsuccessful. One recognises that much of this was anecdotal gossip and that some of the more severe criticisms may perhaps have been unconsciously coloured by the ‘anti-war’ literature then in vogue, but, while Edmonds undoubtedly used the reminiscences and comments of surviving officers to augment and cross-check the written record, he did not do so with an uncritical eye, recognising that at least some of those who replied to him might be taking advantage of the opportunity to present their own decisions and actions in the best possible light. Whatever its shortcomings, the CAB 45 correspondence, if judiciously approached, still provides meaty pickings for modern historians.

As for the tactical and organisational lessons of the Somme, Miles does note, in the concluding chapter of the second 1916 volume, the growing effectiveness of the creeping barrage; the increasing importance to the artillery of flash-spotting, sound-ranging and the work of the Field Survey units of the Royal Engineers; and the creation of ‘army’ field artillery brigades to provide a more flexible field artillery reserve. In contrast, he somewhat underplays the potential of the tank, Lewis guns, Stokes mortars and overhead machine-gun barrages, and, characteristically, the crucial appointment of Brigadier-General Arthur Solly-Flood as head of a Training Directorate at GHQ is dealt with in only a footnote.²⁶ Certainly Miles presents the New Army divisions of 1916 in an unfavourable light when compared with the old professional BEF (see Chapter 3). One should also note that, whereas Bean’s works were enormously influential in shaping Australian views of the war, the British official histories – which Edmonds hoped would be ‘suitable for general readers and for students at military schools’ – failed to reach a wider public. Indeed, as David French reminds us, their appeal was initially so limited that the publishers, Macmillan, had to be subsidised so that they could make a profit from printing them.²⁷

Critics and Commentators

A military commentator who had a much greater immediate impact – and a more lasting one – was Basil Liddell Hart, under whom I worked as an archivist and research assistant in 1962 and 1963. Liddell Hart’s books Reputations (1928), The Real War (1930) and A History of the World War (1934) did a great deal to set the tone and content of the debate on the Great War until, and beyond, his death in 1970. As a young officer in the 9th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, he was present at Fricourt on the Somme on 1 July 1916 and also saw action at Mametz Wood, where he was badly gassed with phosgene. He later collapsed, was sent home to England and was mainly involved thereafter in training men in minor tactics. Following the Armistice he served under Ivor Maxse in Northern Command, helping to rewrite the Infantry Training Manual, but was compelled to leave the army, on health grounds, in 1924. During the First World War itself, Liddell Hart’s attitude to the generals had largely been one of near-idolatry. He wrote, after the Somme battle, that ‘the British GHQ … under the Haig régime comprise the most brilliant collection of brains in the world’ and he thought that never had ‘any military operation been so wonderfully and minutely organised or so brilliantly conducted as this offensive’. In his judgement at the time, Haig had created ‘the finest fighting machine the world has ever known’, while Archie Montgomery, the MGGS of Fourth Army, was one of ‘the brilliant Chiefs of Staff of the two armies on the Somme’.²⁸ He was similarly proud of having been present at the introduction of the creeping barrage – ‘This wonderful wall of bursting shells’ – in 1916.²⁹ As Liddell Hart himself confessed when jotting down some random thoughts in 1936: ‘I intensely admired many of my superiors, and even hero-worshipped a number’.³⁰

It was on being obliged to leave the profession he cherished that Liddell Hart’s views began to undergo an almost complete transformation. ‘I loved the Army all the years I was in it, and my perception of its faults had developed subsequently to leaving’, he recalled.³¹ Influenced by J.F.C. Fuller, he became a champion of mechanisation in the army and particularly of tanks, which he saw as a war-winning weapon that would help save soldiers’ lives. As Military Correspondent, first of the Daily Telegraph and then, for several years from 1935, of The Times, he was frustrated and irritated by those senior officers in the army whom he regarded as obstinately conservative in their attitude to mechanisation and, since a fair proportion of such officers had held important appointments in the First World War, Liddell Hart became, by extension, an increasingly acerbic critic of British generalship between 1914 and 1918. The truth is that he established his own reputation as a military commentator at least partly by criticising Haig and other First World War commanders and, to preserve that reputation, he had to maintain such a stance, thus painting himself intellectually into a corner from which there was no escape.

His opinions on Haig in Reputations were still comparatively mild and while he wrote of Haig’s serious errors in conducting offensives, he also stated that there had hardly been a finer defensive general. Haig emerges from this book as a skilful and hard-working soldier who unfortunately proved unwilling or unable to adapt to new technology, a stereotype which Haig’s detractors have followed enthusiastically, if misguidedly, ever since.³² The Real War and A History of the World War presented an even more negative picture of the performance of the generals on the Western Front, though, as Dan Todman and Gary Sheffield have observed, The Real War was actually less caustic in its criticisms of the British high command than later recycling of Liddell Hart’s works would lead us to believe.³³ Brian Bond suggests that the main thrust of Liddell Hart’s arguments is that Britain – thanks to Henry Wilson’s machinations as Director of Military Operations between 1910 and 1914 – made a fundamental and tragic mistake in committing the BEF to a mass continental war of attrition and that this original sin was compounded, from December 1915, by an incompetent, unimaginative and stubborn Commander-in-Chief (Haig), backed by an ‘excessively loyal and single-minded’ Chief of the Imperial General Staff (Sir William Robertson).³⁴

The above-mentioned works of Liddell Hart, however, have several glaring weaknesses. Liddell Hart makes no real attempt to convey the experiences of, or the conditions faced by, junior officers and other ranks, and he is never greatly concerned with the wider factors underlying military operations – such as manpower issues, munitions supply and logistics, or morale. The naval element of the war is only covered briefly and superficially and, despite identifying the importance of the Allied naval blockade in the defeat of Imperial Germany, this merely appears as a kind of afterthought in the Conclusion of The Real War rather than being analysed at length in the main narrative. Above all, Liddell Hart dwells on the period of attrition and the BEF’s setbacks in 1916–1917, then on the desperate defensive battles of March to May 1918, almost ignoring the BEF’s outstanding successes in the summer and autumn of that year, on which, as Hew Strachan notes, Haig’s ‘claim to greatness must rest’. In overlooking the ‘culminating battles of the war’, Strachan remarks, ‘Liddell Hart allowed his portrayal of British generals to assume an easy continuum, from incompetence on the Western Front to conservatism in the 1920s and 1930s’. Professor Strachan has also shrewdly commented that Liddell Hart’s criticisms of the high command in the Great War are naïve in that, while he based his analysis of Haig principally on the Somme and Passchendaele, he (Liddell Hart) apparently failed to appreciate that ‘the skills demanded in the leadership of mass armies in an industrial age were more managerial than heroic’. Brian Bond – who personally knew Liddell Hart very well – believes it would be pedantic to place so much emphasis on the shortcomings of Liddell Hart’s writings on the First World War were it not for the enduring influence ‘of the theories based on such faulty foundations’ and the fact that ‘so much of the British discussion of the First World War still takes place … under the guidelines which he established …’³⁵ Indeed, one only has to listen to, or read, the glib assertions of the media commentators on the Somme each year to realise just how prevalent some of Liddell Hart’s ideas and conclusions still are.

Two major works by senior politicians, both published in the inter-war years, left a similar, if not more bitter, legacy. In The World Crisis, which first appeared in six volumes between 1923 and 1929, and later in a two-volume edition, Winston Churchill indicted the attrition strategy adopted by the Entente powers in 1916 and 1917 as being wasteful in soldiers’ lives and consequently futile and based on false principles. The 1916 campaign, Churchill declared, was, from start to finish, ‘a welter of slaughter which … left the British and French armies weaker in relation to the Germans than when it opened’. He also accused Haig and Foch (the Allied Generalissimo in 1918) of having launched ‘with obstinacy and serene confidence’ offensives which were subsequently seen ‘to have been as hopeless as they were disastrous’, though he did admit that, with the restoration of semi-open warfare and more mobile operations in the final months of the war, Haig and Foch ‘were vindicated in the end’.³⁶

David Lloyd George’s War Memoirs were published a few years after The World Crisis and rank, in David French’s opinion, as ‘foremost’ among the works of self-justification written by former participants.³⁷ So far as Haig and the high command were concerned, there can be absolutely no doubt about Lloyd George’s venomous intent. In 1934 he candidly told Maurice Hankey, the Secretary to the Cabinet, that he was aiming to re-establish his own reputation as the man who won the war. On another occasion he let it be known that he was ‘very sick that Haig and Robertson were not alive. He intended to blow their ashes to smithereens … Unfortunately, he could not get at them personally’.³⁸ In his original Preface, he claimed that he lamented ‘more than words can express’ the need to tell ‘the bare facts of our bloodstained stagger to victory’, and, in the Foreword to an abridged edition of the War Memoirs, published in 1938, he wrote that the ‘incredible heroism of the common man’ had been squandered ‘to repair the incompetence of the trained inexperts … in the narrow, selfish and unimaginative strategy and in the ghastly butchery of a succession of vain and insane offensives’.³⁹ I dare say that I am probably not alone in detecting a distinct echo of Lloyd George’s vindictive, subjective and hypocritical remarks in many of the present-day media’s pronouncements on the First World War, but, as Professor Brian Bond has justifiably suggested, it is perhaps ‘unnecessary to comment that Lloyd George had been prime minister when the most controversial of these offensives [Passchendaele] had taken place and had the constitutional responsibility to stop it if he deemed it to be failing or too costly in casualties’.⁴⁰

One incidental but important result of Lloyd George’s interpretation of the high command’s conduct of the war was that it tended to shift the focus of attention and interest away from the Somme and towards Third Ypres (Passchendaele), so that the latter battle rather than the former thenceforth became for many years – in the collective mind of the British public – the quintessential symbol of the horrors of the Western Front. In the unabridged version of his memoirs, and with Liddell Hart’s active assistance, Lloyd George devoted over a hundred pages to Passchendaele as against twenty-seven to the battles of the Hundred Days in 1918, when the Allies actually won the war.

Mud and Blood

The Liddell Hart-Lloyd George view of the Western Front still held sway some twenty-five years later when, with the fiftieth anniversary of the Great War looming on the horizon, another generation – mostly born just before, during or shortly after the Second World War – was introduced to the subject through a new wave of books, films and television productions. This latter generation, however, was, in many respects – and quite literally – radically different from their parents and grandparents. The late 1950s and 1960s witnessed the growth of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Aldermaston marches; the Suez crisis; the end of National Service; the building of the Berlin Wall; the Cuban missile crisis (when the world appeared to teeter on the brink of annihilation); the Profumo scandal; the emergence of an independent youth culture and sexual freedom; and, in particular, the Vietnam War, which served as a catalyst for anti-American, anti-imperial and anti-establishment opinion, culminating in radical student protests and clashes with authority throughout Europe and the United States. It was decidedly not a period when it was easy to have an objective debate about the BEF’s handling of the Somme offensive, for example, since the youth of the 1960s generally perceived the Great War as yet another case of ‘them against us’ and the 1914–1918 conflict as representing a betrayal of the ruled by the rulers.

All this was inevitably reflected in contemporaneous writings on the Great War, even if some of the authors in question were neither young nor necessarily radical. Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields (1959) not only kept the public gaze fixed firmly on Passchendaele but also kick-started a new round of ‘Haig-bashing’. In Wolff’s opinion, the fact that the Ypres offensive of 1917 had continued into November of that year was principally the fault of Haig, and his overall conclusion was that the war had ‘meant nothing, solved nothing and proved nothing’.⁴¹ Alan Clark was certainly no radical but his book The Donkeys (1961) – which concentrated mainly on the battles of 1914–1915 – nevertheless perfectly mirrored the mood of the coming decade. Although he was not yet Commander-in-Chief during the 1914–1915 period, Haig was still depicted as the leading ‘donkey’ and as a stubborn, ambitious megalomaniac. Clark contended that the courage and devotion to duty of the ‘lions’ (i.e. the ordinary soldiers) was so great that, after being squandered in successive ill-conceived offensives and losing more men in one day (1 July 1916) than any other army in world history, they achieved victory in spite of the bungling ‘donkeys’ (Haig and his generals). Michael Howard, then my tutor and supervisor at King’s College London, reviewed the book and described it as entertaining but ‘worthless’ as history.⁴² The portrayal of Haig and the senior commanders as callous, incompetent idiots arguably reached its peak in Joan Littlewood’s production of Oh! What a Lovely War at the Stratford East Theatre Workshop in March 1963. The production (like Richard Attenborough’s film adaptation in 1969) presented the First World War from the citizen-soldier’s viewpoint, then a largely fresh approach but one which, as Brian Bond observes, has become relatively common ever since, thus giving Oh! What a Lovely War considerable historiographical significance.⁴³

The Somme did receive some renewed attention in the early 1960s. To his credit, the distinguished historian A.J.P. Taylor, in his The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963), did not unreservedly accept the ‘lions led by donkeys’ myth, concluding that ‘this character was not confined to the British, or to soldiers. All the peoples were in the same boat. The war was beyond the capacity of generals and statesmen alike’. However, he regarded the Somme as an ‘unredeemed defeat’ which shaped the lens through which future generations viewed the Great War: ‘brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved’.⁴⁴ Brian Gardner, in The Big Push (1961), presented a straightforward account of the 1916 offensive, drawing largely upon already well-known published sources. Gardner tended to dodge the issue as to whether the Somme battle would be judged by posterity to have been a victory or a failure for the Allies although he appeared to lean towards the more negative standpoint.⁴⁵

A much more balanced study was provided in Anthony Farrar-Hockley’s The Somme, first published in 1964. Farrar-Hockley’s book was, for the time, more thoroughly researched than many books on the subject, making use of both published and unpublished sources, discussions with survivors and – here was a novelty – personal visits to the sites of the actions described. And, Farrar-Hockley added, as ‘a subsidiary advantage’ he had actually had the experience of being shot at in battle. The book clearly benefits from the author’s intimate knowledge of the army and its command structures and it contains interesting and thought-provoking coverage of the planning of the offensive, the bloody first day, and the long summer of hard fighting up to 15 September, much of it at the tactical level and from a divisional, brigade or battalion perspective. To give just one example, he describes, at some length, how elements of the 18th Division, led by Lieutenant-Colonel Frank Maxwell VC of the 12th Middlesex, seized Trones Wood on 14 July 1916. He also examines the difficulties involved in finding experienced officers to replace those killed or wounded whilst in command of brigades or battalions; the lessons learned in successive assaults, such as the need for infantry to keep close to the creeping barrage; and the ‘enhanced skill of the gunners’ as the battle progressed. These were all themes which would be explored in greater detail by later generations of historians. When discussing Haig’s reasons for continuing offensive operations after September 1916, Farrar-Hockley argues that, while the Commander-in-Chief may have believed that the German line might suddenly collapse, he was unable to appreciate fully that his own casualties placed such a cumulative strain on the remaining British infantry that it was unlikely that either the Fourth or Fifth Armies ‘had units sufficiently vigorous’ to exploit the situation. Disappointingly, his concluding analysis of the strategic consequences of the battle is somewhat superficial, there being no investigation, for instance, of the German decisions to withdraw to the Hindenburg Line or to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. Neither does Farrar-Hockley seek to emphasise the positive tactical and organisational lessons of the 1916 offensive and the changes and reforms in the BEF and the French army that these inspired. All the same, in a 1960s context, he is refreshingly fair in his final summation: ‘It may be right to attack the military leaders, they held the responsibility… But it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that they have become whipping posts or scapegoats’.⁴⁶

Counter-attack

One historian, above all, swam resolutely against the prevailing current in this decade, and that was John Terraine. When I was working with Liddell Hart in the early 1960s, I was encouraged to regard Terraine (and, by extension, Haig) as the devil incarnate. Now, with the wisdom of hindsight, I am more inclined to regard Terraine as, in many respects, a model of robust common sense. His Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (1963) unquestionably represents the first major step in the rehabilitation of the Commander-in-Chief, portraying Haig not as a ‘butcher’ but as a single-minded professional who was driven by an innate sense of duty and was, in fact, reform-oriented and receptive to new technology. Terraine’s views, set out in this book, were repeated in several other works over the next twenty years, notably The Road to Passchendaele (1977), To Win a War: 1918, The Year of Victory (1978), The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War (1980) and White Heat: The New Warfare, 1914–1918 (which appeared in 1982). None of these books concentrated specifically upon the Somme though all contributed in various ways to the modern debate on the battle.

The core of John Terraine’s argument was that ‘external’ factors made the terrible attrition on the Western Front, and the problems faced there by the BEF, unavoidable. With the Germans tenaciously occupying large areas of France and Belgium, a decision had to be sought there – hence the ‘necessity’ of the Somme and the ‘inevitability’ of Passchendaele. However, poor battlefield communications and the dominance of artillery and machine-guns meant that the defensive frequently held sway over the offensive, ruling out brilliant generalship or an easy route to victory. Terraine asserted that, from mid-1916, the task of engaging the main body of the main enemy in a continental war fell increasingly upon the British army, for the only time in its history, and that it carried out that task, at a heavy cost, with ultimately decisive effect. Although he invariably underplayed, or neglected to cover, the ‘internal’ and often self-inflicted problems faced by the BEF, and was sometimes weak on tactical and organisational detail, he reminded us all that the Allies actually won the war and that the British and Dominion forces, under Haig, had played a leading part in that achievement.

For Terraine, the Somme battle was an undeniable Allied victory and mainly a British one, since it ‘laid the essential foundation for the final defeat of the Germans in the field’. He believed that even the horrors of 1 July 1916 helped to shape the whole course of the offensive, since the losses and setbacks of that day had played a ‘great part’ in ‘finally disposing of the idea of positional warfare, with geographical prizes, and had forced the recognition that the true objective must, until it was broken, be the German Army itself’. In Terraine’s view, measurements of gains on the map had little relevance to the real nature of the Somme victory, ‘unless those gains are related to the cost to the enemy of taking that ground from him’.⁴⁷ In The Smoke and the Fire, Terraine also made the important point that the ‘true texture’ of the Somme was at least partly determined by the fact that the Germans had launched a minimum of 330, largely unsuccessful, counter-attacks against the BEF during the battle – this having done much to blunt the cutting edge, and wear down the motive power, of the old first-class, peace-trained German infantry. Making this observation a few years after the publication of John Keegan’s The Face of Battle and Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme, Terraine declared that this was why it was ‘utterly pernicious’ to dwell constantly on ‘the freak’ of 1 July. The enduring image of British infantry rising from their trenches to be mown down is, he writes,

only a true picture of the Battle of the Somme when set beside that of the German infantry rising from their trenches to be mown down. Those military historians of the 1930s who . .. like Captain Liddell Hart, preferred to lend support to the Lloyd-George-Churchill version of the battle did grave disservice to the men who fought on from 2 July …⁴⁸

Terraine was one of the principal scriptwriters for the ground-breaking, twenty-six-part, BBC TV series The Great War, which was first shown on the new BBC2 channel in 1964. Liddell Hart resigned from the BBC’s team of consultant historians in protest over John Terraine’s script for the Somme episode which, he felt, placed too much emphasis on the inexperience and lack of skill of British troops instead of criticising the shortcomings of Haig and the high command.⁴⁹ But if Terraine could claim a minor victory here, his revisionist advance still had a long way to go. While Terraine had put forward a more positive interpretation of Haig’s leadership and strategy, and of the BEF’s contribution to victory from 1916 onwards, audience research reports indicated that, contrary to Terraine’s intentions, viewers had been struck, most of all, by the horrific images of trench warfare and the apparent futility of the First World War.⁵⁰ In this respect, the series – at least in the short term – possibly did more to reinforce existing myths and prejudices than to inspire a major reappraisal of the conflict. Nevertheless, as Alex Danchev has noted, Terraine progressively influenced military historians for the next three decades and beyond. ‘Terraine’s viewpoint’, he writes, ‘stripped of its rhetorical excess and forfeit of its emotional charge, served to reorient the historian’s mental map of the war’.⁵¹

The View from the Parapet

An important ingredient in the BBC series was the extensive use, by Tony Essex and the production team, of film, letters, photographs and interviews with veterans, providing a powerful impetus to renewed interest in the experiences of the common soldier. Up to this point the attention of historians remained largely focused upon the war of the generals and politico-military relations. However, as observed in the previous chapter, a number of other factors in the late 1960s and 1970s also combined to alter the whole tone and substance of the debate. These included the opening to the public of the official records of the conflict; the increasing acceptance of military history as an academic discipline; the assembly and growing accessibility of superb collections of private papers – rich in diaries, letters and unpublished memoirs – at the Imperial War Museum and elsewhere; and the advent of the portable tape recorder, which made it possible to interview men who had seen active service in the Great War while they were still around in sufficient numbers to make such oral history projects of real value in furnishing comparative evidence.

The first, and possibly most influential, of the fresh crop of books generated by these important developments was Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (published in 1971). It is difficult to overstate the immense impact which this book had – and still has – in stimulating serious study of the First World War. Speaking personally, it almost certainly did more than any other work, academic or otherwise, to rekindle my passion for the subject. John Keegan later dubbed the book ‘a truly heroic effort of historical fieldwork’.⁵² Middlebrook drew upon the personal experiences of nearly 550 British and German soldiers to produce an account of 1 July 1916 that possesses both power and sensitivity. He also mined newly available archive sources such as unit war diaries at the Public Record Office (now The National Archives) and the Rawlinson diaries at Churchill College, Cambridge. Admittedly, much of Middlebrook’s evidence comes from junior officers and other ranks who had a limited perspective and grasp of events on 1 July itself, yet the many individual stories he quotes are skilfully threaded together to yield a much more rounded picture of Britain’s citizen-soldiers of 1916 than most previous historians had presented. In addition, he was perceptive enough to question the inaccurate, but lingering, popular impression that the New Army divisions on 1 July were all bands of ‘uniformed innocents’, as even John Keegan called them, noting that the 18th, 30th and 36th Divisions – three of the most successful on 1 July – had not conformed blindly to the Fourth Army’s Tactical Notes issued as guidance before the battle. He also outlines the weaknesses of the artillery preparation before the assault and of artillery support on the day itself. On the debit side, he appears to have missed the point that three out of the five British corps along the main battlefront employed some form of creeping barrage on 1 July; is seemingly unaware of the extent to which deference to the commander ‘on the spot’ was often accepted in accordance with FSR; and consequently stops short of analysing just how many assaulting battalions on 1 July adopted formations and tactics other than simply walking forward in long lines ‘at a steady pace’ as Fourth Army had recommended.

The popularity of The First Day on the Somme had two main effects in my view. One was to spark a whole succession of new books (and television programmes) of a similar genre, particularly around the sixtieth and seventieth anniversaries of the Somme battle. The second was once more to swing the spotlight decisively away from Passchendaele and back to the Somme as the symbol of the First World War in the public mind. Another powerful work, John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976), was only partly about the Somme, but again concentrated on 1 July. As one might have expected from someone who was then still a Senior Lecturer in Military History at Sandhurst, Keegan’s study contains a sharper analysis than Middlebrook’s of the BEF’s tactics and communication problems on 1 July as well as of the motivation of the British divisions in action that day. However, his work tends to support the negative interpretation of the Somme experience rather than underline its positive aspects. He does, though, pay tribute to the standards of junior leadership on the Somme, arguing that this was of higher quality and greater military significance in the First World War, at least in the British army, than before or since.⁵³ Malcolm Brown’s 1976 television documentary The Battle of the Somme – memorably presented by actor Leo McKern – provided another extremely moving examination of 1 July and was again enriched by the use of diaries, letters and personal photographs, much of this material finding its way into Brown’s subsequent spin-off book Tommy Goes to War.⁵⁴ A commendable battalion study also appeared during these years – Alex Aiken’s Courage Past: A Duty Done (1971), which looks at the operations of the 1/9th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Highlanders) at High Wood on 14 and 15 July 1916.⁵⁵

These types of study – concentrating on the experiences of ‘everyman at war’ or on the deeds of particular infantry formations – continued to flourish and grow in popularity in the 1980s. Lyn Macdonald further reawakened interest with her book Somme in 1983. Her canvas was broader than Middlebrook’s and she proved adept at providing a straightforward narrative framework of the battle within which individual participants were allowed to relate their own experiences or reminiscences.⁵⁶ But the problem with this approach lies precisely in its focus on the individual soldier for, as Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson have shrewdly commented, it often fails to give a proper explanation as to why such heroism could be in vain. They point out that when attacks on the Somme proved futile, as they did on 1 July, this has frequently and mistakenly been attributed to ‘the faulty tactics imposed on the infantry by their commanders’ and not to ‘the insufficiency of killing weapons to facilitate such an attack’. In their judgement, only an abundance of shells and guns could foster the conditions whereby the infantry might operate with a genuine prospect of success. They maintain:

When the guns proved insufficient and were employed inappropriately … the infantry also failed, with great slaughter. When the guns were employed with sufficient numbers and skill … foot soldiers were placed in an environment where they could display their skills and gain a modicum of success. None of this may seem glamorous or heroic, but it more nearly represents the reality of 1 July 1916 than any obsessive focus on infantry tactics.⁵⁷

The oral and written memories of ordinary soldiers obviously had – and still have – an immediacy which appealed directly to general readers, who can often identify more readily with the originators of such testimony than with other sources of evidence, but, again, in Lyn Macdonald’s Somme, questions of tactical evolution, organisational improvements and command and control are almost totally ignored. In these latter respects, a major step forward was taken by Colin Hughes in his book Mametz: Lloyd George’s ‘Welsh Army’ at the Battle of the Somme. First published in 1982, this detailed study of the operations of the 38th (Welsh) Division at Mametz Wood between 7 and 12 July 1916 makes extensive and scholarly use of unit war diaries and private papers, enabling Hughes to produce a reasoned and fair assessment of the command weaknesses and difficulties which beset the division at that stage of the offensive. Hughes was, for example, one of the first modern historians to acknowledge the widespread effects of the ‘de-skilling’ of the BEF following its rapid expansion in 1914–1915. ‘Many of the staff were inexperienced and working under great pressure’, he maintains.⁵⁸ Philip Orr’s work on the 36th (Ulster) Division, The Road to the Somme, which appeared in 1987, bravely questioned the traditional explanation that the division’s achievements on 1 July were the product of unique religious and sectarian fervour and of an intense esprit de corps. In reality, Orr insists, there was only one military reason which allowed the 36th Division to enter the German trenches at Thiepval in considerable numbers:

If Middlebrook is right to suggest that the British lost the battle by a matter of seconds (the interval between the lifting of the barrage and the arrival of the first wave at the German parapet where machine-guns were already opening up on their targets), then it becomes clear that the Ulster HQ decision to send the men out into No Man’s Land before the barrage lifted was a crucial factor.⁵⁹

These post-Middlebrook years also saw the inauguration in the mid-1980s of the series of books on individual Pals battalions, published by Wharncliffe/ Pen and Sword. Each gives a very detailed picture of the raising and training of the battalion concerned, the fascinating socio-military history thus presented being the outcome of assiduous research on the part of the respective authors. Unfortunately, a number of these works succumbed to the tyrannical hold which 1 July 1916 was by then firmly exerting on British First World War studies – a by-product of the trend-setting works of Middlebrook and Keegan. For example, William Turner’s book on the Accrington Pals covers the post-Serre actions of the battalion in just 16 out of over 250 pages, while Philip Orr devotes only 8 pages to the story of the 36th Division after the Somme.⁶⁰

The striking visual images of the Somme battlefields shown in Malcolm Brown’s 1976 television documentary coincided with the publication of the late Rose Coombs’ guide Before Endeavours Fade and I am firmly convinced that both – in the wake of Middlebrook’s book – were key factors in inspiring and establishing the present popularity of battlefield tours. Tonie and Valmai Holt – founders of, and leading figures in, the modern battlefield tour industry – once told me that, so far as they were concerned, it was the legendary Rose Coombs who had done most to ‘open up’ the Western Front to new generations. To these names must be added that of John Giles, whose The Somme: Then and Now (1977) similarly helped to persuade many to pay personal visits to the battlefields. Giles saw the book not only as a record of the series of engagements that made up the Battle of the Somme, and a view of the topography, but also as a special tribute to the men of Kitchener’s New Armies, ‘so many of whom lie beneath the soil of France’, and as ‘an acknowledgement to the tenacity of an enemy who fought bravely to retain his hold on former territorial gains’.⁶¹ John Giles’s greatest achievement, however, was the founding of the Western Front Association (WFA) in 1980. Now over 30 years old, the WFA currently has some 6,000 members and 60 branches and affiliated organisations in Britain and overseas. It also publishes a scholarly journal, Stand To!, and plays a very important role in stimulating and maintaining serious public interest in the 1914–1918 period, including the Somme, at all levels from the family historian or hobbyist to the academic.

At this stage in the revival of interest in the Great War, a number of popular books, films and television programmes also sprang from Commonwealth writers, producers and directors. These included Bill Gammage’s book The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War (1974); Patsy Adam-Smith’s The Anzacs (1978); the film Gallipoli (1981); Peter Charlton’s Australians on the Somme: Pozières 1916 (1986); the television series Anzacs (1987); and, in Canada, Pierre Berton’s Vimy (1986). Most of these tended to reinforce stereotypes rather than break new ground, perpetuating the myth of the ruggedly independent ‘colonial superman’ from the backwoods or outback and invariably portraying British officers as haughty idiots who wasted the precious lives of emerging nations in their futile and badly conducted offensives. In this incarnation, the ‘them’ (i.e. the establishment) and ‘us’ (working-class victims) of Oh! What a Lovely War were now replaced by the ‘them’ (Britain and aristocratic British officers) and ‘us’ (young nations and misunderstood and ill-used Dominion soldier victims) of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli. John Laffin’s British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One (1988) possibly represents the nadir of this approach. But, as the Australian-based scholars Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey had rightly pointed out two or three years before, the ‘Digger myth’ propagated by Bean is difficult to challenge as it has long been ‘a potent force in the development of an Australian consciousness’.⁶² Perhaps the best of this group of works is Peter Charlton’s book on the fighting at Pozières on the Somme. Highly critical of British command and tactics on the Somme, he differs from Bean in as much as he dates Australian disillusionment with British methods from the summer of 1916 rather than from the ordeal at Anzac Cove a year earlier, but, to be fair to Charlton, he also tries to place the Australian achievement in taking Pozières in the context of a coalition war, stating that ‘to treat it as solely an Australian victory is to ignore the very substantial British contribution in this sector of the Somme before 23 July 1916’.⁶³

Happily for the future health of First World War studies, archive-based scholarly works were beginning to make their mark by the mid-to-late 1980s. From the standpoint of serious, objective study of the BEF, however, this proved, in some respects, a double-edged sword, for the period witnessed the blossoming, particularly in the United States, of what Chris Pugsley has called ‘the Germans did it first and best’ school of historians.⁶⁴ The pattern was set, in 1981, by Timothy Lupfer in The Dynamics of Doctrine: Changes in German Tactical Doctrine during the First World War. Lupfer’s book, which examines the corporate effort behind German doctrinal changes in the Great War, undoubtedly overrates the effectiveness of German offensive and defensive tactics – and, by implication, denigrates developments in the BEF – but his work had a great deal of influence in American military and historical circles (and on some in Britain). Other recent books with pro-German and anti-British overtones were Bruce Gudmundsson’s Stormtroop Tactics (1989) and two books by Martin Samuels: Doctrine and Dogma: German and British Infantry Tactics in the First World War, published in 1992, followed, in 1995, by Command or Control?: Command, Training and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888–1918. Samuels claims that the BEF was hamstrung by a rigid approach to battle and that its system of ‘restrictive control’ lay at the root of the 36th (Ulster) Division’s inability to exploit its impressive early gains on 1 July 1916.⁶⁵ Yet, in contrasting 1 July – Britain’s worst day of the war – with 21 March 1918, one of Germany’s best, he is hardly making an objective comparison. Had he, for example, compared the failed German attack at Arras on 28 March 1918 with 8 August 1918, the opening day of the Battle of Amiens, he might just have drawn some different conclusions.

Firepower

Again it was fortunate that an antidote to all this Anglophobic history was already to hand. Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904–1945, published in 1982 and written by former gunner officers Shelford Bidwell and Professor Dominick Graham, at long last began to lift the debate up from the emphasis on mud, blood and ‘butchers and bunglers’ to the more solid ground of reasoned analysis of the BEF’s tactical development and operational performance. Andy Simpson recently indicated why Bidwell and Graham’s book was so important, namely that virtually everything published before Fire-Power was based on the official history narrative, with a leavening of formation histories and a re-working of published biographies, memoirs and diaries, whereas Bidwell and Graham clearly demonstrated that fresh and interesting interpretations could be extracted from the then largely untapped sources in the Public Record Office.⁶⁶ With Colin Hughes’ Mametz, published the same year, Fire-Power truly heralded the advent of a new, scholarly, archive-based approach to the study of the First World War.

Bidwell and Graham concentrated primarily upon tactical issues and debates before, during and after the Great War. Their central argument is that, prior to 1914, British officers were largely unaware of the principles of co-operation and had not really grasped how to co-ordinate different branches of the service or how to orchestrate the fire of different weapons. Hence the close interaction between fire and manoeuvre was not fully understood. Artillery was seen simply as an accessory, ‘an extra wheel for the coach’, and the three main arms – the cavalry, infantry and artillery – ‘dined at separate tables’. Consequently, new lessons had to be learned during a long struggle in which many of those best qualified to analyse events became casualties. Even so, the authors go on to emphasise the nature and extent of the BEF’s overall achievement in the latter half of the war. It should be borne in mind, they suggest, that the BEF had to overcome a highly organised defensive system, which was protected by firepower of unprecedented intensity and occupied by some of the best and bravest soldiers in history. It also had to cope simultaneously with the flow of new weapons and inventions, fresh methods, the growth of the ‘base administrative apparatus’ supporting the expanded army, and the problems of training a mass of men who, unlike their adversaries, had no deep-rooted military tradition or experience. It is therefore hardly surprising that costly mistakes were made, they write, yet, by the same token, it is ‘truly amazing that the efforts of the staff and fighting soldiers were finally crowned with such an overwhelming success’.⁶⁷ These statements almost perfectly encapsulate the views of most ‘revisionist’ historians of the First World War over the past twenty-five years or so. Moreover, Bidwell and Graham went much further than, say, the official histories, Liddell Hart or Terraine, in actually defining and explaining the improvements that took place in the BEF’s infantry and artillery tactics and techniques, as well as all-arms co-operation, from 1915 onwards. They illustrated how a creeping barrage worked, made many of us aware, for the first time, of the positive influence of progressive and clear-sighted infantry commanders, such as R.B. Stephens (of the 5th Division) and Ivor Maxse (of the 18th Division), and also outlined the role and contribution of senior artillery officers such as H.H. Tudor, ‘Curly’ Birch, Herbert Uniacke and C.E.D. Budworth.

Although it had less general impact on the scholarly community, and almost none on the wider public, when it was first published in 1986, General Sir Martin Farndale’s Western Front volume in The History of the Royal Regiment of Artillery must be included in any serious historiographical survey covering the lessons of the Somme. Farndale too stressed the importance of the creeping barrage, used ‘shakily’ in the July fighting of 1916, when ‘it was not fully understood’, but ‘perfected’ and employed ‘with confidence by October and November’. He noted the introduction of counter-battery staffs and the enormous improvements in 1916 in conducting the counter-battery battle: ‘At last the vital importance of silencing the enemy guns was realised by all’. Methods of controlling the fire of guns once an attack had started was also being perfected, Farndale asserts, and there were advances too in the area of artillery command and co-ordination: ‘The GOCRA at Corps HQ was shown to be all important and the Heavy Artillery Commander emerged as his subordinate’ – a crucial step in Farndale’s judgement. He admits that, by the end of the Somme offensive, there was still room for improvement in the quality of ammunition, in passing on information about targets to the guns, in the techniques of flash-spotting and sound-ranging, and in the calibration of guns to ensure greater accuracy, but suggests that things were going in the right direction. Farndale also brings to our attention the pressure exerted by GHQ in late 1916, as a result of the Somme experience, for the creation of Army Field Artillery (AFA) brigades – over and above the existing divisional artillery – in order to provide a more flexible artillery reserve for major operations. Finally, he lists what Major-General Noel ‘Curly’ Birch – Haig’s chief artillery adviser at GHQ – saw as the four key artillery lessons of the Somme: first, army-level headquarters (e.g. Fifth Army headquarters) must lay down from the outset the principles of the artillery plan for a battle; second, every available spare gun and period of time must be utilised for counter-battery work before and during an attack; third, accuracy must be improved; and, fourth, a more thorough artillery intelligence and reporting service was needed.⁶⁸ These professional and technical factors may not have a broad public appeal but, in delineating them, Farndale did us all a great service, for they remain vital to our proper understanding of operations on the Somme and thereafter.

The modern, archive-driven approach was even more evident in another important work – The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare 1900–1918 – by the Canadian historian Tim Travers. This book, first published in 1987, contained two thought-provoking chapters on the planning and conduct of the Somme offensive as part of its overall thesis. Because his work was founded on a bedrock of research into primary sources, Travers remains, as John Bourne has remarked, ‘an influential critic not only of the army but also of Haig …’. Travers examines the British army’s weaknesses in the Great War chiefly in managerial terms. As a result, writes John Bourne, the ‘villain’ in the eyes of Travers, is ‘not one individual, not even Haig, but the pre-war Regular Army itself’.⁶⁹ Travers regards the ethos of the pre-1914 British officer corps as that of an over-personalised and exclusive old-boy network which was rigidly hierarchical and more concerned with the ‘dishonest’ preservation of individual and collective reputations than with intellectual enquiry. All this meant that, when faced with war on a continental scale, involving large armies, the officers of the BEF were ill-equipped to respond to the challenges they encountered. Initiative and independent judgement were not encouraged and, since intellectual honesty was also largely absent, failure was concealed or tolerated and the historical record manicured. A second problem, as identified by Travers, was that the British army’s ethos allowed pre-war ideas and attitudes to persist throughout the 1914–1918 period, fostering a ‘human’ image of the battlefield rather than prompting useful evaluation of the tactical potential of new technology. The firepower lessons of the Russo-Japanese War were therefore overlooked and, instead, emphasis was placed on a ‘human-centred’ model of operations in which mass, the concentration of force, morale, the ‘offensive spirit’ and the concept of ‘breakthrough’ were all essential ingredients. Hence, Haig and his senior subordinates tended to pursue unwise and inappropriate tactics which were beyond the actual capacity of the weapons and communications systems to hand.⁷⁰

Linked to this was a third problem, which was that the BEF’s senior officers – as a result of what they had been taught at Staff College – tended to see battle as an ‘ordered’ and structured activity. Travers argues that Haig’s stiff and aloof character, coupled with his personal views on the role and authority of the Commander-in-Chief, did much to isolate GHQ in 1916 and 1917, giving it ‘an unnecessarily authoritarian aspect’. According to Travers, Haig believed that the C-in-C must be ‘determined and display singleness of purpose’; that there should be continuity at GHQ; and that the authority of the C-in-C would be undermined by permitting subordinates to promote their own ideas. In general, the C-in-C should lay down the broad strategic objectives of operations but leave the detailed conduct of battle to his subordinates. The army commanders – like Rawlinson and Gough – were therefore often left alone. However, as Travers explains, while Haig was, in principle, committed to setting strategy and leaving the tactics to his army commanders, he often intervened or interfered in matters such as the depth and number of objectives or the length of a bombardment. This unpredictable mixture of the ‘hands-off’ and ‘hands-on’ approaches led to confusion and compromise on some occasions, especially in 1916, and created a command vacuum and paralysis at the top on others. The BEF’s problems were exacerbated by serious gaps in communication between Haig and his army commanders, because many senior officers were simply afraid of Haig and were not prepared to question him. Many therefore operated in a climate of fear which further isolated Haig and GHQ.⁷¹

While the arguments propounded by Travers are, without doubt, superficially seductive, they are, in fact, seriously flawed. When one examines his footnotes and source references, one discovers that a fair proportion of the evidence on which his conclusions are based comes from the correspondence between various officers and the official historians in the 1930s or from Liddell Hart’s clubland gossip with Edmonds and others in the same period. Andy Simpson has remarked that Travers is too often inclined to accept anecdotal evidence which supports his conclusions, but fails to verify it elsewhere, such as by reference to the General Staff and headquarters war diaries of formations: ‘It is important to deal with what can be verified in the documents or corroborated by other, independently recorded anecdotes, rather than simply to relate retrospective tittle-tattle’.⁷² My own examination of Haig’s relations with his army commanders also suggests a different interpretation to that put forward by Travers concerning the supposed ‘isolation’ of GHQ. Henry Rawlinson’s diary entries for the Somme period by no means wholly support the idea that he was frightened of Haig, and the army commanders met Haig regularly at conferences held at each of their headquarters in turn. Given the difficulties met by the New Armies on the Somme, Haig did not see a ‘hands-off’ command style on some occasions and close supervision on others as being inconsistent or incompatible. ‘It is not “interference” but a legitimate and necessary exercise of the functions of a Commander on whom the ultimate responsibility for success or failure lies’, he told Rawlinson in August 1916, during a particularly tough phase of the Somme fighting. Precisely because he did carry the ultimate responsibility – and a continuing weight of responsibility at that – it should barely come as a surprise to scholars that Haig sometimes found it desirable or tempting to intervene at a tactical level, however unfortunate the end product of such intervention may have proved.⁷³ In addition, one can challenge some of the fundamental points underpinning the case presented by Travers regarding the pre-1914 British army. John Bourne has rightly observed that the ‘wars of empire’ in reality produced an officer corps with vast active and combat experience. Bourne claims that the range of professional opportunities offered by the pre-1914 British army was enormous. He also finds it difficult ‘to reconcile the fit, adaptable, energetic, resourceful, pragmatic men who emerge from the prewar army’s multi-biography with the somnolent, dogma-ridden, unprofessional, unreflecting institution depicted by Tim Travers and Martin Samuels’.⁷⁴

By the early 1990s, the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the conduct of the war on the Western Front was beginning to gather real momentum, especially in the Commonwealth. Two very influential books appeared in 1992: Surviving Trench Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–1918, by the Canadian historian Bill Rawling, and Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914–18, by the Australian-based Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. In his very scholarly book, Bill Rawling deals at length with the transformation in the tools and technology of war between 1914 and 1918 and also with the tactics that governed their employment on the battlefield. He clearly shows how the systematic evaluation of after-action reports in the Canadian Corps, particularly from the Somme period onwards, drew out the principal lessons of successive operations and led to improvements in the application of the creeping barrage; in counter-battery fire; in co-operation with tanks and aircraft; in attack formations; in wire-cutting; and in the use of overhead machine-gun barrages, Lewis guns and Stokes mortars in the assault. Rawling was, indeed, one of the first modern historians to highlight the importance of the British manual SS 143: Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action, which was issued in February 1917 and which heralded a major change in infantry tactics and platoon organisation. In 1915–1916 the platoon had essentially consisted of four sections of riflemen but, from the spring of 1917, it was reorganised into four specialist fighting sections which respectively contained riflemen, rifle grenadiers, bombers and Lewis gunners. In other words, the infantry company now comprised four platoon teams, each capable of waging its own battle in miniature, using a variety of weapons. This is but one of a series of weighty points which Rawling makes to support the view that the Canadian success at Vimy Ridge in April 1917, and in other limited-objective attacks that year, owed a lot to the lessons which the Canadian Corps, and the BEF in general, had learned on the Somme.⁷⁵

Rawling also maintains that some of the most important lessons – particularly in relation to counter-battery fire, flexible attack formations and the structure and weaponry of the infantry platoon – were derived from French experience in 1916 and had been passed on to the Canadian Corps and BEF by Major-General Arthur Currie, then commander of the 1st Canadian Division, who made a special fact-finding visit to the French army at Verdun in January 1917. The impression given by Bill Rawling, if only by omission, is that Currie made this visit to Verdun alone – thus gaining much of the credit for the improvements which it inspired – and this line has been followed by other, though not all, Canadian historians.⁷⁶ As will be seen later, recent research has shown that this impression is highly misleading, for Currie’s January 1917 trip to Verdun was far from a solo mission. To his credit, however, Bill Rawling does not pretend that these improvements were exclusive to the Canadian Corps and notes that they were simultaneously being effected, albeit somewhat unevenly, throughout the BEF, thanks partly to cross-fertilisation and a steady exchange of information and lessons at corps, divisional and brigade levels.⁷⁷

Prior and Wilson’s Command on the Western Front, as its title implies, concentrated on the exercise of command – in this case mainly at army level – rather than on the minutiae of tactics. It was, and is, a seminal work, chiefly because it provided the first scholarly archive-based examination in modern times of the operational performance of a senior commander in France and Flanders. It was much more even-handed and objective than The Killing Ground by Tim Travers, but it is by no means uncritical of Haig or its central figure, Henry Rawlinson, the commander of Fourth Army on the Somme and in 1918. In the view of the authors, Rawlinson had learnt and demonstrated, at Neuve Chapelle in 1915, that artillery was the key to success yet failed to apply this lesson consistently on the Somme, often leaving decisions concerning the use of the creeping barrage, or the weight and intensity of preparatory bombardments, to less experienced lower-order commanders. On the Somme he initially advocated a limited objective ‘bite and hold’ approach but ‘proved sadly amenable to launching, without protest, an unlimited campaign in accordance with the ideas of the high command’. On 16 July 1916, Rawlinson declared that the time for narrow-front attacks was past, but then persisted with exactly that course of action for another two months. He was quick to agree with Haig’s instructions to suspend operations on the left flank of Fourth Army while bringing his right flank into line, yet then proceeded to launch twice as many assaults on the left flank as on the right. ‘Towards the end of the battle’, write Prior and Wilson, ‘we find him simultaneously calling for the campaign to be terminated and prosecuting it so unrelentingly as to cause a revolt by one of his corps commanders [Lord Cavan of XIV Corps]’.⁷⁸

The authors conclude that, in Rawlinson’s case, there was no ‘undeviating advance towards wisdom, and no certain demonstration that at the end of the day Rawlinson was master of his job’. On the other hand, they do generally endorse the idea that a learning process had taken place in the BEF between 1916 and 1918, even if Rawlinson’s contribution to it had been marginal. By 1918, they comment, ‘expertise in the technical aspects of conducting battles had become so widespread throughout the British army, and supplies of the sorts of weaponry appropriate to this expertise had become so generous, that the importance of command in accomplishing victory had diminished absolutely’. As the BEF became a more complex, sophisticated and specialist organisation, detailed intervention by the C-in-C and army commanders became less relevant. ‘Haig’s job, like Rawlinson’s, was … diminishing not expanding as the forces under his direction grew in expertise and complexity. And Haig, again like Rawlinson, proved far more effective as a commander once the sphere of his activities began to diminish to an extent that brought them within the limits of his capabilities’.⁷⁹ One may disagree with some of Prior and Wilson’s conclusions – such as their heavy emphasis on artillery as an almost universal key to success in operations – but one must pay tribute to their major contribution to the ongoing debate, not least in illustrating how far real command and control on the Western Front devolved downwards during and after the Somme.

Advance of the Revisionists

As the decade wore on, more books of genuine value appeared. Most of these, in varying degrees, reflected the fact that, at long last, a serious debate about the Somme and the Great War was in progress. Historians at, or associated with, the Imperial War Museum were now starting to make an important contribution to the historiography of the First World War, as were a group of historians based at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and also postgraduate students and researchers working under Professor Brian Bond at King’s College London and Dr John Bourne at the University of Birmingham. The increasing co-operation and mutual support of these groups of historians did as much as anything, in my opinion, to place First World War studies – particularly in this country – on a really solid and scholarly footing for the first time. The IWM’s team of historians certainly acted as one of the catalysts in this process. A tangible indication of this was provided, in 1993, by Chris McCarthy’s The Somme: The Day-by-Day Account which, as its title implies, contains a useful and concise daily summary of the BEF’s operations on the Somme (including details of the weather and temperature), thereby helping us all to obtain a clearer understanding of the unfolding pattern of the battle.⁸⁰

The following year saw the publication of yet another significant ‘revisionist’ work, namely Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916–18, by Dr Paddy Griffith, himself a former Senior Lecturer in War Studies at Sandhurst. In this book, Paddy Griffith examined, in some depth, the evolution of British infantry tactics throughout the war and concluded that, while the BEF’s plans and technologies frequently failed during the period of improvisation in the first half of the conflict, Haig’s forces gradually improved their methods and their technology from 1916 onwards, thus also gaining greater self-assurance. By the time of its successful sustained offensive in the autumn of 1918, Dr Griffith argues, the BEF was consistently demonstrating a battlefield skill and mobility that would rarely be surpassed, even during the Second World War. He contends that in fields such as the timing and orchestration of all-arms assaults, ‘predicted’ artillery fire, ‘commando-style’ trench raiding as a ‘schooling’ for assault tactics, the use of light machine guns or the indirect barrage fire of heavy machine guns, the BEF led the world, and he suggests that many of these improvements owed a great deal to the lessons learned on the Somme. Griffith undoubtedly tends to underplay the influence of the French in this process and possibly also oversteps the mark in claiming that the British were already masters of ‘stormtroop’ tactics by the end of 1916, but he does show, quite convincingly, that the BEF as a whole – and not just its Dominion or élite formations – progressed a long way in its battle tactics during the latter half of the war. Furthermore, he was, with Bill Rawling, the first modern historian to make us truly aware of the considerable importance of the SS series of pamphlets published and circulated by GHQ, especially SS 135 (Instructions for the Training of Divisions for Offensive Action) and SS 143.⁸¹

These arguments were reiterated in 1996 in British Fighting Methods in the Great War, a book edited by Dr Griffith and containing essays by himself and various other authors. One of the contributors was Jonathan Bailey, a serving officer then based at the Staff College, Camberley. Bailey developed some of the points made earlier – by Bidwell and Graham, by Bill Rawling, and by General Sir Martin Farndale – concerning the BEF’s advances in artillery techniques. In Bailey’s judgement, not only were shells, guns and fuses greatly improved in 1916–1917 but pinpoint accuracy, which had previously been achievable only in optimistic theory, also became daily reality. In 1916, the infantry assault was made more effective by the support of the creeping barrage, and in 1917 the main German response to it, in the form of defensive artillery fire, was increasingly neutralised by counter-battery programmes and techniques that really worked. In Bailey’s eyes, this represented a step-change from the linear battles of the nineteenth century. The term ‘deep battle’ may only date from the NATO debates of the 1980s, but Jonathan Bailey suggests that, in practice, this modern concept was already evident in the artillery tactics of 1916–1918, when technological developments facilitated the employment of effective indirect artillery fire which had a devastating impact upon the enemy’s morale and organisation.⁸²

The new wave of ‘revisionist’ historians of the Great War did not advance entirely unopposed during this period. When reviewing the book Facing Armageddon – an important collection of essays and papers produced for a big First World War conference in Leeds in 1994 – the late Sir John Keegan denigrated ‘revisionist’ historians in Britain and the Commonwealth, declaring that the BEF learned little or nothing between 1916 and the Armistice and remarking that to claim that there was a ‘learning curve’ was rather like saying that Dunkirk provided valuable lessons in amphibious operations which were later applied on D-Day. He repeated this criticism in a subsequent book on the First World War, dismissing the work of the ‘revisionists’ as pointless.⁸³ However, as soon became evident, Keegan only succeeded here in portraying himself as a latter-day version of King Canute, for the swelling tide of scholarly opinion was now running firmly against him. Indeed, as historians began to look at areas of the BEF’s activities other than simply its command and tactics, more and more substance was added to the ‘revisionist’ arguments.

Ian M. Brown’s British Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919, which was published in 1998, clearly showed that, with Haig’s active support, the appointment of the civilian railway expert Sir Eric Geddes as Director-General of Transportation at GHQ in September 1916 transformed the BEF’s supply and transport system. Within two years, the BEF had a ‘truly superb fighting and administrative organisation’ that allowed Haig – in the autumn of 1918 – to mount limited-objective attacks of tremendous power almost at will and to switch their locations at short notice. Ian M. Brown also believes that, in the sphere of relating operational ambitions to logistic necessity, the BEF, in the Hundred Days, displayed a better grasp of the reality of fighting on the Western Front than the much-vaunted German General Staff had in the spring of 1918.⁸⁴

Brown’s significant work was followed, in 1999, by Peter Chasseaud’s monumental 543-page study Artillery’s Astrologers: A History of British Survey and Mapping on the Western Front, 1914–1918. The latter work is decidedly not the sort of book that one reads on the train or at bedtime and its size, density and technical subject matter are likely to deter all but the most dedicated students of the Western Front. It will, nevertheless, repay the effort because it is – as its dust-jacket blurb claims – the definitive operational history of the British field survey organisation. It covers the work of both the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers in survey, sound-ranging and flash-spotting, and all aspects of map production and use in the BEF, as well as drawing comparisons with French, German and American survey and mapping. Chasseaud describes, in huge detail, how the Royal Engineers – with a substantial gunner contribution – helped to make possible the initial British success at Cambrai in November 1917 and the victories of the Hundred Days in 1918. Visionary sappers like Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Winterbotham and gunners like H.H. Tudor played a major part in the development of techniques such as ‘predicted fire’ – achieving surprise by means of massive bombardments without previous ‘registration’ – and in the neutralisation of German artillery and machine guns during set-piece assaults.⁸⁵

In retrospect, 1999 can, in fact, be seen as a vintage year for British First World War studies. Sixteen leading historians contributed essays, for example, to Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On, edited by Brian Bond and Nigel Cave. As the editors admit in their Foreword, the volume is ‘pro-Haig’ in that

scholarly opinion – with some notable exceptions – is generally moving towards a more favourable interpretation of Haig’s achievements – reflecting those of the vast forces he commanded, based on a wider range of sources than those available to earlier polemical writers such as Liddell Hart – and from a more understanding approach derived from a longer perspective and access to a proliferating array of specialist studies.

The ‘revisionist’ interpretation, in their view, shows that Haig has been wrongly or excessively criticised on specific issues, namely that he supposedly appointed a disproportionate number of cavalry officers to the highest commands; opposed or obstructed technical innovation; was callous or indifferent towards casualties; and remained isolated from the front line. Not only were these criticisms misguided, Bond and Cave observe, but historians have now also come to appreciate the enormous difficulties created by the sudden and colossal expansion of the BEF. Relatively few historians, the editors claim, now question the ‘impressive developments in material and war-fighting efficiency embodied in the term “learning curve”’. The debate, they say, has ‘moved on to consider the timing and steepness of the “curve” and to assess the level at which improvements were introduced, codified and implemented’.⁸⁶ In his contribution to the volume, John Bourne tellingly comments that Haig’s name has become synonymous with the huge organisation and complex operations of the BEF for which no single person can realistically be held responsible. ‘In future’, Bourne predicts, ‘there seems little doubt that Haig’s reputation will be finally determined, not by studies of the man himself, but of the man in the context of the armies which he commanded, and especially by detailed operational analyses at the army, corps, divisional, brigade and even battalion level’. Though he judged that, in 1999, such a day had not yet arrived, he did detect a shift away from ‘an increasingly sterile debate’ about a handful of political and military leaders towards ‘an increasingly fruitful consideration’ of the British army as an instrument of war, based largely on contemporary archive sources, including unit war diaries and after-action reports.⁸⁷

Brian Bond also edited another collection of essays which appeared the same year in Look to Your Front: Studies in the First World War by the British Commission for Military History. An essay of particular relevance was John Lee’s ‘Some Lessons of the Somme: The British Infantry in 1917’, which covered the reorganisation of British and Dominion infantry platoons in early 1917 as well as the content and influence of the pamphlets SS 143: Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action and SS 144: The Normal Formation for the Attack. This essay powerfully underlined the positive trends in British infantry doctrine and tactics which resulted from the experience of the Somme. As John Lee confirms, the ‘after action reports themselves show that the army was constantly looking for tactical, organisational and technical lessons to be absorbed and disseminated to improve both future training and battle performance’. In a later essay, Lee explores, in some depth, how these pamphlets, together with SS 135, helped in the development of ‘standard operational procedures’ and also how the principles embodied in such pamphlets were successfully applied in the Battle of the Menin Road Ridge in September 1917.⁸⁸

Gary Sheffield is perhaps the most prolific of the new wave of First World War historians. His balanced and judicious assessments of the 1916 offensive were clearly set out in three works which appeared in the space of just four years: Forgotten Victory. The First World War: Myths and Realities (2001); The Somme (2003); and Douglas Haig: War Diaries and Letters, 1914–1918, which he edited with John Bourne and which was published in 2005. In Forgotten Victory, Sheffield cites examples of tactical flair and improvisation displayed, even by New Army divisions, in the early weeks of the battle. One such case was a ‘Chinese’ (diversionary) bombardment, complete with smoke, delivered against Ovillers on 2 July and intended to cover an assault on neighbouring La Boisselle by two battalions of the 19th Division. Tactical initiative was also shown by the 23rd Royal Fusiliers, a New Army battalion in the Regular 2nd Division, at Delville Wood on 27 July, when their advance was checked by a German strongpoint. After several failed attempts, the position was captured by sending bombers and Lewis gunners to probe around its flanks. This, Sheffield believes, offers ‘a graphic example of an inexperienced unit literally learning on the job, groping their way towards effective tactics while actually in contact with the enemy’.⁸⁹ The learning process was still far from complete, for not all divisions were as tactically advanced as the best formations. Nonetheless, by November 1916, ‘the BEF resembled a coherent weapons system much more closely than it had on 1 July’. Reports on, and analysis of, recent operations emanated from all levels of the BEF, including the pamphlets such as SS 143 and SS 144, which were issued by GHQ. The fruits of this progress were certainly apparent by 9 April 1917 – the first day of the Battle of Arras – when greater density of guns, more plentiful and reliable ammunition, increasingly effective counter-battery work, and better infantry training along the lines laid down in SS 143 and SS 144, all underpinned the tactical successes gained by British and Canadian formations that day. Given the inexperience of the British citizen army only months before, ‘the level of tactical and operational development demonstrated at Arras was substantial’ and it can be traced back to ‘the trial and error days of the Somme’.⁹⁰

Sheffield makes the valid point that, in any consideration of the results of the Somme, the importance of the French operations, to the south of the BEF’s sector, ‘must not be underrated’. He similarly observes that, up to the year 2001, the impact of the Somme on the German army had been insufficiently examined. In his judgement, large numbers of experienced German officers, NCOs and men were killed on the Somme, casualties which the German army could ill afford. The British, Sheffield estimates, lost ‘mostly green soldiers’. Those who survived profited greatly, in a strictly military sense, by gaining experience. ‘The Somme taught the BEF how to fight, while it degraded the quality of the German army’. Thus, although Haig and others may have underestimated German resilience, the two armies were more evenly matched by 1917. At the beginning of 1916, the Germans had to cope with two major armies, the Russian and the French, but at the end of the year, a third (the British) ‘had made its presence felt’. In addition, the benefits of the Somme, in terms of coalition politics, should not be overlooked: ‘In four and a half months of bloody fighting, Britain had demonstrated to its allies its willingness to pay the blood tax, to play a leading role in taking on the main enemy in the main theatre of operations’.⁹¹

Reappraising Haig

In the Introduction to their edition of Haig’s war diaries and letters, Sheffield and Bourne remark that, in January 1916, Haig had rejected the idea of a purely attritional battle on the Somme, striving instead for a decisive success. The impact of the Battle of Verdun on Allied strategy obliged Haig to modify that approach somewhat and, by May, he had a more modest view of the likely outcome of the Somme offensive, as a ‘wearing-out’ battle. In the words of Sheffield and Bourne, the Commander-in-Chief of the BEF now wished to ‘dampen down expectations if the battle did turn out to be an attritional affair; but not to exclude the possibility of operations of a more decisive character. Haig’s post-Somme despatch, which excluded mention of his hopes of open warfare, was to some extent ex post facto rationalisation, but he had certainly anticipated that the battle might be one of attrition and limited gains’.

On the question of the plans for the opening of the battle, Sheffield and Bourne tend to see the proposals presented by Rawlinson, rather than Haig, as being more appropriate to the tactical and technological realities of July 1916. Whereas Haig’s ideas were over-ambitious, envisaging that Gough’s Reserve Army would exploit initial success by striking north in the direction of Arras, Rawlinson advocated a more cautious ‘bite and hold’ approach in which the BEF would capture a section of the German trenches, hold it against counter-attack and – when the enemy had exhausted themselves – carry out the process again. He was thus aiming to mount fairly limited attacks that could be properly supported by artillery. Sheffield and Bourne suggest that, in overruling Rawlinson, Haig was turning a blind eye to the fact that the BEF’s logistic system was actually incapable of sustaining a significant breakthrough in 1916. Moreover, ‘the width of front to be attacked, some 20,000 yards, and Haig’s insistence on capturing trenches to an average depth of 2,500 yards, diluted the available firepower. Too few guns were given too much to do. In general, Haig’s plan was too ambitious, given the state of training and level of experience of his troops in 1916’.

The editors rightly point out that Haig’s command relationships with Rawlinson and Gough during the battle were governed by the concept that the Commander-in-Chief should define the broad objectives but leave the detailed planning to his subordinates. ‘Sometimes’, they note, ‘Haig adhered to this, but on other occasions he intervened, for good or ill’. Haig, they feel, can therefore be reasonably criticised for a lack of control over his senior subordinates: ‘Too often Rawlinson and Gough used “penny packets” of troops (and guns) rather than committing the sort of numbers that would make success possible, and failed to co-ordinate actions across formation boundaries. Such actions generally gained a little ground but at a high price’. Haig did, at times, offer Rawlinson advice, or even give him instructions, on how to conduct operations, and occasionally overruled his ‘man on the spot’, such as during the planning for the 15 September attack at Flers-Courcelette. Overall, the editors conclude, Haig’s approach, in this regard, ‘lacked consistency and “grip”’. Sheffield and Bourne also confess to being puzzled by the failure on the Somme of both Haig and Rawlinson consistently to apply the lessons of those operations which were successful, but they comment that Haig had only been C-in-C of the BEF for just over six months when the offensive commenced. In effect, Haig was serving his apprenticeship as an Army Group commander on the Somme and was himself ‘still learning’. However, his persistence in prolonging the offensive when a breakthrough was obviously beyond the bounds of possibility was, Sheffield and Bourne assert, ‘the consequence of coalition politics’. Haig was unwilling to allow Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, to determine the precise nature and form of his attacks, yet, whatever his personal preferences, he had no real choice other than to continue the offensive.

Sheffield and Bourne accept that the Somme was bloody, wasteful and sometimes badly conducted by the British generals, while shattering the strategic consensus in Britain and seriously undermining relations between Haig and Lloyd George. On the other hand, they maintain that the British and Dominion forces on the Somme in 1916 did help to administer a severe blow to the German army and that, if it was not a ‘victory’, then the offensive was at least a strategic success:

German strategy in 1917 was in large part a reaction to the Somme. The Germans abandoned the 1916 battlefield by withdrawing to the Hindenburg Line, and opened unrestricted submarine warfare in an attempt to defeat Britain in the full knowledge that this was likely to bring the USA into the war, with ultimately disastrous consequences for Germany. This is a powerful vindication of Haig’s strategy.

Sheffield and Bourne likewise reinforce the now common ‘revisionist’ argument that, by the end of the Somme, the BEF was a much more effective and experienced force than it had been in July 1916. This was of major importance, for Haig, they state, was much more than a battlefield commander: ‘He presided over the BEF’s expansion and development, taking a keen interest in diverse matters, including reforming the logistic system, training and minor tactics. Improvements in administration and infrastructure were vital elements in the learning curve that transformed the BEF from the clumsy organisation of July 1916 to the formidable army of 1918’. Although they find it difficult to quantify his influence, Sheffield and Bourne are in no doubt that, as Commander-in-Chief, Haig ‘deserves a share of the credit for the transformation of the BEF, just as he deserves a share of the blame for battlefield setbacks’.⁹²

As the ninetieth anniversary of the Somme drew near, so the stream of new books about Haig and the battle continued to flow. The American scholar Andrew Wiest produced an articulate, if short, study of Haig’s command of the BEF which largely echoed the conclusions presented by Gary Sheffield. Wiest views the reactions of the Germans to the Somme – in the withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line and the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare – as confirmation of the doubts of the German high command concerning their army’s ability to endure another such round of attrition. He therefore supports the argument that the attrition on the Somme ‘should be seen as an essential step along the path to eventual overall victory in 1918’. Like Sheffield, Wiest is not uncritical of Haig, suggesting that the latter’s command style was variable, that Haig expected too much from several of his major attacks and that he and Rawlinson often failed to grasp the lessons of the artillery’s role in the offensive. Yet, if the Somme was not the great victory that ended the war, neither was it ‘the fruitless catastrophe of recent historical memory’.⁹³ The main thrust of Walter Reid’s 2006 biography of Haig is implicit in its title – Architect of Victory – though Reid frequently reminds us of the colossal price paid by the British army for the policy of ‘wearing down’ the Germans on the Somme. In Reid’s opinion, the BEF’s piecemeal attacks on narrow fronts in July and August 1916, including the successive assaults on High Wood, ‘cannot be justified even on an attritional basis’. Haig also stands accused of allowing the battle to drag on in the terrible weather conditions of the late autumn of 1916. Reid, in fact, sees much of the value of the Somme offensive as lying in its ‘educational function’. At every level of the BEF, he remarks, ‘commanders learned lessons and learned them very quickly, though in recognising this one must always remember just how expensive their education was’. Reid too follows Professor Sheffield in highlighting the importance of the training pamphlets SS 143 and SS 144, which appeared eleven months before the so-called German ‘stormtrooper’s manual Der Angriff im Stellungskrieg (The Attack in Position Warfare) dating from January 1918. In such official pamphlets, and the thinking that they reflect, lay ‘the genesis of the transformation of the British army which would achieve victory two years later’. In the end, Haig’s shortcomings were ‘not overwhelming. The dreadfulness of the Somme was the fault not of Haig but of modern warfare’. Haig, in essence, was still at the beginning of his own learning curve.⁹⁴

Another biography of Haig, by Gary Mead, followed hot on the heels of Reid’s study of the Commander-in-Chief, but, if less pro-Haig than the books by Wiest and Reid, it added little of substance to the debate. In general, Mead recognises Haig’s devotion to duty, gritty determination, receptiveness to new technology and utter dedication to his profession, but also stresses his tendency towards obstinacy and dangerous optimism. Mead notes the benefits that Haig and the BEF gained by welcoming the appointment of Sir Eric Geddes as Director-General of Transportation at GHQ. However, he insists that the Somme threw the weaknesses of Haig’s personality and the army’s traditional modus operandi into a harsh light. What Mead fails to explain is precisely how Britain’s unskilled citizen army of 1916 developed, under Haig’s leadership, into the highly effective and modern all-arms force of August 1918. The inadequacies of this biography are revealed by the fact that Mead allocates less than four pages to the decisive Allied counter-strokes and offensive operations of July to November 1918.⁹⁵

A far more valuable contribution to the historiography of the BEF in the Great War was made by Dr Simon Robbins of the Imperial War Museum, whose British Generalship on the Western Front, 1914–1918: Defeat into Victory appeared in 2005. The product of lengthy and painstaking examination of an immense range of archival and published sources, this book adds yet more scholarly weight to the ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the war on the Western Front, helping to explode the long-established stereotype of a blundering BEF with the perception that the formations fighting under Haig’s command became increasingly effective from 1916 onwards. Dr Robbins analyses in great detail the learning process whereby the small, close-knit officer corps of 1914 not only overcame the heavy losses suffered in the opening battles of the war, and also the widespread ‘de-skilling’ that accompanied the huge expansion of the BEF, but managed to adapt to new technology and to retrain and transform itself into a body capable of planning and winning the victories of 1918. All this, moreover, was done while fighting a skilful and implacable enemy, by officers who were invariably operating at levels of command of which they had no previous experience. In these circumstances, as Simon Robbins illustrates, it is small wonder that there were mistakes and reverses or that the learning process was sometimes irregular. Nevertheless, the formation commanders of the BEF were a younger, fitter and more dynamic group by the end of the war and, having adopted a more managerial approach than hitherto, were able to oversee the introduction, codification and application of key new developments in tactics, staff work, operational planning, training and all-arms co-operation. This was an enormous achievement which, thanks to scholars such as Dr Robbins, is finally receiving the recognition it merits.

Training and Tactics

Robbins reiterates the importance of the improvements in the BEF’s artillery techniques which occurred during, or as a result of, the Somme offensive. The employment of the creeping, or rolling, barrage – a moving curtain of fire in front of the advancing infantry – was now becoming standard practice. The introduction of the new 106 fuse, which detonated on immediate impact with the ground, enabled barbed wire to be cut more efficiently without cratering the terrain over which the infantry had to assault. Increasing attention was paid to the calibration of each field gun, and to the amount of wear suffered by individual barrels, as well as to the need to make adjustments to allow for changes in temperature, wind and barometric pressure. All these factors, together with the more precise location of enemy batteries, improved accuracy, helped the gunners to neutralise rather than destroy the enemy defences, and encouraged a shift towards surprise bombardments without registration – thus greatly assisting the battle performance of the British artillery during 1917 and 1918. Robbins similarly re-emphasises the crucial role of Brigadier-General Arthur Solly-Flood as Director-General of Training from early 1917, in recommending and overseeing the changes in the structure of the infantry platoon from four rifle sections to specialist bombing (grenade), rifle, Lewis gun and rifle grenade sections; in disseminating these tactical and organisational reforms through the widespread issue of manuals such as SS 143 and SS 144; and in seeking to standardise and co-ordinate training based on the new tactical principles. The infantry platoon – now being more self-contained – could more successfully exploit the greater firepower it possessed in the form of rifle grenades and Lewis guns and was, at least in theory, more capable of dealing with enemy strongpoints. Within each platoon, the rifle grenadiers and Lewis gunners now acted as the covering fire team while the assault team comprised the rifle and bombing sections. It was, in effect, ‘an army in miniature’ with its own fire support, though Robbins is overstepping the mark in suggesting that, from 1917, the German machine guns ‘ceased to intimidate’.⁹⁶

Two years after the publication of the above work, Alistair Geddes explored, in greater depth, the central part played by Solly-Flood in the reorganisation of the British infantry platoon and of the BEF’s subsequent training. Already an advocate of a return to fire and movement tactics during rehearsals for the Somme, when he was GOC of the 35th Brigade in the 12th (Eastern) Division, Solly-Flood was appointed Commandant of the Third Army School in November 1916, apparently at the instigation of General Allenby, then commander of the Third Army, but almost certainly with Haig’s knowledge and backing. The research undertaken by Geddes indicates that, at the school, Solly-Flood was expected to experiment with new infantry formations and tactics and that, as part of his brief, he joined a party of British officers who visited the French army at Chalons in late November to study its current practice. The French, as the fighting on the Somme had shown, were clearly more advanced in this sphere than the BEF, having adopted a self-contained platoon organisation, including specialist bombing and automatic rifle sections and riflemen trained as rifle-grenadiers. The British observers swiftly appreciated the potential of these measures and Geddes presents strong evidence that, in offering an ‘off-the-shelf’ solution to problems with which the BEF had been wrestling on the Somme, the new French platoon tactics were the inspiration for SS 143. ‘It is not surprising’, Geddes states, ‘that Solly-Flood should have taken these ideas away with him to Third Army School to experiment with and modify for use by the BEF’.⁹⁷

By early January 1917, Solly-Flood was clearly testing the new platoon organisation, attack formations and tactical methods which were being adapted for British needs and specially tried out by the 7th Norfolks, who had served under Solly-Flood when he was commander of 35th Brigade. Meanwhile, other parties of British and Dominion officers were visiting the French army and drawing similar conclusions. As Geddes argues in his scholarly dissertation, not all senior officers were aware of Solly-Flood’s activities, which explains why Lieutenant-General Sir Julian Byng sanctioned Arthur Currie’s move to a new platoon organisation and training methods in the Canadian Corps in January 1917. Geddes also notes that the 29th Division successfully employed the ‘French method of capturing strong points’ by working round them with Lewis guns in an operation on 27 January.⁹⁸ However, the final and principal impetus for the changes seems to have come from a demonstration by the 7th Norfolks on 2 February which was attended by Haig and some 200 officers of the Third Army. Shortly afterwards, Haig gave the green light for the appointment of Solly-Flood as head of the Training Directorate, for the adoption of the new platoon organisation and for the production of the relevant training pamphlets. Alistair Geddes suggests that SS 144 was, in fact, circulated first, on 14 February, followed by SS 143, probably in March.⁹⁹ He also lays considerable stress on the point that, as a consequence of these developments, Solly-Flood was able to restructure the BEF’s training system and to redesign and standardise the schools at each level of the BEF’s hierarchy in an effort (not always successful) to meet the demands of the platoon organisation and tactics covered by SS 143. In Geddes’s view, the BEF’s most important publication with regard to training – SS 152: Instructions for the Training of the British Armies in France – initially issued in June 1917, has received all too little attention from historians, even though, to standardise training, it prescribed the curriculum of every school and the syllabus of each course. Contrary to previously held opinion, Geddes maintains, it is evident that ‘Haig and GHQ did provide leadership by overseeing the development of a sophisticated training organisation which was responsible for the creation of the BEF’s tactical doctrine and its uniform application in its schools system’.¹⁰⁰ Both Jim Beach and Dave Molineux have recently underlined that the updating of training pamphlets, continued experiments with the platoon structure and the addition of an Inspectorate of Training under Ivor Maxse, lead one to conclude that, even in the final months of the war, GHQ remained proactive in seeking to adapt training and tactics to the changing circumstances of the Western Front. Since GHQ plainly endeavoured to apply uniform methods of tactics and training, ‘the BEF’s learning curve in this instance was neither haphazard nor accidental’.¹⁰¹

Even more recent doctoral research by Trevor Harvey has revealed that Arthur Currie’s visit to the French army at Verdun between 5 and 8 January 1917 was made in the company of twenty other officers. Interestingly, two-thirds of the twenty-one officers in the party were gunners, including such senior figures as ‘Curly’ Birch (Haig’s chief artillery adviser at GHQ) and Herbert Uniacke (MGRA, Fifth Army) and some relatively junior officers such as Major Alan Brooke, then still with the 18th (Eastern) Division. Among the other divisional commanders present on this visit were Cyril Deverell (3rd Division), Reginald Stephens (5th Division), Arthur Scott (12th Division), Victor Couper (14th Division) and Cameron Shute (63rd (Royal Naval) Division). It is notable from these details that nearly all the members of the party were drawn from the First, Third and Fifth Armies, which were to be involved in the offensive at Arras in April 1917, while the combination of influential senior figures and promising junior officers strongly suggests that not only were the participants nominated by GHQ and the appropriate army commanders but also that a degree of ‘talent spotting’ was being exercised. Trevor Harvey’s ongoing research additionally indicates that the subsequent production and publication of the pamphlet SS 139/3: Counter-Battery Work may have owed something to the Verdun visit. It could therefore be inferred from this that the simultaneous counter-battery developments, the restructuring of the infantry platoon and the lesson-dissemination process were all parts of one reform and reorganisation movement approved and authorised by a proactive GHQ which bore little resemblance to the remote and isolated body depicted by Tim Travers.¹⁰²

Command and Control

Another major pillar supporting the ‘revisionist’ arguments was provided by Andy Simpson’s book Directing Operations: British Corps Command on the Western Front 1914–18. Published in 2006, this is one of the most significant recent studies of the actual mechanics and functioning of command in the Great War. Like Albert Palazzo’s Seeking Victory on the Western Front (2000), it stresses the importance of Field Service Regulations Part I (Operations), drawn up under Haig’s aegis (as Director of Staff Duties) in 1909, and shows how FSR I, supplemented by the SS series of pamphlets, helped to shape the ethos of the BEF and was consistently applied and used by commanders throughout the conflict. The principle of deference to ‘the man on the spot’ was enshrined in FSR I and encouraged, where possible, the devolution of command and control downwards. It may be perceived from Simpson’s study that this process of decentralisation and devolution was, to some extent, already under way by, and during, the Somme offensive. Simpson describes how, within the framework of the overall strategic plan and objectives agreed by GHQ and the army level of command, the army concerned – e.g. the Fourth Army – would then assign to its corps the resources which it hoped would suffice for the task set. While the general timetable for a big attack would probably come from the army headquarters, corps could make their own arrangements within it. Indeed, as Simpson demonstrates, the role of corps in operations had grown by 1916 in parallel with the increasing importance of artillery and of the need to co-ordinate its activities in battle. Next, according to Simpson, divisions would be informed of their objectives and expected to produce detailed plans of attack for their individual sectors. Thus divisions acted within the parameters defined by corps but did not simply have plans imposed on them. During this planning process there was often discussion and consultation at all levels – even down to brigade and battalion – though the extent to which the ideas of subordinates were listened to, or adopted, in practice frequently depended upon the character, temperament or command style of the corps and army commanders involved.

This latter issue, and the fact that, in 1916, no one in the BEF, including Haig himself, was yet quite sure when, or how, to apply the principles of FSR I, helps to explain why there were variations in the attack formations, tactics and artillery plans adopted by the different corps and divisions both on 1 July and throughout the Somme battle. As Simpson detects, the huge changes in the style and techniques of warfare employed by the BEF, coupled with the need to impose a degree of consistency on a number of corps and divisions undreamed of in 1914, led, for a period on the Somme, to a more prescriptive style of command, particularly as exercised by the relatively authoritarian Hubert Gough as the battle progressed. This drift towards prescriptive methods was ‘made all the more necessary because the commanders and staffs of corps and divisions had not been trained at these levels of command and consequently lacked the trained judgement required to use FSR I effectively’. Poor battlefield communications in 1916 also made it highly tempting to attempt to cover all likely eventualities prior to an attack, in case any variation from the plan threw the ‘whole complex machine’ out of gear, and the ‘vital need for a comprehensive artillery programme to permit any infantry advance exacerbated this’. However, as the BEF in general moved towards a more managerial and consultative style of command, the advance, in Simpson’s judgement, ‘leaves no doubt’ that the Battle of Arras in April–May 1917 ‘did encapsulate the lessons of the Somme’ and that the Battle of Messines in June ‘represented a further progression in tactical and operational thought’. Some staffs, by then, had greater experience, ‘corps were less prescriptive in their dealings with divisions too, and their respective responsibilities were now clearer. Corps dealt with the general (or operational) and divisions with the local (or tactical)’.¹⁰³

Peter Hart, the Imperial War Museum’s Oral Historian, has produced a number of commendable books on Great War topics, all making extensive use of the Museum’s rich collections. These works include one called simply The Somme, which came out in 2005, the same year as Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson produced a book bearing an identical title. Hart’s primary focus is upon the experience of relatively junior officers and other ranks but his final assessments show that he is fully aware of the main trends of the recent historical debate. As he remarks in the concluding part of his study: ‘There was a learning curve and the British Army slowly ascended it, though occasional, heart-stopping “big dipper” moments still occurred right to the very end of the war’. He also gives due credit to the ‘indomitable defence’ mounted by the German army on the Somme. ‘Overall’, says Hart, ‘it was a supreme example of sustained courage in one of the greatest defensive battles ever fought in the history of warfare’.¹⁰⁴

Ever since the publication, in 1992, of their seminal work Command on the Western Front, a more lengthy study of the Somme by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson had been eagerly awaited by historians. When it finally appeared in 2005, it proved, in some respects, to be a disappointment. On the credit side, it contains much excellent analysis of the realities of operations ‘at the sharp end’, especially the impact of battle upon individual formations. It reveals, for instance, that the British 1st Division suffered over 10,000 casualties in an 80-day period between July and September 1916 (almost 100 per cent of its infantry strength) without actually taking part in any of the major set-piece assaults launched by the BEF during that time. Despite such losses, the 1st Division, like many others, not only survived the bloody ordeal of the Somme but still emerged as an effective fighting formation. The explanation, Prior and Wilson submit, lay not in superior training or skill in manoeuvre but in ‘the ability to stick close behind a barrage’ and in what Winston Churchill called the ‘wonderful tenacity’ of the British infantry.¹⁰⁵

Prior and Wilson reserve their main criticisms, as in earlier books, for Haig and his principal subordinates who, in their eyes, were repeatedly deficient in strategic insight, tactical understanding and organisation. Some corps commanders – such as Pulteney (III Corps), Hunter-Weston (VIII Corps) and Horne (XV Corps) – are similarly castigated for poor decision-making. A handful of divisional and brigade commanders or BGRAs, including H.B. ‘Hooky’ Walker (1st Australian Division), H.H. Tudor (9th Division), Ivor Maxse (18th Division), Harold Higginson (53rd Brigade) and Thomas Shoubridge (54th Brigade), receive some praise for their tactical flair and innovation, but most brigade and divisional commanders remain shadowy figures at best in this study. The authors justify this by stating that ‘it was often not the quality of the brigade or divisional command that led to success but the position in which their troops were placed by decisions made elsewhere’. If adequate fire support was absent, ‘a Maxse, Tudor, or Walker could make no difference whatever’.¹⁰⁶

Most First World War scholars would find it hard to disagree with Prior and Wilson’s central criticisms of the British high command on the Somme. There were fatal contradictions, faulty assumptions and misunderstandings in the British planning for the assault on 1 July. As the offensive unfolded, Haig consistently failed to exercise sufficient ‘grip’ on his subordinates, to co-ordinate their actions, or to control their tendency to persist with small-scale, isolated and narrow-front attacks. In addition, Haig, Gough and Rawlinson seemed unable, at the time, to grasp the full implications of the successes of 14 July and 25 September with regard to the formidable weight of artillery fire which, on those occasions, had been concentrated on every yard of enemy trench attacked. And yet, however well-founded some of these points may be, the almost unrelieved litany of criticism in this book gives the study an unnecessarily negative and sour tone. In their concluding reflections on the Somme, the authors themselves totally fail to mention the positive lessons which Haig and GHQ not only drew from the campaign but acted upon during the winter of 1916–1917.¹⁰⁷ One has an uncomfortable feeling that the Prior and Wilson approach to the study of the Great War, with its recurrent emphasis on the failings of the most senior commanders and on the cardinal importance of artillery fire as an almost universal solution to all tactical problems, has become just a trifle formulaic. In their largely negative view of the British high command, they are now at variance with the majority of ‘revisionist’ historians in Britain.

The fact is that, because Prior and Wilson have chosen to focus their critical gaze on a few very senior officers, their view of the BEF’s command system is consequently somewhat restricted and, indeed, has been exposed as such by a number of works written by other British and Commonwealth scholars in the last decade or so. Thanks to these, we now have a much more rounded picture of British and Dominion commanders at all levels – and of the mechanics of command in the Great War (i.e. how it actually functioned in the field) – than we previously enjoyed. For example, Christopher Pugsley’s The Anzac Experience: New Zealand, Australia and Empire in the First World War (2004) contains an excellent summary of the process of learning and improvement which occurred in the BEF and its Dominion contingents between 1916 and 1918, and shows convincingly how gifted ‘middle management’ commanders, such as Andrew Russell of the New Zealand Division, could have a genuine and beneficial influence on the planning and conduct of operations.¹⁰⁸ These themes were also developed in Command and Control on the Western Front: The British Army’s Experience, 1914–1918, a book of essays by eight leading British and American historians, under the editorship of Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman, which appeared towards the end of 2004. The essays in question moved the debate about British generalship in the Great War a significant step forward by examining the practicalities of command and control at all levels, from GHQ down to battalion, demonstrating how operational and tactical command really did devolve downwards, particularly in the latter half of the war. Collectively, the essays leave a strong impression that the BEF’s command and control system was a good deal more flexible, pragmatic, robust and innovative than many earlier critics would have us believe, and that these qualities help to explain why the British and Dominion formations in France became much more effective in waging modern all-arms warfare by the summer and autumn of 1918.¹⁰⁹