Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War (Cassel Military)

by Gordon Corrigan

  * There were a number of independent brigades engaged in Normandy. In order to provide a proper comparison I have combined them into divisions

  Normandy is not engraved on the British national consciousness as a slaughter. Partly this is because in Normandy there was not much doubt that the British were winning, but more importantly we did not recruit our infantry battalions from small geographical areas. The 6th Battalion the Green Howards, a Territorial battalion supposedly raised from the Middlesbrough area, lost thirty-one men killed and took 250 casualties overall in one day, at Cristot on 11 June 1944. In the First War they would all have come from the same town or village, and their relatives would all have known one another. It would have been a significant loss, and the entire toll would have been engraved on one war memorial and remembered down the generations. As it was, two of the dead were American-born, two were from Liverpool, two from Sheffield, two from Birmingham, two from Derby and two from Middlesbrough. The homes of the other nineteen ranged from Edinburgh to Glamorgan, no two coming from the same place. The bill went unnoticed except by those most closely involved.

  The Somme is often thought of as five and a half months of staggering about in mud and attacking in blinding rain. In fact, for the whole months of July and August the temperature never dropped below a comfortable 60° Fahrenheit. In September it dropped below 60º on three days, and for roughly half of October the temperature fluctuated between 50º and 58º, with four days being described as ‘very cold’. In November it stayed between 54º and 57º until the last four days of the battle, when it fell to 37º on 17 November. In July 1.3 inches of rain were recorded over four days, in August two inches over twelve days and in September 2.8 inches over nine days; in October there were two inches of rain in sixteen days, and just under one inch over ten days before 18 November, the last day of the offensive. On that day also the first snow of the winter fell. On two days (16 October and 9 November) frost was recorded.14 The wettest period was the last two days of October and the first week of November, when 1.3 inches of rain fell in eight days. There is no doubt that towards the close of the battle the weather did have an effect on operations, not so much because the infantry could not fight in the mud as because movement of vehicles and artillery was hampered. On 10 November it was recorded that no movement at all was possible owing to the state of the ground. That said, the picture of a constant sea of mud is clearly false.

  Why did Haig not stop the battle when he saw that the casualties were so great? This oft-posed question assumes firstly that the casualty list was somehow disproportionate, and secondly that Haig could have stopped the battle. Of all the British soldiers involved in the Somme offensive, seventy-four per cent emerged at the end of it without a scratch. Given that one of the primary aims was to relieve the pressure on Verdun and thus prevent the Germans winning the war, a twenty-six per cent toll of killed, wounded and taken prisoner is not excessive, although I accept that to be a subjective opinion. Haig could not have stopped the battle because the British were not alone. This was a coalition war and this was an Allied offensive. Given their involvement at Verdun, which absorbed seventy-three French divisions, one could not have blamed the French had they declined to take part at all.15 As it was, their part in the Somme, while considerably smaller to begin with, was eventually not much less significant than that of the British – forty-four divisions compared to fifty-three – and they had around 90,000 men killed there.16 There were 160,000 French deaths at Verdun, and the total for the year of 1916 came to 270,000 dead French soldiers. The British Empire lost 115,389 dead in 1916: 109,411 on the Western Front, 3,871 in Mesopotamia, 579 in East Africa, 857 in Salonika, 471 in Palestine, 180 in Gallipoli and twenty in minor theatres elsewhere. The British had come through 1916 much less scathed than their principal ally or main enemy.17

  Haig did not want to attack on the Somme at all, but since the politics of a coalition war meant that he had to, the preparation and planning were as good as they could be. That more was not achieved was due to an underestimation of the strength of German defences, a shortage of artillery ammunition and, more than anything else, the lack of experience of the New Armies. Once the Germans had attacked towards Verdun, waiting another year before launching a major offensive was simply not an option for the British. The Somme had to happen, and it had to continue until German reserves were used up, and until the Germans could not win the war in 1916. The tactics were simple because it was all that the new Armies, in their first blooding, were capable of at the time. Had Haig been left to follow his own counsel and attack out of Flanders, or anywhere else for that matter, he could not have lowered the ante for putting a civilian army into the field, in its first battle, against an enemy that had had universal male conscription since 1870, had prepared for European war for twenty years and had spent eighteen months preparing his positions for defence. Even so, the damage inflicted on the Germans by these New Armies was far more than might have been expected. Ludendorff, effectively Chief of Staff of the German army, admitted that his troops had suffered very heavy losses, first at Verdun and then on the Somme, and that morale was at a low ebb. Before the end of the year both he and Hindenburg would be demanding the use of child labour in Germany to release men for the front.18 It was far from being a needless slaughter.

  The British learned much from the Somme, and this was reflected in new methods and structures implemented during the winter. The infantry platoon – the basic building block of that arm of the service on which the bulk of the fighting fell – underwent a radical change. Instead of a headquarters and four sections, each section with the same weapons mix and with the same tasks, the platoon was now reorganised on a functional basis. The new infantry platoon still had a headquarters consisting of a subaltern officer, a sergeant and two private soldiers, and each section had an NCO commander and a minimum of eight men, but each section would now have its own specific role: bombers, Lewis gun, riflemen and rifle bombers.

  The Bomber Section had two teams, each of two bombers and two bayonet men. Their task was to bomb along an enemy trench, the throwers protected by the bayonet men. Each thrower carried five grenades, and the rest at least ten each. The Lewis Gun Section provided the platoon’s fire support. Two men operated the gun itself, the remainder carried ammunition for it (a total of thirty forty-seven-round drums) and protected the gunners. The Rifle Section had the platoon’s picked shots and bayonet-fighting experts, and also provided scouts when the platoon was moving across country. The Rifle Bombers were armed with rifles and a cup discharger for firing grenades into an enemy trench or behind cover. They were described in the training pamphlet issued in February 1917 as ‘the howitzer of the infantry’.19 In addition to his specialist role every man had to be able to fulfil any other of the platoon’s roles, and throughout the winter training was carried out to accustom the troops to the methods learned at great cost on the Somme.

  A suggested format for platoon training programmes was laid down, with the first period devoted to individual and section training and the second to platoon training, after which the men would move on to battalion and company training, then to training by brigades and divisions. A typical training programme laid down for the first phase for platoons out of the line was:

  Before Breakfast

  Section drill

  After Breakfast

  One hour each section in its own weapon, the rifle sections being allotted half to the Lewis Gun Section and half to the Rifle Bomb Section.

  One hour the whole platoon bomb throwing. [As there were insufficient grenades for this always to be done ‘live’, trainers improvised. In one brigade turnips were used, with nails stuck in them to represent the pin.]

  One hour physical training and bayonet fighting.

  Finish the morning with ceremonial, that is to say, form up and march past the Platoon or Company Commander on the way to dinners.20

  After Dinners

  Communicating drill and control of fire drill. Musketry o
n the range alternately by sections.21

  Recreation at 4 p.m.

  NCOs refreshed in the next day’s work at 6.30 p.m.22

  For the second phase of training men were also to be practised in wiring and digging, map-reading, message-writing, communications, mopping-up and ‘simple tactical schemes’.

  By the spring of 1917 the British army was no longer a collection of enthusiastic amateurs but a hardened, skilled and trained force, which got better and better as the war went on.

  NOTES

  1 André Laurent, La Bataille de la Somme 1916, Martelle, Amiens, 1998.

  2 Laurent, La Bataille de la Somme 1916, Martelle, Amiens, 1998.

  3 Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, La Grande Guerre des Français 1914–18, Perrin, Paris, 1994.

  4 Miles, Military Operations in France and Belgium, 1916, Vol. II, Macmillan, London, 1938.

  5 Jean Autin, Foch, Perrin, Paris, 1987.

  6 Laurent, La Bataille de la Somme 1916, Martelle, Amiens, 1998.

  7 Times are changing for the better, however. In 1998 a joint Anglo-Irish initiative erected a memorial at Messines to the 16th and 36th Divisions, and the annual Remembrance Day parade in Dublin is at last recognised by the government of Ireland. One might ask why, if the two traditions could work together so well in war, they cannot do so in peace?

  8 Quoted in Trevor Pidgeon, With the Tanks at Flers, Vol. I, Fairmile Books, Cobham, 1995.

  9 Hastie was an officer of the Highland Light Infantry. ‘Dinnaken’ is Scots for ‘I do not know’. I am grateful to Lt Col. Ian Tedford, of the Scottish persuasion, for his assistance in translation.

  10 John Baynes, Far from a Donkey: the Life of General Sir Ivor Maxse, Brasseys, London, 1995.

  11 The DSO was then a decoration for junior officers, with their seniors getting the CB (Companion of the Order of the Bath). In 1915 the MC (Military Cross) was instituted and the DSO became a leadership award for more senior officers.

  12 Duroselle, La Grande Guerre des Français 1914–18, Perrin, Paris, 1994.

  13 Autin, Foch, Perrin, Paris, 1987.

  14 Chris McCarthy, The Somme: The Day-by-Day Account, Arms and Armour Press, London, 1993.

  15 Forty-three French divisions served one tour at Verdun, another twenty-three spent two tours there, and a further seven divisions served there three times ormore. A tour was until the division was considered to be ‘used up’, which averaged fifteen days. William Serman and Jean-Paul Bertaud, Nouvelle Histoire Militaire de la France, Fayard, Paris, 1998.

  16 Most French sources say 140,000 killed, but when looked at in conjunction with official French returns of the total killed for 1916 and the number killed at Verdun, this is an overestimate.

  17 The death total for the British army alone for the whole of the Second World War was 171,000.

  18 Major-General Sir John Davidson, Haig, Master of the Field, Peter Nevill, London, 1953, and General Erich von Ludendorff, The General Staff and Its Problems, Hutchinson, London, 1920.

  19 Instructions for the Training of Platoons for Offensive Action 1917, General Staff, February 1917.

  20 In the British army the midday meal for other ranks is always known as ‘dinner’. The evening meal is ‘tea’. Just to confuse, officers eat lunch at midday and dinner in the evening.

  21 Although the musket disappeared in the mid-nineteenth century, the British army continued to refer to rifle shooting as musketry until the late 1960s.

  22 Ibid.

  11

  THE FROCKS AND THE BRASS HATS

  It has become a cliché that ‘war is too important to be left to generals’. Why so? One might as well say that flying an aeroplane is too important to be left to the pilot or a heart transplant too important to be left to the surgeons; that architecture cannot be left to architects, or making shoes to cobblers. The origin of the saying is lost, but one can be pretty sure that a politician coined it. Most democratic politicians, whose authority derives from an election every five years or so, are suspicious of an institution that is patently non-democratic and which, in the way that it carries on its business, is even anti-democratic. Governments are reluctant to embark on a venture whose course they cannot predict, like a war, but when they do embark on it they want to control it. Ever since the Restoration of 1660 the British constitution has incorporated checks and balances to guard against an over-mighty monarch, and by extension to keep the army under firm civilian control. The memory of Cromwell’s major-generals may have faded, but until very recently the legal life of the army was for only one year at a time, and if the Annual Army Act was not passed by Parliament the army ceased to have a lawful existence.

  In Imperial Germany the constitution gave the army almost unfettered discretion once war started; the British army, however, operated under a system of control designed to make a military coup impossible, and which actually made operations of war very difficult. For centuries Britain’s defence had been the Royal Navy, and the voters were interested in the Naval Estimates. The army, on the other hand, was seen as an imperial police force, was not highly regarded by the public in peacetime, and was rarely an electoral issue. It was usually neglected and underfunded, and was always far smaller than that of any potential European enemy, relying as it did on voluntary enlistment. As the first decade of twentieth century wore on and it became more likely that there would be a European war, some thought was given to Britain’s likely role, and this thinking was accelerated with the establishment of the Expeditionary Force. Even then, the Expeditionary Force was not intended solely for Europe, but was available for deployment wherever Imperial interests might be threatened. Some soldiers who were advocates of the ‘WF’ or ‘With the French’ policy pointed out that the British could never, by voluntary enlistment, recruit an army of the size that might be needed for European war; but when in 1912 Field Marshal Lord Roberts, in a scaremongering speech warning of a German invasion, expressed support for the National Service League – which advocated conscription – a motion to reduce his half-pay was tabled in the House of Commons.

  Of course war cannot be waged in a political vacuum, and of course it is right that the British army should be subordinate to government control. It is for the government to decide whether to go to war, when to go to war, who to go to war with and who to go to war against. Having taken the nation into war, the politicians then expect the soldiers to win it, and the soldiers would much prefer the government to allow them to get on with plying their trade, which they have trained for and prepared for all their lives. This did not happen in the Great War, and the history of political–military relations between 1914 and 1918 is one of the generals trying to prevent what they saw as meddling by ignorant amateurs, and the politicians trying to restrain what they thought was a coterie of bloodthirsty generals who had no conception of the political imperatives.

  Soldiers and politicians rarely understand each other, for they have different aims. Politics is about consensus, whether nationally or within the Cabinet, and it is about power – the winning of the next election, and the patronage and opportunities that flow therefrom. Soldiers have a much simpler aim: the destruction of the enemy’s armed forces. Politicians are accustomed to discussion, with everyone having their say; soldiers make a decision, issue the necessary orders and get on with it. Politicians accommodate; soldiers reject anything that does not contribute directly to the fulfilment of the operational requirement.

  The British army had a long tradition of remaining aloof from politics, but this did not mean that generals of the early twentieth century did not intrigue. Senior officers and senior politicians were, in the main, drawn from the same social class, and if they did not often meet professionally, they did socially, and generals did lobby those whom they thought sympathetic to their cause. The army had very nearly become politicised over the issue of Irish Home Rule in 1914, when many in the military sympathised with Protestant opposition to a dilution of the British connection with Ireland, but politicians and soldiers withdre
w from the brink just in time. Even though many of their fellow officers privately shared their views, those who had been too vociferous in the Unionist interest, like Major-Generals Wilson and Hugh Gough, were regarded with some suspicion by their colleagues. Sir John French, who would command the BEF on the outbreak of war, had to resign along with the Secretary of State for War, J. E. B. Seeley, when their written guarantees to officers that the army would not be called upon to put down Ulster Protestant resistance to Home Rule were publicly repudiated by the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith.1

  As the war went on, confrontation and disagreement between British politicians and soldiers proliferated. Inevitably perhaps, the politicians have won the historiographical battle, for it was they who had access to the press and who could have their speeches recorded in Hansard. The public perception now is of decent elected representatives of the people trying to curb pig-headed generals from wasting the lives of yet more young British men, and of the government being prevented from applying an intelligent eye to the war by generals fixated upon a Western-Front strategy. For many years that viewpoint was reinforced by writers such as Basil Liddell Hart, whose doctrine of the indirect approach was not far short of a mantra for critics of the conduct of the First World War.2

  Constitutionally, in 1914, the army and the navy owed their loyalty to the King, to whose orders they were subject. In practice the government controlled the army through the Secretary of State for War, a Cabinet minister, who chaired the Army Council, which in turn gave instructions to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the army. Another Cabinet minister, the First Lord of the Admiralty, controlled the Royal Navy in a similar fashion.