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

by Gordon Corrigan

  In the 1920s the League was shown to be toothless. Raging inflation, the collapse of the economy and civil unrest in Germany led to the rise of extreme nationalism, the unravelling of the peace settlement and war again in 1939. It is often held that the climate that fostered the rise of National Socialism was created by the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Certainly the cutting-off the German eastern provinces by the Polish Corridor was always going to be a casus belli, as were the demilitarisation of the Rhineland and the existence of substantial ethnic German minorities outside Germany’s borders. Nevertheless it was not just Germany but the whole developed world that went into economic recession in the 1920s, and the Germans can hardly be blamed for voting for a party that promised full employment, a stable currency, the recovery of Germania Irredenta, good roads and trains that would run on time. The Nazi uniforms were smart too. All would-be dictators look for internal and external enemies, and Hitler had no trouble finding them: Germany had not been defeated on the field of battle, but stabbed in the back by traitors at home, aided and abetted by international Jewry, Bolshevism and faithless politicians. If Versailles had been kinder to Germany, then perhaps phase two of the Great War of 1914–45, as it has been called, might not have happened; but it is difficult to see how the terms could have been much different. France was determined to regain her lost provinces and wanted security against ever being invaded again; the nationalist aspirations of the Poles and the races of Austria-Hungary had to be taken into account; Britain had to ensure that she was no longer threatened by a naval arms race, and Germany was not a natural colonial power in any case. The war-guilt clause and the reparations were window dressing: Germany could not afford to pay, and after one instalment the reparations were forgotten. Had the First World War not happened there would almost certainly have been a Russian Revolution anyway, although power might have remained with relative moderates like Kerensky instead of being seized by the Communists, and Russia might have developed into a liberal democracy. Might have, because there is no democratic tradition in Russia.

  Hangovers from the war of 1914–18 are still with us. Versailles failed to reconcile cultural and religious differences in the Balkans, which with the demise of communism have reverted to chaos and tie up increasing numbers of British troops today. The founding of the state of Israel flowed from the Balfour declaration of 2 November 1917. America had entered the war and the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised a national home for the Jews in Palestine, his motive being to obtain Jewish support for the war effort. As the only country where Jewish opinion mattered was the United States, this was in fact a ploy to attract an influential section of American opinion. The declaration was abrogated by Chamberlain’s government in 1939 as a result of Arab objections and Jewish terrorism, but it was too late. The terrible fate of the Jews in Germany during the Hitler era, to say nothing of American pressure, made it impossible for Britain to block the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and Israel came into being in 1948. Israelis are a charming and hospitable people, and the British, with their natural sympathy for the underdog, are inclined to admire their courage and their ability to stand up to far stronger enemies. While it is not the purpose of this book to argue the validity of the Jewish claim to a state in Palestine – a claim based on their god’s having supposedly granted the land to them at some time in the distant past – the fact is that there was, and is, no British interest in Israel. We buy nothing from her apart from Jaffa oranges, which would presumably grow there anyway, and we have no military understandings with her. Israel exists because of American subsidies. There was, and is, a major British interest in the Arab states – oil – and the troubles still raging in the Middle East today might not continue to threaten the peace of the world if Britain had stuck to her traditional Arabist policy, and not betrayed the Arabs at Versailles.

  All this is speculation, and we cannot undo what has been done. Britain entered the war because she had to, and in 1918 it was the British army that made the major contribution to the defeat of the German army – and whatever the Germans later claimed, it was a defeat. The British army in 1918 was more professional, better organised and better led than it was in 1945; this is hardly surprising, because in 1918 it had been fighting the main enemy in the main theatre for four and a quarter years, whereas in 1945 it had been doing so only since the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944. Even then, it can be argued that in 1944–5 the major theatre was not Western Europe at all, but the Eastern Front, where the bulk of the German army was.

  Field Marshal Haig, the bête noire of today’s critics of Great War generalship, was congratulated by the King and lauded in the newspapers. For winning the war he was offered a viscountcy by Lloyd George, the same level of the peerage that had been given to Sir John French for not winning it. Haig refused any honours until the government agreed financial provisions for disabled ex-soldiers, which eventually it did. Then, after intervention by the King, he accepted an earldom. He remained as Commander-in-Chief of the BEF until April 1919 when he became Commander-in-Chief Home Forces, with Robertson assuming command of the Army of Occupation in Germany. When the Home Forces post was abolished in January 1920 Haig was still only fifty-nine, and might reasonably have expected to be appointed to a viceroyalty or a governor-generalship. Lloyd George was still Prime Minister, however (he had won a landslide victory in the 1918 election), and he was not going to do anything for a man whom he detested. Haig devoted the rest of his life to the welfare of ex-servicemen, and it was his prestige and powers of persuasion that managed to combine a number of mutually hostile and quarrelling ex-servicemen’s organisations into the British Legion, not only in the United Kingdom but also around the empire. He died of a heart attack in January 1928, and was mourned by hundreds of thousands who had served under his command in the greatest war in British history.

  ‘Wully’ Robertson, who had done so much to put the British army and the management of the war on a professional footing, and had acted as the buffer between Haig and those politicians who were out to undermine him, was promoted to field marshal and created a baronet in March 1920. As another soldier whom Lloyd George disliked, he was offered no further employment, and left the active list. He became Colonel of the Royal Horse Guards in January 1928, a singular and deserved honour for a man who had started his military career as a private soldier in the line cavalry, and held the appointment until his death in 1933. Henry Wilson, the clever, devious, political soldier whom Lloyd George did like, at least initially, and who had taken over from Robertson as CIGS, saw his influence decrease when Foch, who did not trust Wilson, took over as Allied Generalissimo in 1918. After the war he fell out with Lloyd George when the Prime Minister announced the end of conscription as soon as the Armistice was signed, without consulting the CIGS. Wilson became a baronet and a field marshal in July 1919 and left the active list in 1922, being elected Unionist member of parliament for a Northern Ireland constituency. He was murdered in London by the IRA in July 1922.

  Pershing went back to America and was promoted to General of the Armies, the first since George Washington, and the first actually to carry the rank.1 He was nominated as a presidential candidate, flirted half-heartedly with the idea and was not adopted, and became Chief of Army Staff (equivalent to CIGS) in 1921.2 As Chief of Staff he fought valiantly but largely unsuccessfully to preserve American military strength in a period of retrenchment and cost-cutting, and retired in 1924. His greatest legacy to the American army as its Chief was probably his reformation of the General Staff system, which developed into the branches of G1 (Administration and Personnel), G2 (Intelligence), G3 (Operations and Training), G4 (Matériel) and G5 (Civil Affairs), now used by all NATO armies. He established a War Plans Division in the War Department, and the schools system for peacetime training. In retirement he carried out various overseas visits and inspections on behalf of the government, and wrote My Experiences in the First World War – a mine of information but, it has to be said, not a
n easy read. He died peacefully in 1948.

  Marshal Foch became a member of the Académie Française in 1920, and he and Marshal Joffre (not a member of the Académie) did little more than participate in ceremonial occasions until they died in 1929 and 1931 respectively. Marshal Pétain, the ‘Saviour of Verdun’ and the man who restored order to the French army after the mutinies of 1917, was appointed to the Military Advisory Council, was Minister of War in 1934, and became ambassador to Madrid in 1939. On 17 May 1940, with the German invasion of France a week old, Pétain was recalled as Deputy Prime Minister of France. On 10 June the French government left the capital, and four days later German troops entered Paris. On 16 June Paul Reynaud resigned as Prime Minister and Pétain took his place. The next day, with French resistance almost at an end and the British Expeditionary Force having beaten an undignified retreat back to England via Dunkirk and Cherbourg, the Marshal announced an armistice. The nation that had defied Germany for four and a quarter long years when Pétain last commanded her armies had been defeated in a mere six weeks. On 10 July 1940 the French National Assembly voted ‘all powers to the government of the Republic under the authority and signature of Marshal Pétain’. For four years Pétain headed the collaborationist Vichy regime, and when France was finally liberated the Free French government of Charles de Gaulle (who had been an officer in Pétain’s old regiment and had been wounded and captured at Verdun in 1916) put the eighty-nine-year-old Marshal on trial for treason.3 The finding was guilty and the sentence death, commuted to life imprisonment on the Île d’Yeu in the Bay of Biscay. Pétain died in his island prison on 23 July 1951. The Pétain story does not quite end there, however, for in February 1973 his tomb on the Île d’Yeu was opened clandestinely and the body stolen; spirited away by those who wanted to lay him to rest with his soldiers in the cemetery at Fort Douaumont, monument to the defence of Verdun and symbol of French defiance. The coffin was found in a lock-up garage in Saint-Ouen and reinterred on the Île d’Yeu, where, as far as we know, it still is.

  The Kaiser spent his exile at Doorn in Holland. He rejected all overtures from the Nazis, realising that this arriviste party, that had sprung from the working and lower middle classes, was unlikely to restore the monarchy. Nevertheless he could not resist sending a message of congratulation to the German army when it occupied Paris; this irritated Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and led to the sequestration of the Doorn estate after the war. This deprived not the Kaiser, who died on 4 June 1941, but his son, Crown Prince William, who died a dissolute and poverty-stricken rake in the arms of his mistress in Italy in 1951. The Kaiser’s grandson died serving in the German army in 1940, and today’s claimants to the Hohenzollern throne serve in the British army under the name of von Preussen. Field Marshal von Hindenburg became President of the Weimar Republic, appointed Hitler as Chancellor, and died in 1934. Ludendorff became an ultra-nationalist, marched with Hitler in the abortive Munich putsch of November 1923, was tried for treason but acquitted, and died in 1937.

  Lloyd George remained Prime Minister of the United Kingdom until 1922, when he fell out with the Conservatives in his coalition, resigned and published a self-serving, exhaustive and exhausting account of his part in the Great War. The rest of his life was dogged by (well-founded) allegations of corruption while in office, particularly his enrichment by the sale of honours. He had an active sex life and Queen Mary advised her ladies-in-waiting never to be alone in a room with him. He was too unwell (and unwilling) to join Churchill’s coalition government in 1940 and died in 1945.

  After the war the British army was demobilised with almost indecent haste, leading to unrest when those considered essential to industry were released before others who had served for longer. The army itself settled down and appointed a committee under Lieutenant General Kirke to study the lessons of the war, with a view to putting things right for the next one. Whatever politicians might be saying on the hustings, the generals knew very well that there would always be wars. The committee, composed of officers who had all served in the late conflict, albeit in relatively junior posts, eventually presented its conclusions in voluminous detail in October 1932.4 Much of it was common sense: the need for thorough training; the importance of good intelligence; the advantages of modern equipment, including tanks and aircraft (this was a time when the army considered it had insufficient tanks, lacked offensive air support and was concerned over proposals to save money by reducing the number of heavy artillery units); the significance of good food, welfare facilities and medical support in the maintenance of morale; the pointlessness of trying to capture ground for its own sake; the vital necessity for artillery and infantry to work together, and the recognition that cavalry did not have the capability to break through defended lines. The report was still, alas, trying to convince readers that shrapnel should be discarded completely in favour of high explosive. It highlighted the problems of communications, with some headquarters being too far back and the commanders ignorant of what was happening at the front. The answer to this was radio, but even in 1932 the army still did not have enough battlefield radios for its needs. Much attention was paid to the preparation and training of commanders, and the report insisted that they should be young, energetic and vigorous, able to ‘grasp those fleeting opportunities which, if rightly used, can turn partial success into complete victory’. Recognising that the absence of flanks on the Western Front in 1914–18 made frontal assaults inevitable, the report nevertheless advocated surprise, attacking at night, and the use of smoke to mask movement. It also bemoaned the likelihood that gas would be denied to the British army in any future conflict.

  The next war would doubtless be different, said the report, but as one member, Major-General Kennedy, pointed out:

  …in the class of major operations which our training contemplates [i.e., training for the next war] manoeuvre and mobility will play a leading part… I know too that the problems of such operations are being studied and applied in our training, and that there is no need to stress further what is already in our manuals. What these latter, of course, cannot picture, nor our training produce, are the real conditions of warfare – the disorder that must be controlled to make manoeuvre possible – the confusion that hampers mobility – or the shells and bullets under which opportunity dies…We must not forget the sordid details of the actual man-to-man struggles, which so often made manoeuvre possible. The most important object of our training must be to produce commanders with the character and ability to turn unfamiliar conditions to their own advantage, and who will neither be crushed by the unexpected, nor afraid of the unknown.

  The report was no great traducing of the past, nor a visionary panorama of future war. It said that the Great War had been fought as well as it could be, given the situation and the manpower and assets available to the British army. Such criticisms as there were – like headquarters being too far back, and the need to deploy reserves quickly – were well known at the time, and unavoidable given the difficulties of communication. Those who now deplore the generals’ conduct of the war, particularly on the Western Front, might like to demonstrate how they would have done it differently, and how the results would have been better. This author, with a lifetime of army service and access to every worthwhile fountain of military thought, has to confess that, with the exception of individual errors to which all are prone, he cannot!

  Far from being simply a series of mindless frontal assaults by massed infantry – not much different from previous conflicts except in scale – the Great War was in reality a revolution in the art of warfare. There were huge advances in technology. The first use of tanks, air reconnaissance and aerial photography, fighter aeroplanes and strategic bombing, artillery spotting by aircraft, mechanical transport, indirect fire by artillery, man-portable machine guns, trench mortars, radio, gas, plastic surgery, attack submarines and aircraft carriers – all these owe their development to the war of 1914–18. Many of these innovations were British, and those that were not were
eagerly seized upon and developed by them – at the instance of the very generals who are supposed to have been so hidebound and resistant to new ideas.5

  Whether the generals and the politicians did any better in the Second World War is a moot point. The two wars were very different because British participation on land was largely peripheral between 1940 and 1944. It is often claimed that the Second War generals, having learned their trade in the trenches of the Western Front, were determined that such casualties should never happen again; but to have casualties you have to fight. And when the British did fight, the casualties in the Normandy campaign, as has been shown, were every bit as heavy as they had been in the Great War, although absolute numbers were lower because there were significantly fewer troops involved. If casualty rates are to be the sole criterion for judging a general, then Montgomery was no less a butcher than Haig; and Montgomery was not facing the cream of the German army.

  Political interference in the Second War was almost as dangerous as it had been in the First. Churchill was an honourable man, which Lloyd George indubitably was not, and Sir Alan Brooke had more success in controlling Churchill than ‘Wully’ Robertson had with Lloyd George; but it was Churchill’s wild flights of fancy, and the old search for the ‘soft underbelly’, that led to disasters like Crete, which achieved nothing apart from dissuading the Germans from using parachute troops en masse again, and Dieppe, which achieved nothing except Canadian distrust of British competence.