One answer to Britain's manpower problem was conscription, a course strongly urged by Lord Roberts and the National Service League, which campaigned for the creation of a larger army, but conscription did not suit Britain's pre-war military requirements.
Men could be conscripted only for a limited period, and quite apart from the general unpopularity of forced service, by the time a conscript had been trained and posted abroad it would be time to bring him back for demobilization.
However, the major problem facing the government and the army as the new century opened lay in the critical area of command and control. Britain's limitations in these particular skills had been brought harshly into focus by the various defeats and disasters of the South African War. That apart, the growing political tensions in Europe and elsewhere indicated that the army must be put on a more efficient footing, and above all provided with a General Staff of the kind that had organized Germany's rapid victory over France in 1870.
In 1900 StJohn Broderick was appointed Secretary of State for War. Early in 1901 he decided that, apart from home defence, the country 'ought to be ready at any moment to send abroad three Army Corps with the proper cavalry division, in fact a force of 120,000 men'. To supply such a force would be costly, so nothing was done to put this scheme into practice.
Broderick was much more successful with another scheme, persuading the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, to set up a committee to study the problems of imperial defence; the Cabinet Defence Committee was established in December 1902. This committee consisted of the Prime Minister, the Lord President of the Council, the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for War, all political figures, plus four serving officers, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, the First Sea Lord and the heads of military and naval intelligence. The purpose of the com mittee was to 'survey as a whole the strategical military needs of the Empire'. It was not designed to consider the prospect of a major war in Europe.
In October 1903, Hugh Arnold-Forster, a man who had little understanding of the army but plenty of ideas, replaced Broderick as War Minister. During his brief tenure in office he asked Lord Esher to examine the current structure and organization of the army and suggest improvements. Esher's committee, the War Office (Reconstitution) Committee, began work in November 1903 and filed the first part of its report in January 1904; two further parts followed in February and March. The full Esher Report provided the Army with a blueprint for change at the highest level, which was the entire purpose of Esher's deliberations. In the first part of his report, which dealt with high command, Lord Esher stated that 'The object is to secure for the British Empire, with the least possible derangement of existing machinery, the immense advantages which the General Staff has conferred on Germany.' (21)
In this task Esher was very successful. Indeed, as Correlli Barnett has stated, 'Without the Esher Report and its acceptance by the Government of the day it is inconceivable that the mammoth military efforts in the two world wars could have been possible, let alone so successful.' (22)
However, here as elsewhere there was no gain without pain. One of the report's first proposals was to abolish the office of Commander-in-Chief of the army and replace it with an Army Council - later known as the Army Board - and a General Staff. The current commander-in-chief was a much loved figure, Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the famous 'Bobs' of Afghanistan and South Africa. Fortunately, 'Bobs' was a stout advocate of reform. He had been pressing the Government and the Army hard to introduce compulsory military service and raised no objections to the termination of his office.
A Committee of Imperial Defence, or CID - so called because Dominion ministers were invited to attend when in London - replaced the Cabinet Defence Committee. This committee included the nucleus of what became the General Staff, five officers each charged with some specific task - considering all matters relating to imperial defence; obtaining and collating relevant data from all official departments; preparing papers for the prime minister and the Defence Committee; furnishing advice on defence questions, especially those involving more than one department - so ending, for example, the compartmentalization of War Office and Admiralty. The CID was also charged with keeping records for the use of the current Cabinet and its successors.
The Army Council was created on 4 February 1904 and was followed three months later, on 4 May, by the formal establishment of the CID. The first task of the Army Council was the setting up of a General Staff under the first Chief of General Staff (CGS), General Sir Neville Lyttelton. This title was changed to Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) following the Imperial Conference of 1909.
To help him in his tasks the CGS was given three new directorates- Military Operations (DMO), Staff Duties (DMS) and Military Training (DMT); intelligence matters were included in the remit of the DMO. This new General Staff formed the second arm supplying the government, via the CID, with advice on strategy, the other arm being the Admiralty, both arms competing for official attention and funding.
This reorganization of the army command came at a fortunate time, for in 1905 two events shook the world's fragile stability. The first was Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, and in particular the destruction of the Russian Navy at Tushushima. Then came the Moroccan Crisis - the 'Tangier Incident' - in which the Kaiser displayed a remarkable resentment of France's activities in the western Mediterranean and which underlined the need for France and Britain to review their defence arrangments - by sea in the case of Britain, by land in the case of France. This was a year after the signing of the Entente Cordiale, and although this dispute was settled at the 1906 Algeciras Conference, the idea of extending Anglo-French cordiality into something more specific was soon mooted.
From its inception the CID had been dominated by the forceful character of Admiral Sir John 'Jackie' Fisher, the First Sea Lord. Fisher was relentless in pursuing the interests of the Royal Navy and the merits of a maritime or 'blue water' strategy for imperial and national defence; Fisher regarded the Army as 'a missile to be fired by the Navy', with no need for any separate function. Now, following the election of a new Liberal government in 1905, the CID was joined by the new War Minister, Richard Haldane, later Lord Haldane, a man who would not be browbeaten by Fisher and proved a strong advocate for the expansion of the army and its role in continental affairs.
This was useful, because following the Moroccan Crisis two separate strands of thought were emerging at the CID. Fisher and his Naval Staff considered that in the event of war between France and Germany the Royal Navy should rely on blockade and the army should launch amphibious assaults on the German North Sea and Baltic coasts. The army, on the other hand, considered that in the event of war the place of the British Army- assuming the government chose to commit it- would be in Belgium, both in support of Belgian neutrality, of which all the major European nations were guarantors, and to extend the northern flank of the French Army, should it deploy along the Franco-German frontier.
Major-General James Grierson, the DMO at the War Office, also averred that the idea of an amphibious operation in the Baltic was unsound since the Germans could reinforce their troops far more quickly than the Royal Navy could ship reinforcements and supplies to the landing force. This was quite true and everyone knew it; most people also knew that Fisher's amphibious strategy was simply his maritime strategy in another guise, a further plea for more resources and more Dreadnoughts.
For the moment all this was theory, a discussion of possible eventualities. There was no agreement of any kind that would lead Great Britain into a continental war. The Entente Cordiale had been a settlement of Franco-British colonial disputes and the setting up of spheres of influence with no hint of close military or naval involvement. Now, gradually and post-Tangier, all this was to change.
The Tangier Incident had long-term repercussions in Britain. According to the Cabinet Secretary, Maurice Hankey: 'About this time grave trouble arose between France and Germany over Morocco, and there were com
munications between the French and British General Staffs. In the case of the Admiralty these took the form of direct communications between Fisher and the French Naval attaché. In the case of the War Office they seem to have been conducted to some extent through the medium of Repington, the brilliant military correspondent of The Times - a somewhat irregular channel.' (23)
'Colonel Repington' was the pen name of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles a Court Repington, who, by virtue of his Times connections, was a well-known and influential figure in military and political circles. Again according to Hankey, in January 1906 the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, 'yielded to the desire of the French Government for military "conversations" between the General Staffs of the two nations'. (24)
Grey agreed to these talks on the understanding that these 'conversations' were to be 'entirely non-committal in character, were to involve no promise of support in war and were not to restrict either Government if war should come to decide whether or not to assist the other by armed force'. (25)
A further requirement was that the talks were to be kept secret even from most members of the British Cabinet - and it was this need for secrecy, plus the other essential requirement - that the 'conversations' were not to be seen as any form of military commitment - which obliged Grey to keep his distance and employ the good offices of Colonel Repington. As a result, the process of setting up these early Staff 'conversations' became somewhat convoluted.
After private talks with Lord Esher and Sir George Clark, the secretary of the CID, on 5 January 1906 Repington addressed eleven questions to Major Victor Huguet, the. French military attache in London. (26) The first question was: 'Have the Conseil Superieur de la Guerre considered British co-operation in case of war with Germany? In what manner do they consider this cooperation can best be carried out, (a) by sea, (b) by land?'
The French answered this question in reverse order, and only the part concerning the Army need be covered here: 'The question of cooperation with the British Army has been studied - it is considered that, to be most useful, its actions should (a) be joined to that of the French Army, that is to say placed under the same direction, whether the two armies act in the same theatre of operations or in different theatres, (b) make itself felt at the opening of hostilities, because of the considerable moral effect that would result from that.'
In other words, the British Army should enter the war as soon as the French did and be under French command wherever it served. As a quid pro quo, the French would allow their fleet to serve under British command. Repington requested clarification on this point, and to the question 'Should we establish it as a principle ... that the English shall command at sea and the French on land?' the French reply was: 'Yes; unity of direction being absolutely essential whether on land or sea.'
Repington's other questions requested French views on Allied action should Germany violate Belgian territory and the disposal of any captured German colonies, but having elicited the official French view on the use of the British Army in war- and a rather alarming view at that, since it implied handing over control of the British Army 'wherever it served' to the French - Colonel Repington reported back to Sir Edward Grey and responsibility for continuing these 'conversations' was handed over to Major General Grierson. To pursue the matter, General Grierson had to meet the French attaché, Major Huguet, and to maintain secrecy, 'a few days later Grierson met Major Huguet, as if by chance, while riding in Hyde Park' (27)
These somewhat torturous proceedings had an underlying purpose relating to the British Government's two prime needs. First, it was only wise to conduct staff talks with the French on how the two countries might cooperate in the event of war. Effective arrangements for military cooperation could not be created overnight or with the enemy at the gates. On the other hand it was also essential that there should be no 'mission creep' in these conversations. The French must be left in no doubt that these staff talks were not, must not become and must not be taken to imply any kind of British commitment to military action.
That this was a major British concern is borne out by the fact that this latter point appears again and again when the subject of these 'conversations' appears in contemporary accounts or subsequent memoirs. However, in his later reference to these 'conversations', Winston Churchill, then Home Secretary and later First Lord of the Admiralty, makes a significant point: 'However much the two Governments might agree and affirm to each other that no national or political engagement was involved in these technical discussions, the fact remained that they constituted an exceedingly potent tie.' (28) The British Government's position was understandable but naive. It was understandable because current circumstances did indicate that Imperial Germany was a potential threat to Britain as well as to France. If France were attacked, the chances were that without British support Germany would triumph - and what Germany would extract from that victory could only be to Britain's disadvantage. In any event, Britain could not tolerate either the violation of Belgian neutrality or a hostile and aggressive naval power - which Germany was rapidly becoming - gaining possession of Channel ports 20 miles from the Kent coast. In fact, German ambitions in the event of military victory would go far beyond mere naval interests, but that alone made Britain listen attentively during these 'conversations'.
The naivety stems from the point that these 'conversations' did not indicate the possibility of intervention. It was quite unrealistic to suppose that two nations could conduct military debates at the highest Staff level without the tacit admission that they did concern military action at some future date. If that was not the subject of these 'conversations', what were the General Staff members talking about?
Barbara Tuchman comments that: 'The [British] Government maintained the disingenuous position that the military "conversations" were, in Lord Haldane's words, "just the natural and informal outcome of our close friendship with France."' (29) That was one man's opinion. Lord Esher, on the other hand, maintained that 'the plans worked out by the Chiefs-of-Staff have certainly committed us to fight whether the Cabinet likes it or not'.
The Cabinet at large were in no position to object to or approve of these 'conversations' because they did not know they were taking place. Knowledge of the talks was restricted to the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State for War.
The other Cabinet members were kept in ignorance for years, and were understandably peeved in 1912 when they finally found out what had been going on for years behind their backs. A final point was that these talks were taking place with a foreign power - France- that was fully determined to involve Britain in any coming war and transform the Entente into a full-blown military alliance.
Over the years after 1906 the French convinced themselves that the British were planning to join them on the outbreak of war. This conviction was established in spite of a letter of agreement, drawn up in 1906 by Sir Edward Grey and signed by Ambassador Cambon, that both parties were free to decide 'whether or not to assist each other by armed force' in the event of war. The later Anglo-French Naval Pact of 1912, an agreement by which the British fleet was to protect the Channel and the French fleet the Mediterranean, was also concluded on the understanding that it was 'not based on an engagement to co-operate in war'.
There is also a debatable political point. Had these 'conversations' become common knowledge, would they have alarmed Germany, increased the Kaiser's fear of encirclement and brought war closer - or would they have confronted Germany with a powerful alliance and made the Kaiser think twice about the direction of his policy? Unable to decide, the British Government elected to keep the talks secret.
Secrecy was easier to maintain because there is little evidence that the talks were leading anywhere. Jackson and Bramall comment that 'The military staff talks ... were conducted intermittently from 1906 onwards on a contingency basis without political commitment on the British side', adding that 'Fisher [the First Sea Lord] refused to reveal any of the Admiralty war plans to the French and
did his utmost to obstruct the General Staffs' intervention planning by refusing to authorise Admiralty staff co-operation in working out shipping schedules for the hypothetical movement of the BEF to France'. (30)
This matter of naval-military cooperation was partly resolved by aCID subcommittee, set up in 1908. According to Hankey: 'It defined the respective responsibilities of the War Office and the Admiralty and laid down the broad lines of policy on which their plans would have to be based ... and brought our leading sailors and soldiers into intimate personal contact, to their mutual advantage.' (31)
This last point is debatable. Another CID subcommittee decided in 1909 that the question of if and where the BEF should be sent was a policy matter that could only be decided 'by the Government of the day'. In other words, there would be no formal alliance with France and the decision to support her or not would be left until the opening of hostilities. On the other hand, it was clearly necessary to have some operational plans in place should some commitment be necessary.
The snag was that without a policy there could be no agreed plan - and so it proved. The General Staff continued to tinker with a scheme for sending a force to France but, again according to Hankey, 'The Admiralty, however, took a different view, Fisher remaining opposed to military adventures on the Continent. He had his own ideas on the subject and did not wish to see the British Army committed to a European campaign at the outset of a war. Consequently the Admiralty came forward with a counter proposition.' (32)
The Admiralty proposed relying on economic pressure- a naval blockade- in the event of war with Germany. Fisher also stated again- that any British military presence on the continent should take the form of a landing on the Baltic coast of SchleswigHolstein, from where the landing force could threaten Prussia and so ensure the withdrawal of German units from France. The various difficulties attendant on this proposal- how the landing force could even reach the Baltic without running into the High Seas Fleet or the fact that, should it even land, the Germans could certainly supply and reinforce their armies far more quickly than the Royal Navy could bring aid to the British troops, or that France would be overrun by the German Army long before a British naval blockade could take effect - were not even discussed.
The Old Contemptibles Page 5
