page_title: Lions led by donkeys
section_title: Attribution to First World War German or British officers
hierarchical_section_title: Lions led by donkeys / Attribution to First World War German or British officers
caption_attribution_description: Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937) Deutsch: Erich Ludendorff, deutscher General und Politiker. English: Erich Ludendorff, German general.
context_page_description: "Lions led by donkeys" is a phrase popularly used to describe the British infantry of the First World War and to blame the generals who led them. The contention is that the brave soldiers were sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent leaders. The phrase was the source of the title of one of the most scathing examinations of British First World War generals, The Donkeys—a study of Western Front offensives—by politician and writer of military histories Alan Clark. The book typified the mainstream First World War history of the 1960s, was vetted by Basil Liddell Hart, and helped to form a popular view of the First World War in the decades that followed. However, the work's viewpoint of incompetent military leaders was never accepted by some mainstream historians, and both the book and its viewpoint have been criticised.
context_section_description: Evelyn, Princess Blücher, an Englishwoman who lived in Berlin during the First World War, in her memoir published in 1921, recalled hearing German general Erich Ludendorff praise the British for their bravery and remembered hearing firsthand the following statement from the German General Headquarters (Grosses Hauptquartier): "The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys."
  The phrase Lions Led by Donkeys was used as a title for a book published in 1927, by Captain P. A. Thompson. The subtitle of this book was "Showing how victory in the Great War was achieved by those who made the fewest mistakes",
  Alan Clark based the title of his book The Donkeys (1961) on the phrase. Prior to publication in a letter to Hugh Trevor Roper, he asked "English soldiers, lions led by donkeys etc. – can you remember who said that?" Liddell Hart, although he did not dispute the veracity of the quote, had asked Clark for its origins. Whatever Trevor Roper's reply, Clark  eventually used the phrase as an epigraph to The Donkeys and attributed it to a conversation between German generals Erich Ludendorff and Max Hoffmann:
  Ludendorff: The English soldiers fight like lions.
  Hoffmann: True. But don't we know that they are lions led by donkeys.
  The conversation was supposedly published in the memoirs of General Erich von Falkenhayn, the Chief of the German General Staff of the German Army between 1914 and 1916, but the exchange and the memoirs remain untraced. A correspondent to The Daily Telegraph, in July 1963, wrote that librarians in London and Stuttgart had not traced the quotation and a letter to Clark was unanswered. Clark was equivocal about the source for the dialogue for many years, although in 2007 a friend Euan Graham, recalled a conversation in the mid-sixties, when Clark on being challenged as to the provenance of the dialogue, looked sheepish and said "well I invented it". At one time Clark claimed that Liddell Hart had given him the quote (unlikely as Hart had asked him where it came from) and Clark's biographer believes he invented the Ludendorff-Hoffmann attribution. This invention has provided an opportunity for critics of The Donkeys to condemn the work. Richard Holmes, wrote of The Donkeys:
  ... it contained a streak of casual dishonesty. Its title is based on the "Lions led by Donkeys" conversation between Hindenburg [sic] and Ludendorff. There is no evidence whatever for this: none. Not a jot or scintilla. Liddell Hart, who had vetted Clark's manuscript, ought to have known it.
caption: General Erich Ludendorff
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