Lions Led by Donkeys? Haig's Command Reappraised (2001)

In the past 20 years there has been a revival of interest in World War I, which has resulted in a significant revision in the understanding of how the war on the Western Front was fought. Through most of the last century, the view of the fighting in Belgium and France was one of futility and stagnation. In the 1980s, historians Shelford Bidwell, Tim Travers and John Terraine prodded us toward a different view, asking that we consider the time from 1914 to 1918 as a period of impressive innovation.1 The interpretative wave they launched reached high tide recently with Williamson Murray's bold assertion that World War I is the Revolution in Military Affairs of the 20th century.2 The renewed interest in the Great War is accompanied by an effort to rehabilitate the much-maligned men who led the armies on the Western Front. For years historians have looked on senior World War I leaders as chateau generals, who hid in the rear while their blunders caused thousands of soldiers to die amid mud, blood and barbed wire. Against the persistent perception of armies being lions led by donkeys, recent scholarship increasingly reveals that many World War I officers worked doggedly, often creatively, to overcome the tactical problems that had led to stalemate and trench warfare. The German officer corps of 1914-- 1918 has been the chief beneficiary of this rehabilitation. US historians Tim Lupfer, Bruce Gudmundsson and David Zabecki emphasize the role of military culture in encouraging tactical innovation and adaptation in the Kaiser's army.3 However, as these historians celebrate Teutonic military excellence, they cast the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) into the role of foil and victim. This is explicitly the case in Martin Samuels' Command or Control, Command, Training, and Tactics in the British and German Armies, 1888-1918.(4) Samuels makes the BEF look hapless in comparison with the efficient Germans. Travers blames a flawed military culture for much of the suffering and frustration endured by the British army on the Western Front. A reaction was inevitable. Led by British scholars, a number of historians have counterattacked the perception of flawed leadership and institutional ineptitude within the British army. Three books representative of the concerted effort to reevaluate the BEF's tarnished image are Amiens to Armistice: The BEF in the Hundred Days' Campaign, by J.P. Harris with Niall Barr; Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On, edited by Brian Bond and Nigel Cave; and Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I, by Albert Palazzo.5 Harris and Barr's book is a straightforward campaign narrative that covers the British Army's greatest victory, the Hundred Days' Campaign of late 1918. Bond and Cave's collection of essays provides readers a fresh look at Haig-the much-maligned general who led the BEF through most of the war. Palazzo's book is the most provocative. He cites the BEF's development of chemical warfare as evidence that the British army's professional ethos made it a true learning organization-to use the current, trendy phrase. Although drawn to the BEF's bloody history in the Meuse-- Argonne, US readers often overlook the powerful blows the British Empire dealt the Germans during the last months of the war. Harris and Barr remind us that, although the BEF of late 1918 was the smallest of the major armies on the Western Front, it captured more Germans in the last months of the war than the US or French combined. Indeed, the BEF's role in the final Allied offensive was predominant. Harris and Barr compellingly support this assertion. From the German army's Black Day in August to the general pursuit into Belgium in early November, the British kept constant, brutal pressure on their enemy, driving the Germans into exhausted despair. In achieving these final victories, the BEF revealed itself to be the world's most technologically advanced army. …