The British Army and the Western Front 1914-1918 (Dr John ...



The British Army and the Western Front 1914-1918 (Dr John Bourne and Mr Rob Thompson)

The First World War was a deeply unhappy experience for the British. Popular feelings about the war have been captured by A.J.P. Taylor in his dismissive phrase ‘brave, helpless soldiers; blundering, obstinate generals; nothing achieved’. This unhappiness stems principally from the war’s human costs. British casualties were unprecedented in the nation’s history. The majority of them were suffered on the battlefields of the Western Front. Whenever the British media wishes to illustrate ‘futility’ or ‘military incompetence’ or ‘the carnage of modern war’ it turns instinctively to the battles of 1916 and 1917, to the Somme and ‘Passchendaele’. An explanation for the events that took place there rarely strays beyond an indictment of British generals, especially the high command. They are castigated as stupid butchers with no more idea how to win the war than by piling corpse upon corpse. Unflattering comparisons are made with the military genius of the German army, and especially of Ludendorff, whose flexible tactics, encouragement of initiative and ability to learn from experience seem to mock mindless British ‘attrition’. Even within the British Army itself, the purely British units are also often unfavourably compared with the more enterprising, more aggressive, more ‘democratic’, physically stronger forces of the Dominions, especially Australia and Canada. Behind the failures of the army stood the wider failures of Victorian and Edwardian society, class-ridden, hierarchical, amateurish, obsessed with form and detail, incapable of rising to the challenge of war. In these circumstances it is surprising that the British Army managed to survive the struggle against its powerful enemy, much less to prevail.

During the last twenty years, beginning with Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham’s Firepower: British Army Weapons and Theories of War, 1904-45 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), however, there has been a revival of interest in the military history of the war, based on contemporary archival records, especially unit war diaries, after action reports, ‘lessons learned’, and individuals’ private papers. The academic debate about the performance of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on the Western Front has significantly shifted from an increasingly sterile fixation on the professional and human limitations of a handful of leading military personalities, the ‘donkeys’, to a wider concern with the British Army as an institution. A very different picture from the popular stereotype has begun to emerge, though so far with little effect on popular and media views of the war. The module takes its lead from this openly revisionist perspective.

This module meets on Tuesday, 2.00 p.m.-4.00 p.m.

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