Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman recently published Victory to Defeat, which chronicles the decline of the British army’s fighting capabilities in the interwar years. Robert Lyman posted a longer version of Gordon Corrigan’s review for Aspects of History (with permission):
The British Army ended the First World War well trained, well led, well equipped and capable of engaging in all arms intensive warfare. Of all the players, on both sides, this army was unquestionably the most capable of deployment against a first class enemy anywhere in the world. Twenty years later it found itself with very much the same equipment, but with very much less of it, and devoid of either the ability or the means to fight a war in Europe against an enemy which had absorbed the lessons of 1918 but which the British had forgotten. It was the British Army that had invented blitzkrieg (although of course they did not call it that, a term coined by the French press very much later) and used it during the Battle of Amiens and on into the “Hundred Days” that saw the defeat of the German Army on the battlefield, and whatever German myth later averred, it was the British Army that forced that victory on the Western Front, not the French and not the Americans. And yet, in 1939 and 1940 the British were roundly defeated in France and Belgium, in Greece, in Crete and in North Africa. In this important – and to this reviewer almost heart rending – book the authors describe how and why the victors of 1918 were allowed to become incapable of fighting intensive warfare a mere two decades later.
In the first part of the book the authors describe the build up to the First War, and their explanation of the so called “Curragh Mutiny” is much more accurate than many accounts by others (although the officers did not threaten to disobey orders, only to resign, and while Carson’s Ulster Volunteers were indeed incorporated into the British Army as the 36th Ulster Division, so were Redmond’s National Volunteers, into the 16th Irish Division). The authors then go on to show how the British government had, albeit reluctantly, accepted a continental commitment in 1914 and had despatched an expeditionary force to Belgium, described then and later as the finest body of troops ever to leave these shores. Fine they certainly were, well trained, well led and well equipped, but the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of professional regular soldiers was pitifully small, and with experience of imperial policing and not of war against a first class enemy. With the need to expand enormously and rapidly, this army had to adapt to a theatre where massed artillery, machine guns and barbed wire made any attempt to manoeuvre almost impossible. The book shows how by trial and error, by analysis of operations and by a gradually developing doctrine the British learned to use a combination of all arms to break through German defences and eventually to defeat them. With the infantry, the artillery, the armour, the engineers and increasingly the air all working together to get inside the enemy’s decision making circle, to get him on the back foot and keep him there, these were the elements of blitzkrieg, but it was the defeated Germans who were to absorb those principles and perfect them until twenty years after their defeat they were the most competent army in Europe.
After an excellent account of the British journey from an imperial gendarmerie to a practitioner of intensive war, the next part of the book shows how and why by the time the Second World War came along the British were incapable, not only of deterring war, but of fighting it. The “ten year rule”; the reluctance of governments to spend on defence; the political refusal to contemplate another war in Europe and the reluctance of the public to contemplate another bloodletting like that of the First War; the inability to experiment or to develop tanks and armoured vehicles; the seeming impossibility of reconciling the twin requirements of imperial policing and any commitment to land operations in Europe with the assets available; the myth of the “bomber will always get through” and the absence of any consistent war fighting doctrine, all are lucidly explained. Much of the fault is shown to lie with politicians, and surely the most disgraceful example of political interference was the sacking of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the army, by the leaving of a note on his desk by the very dubious Secretary of State for War, Hore-Belisha. The generals are not spared, however. Despite restrictions on funding and refusal by governments to accept that another war was looming generals could have spoken out, although it does have to be recognised that in a democracy the civil power is paramount.
Bro, is there a way to fix this commenting system? I would love to nerd out here but this commenting system sucks.
Comment by Pickle Rick — September 27, 2023 @ 15:01
Sorry, PR. It’s the WordPress default commenting system and I’m not techy enough to replace it with something more sophisticated. If it helps, for longer comments, I do all my composition in a plain text editor and then just copy-paste into the comment body.
Comment by Nicholas — September 28, 2023 @ 08:48
I’m not so sure you can ascribe the British army’s manifest failures in 1939-1942 to a technical, financial, strategic or tactical lack of imagination but to a more fundamental lack of heart in the core of the army, both in the enlisted ranks (and their families) and the officer corps to do it all over again, much like the French and Italian armies, but very, very unlike the German army.
Comment by Pickle Rick — September 28, 2023 @ 14:48
The British army in 1940 was defeated, but the other allied armies were shattered. The French army in the Battle of France after the Dunkirk evacuations was already beaten in a physical sense — the crème de la crème of the field army was crushed during the retreat … and the number of evacuees still willing to fight was tiny. They believed the German propaganda reels and despite any evidence to the contrary (like the horse-drawn artillery and leg infantry any individual French unit might have faced) were already in a state of defeat because of the invincible German panzers and airpower. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were out of the war with no real chance to recover (we could debate on the Gaullists, but they were never all that large in proportion to the 1939 French army).
British army leadership wasn’t as hidebound as their reputation would have had it, but many senior positions were held by officers who were excellent peacetime soldiers that couldn’t hack it when the bullets were real (exceptions existed, but they were exceptions like Adrian Carton de Wiart and Percy Hobart … and even Churchill’s fencing partner Alan Brooke). Below the senior level they tended to be competent but not exceptional leaders (Bill Slim was exceptional, but even he didn’t get the top job in his theatre for a few years). The rest were pretty mediocre.
Why did the German army perform better in WW2 than in WW1, while the British army clearly declined until quite late in WW2? My best guess is actually economics … Britain had a tough time through the 1930s, but they’d had tough times before. Germany lost everything and it broke the middle classes almost completely. Poor men don’t lead revolutions, but poor men who used to be well-off crowd the list of revolutionary leaders across the board. Britain still felt it had too much to lose by getting into another continental war … Germany had already lost everything, so why the hell not, kameraden?
Comment by Nicholas — September 28, 2023 @ 15:13