In 1918 British and Dominion forces played a crucial role in winning the war on the Western Front. The Royal Navy and the recently created Royal Air Force also ended the war in strong positions vis-à-vis present allies and future rivals. Lloyd George had enhanced his power base at the head of a coalition government by means of the ‘Khaki Election’ held in December 1918. In the prolonged peace negotiations at Versailles he secured virtually all Britain’s war aims both as regards security in Europe and also in the wider world. With the additions of Mandates in the Middle East and Africa the British Empire was enlarged, if not politically enhanced, and reached its greatest extent. Even allowing for the heavy debits of unprecedented casualties, loss of trade and indebtedness to the USA, this was a tremendous achievement, not just for the armed forces and the government, but for the nation as a whole. Yet the outcome of the war was soon to be regarded as, at best, a Pyrrhic victory or at worst as a futile enterprise that had neither put an end to wars nor created a ‘land fit for heroes’.

By contrast, in 1945 Britain’s war effort was flagging, particularly as regards the Army, which was desperately short of trained manpower. By 1944 Britain had clearly become the junior partner to the USA and this was made painfully evident in a series of political and military decisions. Moreover, between 1941 and 1945 there could be no illusions about the dominant role of the Soviet Union in first absorbing the shock of Nazi invasion and then remorselessly wearing down and defeating the Wehrmacht; in the process suffering horrendous losses that dwarfed those in other theatres.

The unique awfulness and ‘horror’ of the First World War has become so deeply entrenched in British folk memory that it may seem almost blasphemous to suggest that combat conditions in other modern conflicts have been equally dreadful or, in some particular cases, even worse. Yet contemporary historians, including John Ellis, John Bourne and Gary Sheffield, have shown that modern industrialised war is always horrific for soldiers ‘at the sharp end’, that is in close proximity to the enemy. Why then has the First World War, and above all the Western Front, retained and even increased its reputation for unique dreadfulness and futility?

Here are some of the answers. Before 1914 the nature of modern war had not been properly understood by the British public. Romantic illusions flourished about a limited, chivalrous and exciting conflict that might well be ‘over by Christmas’. Rupert Brooke, in his poem ‘Peace’ (1914), touched on another appealing theme with his line about ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’, while Philip Larkin would much later allude nostalgically to the spirit of innocence prevalent in 1914 but soon to disappear forever.

In Britain in 1945 victory was greeted with relief rather than euphoria. Living conditions remained harsh and an ‘Age of Austerity’ was dawning. It would soon become clear that although Britain had emerged on the winning side she was markedly in decline as a world power and her Empire was breaking up. Nevertheless Britain’s role in the Second World War continued to be viewed in a very patriotic light in sharp contrast to the First World War, whose negative attributes were ever more grimly emphasised.

As the editors of a two-volume study entitled The Great War, 1914–1945 remarked, ‘The First World War has more often than not been regarded as a “bad” war resulting from failures in diplomacy, and a war characterised by the “futile” sacrifices of trench warfare on the Western Front; standing in stark contrast to the justifiable and necessary struggle, between 1939 and 1945, against Nazi tyranny and Japanese militarism’. One of the contributors neatly summarised the contrasting myths of the two world wars: ‘The First World War was not really about anything, or not about anything important; the Second World War was about national survival at home and defeat of a vile tyranny abroad’. Moreover, whereas the earlier war had been hopelessly mismanaged by incompetent generals, their successors had been technically proficient and had avoided heavy casualties by conducting mobile wars of manoeuvre.

In some respects the British’s Army’s trajectory, in the sense of developing operational skills, was similar in the two world wars. It entered both major European conflicts at their outset and, in comparison with both allies and enemies, was small and under-equipped. It suffered a series of reverses, retreats and outright defeats, worse in the later war, but also learnt from these experiences to become more effective and more professional in the second half of both wars. But there was also a huge contrast, which makes comparison of the learning processes difficult. In the second war the Army confronted the main enemy (Germany) in the principal theatre, North-West Europe, only briefly in 1940 and at greater length in 1944–1945 when it became the junior partner to the United States. Moreover though still stubborn and skilful in defence, the Wehrmacht was suffering devastating losses in the vastly larger struggle on the Eastern Front. Consequently, in sharp contrast to 1914–1918, the British Army never became the principal Service between 1939 and 1945 and played a far less dominant role in the outcome. Moreover, although the Army fought in numerous and varied theatres in both wars, there was no doubt, particularly after 1915, that it was on the Western Front that the war would be decided and that Britain must make her main effort there, no matter how high the cost. For the strategic reasons mentioned above this did not turn out to be the case after May 1940, so the Army had to adjust to remarkably differing conditions in the Middle East (especially North Africa), Italy and North-West Europe. This latter consideration, and the comparatively small scale of Britain’s land forces, made it harder to evolve in the spectacular ways witnessed in 1916–1918, but this also helps to explain why there has been far less criticism of the slow pace of adaptation and development in professional skills, particularly all-arms co-operation in battle, between 1939 and 1945.

Their early critics, during and just after the war, were mostly well informed and made some valid points, but their successors in the 1960s and after were more polemical; determined to find scapegoats and express class prejudices. In some cases lack of knowledge was no barrier to splenetic criticisms and mockery because the writers believed their opinions were now common knowledge. Had these authors been required to name, say, a dozen generals and the battles in which they had sent thousands of soldiers to pointless deaths then at least some research would have been necessary. The grounds for angry denunciation were the unprecedented scale of British casualties: nearly three-quarters of a million dead and perhaps three times as many seriously wounded. Someone or some clearly identified groups must be held responsible. Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief from December 1915, bore – and continues to bear – the brunt of criticism but ‘the generals’, as a privileged and mostly upper-class body are also deemed fair game.

The purpose of this chapter is not so much to provide a blanket defence of the high command, but rather to expose some of the main sources of the characteristics summarised above and then to demonstrate the complex problems that all the warring nations’ military leaders had to confront. Furthermore, drawing mainly on the research of John Bourne and his colleagues at Birmingham University, it is now becoming possible to discuss the career patterns, qualities and characters of the large numbers (at least 1,255) who attained the rank of brigadier general and above on the Western Front.

The changing attitudes to the British bomber offensive against Germany provide a clear example of distortion in hindsight. There were a few pacifist or near pacifist critics during the war but in general the campaign received public support. In the immediate post-war years there was some criticism, mostly on operational grounds, but also a strong show of resentment at the way Bomber Command and Sir Arthur Harris had been slighted in post-war commemorations and honours. Since the 1960s, however, there has been widespread condemnation of the campaign for a complex and sometimes muddled combination of moral, strategic and political reasons. In principle a critical reappraisal is entirely legitimate, but in some cases there has been a marked lack of historical understanding and empathy, both as regards the fraught conditions in which decisions were made and the operational problems in implementing them. There is a certain irony in the tendency to exaggerate Britain’s contribution to the defeat of Germany, in comparison to those of the United States and the Soviet Union, while underrating, and even condemning, Britain’s principal offensive achievement: namely the strategic bombing campaign against Germany.

British opinion at all levels has been deeply affected by the pervasive arguments propagated in the inter-war decades about the omnipotence of the bomber and fear that the next major war would begin with immediate cataclysmic bombing of cities with high explosives and poison gas. British governments, and more especially the Royal Air Force as the interested Service struggling to maintain its independent status, had placed great emphasis on Bomber Command, primarily as a deterrent to enemy air attack, but also as a counter-weapon should deterrence fail. In the late 1930s, however, a much higher priority was given to fighter aircraft for home defence, and little thought was given to the huge problems involved in penetrating distant enemy defences, locating legitimate targets and hitting them with sufficiently heavy bombs to inflict significant damage. Consequently when war came Bomber Command was completely unprepared to carry out its offensive role; but in any case Neville Chamberlain’s government during the months of ‘phoney war’ proved unwilling to initiate the bombing of Germany (‘taking the gloves off’ in the idiom of the day) for fear of provoking enemy retaliation. Britain and France generally observed these self-imposed restrictions on bombing, which were confined to clearly defined and specific military targets.

The nature of warfare on the Western Front experienced a remarkable transformation between 1914 and 1918. A largely static siege war, unanticipated by all but a few maverick thinkers, quickly set in, absorbing millions of soldiers whose daily needs were equivalent to those of great cities. Completely new, or relatively untried weapons – aircraft, submarines, tanks, poison gas – were introduced and had to be integrated into traditional arms and institutions. Communications of all kinds in the battle theatre witnessed impressive developments.

All these innovations had to be combined into weapons systems: in land operations entailing not only the co-operation of artillery, cavalry and tanks but also with the revolutionary new potential of aircraft. Some recent analysts have hailed these developments by the end of the war as the advent of ‘modern’, twentieth-century warfare. War on the Western Front changed almost beyond recognition between 1914 and 1918.

These revolutionary changes have been broadly acknowledged by military historians for at least a generation; their debates have moved on to more complex issues such as the speed at which innovations occurred. In the case of Britain, however, there is still a great gulf between a small number of military historians and their followers, and the general public in understanding and accepting this transformation. When these developments are more widely grasped it will probably not end criticism of such emotive topics as generalship, attrition and heavy losses, but it should cause them to be reviewed in a new light. How was it, for example, that the British ‘donkeys’ were able to win a decisive victory in 1918?

A selection of provocative remarks about the First World War that prompted me to write this book.

‘And that’s why we lost the First World War.’ Lady novelist in a radio discussion on the harmful influence of the public schools in Stop the Week, 21 February 1987. None of the panellists queried this opinion.

‘Watching Field Marshal Haig up a ladder, steering more Tommies towards senseless slaughter, you’re inclined to laugh in disbelief.’ Review of Oh! What a Lovely War in Newcastle. Daily Telegraph, 24 March 2010.

‘We are still defined by that pointless war.’ Simon Heffer, Sunday Telegraph, 2 August 2009.

‘The worst war that ever happened.’ Review of television presentation of Birdsong, Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2012.

‘Arsenal imploded at Newcastle, while Field Marshal Haig also failed to produce a Plan B.’ Caption to photograph in a report by Brian Moore, Sunday Telegraph, 10 February 2011.

‘It was suicide warfare by 19th century armies equipped with 20th century weapons. If it weren’t for the Americans plunging in the war would have been won by Germany. Yet all leaders – Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau . . . not to mention that arch-criminal Haig – should have been shot in the back as cowards who had sent young men to die for Dolce et Decorum Est.’ Taki in The Spectator, 28 January 2012.

In ‘A Personal Reflection on the Two World Wars’ John Bourne neatly captures the public’s view of Britain’s contrasting roles in the two conflicts.

Furthermore, he writes, ‘the outcome of the First World War was futile…making another war inevitable; the outcome of the Second World War, sanctified by the discovery of the Nazi death camps, was not only a military but also a moral triumph’.

As regards the experience of combat, the First World War, invariably associated in popular mythology with the horror of the trenches, is imagined as an unending hell on earth whereas the later conflict, being more mobile and with far fewer British casualties, is thought to have been easier, or at least more tolerable.

In 2000 Peter Liddle and his co-editors published a two-volume study entitled The Great World War, 1914–1945, an interpretation which many historians would endorse for viewing the two world wars as a prolonged struggle against Germany’s drive for European hegemony separated by a twenty-year truce. Britain was reluctant to enter either war but fought in both from beginning to end. Her grand strategy was essentially defensive: namely to protect the home islands, her vital sea communications and her empire.

For part of both wars France and Russia (or the Soviet Union) were her co-belligerents against Germany, and in both the USA’s delayed entry was decisive in tipping the balance in Western Europe. In both conflicts Britain’s fundamental assumptions about the likely length and nature of the struggle were soon completely shattered, but with sharply contrasting outcomes. Above all, the most obvious difference cannot be over-stressed. In 1914 Britain had enjoyed one hundred years of freedom from involvement in a major European war during which her industry, finance and commercial links with a worldwide empire, protected by a dominant navy, had together made her the Super Power of the era. Moreover, despite the frequent international crises of the pre-1914 decade, Europe appeared to be enjoying a period of closer communications and growing prosperity in which large-scale wars were widely viewed as unnecessary and counter-productive – indeed almost impossible to wage for more than a few months for economic and financial reasons. True, the Anglo-German naval race and invasion scares, dramatised by the press and fiction writers, had stirred up anti-German feeling (which was fully reciprocated), but in 1913–1914 there seemed little likelihood of a general European war. Where British involvement in a terrible civil war seemed a real possibility was in Ireland as the Home Rule issue, and preparations for armed resistance in Ulster, reached a crisis.

In both world wars Britain pursued harsh attritional strategies towards Germany. Naval blockade in the First World War and strategic bombing in the Second were both effective in causing serious damage to the enemy’s infrastructure, economy and morale, but neither was in itself decisive. The naval blockade caused hardship, bordering on starvation, for the civil population, particularly women, children and the elderly, but was not much criticised in Britain, either at the time or later. In sharp contrast, strategic bombing, though generally popular during the war, has been subjected to bitter criticism in recent decades, even to the extent of being labelled a war crime. This chapter examines the development and impact of the strategy of blockade in the broad context of deciding the outcome of the First World War, and seeks to explain the contrasting reactions of public opinion.

Historically naval blockade had been a key element in British naval power with the aim of denying seaborne commerce to Continental enemies. The policy and strategy of blockade remained very attractive to the government and the Royal Navy before 1914 and had an influential spokesperson in Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence. This exercise of superior naval power would be much cheaper and more popular than raising a large army and, in addition to its economic effects, would have the equally important consequence of forcing the German High Seas Fleet to seek a decisive battle in the North Sea.