The Road to Defeat

An article for History of War magazine

My friends at History of War magazine have just published an article I’ve written for it on the subject of the neglect of the British Army - by successive British Governments as well as by the British Army itself - in the years following the battlefield victories that brought the First World War to a close. Its the subject, of course, of the book that General Lord Dannatt and I have recently published, Victory to Defeat.

If you don’t take the magazine, the article is reproduced for you here.

Enjoy!

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There was a fleeting moment during the One Hundred Days battles that ended the First World War in France in which successful all-arms manoeuvre by the British and Commonwealth armies, able to overturn the deadlock of previous years of trench stalemate, was glimpsed. But the moment, for the British Army at least, was not understood for what it was. With hindsight we can see that it was the birth of modern warfare, in which armour, infantry, artillery and air power are welded together able successfully to fight and win a campaign against a similarly-equipped enemy. Unfortunately in the intervening two decades the British Army simply forgot how to fight a peer adversary in intensive combat. It did not recognise 1918 for what it was; a defining moment in the development of warfare that needed capturing and translating into a doctrine on which the future of the British Army  could be built. The tragedy of the inter-war years therefore was that much of what had been learned at such high cost in blood and treasure between 1914 and 1918 was simply forgotten. It provides a warning for our modern Army that once it goes, the ability to fight intensively at campaign level is incredibly hard to recover. The book that General Lord Dannatt and I have written traces the catastrophic loss of fighting knowledge after the end of the war, and explains the reasons for it. Knowledge so expensively learned vanished very quickly as the Army quickly adjusted back to its pre-war raison d’etre: imperial policing. Unsurprisingly, it was what many miliary men wanted: a return to the certainties of 1914. It was certainly what the government wanted: no more wartime extravagance of taxpayer’s scarce resources. The Great War was seen by nearly everyone to be a never-to-be-repeated aberration.

The British and Commonwealth armies were dramatically successful in 1918 and defeated the German Armies on the battlefield. Far from the ‘stab in the back’ myth assiduously by the Nazis and others, the Allies fatally stabbed the German Army in the chest in 1918. The memoirs of those who experienced action are helpful in demonstrating just how far the British and Commonwealth armies had moved since the black days of 1 July 1916. The 27-year old Second Lieutenant Duff Cooper, of the 3^rd Battalion The Grenadier Guards, waited with the men of 10 platoon at Saulty on the Somme for the opening phase of the advance to the much-vaunted Hindenburg Line. His diaries show that his experience was as far distant from those of the Somme in 1916 as night is from day. There is no sense in Cooper’s diaries that either he or his men felt anything but equal to the task. They were expecting a hard fight, but not a slaughter. Why? Because they had confidence in the training, their tactics of forward infiltration, their platoon weapons and a palpable sense that the army was operating as one. They were confident that their enemy could be beaten.

On the morning of 21 August 1918 the barrage began. It was the loudest he had ever heard. At 5.20am on the dot, without any whistles, bugles or shouted exhortations, the men arose from the ground and advanced into the darkness, going forward in groups around the two Lewis gun teams. The mist was so thick that the platoon very quickly got lost. In fact they strayed far to the south of their axis of advance. The battlefield was all confusion, but it didn’t seem to matter. 10 Platoon, as they had been instructed, just kept going in what Cooper hoped to be the right direction. Every now and again they bumped into groups of men from other battalions. His diary recorded:

We met an officer in the Coldstream with a platoon. He said the Scots Guards had failed to get their objective, that everyone was lost and that the trench we were in was full of Germans. I said I would work down the trench, which I thought was Moyblain, our first objective, and clear it of the enemy... After this I pressed on alone with my platoon, guiding myself roughly by the sound of our guns behind us. We were occasionally held up by machine-gun fire and we met one or two stray parties of Scots Guards without officers. Finally we met a fairly large party of the Shropshires, who I knew should be on our right.  The officer with them did not know where he was, but we agreed to go on together.

Occasionally small groups of enemy were discovered in trenches and posts scattered across a deep battlefield. The concentrated Lewis gun fire usually quickly disposed of any potential opposition. When a trench needed to be taken the machine guns would attack from one side and grenadiers – men with especially strengthened Lee Enfield rifles with grenade attachments on their muzzles, capable of throwing a Mills bomb up to 200 yards – would attack from another. The assault sections – men with rifles and bags full of grenades – would only crawl up to the enemy trench under the cover of machine guns and the bombs fired by the grenadiers. Cooper found no difficulty in clearing enemy trenches. Each one that they attacked, fell. After an initial fight most enemy surrendered, the prisoners being sent back to the rear, before the platoon gathered itself together and continued on.

They knew they couldn’t miss their objective, the railway line running south from Arras. They’d been practising on models carefully built in the ground for the past week. After a while Cooper realised that he’d drifted far to the right, bumping up to the village of Courcelles le Comte. He needed to move left. As he did so they encountered a machine gun firing straight down the road at them along the obvious route for him to take. The broken bodies of its earlier victims lay scattered on the road. Just then a lone Mark V tank trundled up through the early morning mist, also lost. When they called for its assistance, the tank advanced up the road and dealt with the machine gun, the men of 10 Platoon following on either side of the road through the fields. Reaching their objective, a building on the railway embankment, the Lewis guns made short work of the German defenders, those not being killed tumbling out with their hands raised.

So went Cooper’s war. Despite the expected confusion of the battlefield Cooper did what he had been instructed: carry on forward in the direction of the objective, only fighting those enemy that directly imperilled his advance. The artillery barrage had opened the battle for them by targeting enemy machine-gun positions, command and control bunkers and artillery positions, as well as plastering the front trenches of the Hindenburg Line. The aim was to knock out the German defender’s ability to strike back against the hundreds of dispersed platoons of British troops infiltrating through and behind the German positions. Cooper’s men were told not to stay and fight for individual trenches if they didn’t need to, but to keep pressing on; isolated enemy positions could be cleared up later by troops following behind. This was no longer a linear battlefield with everyone going forward in choreographed unison, but one in which semi-autonomous groups of machine-gun- and grenade-equipped infantry infiltrated their way forward to objectives far to the enemy’s rear. The short bombardment was designed not to destroy the enemy trenches, but simply to provide the opportunity for the British assault platoons to get into and across the first German positions while their occupants were still down in their deep bunkers underground.

The wider battle in which Duff Cooper fought and distinguished himself – he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his exploits in August 1918, an unusual award for a platoon commander – was a very different one to that which remains firmly lodged in Britain’s corporate cultural memory of the Great War. The shoulder-to-shoulder infantry advance that for most people captures the horror of the Battle of the Somme on its inglorious first day on 1 July 1916 had long disappeared. Battalions were given objectives to secure and a considerable degree of latitude in how to achieve them. In the case of Duff Cooper’s battalion of the Grenadier Guards on 21 August the plan entailed two forward companies advancing towards the railway line under a creeping barrage, supported by tanks. A heavy initial artillery barrage would send the Germans scurrying for the safety of their deep bunkers, there to await an attack, they thought, perhaps several days later. On this occasion, however, the British assault platoons would be in the enemy front-line trenches long before they were aware of their presence. Companies and their platoons were expected to fight their way forward, independently if necessary, relying on the initiative of their junior leaders, who would make decisions based on their training and the circumstances of the battlefield as they found it. Once the first two companies had secured their positions, two further companies would pass through each of them, carrying on the advance to the next bound. During this advance they would be supported by the rifle and machine-gun fire of the first two companies, who by now would have dug themselves into hasty ‘shell scrapes’, prepared to see off any attempt by the enemy at a counter-attack and to protect themselves from incoming artillery fire.

Each of the ten platoons deployed for the attack (about 40 men in each) was based on four sections, three of riflemen/grenadiers and one with two of the portable gas-operated Lewis machine guns introduced in 1916. The rifle sections were equipped with rifles, hand grenades and dedicated rifles adapted with cup-dischargers on their ends, which threw the Mills bomb on a seven-second fuse up to 200 yards. Rifles were now subordinate to the hand grenade and the cup-discharger. Rather than being riflemen in the old sense, in which the bullet and bayonet were an infantryman’s standard weapon, the men were now effectively machine-gunners or grenadiers, weighed down with hessian or canvas sacks full of grenades for hand throwing and firing from the cup-dischargers. In the machine-gun section rifles were secondary, self-defence weapons only, the men grouped around the two guns. Two gunners were responsible for firing the weapon, with two or three men supporting each gun by carrying, changing and re-filling its 47-round circular magazines. The old (pre-1916) concept of a platoon consisting of three or four equal sections of riflemen equipped with a Lee Enfield rife and bayonet had passed into history, at least on the Western Front. The 1918 version of the infantry platoon was one in which the primary weapons were the machine gun and grenade.  Likewise, the artillery had seen an equally dramatic e3volution and, of course, tanks had first joined the battlefield in 1917.

The British Army of late 1918 had become something that a combined arms manoeuvre army of modern times would recognise. It fought its battles based on a mastery of an artillery-dominant offensive in which machine-gun-equipped infantry worked closely with tanks, combat engineers and aircraft, deploying a relatively sophisticated approach to warfighting in which a single weapon was crafted from its many constituent parts. It was built on the bloody experience of battle. By the end of the year the British Army had mastered what might be described as ‘methodical’ warfare. It understood every constituent element required to undertake successful battle in a step-by-step manner. Methodical battle was designed to unpick the enemy’s defensive lock one piece at a time. The fast mechanised (and sometimes armoured) troop transport, and mobile artillery, supported by ground support aircraft such as tactical bombers and dive-bombers, all glued together by radio communications, were the next advance in tactical and operational thinking. This would, in a future war, enable more dynamic or fluid operations, where decisions could be made spontaneously as battle took place. It would allow for smarter warfighting. Dynamic warfare, by contrast, allowed for the attacker to look at other ways to defeating the enemy operationally, rather than attacking their defensive positions head on. Dynamic warfare allowed the attacker to identify positions, infrastructure or localities that were critical to the enemy’s ability to continue fighting. Strong defensive positions could therefore be bypassed and allowed to wither on the vine, if a more strategic target, such as a headquarters location, railway junction or supply depot behind the front lines, offered itself as a target. It might be that battlefield superiority could be achieved by bypassing the fixed defences entirely, if this would demoralise the enemy and force them to turn back or attempt to reorganise themselves to defeat a line of attack they were not expecting. This discombobulation was key to German success in northern France in 1940. The Great War did not allow for dynamic warfare, but it did allow for the expert development of methodical warfare, its essential precursor.

The Hundred Days taught the British Army that at the heart of warfighting lies the premise that successful campaigns strike not just at the enemy’s military mass and its physical capability (its tanks, infantry, artillery, air power and so on) but also its ability to command and direct its forces, as well as the morale of both commanders and men, and their individual and collective will to fight and win. It reflects the need of an army to adapt to meet the ever-changing demands of a complex battlefield. It also reflects the need for a command philosophy that allows subordinate commanders at all levels of the rank structure to understand their commander’s intent, while executing operations according to the local circumstances, but always within a set of sensible rules laid down in the fighting manuals. Herein lay battlefield success, and provides the context for the advance of Cooper’s 10 Platoon towards their objective on the Hindenburg Line. The successive victories in 1918 didn’t just unravel Germany’s military power, but attacked its self-belief, persuading many that their sacrifice would be wasted were they to fight to the death. An army does not need to be defeated in detail on the battlefield, but its soldiers need to believe that that they have lost. That army is indeed then beaten.

It would take the next war for dynamic warfare to be fully developed. It would be mastered in the first place by the losers in 1918 – the German Army. The moment the war ended the ideas and approaches that had been developed at great expense were discarded as irrelevant to the peace. They weren’t written down to be used as the basis for training the post-war army. Flanders was seen as a horrific aberration in the history of warfare, which no-right thinking individual would ever attempt to repeat. Combined with a sudden raft of new operational commitments – in the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Ireland – the British Army quickly reverted to its pre-1914 role as imperial policemen. No attempt was made to capture the lessons of the First World War until 1932 and where warfighting was considered it tended to be about the role of the tank on the future battlefield. This debate took place in the public arena by advocates writing newspaper articles to advance their arguments. These ideas were half-heartedly taken up by the Army in the later half of the 1920s but quietly dropped in the early 1930s. The debates about the tank and the nature of future war were bizarrely not regarded as existential to the Army and they were left to die away on the periphery of military life.

The 1920s and 1903s were a low point in national considerations about the purpose of the British Army.  The British Army quickly forgot what it had so painfully learnt and it was this, more than anything else, that led to a failure to appreciate what the Wehrmacht was doing in France in 1940 and North Africa in 1941-42.

The army in which Duff Cooper and the men of 10 Platoon were a part in 1918 was at the top of its game. Victory for the British Army in 1918 was brought about as a result of the tactical skill of its well-equipped and well-trained machine-gun-equipped infantry working closely with artillery, tanks, combat engineers and aircraft, deploying a relatively sophisticated approach to warfighting It was built on the bloody experience of battle, as this warfighting methodology had been developed directly as a result of what had been learned day by day on this new type of battlefield. Although mistakes continued to be made and men continued to die, they did so in relatively fewer numbers and for greater purpose. Most British commanders demonstrated that they were able to understand and master the intricacies of the modern battlefield. The British Army was, in late 1918, an impressive, war-winning weapon. The tragedy for the decades that followed was that this mastery was thrown away, and had to be re-learned the hard way after the debacle of 1940.