The Making Of The British Army (53 page)

Spring 1918 brought the massive German offensive known as the
Kaiserschlacht
(‘Kaiser’s battle’), for Wilhelm had personally ordered Ludendorff, effectively commander-in-chief, to add more men to the planned offensive to make them up to one million. It failed, and the allied counter-offensive began in August. This was a sustained three-month effort (the ‘Hundred Days’) which included American troops just arrived in France, and Italian pilots, and involved sophisticated all-arms cooperation and close air support. Mechanical, aeronautical and ballistic technology had all advanced apace: Blériot had spluttered across the English Channel not ten years before, yet by November 1918 over 1,000 aircraft were flying in close support of Haig’s armies – on reconnaissance, artillery spotting, and in ground attack sweeps with bombs and machine guns. If only radio technology had advanced as quickly (Marconi had sent radio signals across the Channel in 1899) commanders would have had the means to exploit the full potential of tanks, aircraft and artillery. Nevertheless, the Hundred Days was undeniably Haig’s victory, and one which until relatively recently had not been fully acknowledged. Some historians now maintain, in fact, that it was the British army’s greatest victory.
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Certainly in November 1918 the British army stood second to none. The French generalissimo Ferdinand Foch, who had been hastily appointed to overall allied command when the German offensive opened – the first time there had been a unified command in the whole course of the war – wrote to Haig after the armistice:

In fact, in those final Hundred Days the BEF engaged and defeated 99 of the 197 German divisions on the Western Front, taking nearly
200,000 prisoners – almost 50 per cent of the total taken by all the allied armies in France in this period.

But before the opportunity that the
Kaiserschlacht
gave Haig and Foch to get out of the trench system which had dominated strategy and tactics for almost four years and ‘back’ to mobile warfare, an ambitious plan was being worked up for the following year to attack deep into the German rear areas with faster, lighter tanks supported by aircraft – ‘Plan 1919’. Victory in November 1918, which was in large measure attributable to the enormous increase in professional capability in all parts of the army (the artillery especially) and in inter-arm cooperation, consigned the plan to the archives, but its concepts were not wholly abandoned in the minds of the protagonists of armoured manœuvre. And they would be eagerly studied by what remained of the German army after the war – and in due course refined as
Blitzkrieg.

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For the time being, however, the British army would have no need of mechanical toys. The Great War had been the war to end all wars, certainly on the Continent, and the treaty conference which followed at Versailles aimed to bring about a settled European peace as enduring as that at Vienna had done a century before. The army could therefore return to its late Victorian priorities: home security – which meant aid to the civil power, since the Royal Navy could prevent any invasion – and imperial policing. And although the two brigades which comprised the British Army of the Rhine after the great bulk of the occupation forces left at the end of 1919 remained in Germany until 1929, the notion of a ‘limited liability’, as it was called, in continental warfare soon became in reality a policy of no liability at all. With deterrence provided by the navy and increasingly by the bomber force of the RAF, there was no need of an expeditionary force for Europe.

In 1919 the new coalition government adopted a ‘ten-year rule’, a rolling assumption that there would be no major conflict in Europe in the coming decade. The army, which had stood at three and a half million men in November 1918, contracted within two years to one-tenth that size, and shrank even more in the years that followed through further savage cuts in public spending (the so-called Geddes Axe of 1922) and because of the difficulty of finding recruits even during a time of rising unemployment, conscription having ended
with the war. A decade later, the secretary of state for war, Lord Hailsham, was calling the army ‘a Cinderella of the forces’.
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But what had the Great War actually taught the army? Had it in any way reshaped it, in body or in mind? Or did the army collectively deal with the memory of its heavy losses by putting the experience of 1914–18 to the back of its mind – as the CIGS himself (Sir George Milne) seemed to do when in 1926 he said that the Great War had been ‘abnormal’?

To most outward appearances the army did indeed seem to be doing just that. Regimental soldiering returned with a renewed vigour – some might say with a vengeance. Robert Graves, convalescing with the 3rd (Special Reserve) Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers in Ireland in January 1919, wrote of the regular officers’ dismay on seeing some of the ‘Manchester cotton clerks’ who had been accepted for commissions in the desperation to find subalterns for the Kitchener battalions, and who were now returning for demobilization:

Terms like ‘officer and temporary gentleman’ and ‘for the duration only’ peppered the conversation of ‘proper officers’.

Yet quite obviously not all the ‘temporary gentlemen’ had put shop girls in the family way, bounced cheques or been unable to hold their drink. And some had proved themselves capable officers – despite, perhaps, holding their knives like pencils at the mess table. The discovery, for the first time in the army’s history, that a man from the lower middle class who possessed a good mind and leadership qualities might be trained directly as an officer rather than work his way through the ranks might be inconvenient, but it could not be forgotten. Certainly it
was a most useful discovery for the growing technical and logistic arms.

The reduction of the army also meant the re-emergence of the cavalry as the coequally pre-eminent arm after their marginalization on the Western Front. In Palestine under General Sir Edmund Allenby mounted troops had had dramatic success, and with attention now turning increasingly to the Middle East – drawn thither by the Suez Canal and oil – and once again to India, the mounted arm could expect to be back in the thick of things. And although the newly ennobled Field Marshal the Earl Haig was to leave the stage soon after the war (and throw his remaining few years into the welfare of ex-servicemen), in his final despatches he made clear his opinion that a strong cavalry arm would remain essential in
any
future warfare – and so authoritative an opinion as that of the recent victor of the war in the West could not be lightly disregarded. The petrol engine was still not universally reliable, and the cross-country mobility of the horse was undeniably superior to anything the proponents of mechanization could point to – when, of course, the horse was not being fired at. Nevertheless there were cavalry amalgamations when the Geddes Axe swung, if no immediate appetite to part the men from their mounts. The twenty-six battalions of the new Tank Corps were reduced to a cadre of four, and the tanks themselves were left to rust in a field near Bovington in Dorset until Kipling urged the authorities to improvise a museum.
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(This fate was at least better than that of the US Army Tank Corps which was disbanded altogether, with further tank development limited virtually to the drawing board.)

The Royal Artillery, which had ‘gone heavier’ with every year of the war, now put aside most of its larger-calibre guns to return to field artillery, although direct fire except
in extremis
was now firmly a thing of the past (the RA, RHA and RGA were merged into one in 1924). The Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service had already morphed into the Royal Air Force – on 1 April 1918, and to some opposition (with taunts of the ‘Royal April Foolers’) – and henceforth ‘army cooperation’ – reconnaissance, artillery spotting and the like – would have to take its place in the queue as the RAF set out to demonstrate that there was in fact little need for an army at all, that the Empire could be policed through ‘air control’ – knocking dissident tribesmen into line by the simple expedient of
dropping bombs on their villages – and that future war could be won by strategic bombing. ‘The bomber will always get through’ was soon the prevailing doctrine (and fear). So the army, starved of funds and with no pressing role in Ireland after the creation of the Irish Free State in 1921, became once again a far-flung patchwork of regiments.

However, the army now knew – unquestionably – how to organize for war; and both the unit and the staff organization that emerged from the First World War remain substantially the same today. The battalion of infantry, between 700 and 1,000 strong, had proved itself the enduring tactical unit for fighting, the irreducible minimum in the field. Commanded by a lieutenant-colonel, it had a major as second-in-command; a captain as the executive officer (adjutant); one or two specialist officers in charge of, for example, signalling or machine guns; a longservice quartermaster commissioned from the ranks responsible for every aspect of equipping, supplying, feeding, clothing and housing the battalion; and a second executive, the regimental serjeant-major (the patriarch of the NCOs), who knew how to get things done. Within its constituent ‘rifle’ companies – usually four, each commanded by a captain or, increasingly as time went on, a major – the platoon system had also proved its strength. Before the war the subalterns had usually been simply additional company officers, with no fixed responsibilities; the experience of the trenches had shown the value of the officer figurehead for the fifty or so men who comprised the platoon, which was in turn divided into sections of eight to ten under a corporal. The platoon could act as a unit of fire and movement within the company, and with proper training the section could act likewise within the platoon, especially after the Bren light machine gun was introduced in the 1930s, one to each section. The young platoon commander and his older, more experienced platoon serjeant became one of the most hallowed, if perilous, relationships in human existence.

The battalion’s regimental identity, itself rooted in a county, a clan or a historical function (such as Rifles), had also proved itself the most effective means of assimilating replacements for battle casualties – indeed, at times, of wholesale regeneration. By 1916 it had become the practice for a ‘battle margin’ to be formed before any offensive: a reserve of two or three officers and the RSM, who were left out of battle to form the nucleus around which the battalion could rebuild in case of heavy casualties. The ability of battalions to recover after major setbacks was one of the most remarkable aspects of the First World
War, and that resilience – an attitude of mind as well as a system – has remained a distinctive feature of the army. Rarely were battalions broken up during that war, except towards the end when manpower shortages forced a reorganization of the K5 battalions. It was better for morale to rebuild rather than redistribute.

All-arms cooperation, however, had only really been effective at brigade level. Although artillery observation officers, usually captains, deployed increasingly with the infantry battalions, it was usually to adjust the fall of shot and help the commanding officer conform to the brigade or divisional fire plan; it was not primarily to provide him with the means of calling for fire for his own purposes. An artillery regiment consisted of three or four batteries and might be placed in support of an infantry brigade, though it remained – as today – a divisional asset. Indeed, it was the division, commanded by a major-general, that emerged definitively as the ‘permanent’ all-arms grouping, with its constituent brigades (usually three) allocated divisional support units on an ad hoc basis. The number of divisions in a corps – more correctly ‘army corps’, commanded by a lieutenant-general – varied from two to four depending on fighting requirements. The division therefore came to be regarded as the highest-level ‘tactical’ formation, one that focused from day to day on fighting the enemy. The corps, Janus-like, looked in both directions – to the headquarters concerned with overall campaign planning, as well as to the divisions during both the battle’s planning and its execution.

When the BEF sailed to France in August 1914 it had consisted of two relatively small corps, with a force headquarters – G(eneral)HQ – commanded by Field Marshal Sir John French, plus the cavalry division and lines of communication troops working directly to him. By 1915 a subordinate level to GHQ had been created – the ‘army’, commanded by a full general – for the first time in British military history. By 1916 there were five armies, the composition of each depending on the fighting requirement but consisting of a minimum of two corps. It was at army level that operations of significance to the campaign as a whole – and thus to allied war strategy – were planned, with direction from GHQ, which is to say Haig (a field marshal), whose job it was, inter alia, to interpret the strategic direction from London. There was no allied headquarters superior to GHQ until the German spring offensive in 1918, when the imminent collapse of the front required a supreme commander (and Foch was appointed ‘generalissimo’) rather than merely consultation.