Haig (2)

Case study: Passchendaele

Passchendaele had long been a possible Allied target for a sweeping breakout from Ypres. However,

  1. The Germans had known that, and spent the previous years reinforcing its defence. Haig nevertheless remained committed to an artillery barrage that created an impassable shell crater half a mile wide and covered by four feet of slime.
  2. The water table in the areas was so close to the surface that shelling alone would "turn it into cream cheese".
  3. The weather was wholly unpredictable, but it was well known that a few hours of rain "brings the brooks into flood which only subsides (slowly)". As it was, Haig was entirely out of luck: 76mm of rain fell during the first four days, against an expected average of 8mm.
  4. Whatever strength the defences and weather provided, Germany, in addition, had the technological edge of more accurate, better trained and greater range of artillery, and also the novel use of mustard gas. The impact of mustard gas used in the weeks before the attack was so great that it had been covered up!.
  5. Four days before the attack, the Germans pulled back, leaving an extended fresh zone of marshland between them and the British front lines.
  6. Germany’s sophisticated deployment of barbed wire funnelled the attackers into a dense column, as sitting ducks for their guns. In the event, the British artillery deposited five tons of shells per square yard from July 31, but communications were so flawed that the artillery fired on its own advancing troops as well as the Germans. The battle itself was a wholly confused mess covered up by the ‘camouflage of misinformation’ and the pose that everything was all right. It continued until November. At the end, the destruction can best be summed up, for once, by Haig’s quiet question, “Have we really lost half a million men?”.

Haig’s childhood had not prepared him for the day–to–day need to debate, to explore arguments, to learn from testing ideas. A dislike of women, he may have had homo–erotic tendencies – his preference was certainly for young, good–looking junior officers. He was a stickler for tradition, for a militant anti–intellectualism. Anti–reading, anti–study, and anti–training – as was much of the army at that time. There was no respect for non–regular soldiers – no scope for commonwealth or star young successes to be promoted. No–one from Civvie Street was ever promoted to General.

Norman Dixon, in "The Psychology of Military Incompetence", describes the self–destructive contradiction at the heart of all the military. Dedicated to kill or be killed, they are inevitably drilled, regimented and disciplined to respond to murderous orders without hesitation. After all, one moment’s deliberation and freedom of action would have most of us resolutely walking away from the battle zone. The purpose of military training is geared to stopping any such deliberation. Uniforms, codes of regimental honour, medals, the aggrandisement of often futile heroism, all play a part aimed at cementing such unquestioning obedience to orders, and traditional ways of managing a battle. Haig was not alone in finding it hard to turn away from the established cavalry of the 19th century, nor was he unusual in his resolute disinterest in new technologies or methods. It is extraordinary how, despite the apparent feast of learning available for anyone to see during the First Word War, Haig’s successors during the 1920s and 1930s were also blind to new ideas. Here is Dixon describing the British rejection of tank development in the 1930s, even whilst Hitler was re–arming.

"Upon reflection, it is hardly surprising that the horse became the sine qua non of the military life. For a thousand years, man had found in it enormous advantages. There was nothing better for transportation and load–hauling. Horses raised morale and enhanced egos. Horses took the weight off the feet and enabled people to go to war sitting down. When they lay down you could hide behind them. When it was cold, you could borrow their warmth, and when they died, you could eat them!

Because of the traditionally rural origins of many Army officers and military families, horsemanship, in the context of sports like hunting, became one of their preferred leisure activities. Since such sports as polo, pig–sticking and, in an earlier age, jousting not only act out symbolic aspects of real warfare, but are also associated with a higher social class, there is little wonder that they should find so much favour with those who choose the Army as a career. All in all, it is not surprising that the cavalry became that branch of the Army with the highest status. Nor is it surprising that they should have become the most vehement in denunciation of the tank, which was seen as an "intrusive junior rather than an heir apparent."

Nor is it surprising that the desire of the War Office to placate the cavalry was stronger than logic. Not only did they veto any expansion of the Tank Corps, but, under the direction of Montgomery–Massingberd, ruled that the new Tank Brigade should never be reassembled, and this in the mid–1930s, with Hitler arming to the teeth.

Horses also reared their heads in the Army Estimates. By an unhappy coincidence, British Army needs for 1935–36 were published on the same day that Hitler announced that his ‘peacetime’army would comprise thirty–six tank divisions. To meet this threat, Montgomery–Massingberd decided that the amount spent on forage for horses should be increased from £44,000 to £400,000.

It would be unfair to suggest that CIGS was alone in this romantic behaviour. Others shared his prejudice. Just below the surface was another voice no less reactionary and hardly less influential, that of Sir Philip Chetwode, Commander–in–Chief India. Despite the proved success of tanks on the North–West Frontier, this old cavalryman made the surprising pronouncement that the Army in India would be unlikely to adopt tanks for a very long time, and then only to keep up the momentum of horsed cavalry!"

The British Army in the 1930s appeared to be obstinately opposed, however, not just to he tank itself, but to any form of challenging thought, of debate or originality.

General Edmonds, Chief of the Military Branch of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence, considered all the evidence and wrote "Any tank which shows its nose will, in my opinion, be knocked out – the wars you [Liddell Hart] and Fuller imagine are past". This implied inversion of the real chronology of military technology is surprising to say the least.

To return to the tank, successive Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff between 1918 and 1939, with the support of other senior officers, did not exert themselves to mechanise the Army. Some were actively obstructionist. Against these reactionary elements stood a handful of progressive Army officers and a few like–minded civilians. The progressives, who had assimilated the incontrovertible evidence from the preceding war with Germany, and were only too well aware of Hitler’s preparations for the next, made their views known through books, essays and lectures and by word of mouth. These moves were countered by the military establishment in two ways. Firstly they resisted the dissemination of progressive literature; secondly they did their best to curtail the careers of those who questioned their own obsolete ideas. For example, when Fuller, an early protagonist of mechanisation, won the RUSI gold medal for his essay on tanks, and later produced a book on the same topic, he was castigated by successive Chiefs of Staff, remained unemployed in the rank of Major–General for three years, and was then forcibly retired in 1933.

In the course of these events, the CIGS, Lord Cavan, whose ideas, according to Fuller, were "about eight hundred years out of date", opined that no officer should be allowed to write a book. Not to be outdone, his successor, Field Marshal Montgomery–Massingberd, delivered himself of a diatribe against Fuller’s books, while admitting that he had never read them, because it would make him so angry if he did!

Equally unambiguous was the treatment meted out to Liddell Hart, a man described by the press as “the most important military thinker of the age of mechanisation in any country”. Over the years, Liddell Hart produced a number of articles and books on mechanisation, on new infantry tactics, and on the strategic and tactical use of armour. His efforts encountered extreme hostility and resistance from the British General Staff. When he submitted his essay on ‘Mechanisation of the Army’ for a military competition, it wasrejected in favour of an entry on ‘Limitations of the Tank’s. The judges were a Field Marshall, a General and a Colonel.

Unfortunately, Liddell Hart’s entry was not entirely lost to view. Along with other products of his pen, it was enthusiastically studied by Hitler’s Panzer General Guderian, and became required reading of the German General Staff.

Like those of his fellow protagonists, Liddell Hart’s Army career was prematurely cut short by the military establishment. The case is germane to the thesis of this presentation. Here was a man who was cultured, fluent, lucid, highly intelligent and, that rare combination, a soldier who was also a first class military historian, one whose advice on military matters was frequently sought by such civilian leaders as Hore–Belisha and Winston Churchill, who, in due course, became military correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and subsequently The Times, chosen by these papers in preference to a number of retired generals who had applied for the same job. Here was a man whose views and writings were eagerly studied and acted upon by many foreign powers including Germany, Russia, France and Israel, whose prophecies in the military sphere were borne out time and again, and who lived to see his ideas on mechanisation and tank tactics used against us by Germany in 1940. But here was the man so deplored by the British military establishment that Lord Gort, Chief of the Imperial General Staff at the outbreak of the war, felt moved to say during a lecture to 400 officers to the Territorial Army, "Kindly remember that Liddell Hart does not occupy a room at the War Office". It was this same Lord Gort, the Army’s top man at the outbreak of war, whom Hore–Belisha described as "utterly brainless".

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