The Great War Generals on the Western Front, 1914-18 (Paperback)

(Readers who enjoy this book will find Alan Palmer's recent "Victory 1918" equally absorbing).

While the concentration on Haig is understandable - since he not only bore ultimate responsibility for the actions of his subordinate commanders in his time as CiC, but as subordinate commander to his predecessor as CiC, Sir John French, was directly responsible for some of the worst slaughters so far - other mistakes of this books are simply annoying. On a formal level the author firstly omitts any coherent definition of incompetence of his own. Instead,he supplies Liddel-Harts definition of criminal behaviour by officers by which to judge the events under scrutiny. No doubt criminal behaviour is a much more serious charge than mere incompetence, and to prove that the generals weren't criminal (which by Liddel-Harts' definition some decisions ot the British generalship certainly were!) doesn't disprove the charge of incompetence. Secondly, the reader is inundated in biographical details irrespective of whether they contribute anything to elucidate the issue under discussion. Thirdly, somewhere midway Neillands rather abruptly loses the focus of his discussion and offers a lengthy refute of the alleged inferior fighting qualitity of British divisions in comparison to Commonwealth troops. Finally, contrary to his stated intentions Neillands enters into lengthy descriptions of the separate battles down to the level of individual actions. Finally, to argue that the generals couldn't have been utterly incompetent because victory over Germany in the end was achieved by these very same generals is preposterous. If one looks at the advantages of the Entente in numbers and production capacities, the question surely must be why it took them so long and brought them so close to defeat.

On the level of the discussion proper Neillands is equally unconvincing. The sheer volume of the description of the fighting prevents him from asking the right questions. For example, we get a thorough description of the events surrounding the disastrous battles of 1917 commonly known as Passchendaele, followed by an equally thorough description of the immediately following tank offensive at Cambrai, the success of which surprised the British staff to such an extent that any exploitation of the breakthrough was out of the question due to an utter lack of preparation. Doesn't this point to some sort of rather poor judgement and incompetent military leadership? But Neilland refuses to give an in depth analysis just why Douglas Haig chose the best fortified and most unpassable section of the Western Front for his main offensive when Cambrai showed that success indeed would have been possible on other sectors. Time and again Neillands contends that under both French and Haig British troops were wasted in strategically (and most of the time tactically) utterly useless offensives because politicians insisted on action for overriding political reasons. But never he goes into the question if military leaders with a sense of responsibility should have refused to execute orders like these.The only time Haig considered stepping down was when British Prime Minister Lloyd George after the massacres of Passchendaele refused to send him more troops for use in offensives.

Neillands argues that the appalling losses throughout the war resulted from poor battlefield communications that prevented effective command and control of battles. As a consequence, offensives that had run out of steam were kept up with the single effect to add to the casualties. From a technical point of view this argument is valid, but the relevant question here is if the numerous failures shouldn't have taught the general and especially the CiC responsible for overall strategy to take this fact into proper account. At least there were some subordinates to Haig who argued for limited and controllable bite-and-hold operations instead of complex large scale operations aiming at a decisive breakthrough. Even Neillands has to admit that the pushing on with offensives was a mistake. However, he exculpates Haig by an astonishing twist of thought. Haig did his best to win the war, and the mistakes and blunders he made were not attributable to his incompetence, but to his character. He was only pushing on and squandering lives because he was such an optimist that he thought that just one more push might bring the decision. Any definition of competence or incompetence without doubt would encompass something like an individual's capacity to draw the proper conclusion from information available to him at a given time. For a judgement on competence or incompetence the reasons why an individual failed to draw the right conclusion is quite irrelevant, since competence is a factual and not a moral quality. Just to try to do one's best simply isn't enough if hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake. Without saying so, Neillands by his twisted argument delivers the judgement Haig deserves: incompetent.

Books on World War I I'd rather recommend are Alan Clarke (still!), The Donkeys, and Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War.