The image of Britain’s military leaders as conservative, reactionary, unimaginative, technophobic and resistant to change is all too well established in the popular imagination and memory. Britain, it is often said, always begins its campaigns with disaster on the battlefield because those in charge of the war effort, if they have thought about the art of war at all, are too preoccupied with fighting the last conflict to have taken any proper notice of subsequent developments. Consequently, being unprepared for future challenges, they fall at the first hurdle. Such shortcomings in strategic and tactical thinking, all too frequently revealed in the short wars of the nineteenth century, were, it is said, especially obvious when that most demanding of tests—modern industrialised warfare against a coalition of major powers—was faced in 1914.
The main victim of this caricature of disaster through thoughtlessness and incompetence, especially when it comes to the First World War, is the British Army. Books such as John Laffin’s British Butchers and Bunglers of the First World War proclaim in the most forceful terms that Britain’s devastating casualties on the Western Front were a result primarily of an intellectual failure—a failure of command, a failure predicated on a rigid adherence to outmoded tactical ideas and faulty operational thinking, which led to the unnecessary slaughter in the trenches. The bête noire of such historians is Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, the epitome, for some, of inflexible leadership and the rigid refusal to adapt to new circumstances. This ‘lions led by donkeys’ thesis has gained enormous popular traction; and yet, as numerous military historians have laboured over the years to show, the British army command, while certainly not without fault, was not the inflexible and hidebound organisation of this common portrayal. Indeed, the army that introduced to the world armoured warfare, gave prominence to close air support and perfected combined arms tactics was far from resistant to change, irrespective of any general perception to the contrary. It is also worth recalling that the Imperial General Staff was an organisation dedicated to learning and innovation, and had been created specifically to think through the problems of future warfare. Prior to the outbreak of war in 1914 it held an annual conference at the Royal Military College at which all the key figures in the Whitehall organisation met the leaders of the various home commands to discuss the key military developments and challenges of the day and then to assess possible solutions. An indication of the General Staff’s forward thinking can be gained from the list of topics examined at the final event of this kind, held in January 1914, at which the role of aerial reconnaissance, artillery organisation, machine-gun training and infantry fire and movement—all matters that would prove crucial during the First World War—were raised.