Smith Dorrien and the Mons Campaign

Based on a fresh operational analysis, with reference to war diaries from GHQ to battalion level, Horace Smith Dorrien's coolness and rapidity of thought, under the competent direction of Sir John French, is revealed as the key to the remarkable survival of II Corps at both Mons and Le Cateau. There is no reliance on the Official History or retrospective 'memoirs' in this talk.

David is an ex-general practitioner, and has been researching the First War for 10 years. His first book (published pseudonymously as David Hutchins), The Young Gunner, the Royal Field Artillery in the Great War is the edited letters of his grandfather, a highly decorated, very young, artillery officer who served from Mons to the Armistice as a Forward Observation Officer on the Western Front. David’s second book was Mons, an Artillery battle, published in 2018. Under his own name, in 2023, "The Conception and Implementation of Field Service Regulations in the British Army, 1900 -1915" was published in the Journal of Military History, a prestigious peer-reviewed journal.

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