President’s Address - The President Reflects on the Centenary

We are now well into the commemorations of the Centenary of the First World War and the Western Front Association continues to play a leading role in those activities. For example, this year we are organising, or jointly hosting, further conferences – some with a definite 1915 theme – at a national or regional level. Last month (11th) in Oxford, we were centrally involved in a conference at Brasenose College on the theme ‘Haig and 1915’, the Field-Marshal himself having been an undergraduate at Brasenose in the early 1880s. In June this year, the President’s Conference, again with a focus on 1915, will be held in Birmingham. September promises to be a particularly busy month. On 19 September there will be a conference hosted by the WFA’s Scottish branches on the theme ‘Scotland in the Great War’, and this will be followed, on 26/27 September, by a two-day event which we will be organising jointly with the Gallipoli Association. Then, on 24 October, the Suffolk Branch will be presenting the second in its excellent series of annual seminars – this event too, at which I will be speaking, being likewise devoted to 1915. Details of other Centenary activities can be found on the Events Calendar of the WFA’s website and in this Bulletin.

Our contribution to the Centenary is not, of course, restricted to big national conferences and seminars. Practical help, in the form of grants, has been provided to date for various local projects, from Merseyside and Wiltshire to Sri Lanka, which includes, for instance, exhibitions and research into war memorials. We also helped with the restoration and rededication of the Haig memorial at Brasenose College. In addition, we have sponsored a series of lectures presented by the First World War Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, an institution with which we now have close ties. Recently, in line with our objective to promote education, we have become involved with the publishers, Helion, in awarding a series of prizes recognising First World War scholarship.

For all this activity, I sense, however, that so far as the story of the Western Front is concerned, media interest has cooled and slackened somewhat in comparison with the almost frenzied demands on our knowledge, time and advice last summer. I feel, and predict, that the battles of Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert and Loos – or even Second Ypres – do not grab the attention of the media or the public at large in anything like the same way as, say, the Somme or Passchendaele. Indeed, I would venture to suggest that many members of the general public have never even heard of the 1915 battles in France and Belgium. My remarks certainly do not apply to the campaign on the Gallipoli peninsula, which possesses all the elements of fruitless sacrifice, gallant failure and inadequate command so beloved of the media. Moreover, Gallipoli is rightly sacred in the collective memory of Australia and New Zealand because of the feeling of emerging nationhood which that campaign generated and fostered. I need hardly remind anyone here today that, in precisely a week’s time, Anzac Day will be celebrated.

As some of you may already know, I have my own personal and family reasons for remembering the Gallipoli campaign. My great uncle on my mother’s side – Corporal Frank Hill, a native of Cheltenham – lost his life near the crest of Chunuk Bair while fighting with the 7th Gloucestershires alongside the New Zealanders of the Wellington Regiment, on 8 August 1915. Frank Hill had served in the Metropolitan Police before the war but had enlisted in the army in August 1914 as a Kitchener volunteer. Perhaps there is something in the inherited family genes or the spirit of Frank that has subconsciously prompted me to devote a considerable part of my life as a military historian to the study of Kitchener’s New Armies. Who knows? What I can say is that as a result of the bitter fighting along the crest of Chunuk Bair, above Anzac, on that day nearly one hundred years ago, the 7th Gloucestershires incurred some 350 casualties, including all their officers and sergeants. Frank has no known grave and is commemorated on the Cape Helles Memorial.

Frank’s death in action was, of course, only one among countless personal and family tragedies that year. 1915 was, in a great many respects, a bleak year indeed – an annus horribilis – for the British Empire and its allies. The multiple reverses suffered by the Entente powers on the Western Front, in the Dardanelles and the Middle East, and in Africa are, in my view, partly attributable to a common set of root causes, particularly – and not least in Britain’s case – a failure to match commitments with resources. Britain also paid the price for the lack of adequate machinery (apart from the Committee of Imperial Defence) for proper co-ordination between the government and the armed forces, such as existed in the Second World War in the form of the Joint Planning Staff and the Joint Intelligence Committee. Above all, Britain’s trials and tribulations in 1915 reflect the fact that Asquith’s Liberal government had committed Britain to a major industrialised war against a highly-trained mass conscript army on the Continent without providing the means – or even a clear blueprint for further action – with which to conduct and fight such a war.

As the junior partner in the alliance with France, Britain was mainly obliged to follow French strategy on the Western Front throughout 1915. For the French the options were relatively simple. The Germans occupied large areas of northern France and Belgium, including regions rich in raw materials or heavy industry. These could only be liberated through an offensive policy. Joffre, the French Commander-in-Chief, remained convinced that a breakthrough was ultimately possible, but recognised that a succession of preliminary attacks might be required to devour German reserves before the enemy’s lines were finally ruptured. In a phrase attributed to Joffre – Je les grignote (‘I keep nibbling at them’) – lay the embryo of three years of attrition. Joffre elected to attack and pinch out the German-held salient between Reims and Arras, the snout of which, at Noyon, pointed towards Paris. He would assail it from two directions. A thrust eastwards from Artois might drive the Germans back across the Douai plain and threaten their supply lines to Cambrai and St Quentin. Another advance northwards from Champagne might sever railway links feeding the German centre. A third offensive, from the Verdun-Nancy sector, might cut the Thionville-Hirson railway communications. The routes north of the Ardennes could not, on their own, sustain the whole German front in the west.

Joffre’s strategy, which shaped Franco-British operations in 1915, was basically sound. In a modified form it would produce decisive results in the second half of 1918. In 1915 it partly dictated when and where the BEF would fight its major operations on the Western Front. For example, its attacks at Aubers Ridge and Festubert in French Flanders in May, and at Loos in September, were essentially launched in support of French operations in Artois, though the need to relieve pressure on Russia was also a consideration. However sensible the overall strategy might appear, in 1915 the Allies had neither the full means nor the tactical skills necessary to apply it successfully.

Not surprisingly, 1915, for Britain, was a year of trial and error as the Empire gradually built up its military strength while the BEF on the Western Front underwent a process of what John Bourne has termed ‘de-skilling’. Having suffered such heavy losses in 1914, the expanding army, containing many enthusiastic but raw recruits struggled to adjust to the new conditions of warfare with a much-reduced pool of experienced officers and NCOs to command and guide the mass of volunteers. Under pressure from the French to pull its weight in the desperate struggle for survival, the BEF did not yet have enough muscle to make a real difference. For much of the year it was ill-equipped – in terms of artillery, mortars and grenades – for trench warfare, while there was no genuine consensus as to which tactical approach to adopt, with some officers favouring a policy of ‘bite and hold’ and others seeking a breakthrough. But, as Paul Harris and Sanders Marble have remarked, irrespective of how British operational thought developed before the Somme, the lack of resources, especially shells, rendered all the BEF’s offensives in 1915 ‘problematical’.

The Secretary of State for War, Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener, believed in the primacy of the Western Front and in meeting Britain’s obligations to her allies, particularly France and Russia. A national and Imperial hero, his reputation had been almost unassailable when he took office in August 1914. Yet he was autocratic, often reluctant to delegate, and was ill-at- ease in the Cabinet system of government and the cut and thrust of debate with intellectuals and brilliant orators such as Asquith, Lloyd George, Edward Grey and Churchill, who were among his Cabinet colleagues. At the same time, he made insufficient, or at best sporadic, use of machinery to hand, especially the General Staff. The already considerable load placed on his shoulders in 1914 became even heavier the following year as the scale and scope of the war increased, intensified and widened. His position was not helped by the formation of a Coalition government in the wake of the ‘Shells Scandal’ in May 1915. Thus, while he continued to compound his own difficulties, his efficiency and vigour decreased as his work load inexorably mounted. As 1915 wore on, his authority was increasingly challenged, his decisions were frequently called into question and his influence was eroded.

With no immediate solution to the trench deadlock and strategic stalemate on the Western Front yet in sight, Kitchener allowed himself to sanction various alternative strategies proposed and suggested by Cabinet colleagues, and so was drawn piecemeal into campaigns – such as that in the Dardanelles – against his better judgement and contrary to his own original war aims. In some of these theatres such as Mesopotamia where Britain had vital oil interests, the situation was not helped by the fact that the chain of command and administrative responsibility was confused and messy. There, for instance, the India Office and Indian Army too had a major say in the decision-making process.

In 1915 there was as little cause for celebration in the alternative theatres as there was on the Western Front. Although the German territory of Togoland in West Africa – with its important wireless station- was quickly subdued, operations in the Cameroons, dogged by disease, intense heat and difficult terrain, took much longer. The capital, Yaoundé, was not occupied until 1 January 1916 while the last German stronghold at Mora held out until 18 February 1916. Across that continent, the struggle for German East Africa (later Tanzania) proved even lengthier and more difficult. Indeed, the resolute and skilful German commander in East Africa, Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, was still evading his hunters at the time of the Armistice. In Mesopotamia, another theatre where there was an initial inability to match political ends with military means, a premature attempt to advance on Baghdad had seen the force in question, under Major-General Charles Townshend, obliged to fall back, in late November, on Kut-al-Amara, where it was besieged and ultimately forced to surrender. By the end of the year, Britain had been committed to a further campaign, this time in the Balkans, and had already sent troops to Salonika. And on Gallipoli, the failure of the August offensive at Anzac and Suvla effectively ended any lingering hopes of capturing the peninsula and reaching the Narrows. From this point, the abandonment of the Dardanelles campaign became ever more likely. The American historian, George Cassar, has commented: ‘The successful withdrawal from Gallipoli was the one bright spot in what had been a terrible year for Kitchener and Britain’.

And yet it is possible to argue that there were some encouraging signs as 1915 drew to a close, not least for the BEF on the Western Front. The appointment of both Douglas Haig, as the BEF’s Commander-in-Chief on 19 December, and William ‘Wully’ Robertson, as Chief of the Imperial General Staff four days later, on 23 December, swung British strategic policy more firmly towards the Western Front as the decisive theatre. Moreover, in the next two years or so, they would progressively bring a greater feeling of professionalism and ‘grip’ to the high command of the army and the conduct of the BEF’s operations in France. The strength of the BEF had also grown exponentially. Quite apart from its Dominion units, the BEF comprised, at the end of 1915, three cavalry divisions, nine Regular infantry divisions, 19 New Army divisions and six first-line Territorial divisions, representing a six-fold increase when compared with the size of the original BEF in August 1914. Many of these formations had already been blooded in battle. While the 21st and 24th Divisions had experienced a near-disastrous baptism of fire at Loos on 26 September after less than a month in France, the 9th and 15th (Scottish) Divisions and the 47th (London) Division had performed very creditably in that same battle, showing promise for the future. In the air, and despite the temporary ascendancy of the Fokker monoplanes, the Royal Flying Corps had taken giant strides in the development of aerial photography, reconnaissance, target-spotting and co-operation with the artillery – all of which were becoming vital to the success of operations on the ground.

New and improved weapons, such as the Mills bomb and 3-inch Stokes mortar, were emerging and, following the creation of the Ministry of Munitions in May, much more plentiful supplies of artillery ammunition would be available before long. Thus, in several respects, one might claim that, on the whole, the BEF was in better shape at the end of 1915 than it had been a year before.

While acknowledging the undoubted and lasting impact of the Anzac story in Australia and New Zealand, I would contend that 1916, the year of the Somme, has left a far deeper psychological scar than has 1915 on the collective folk-memory of the British people. Again, I predict that, because the BEF of 1916 had such unique and highly-localised social, occupational and geographical links, with its plethora of Pals and Territorial units, next year (2016) may very well see the peak of interest in the Centenary and perhaps the most demanding time we may face as the WFA. Be ready for that challenge!

This article first appeared in Bulletin 102, in July 2015. Bulletin is one of several magazines available for free to members of The WFA. If you want to see more articles like this one, you may wish to become a member of The Western Front Association.