Hutchinson, 1964. 231p.

This is a book I got at a library sale years ago and have only just got round to reading. Rather than an overview of the Western Front as a whole it turns out to be a series of essays Terraine wrote between 1957 and 1962 which were finally collected in book form in 1964.

In the introduction Terraine is at pains to emphasise that the casualty rate in World War 1 was by no means unprecedented. Starting with Waterloo and taking in the Crimea, The American Civil War and the Boer War he illustrates that, for those with eyes to see, in a time of increasingly industrialised warfare high casualties were inevitable once the fighting started. This was a theme he developed fully in his later book The Smoke And The Fire.

World War 1 was unique, though, in the prolonged timescale of the battles and the static nature of the Western Front. (Other fronts had movement but sustained equally high, or even higher, percentage casualties.) The carnage of the Second World War eclipsed even that of the First, but Britain escaped most of it.

The focus of the book is, however, more on the personalities on the British side than the battles themselves; in particular in the antipathy between Lloyd George and his top commanders. Now, Terraine is a military historian and it is not surprising that his sympathies should lie with the generals but the evidence he presents for Lloyd George’s unhelpfulness is convincing.

His assessment of Douglas Haig as being far from the stolid and hidebound figure of the popular imagination is well argued. His highest praise, though, is reserved for the all but forgotten British general Herbert Plumer.

There is also a discursion into the baneful effect the cult of Napoleon had on the French military mind – and on others. In Terraine’s view Napoleon was anything but the tactical and strategic genius he is usually taken for and, moreover, was exceedingly careless with the lives of his men. The yearning for “something else,” the strategic or tactical genius who might have been able to circumvent the Western Front’s defences was always a chimera. None of the generals, on either side, had a quick and easy solution. In the end, by applying the lessons learned throughout and the integration of new tactics and weapons like the tank, it should not be forgotten that the war was won, and it was won on the Western Front. And that within the three months of late summer and early autumn of 1918.

While Terraine mentions it briefly, the most important assessment of the implications of the war is outwith the scope of this book. Britain was unable to wield sea power effectively (with the launch of the first modern battleship, Dreadnought, and the subsequent naval arms race its dominance had in essence been lost.) The development of the mine and torpedo and the advent of the submarine made a surface fleet almost useless in any case. As a result Britain was sucked in by force of events to becoming a land power; from 1917 onwards – arguably from the Battle of the Somme a year earlier – the major contributor to the Allies; fighting strength and the instrument of final victory.

Had the navy been able to ensure safe passage across the North Sea (rather than keep secure the shorter distance to France) an amphibious landing might have been attempted in Northern Belgium and the Western Front’s flank turned. Whether that would actually have led to an earlier German defeat is another matter.

Macmillan, 204, 298p

This volume is a companion piece to What If? and More What If? and is the sort of speculative stuff which I just love. (I don’t much care whether it is as fiction or as historical rumination. Both illuminate how we got here and how it could have been different.) The professional historians call the medium counter-factual, while it is known in speculative fiction as Alternative History. (My preferred term is Altered History.)

This book concentrates mainly on the history of the US. So we have:-
The Mayflower landing in Virginia instead of Massachusetts and so less religious influence on the US.
Pitt the Elder avoiding the American Revolution.
George Washington being trapped by British troops in Brooklyn before the War of Independence gets fully into stride.
No incorporation of Texas into the Union – and no Vice Presidents automatically succeeding on a President’s death.
No loss of Lee’s cigar-wrapped orders before Antietam and hence a Union defeat in the Civil War.
No (possibly unjust) blaming of a certain Civil War Union general for a near catastrophe. (That circumstance eventually gave us Ben-Hur and all the cultural efflorescences that followed from it.)
A second secession (of Mid-West States) during the Civil War.
Andrew Johnson being assassinated along with Lincoln.
A class war in the 1870s.
A US-Britain war in 1896 (over a border dispute in South America!)
FDR delaying the Pacific War.
Eisenhower taking Berlin before Zhukov and Konev get there.
Joe McCarthy as a Soviet agent. (Not too big a leap for the imagination if you apply the old saying “cui bono” to that Senator’s activities.)
A thawing of the Cold War because Gary Powers’s U-2 mission is cancelled.
The Cuban missile crisis is not resolved safely.
An unassassinated JFK reconciling with Cuba (and resisting embroilment in Vietnam.)
Watergate as only a minor scandal.

All fascinating stuff – if perhaps sometimes the historians assume nothing too much would change thereby.

Collins, 1974. 162p

I bought this book at a library book sale several years ago because I knew virtually nothing about the War Of The Spanish Succession apart from the names of the main battles involving the British* Army – Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet (some of which later came to grace Royal Navy ships) – and Southey’s famous poem.

The political and strategic options facing the Duke of Marlborough at the outset of his 1704 campaign are set out somewhat baldly. Marlborough’s boldness – bordering on recklessness – in making his march to the Danube from the Low Countries is emphasised. He was astute in making good provision for his soldiers and his order that they not ransack the countryside through which they marched but pay for any food they required was unusual for his times as were his pains to provide care for his wounded. It was his talent for misdirection, both strategic and tactical, – even to the extent of misleading his allies – which marks him out as an outstanding general, though.

The Battle of The Schellenberg at Donauwörth which preceded Blenheim is presented by Green as an example of Marlborough’s decisiveness as, rather than institute a long siege, he ordered an immediate assault on the fortification, which, though bloody, succeeded. The remainder of the opposition’s local forces being reluctant to fight Marlborough then ordered the plundering of his Bavarian enemy’s lands to force the issue, but this did not succeed in its aim and the French Marshal Tallard eventually arrived to link up with the Elector of Bavaria. But Marlborough’s decision to close battle early caught them off guard. His handling of the conflict also drew them into false conclusions about his intent.

The overall treatment by Green is a bit sketchy and sometimes assumes more background knowledge of the times than the casual reader such as myself holds. The Wiki article on the battle – not, of course, available when Green was writing – is as informative.

*Green refers to it as the English army (this was just prior to the Act Of Union, which occurred in 1707) but explains this point.

A film by Ken Burns. 1989 (remastered 2002.)

The titles on the actual films of course say just The Civil War. Still if they’ll forgive us our parochialism we’ll forgive them theirs.

In any case, the series is nothing short of exemplary. It is a magnificent blend of eye witness account, anecdote, written and printed sources, photographs, paintings, panoramas and music; all of which complement each other and add up to more than their sum. The haunting theme tune, Ashokan Farewell, – a relatively recent composition, though resolutely in keeping with the subject nevertheless, and which resounds throughout the series – is an inspired choice.

While not neglecting the battles – how could it? – it does not dissect them with a military historian’s scalpel. Its preferred use is of individual testaments from soldiers and civilians on both sides – including that of slaves – which grounds it superbly. It never loses sight of the human cost of the USA’s national tragedy, an understanding of which is probably essential to any understanding of that country. One of its consultants, Barbara Fields, makes the point in the last episode that the Civil War is still ongoing, not just in the US but anywhere where injustice and lack of freedom persist.

While watching it I was trying to think if anything in our national narrative approaches this conflict. In social effects, along with its attendant trail of corpses, graves and memorials, the grinding sense of endlessness, the hope for a higher purpose, the nearest would be World War 1. But even that, in its worst battles, did not achieve the casualty rates of the war between the States, which were horrendous and way, way beyond what any western army or its public at home could tolerate now.

The star of the films is undoubtedly Shelby Foote whose knowledge of the Civil War seems to be close to encyclopædic. In the eleven or so total hours he appears most frequently; always with telling anecdotes. In one, he describes waving Nathan Bedford Forrest’s sword above his head; about which his delight was obvious. He then relates giving that general’s granddaughter his opinion that Forrest had, along with Lincoln, been one of the two genuine geniuses of the war. There was a long pause before she replied to him, “We didn’t think much of Mr Lincoln in our family.”

His ability to inhabit the mindset of both sides is superb as are his analytical skills. Towards the end he says of Americans as a whole (I paraphrase a bit but this is the gist,) “We like to think of ourselves as a superior people. If we were a superior people we wouldn’t have fought that war. But since we did then it has to be the greatest war and our generals the greatest generals. It’s very American to think like that.”

Speaking strictly as a non-American I still say The American Civil War is probably the greatest war documentary you’ll ever see.

Those of you who know me know my birthday lies about as close to Christmas as you can get.

This means I get presents two days in a row. A downside is that I then have to wait a whole year before getting any more.

It also makes things difficult for my family in getting me cards and such for my birthday. In particular, the shops seem not to stock birthday cards in December.

I mentioned last year I have a collection of tins. I got two new ones this year; both nice examples – with biscuits in them!

My eldest son was stuck for a birthday present. The good lady suggested The American Civil War documentary series from a few years back on DVD. He thought it wouldn’t be very festive but the good lady assured him I’d be delighted. I was. (I did videotape it when it was first on; but the DVD is more durable.)

Since it hasn’t been the weather for gallivanting – unusually heavy snowfall and unusually persistent frost and ice for Kirkcaldy – a lot of my holiday has been spent (re)watching the series. Review will follow.

Back to work tomorrow. Ridiculously early in the year. I’ve never before been back on a January banks’ holiday.

“This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by 11.00 a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us.

I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

– Neville Chamberlain, 3rd September, 1939.
(The above link also leads on to the BBC audio file of the speech.)

Don’t you just love that use of the word “note?” (Chamberlain’s pronunciation made it sound more like “nit.”)

Not demand, not insistence.

Note.

How British, how understated, how public school. How ineffectual.

That note certainly put the wind right up the buggers, and no mistake.

Today is the anniversary of the main triggering of the calamity that overshadowed the second half of the Twentieth Century and hence loomed large in the childhoods of people, like me, born years after the events it precipitated.

Germany attacked Poland.

Though the war in Asia had been going on for some time following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria it was this European outbreak that signalled catastrophe would be a global affair.

Chou En-Lai (Zhou Enlai) is reported to have said when he was asked what he thought were the implications of the French revolution that, “It is too early to say.”

The same is true of World War 2.

Pan, British Battles Series, 1967

Occasionally I like to toss in the odd googly and read a History book.

I’ve had an interest in History, in particular the First World War, almost since I can remember and have a tidy collection of these British Battles Series books which were/are a nice compact size, around 200 pages, easy to hold and carry about, and roam British history from Agincourt through the Spanish Armada (both of which occurred before British History proper began) up to, I think, the Korean War. Taken in all they give a good overview of how this sceptred isle bickered and fought through the ages. Some are more readable than others (A. Farrar-Hockley’s The Somme I remember as less so, sadly.)

With my background of reading around this subject I didn’t really learn much I hadn’t known already from The Ironclads Of Cambrai apart from the fact that the sponsons on the male tank could swing inside to allow it to travel by train. (Male tanks had cannon, female ones machine guns.) The book is at the more readable end of the spectrum, managing to make the elements of the battle as clear as such confused events can ever be rendered. There are some eye witness accounts quoted which add to the clarity. More of these might have been a further boon.

The book starts with the events leading to the formation of The Tank Corps and goes on to delineate the lack of knowledge of how to handle the new weapon plus the waste of its potential advantage of complete novelty through being utilised too early and in too small numbers in the later stages of the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and over the totally unsuitable ground/mud in Flanders in 1917.

The terrain in front of Cambrai was a much more promising area for deployment of tanks, being firm and relatively unfought-over. The element of surprise in the attack, though almost compromised, plus the cursory (in First World War terms) preliminary bombardment and the panic the lumbering monsters engendered in the defenders helped achieve a breakthrough which even enthusiasts hadn’t dared to hope for. Cooper makes much of the failure to exploit the initial advantage gained and in particular castigates those commanding officers who had no great hopes for success and stuck too rigidly to timetables drawn up before the attack went in. Their lack of imagination and, crucially, of belief in a breakthrough after the stalemate years were certainly a hindrance.

However, the difficulties of command and control of such a battle in a time when radio was neither truly effective nor practicable make this a harsh criticism. Cooper does note the Germans also failed to make the most of their initially successful counterattack for much the same reasons, so this rather goes against his point that the British generals were the stumbling block to success, that if only they had had confidence in the tanks’ abilities a great victory might have been won. But even by Cooper’s account, the C-in-C General Haig seems to have appreciated at least the possibilities of the tank; though others lower down remained to be convinced. More crucial was the lack of reserves Haig was prepared to commit to the battle. Given that, success was always going to be an ephemera.

The most culpable behaviour, which came in the subsequent enquiry, was the blaming of the loss of ground suffered in the German counterattack on the troops in the line. As ever, this was a gross calumny.

The book of course focuses on the tanks. For this was the first battle in which they had been employed in what has come to be seen as their proper function. Moreover what few tanks were left undamaged and still mechanically sound after the attack was finally called off played a critical role in the holding back of the German counterattack. Cooper emphasises that their deployment in this endeavour was due mainly to the initiative of individual members of the Tank Corps. He finishes by eulogising the Corps and mentions the Tank Musuem at Bovington where one of the ironclads of Cambrai is on display (or was in 1967.)

Final comment:-
In the end lessons were learned. The great victories of 1918 (and they were victories) could not have been achieved without the experiences gained by trial – and error – in the years before. Which, of course, was a tragedy for the many thousands who died or were wounded.

The salient fact of the First World War was that neither sheer weight of numbers nor any of the newly employed technologies, poison gas, air power, the submarine, radio, the tank, were capable of being decisive on their own, or even, in most cases, together. It is pointless to wish that they were. The techniques for coordinating vast resources and numbers of men, even of supplying them – especially in a fluid situation – also had to be developed. All that took time. And a resourceful and resilient enemy didn’t help. It was only the German offensive of early 1918, a near disaster for the Allies, which brought about the final requirement – the implementation of a unified Allied command structure.