Gary Sheffield

Military Past, Military Present, Military Future

DOI: 10.1080/03071840802249687 Military history is useful: this is the simple, if controversial, argument of this paper. Used carefully, military history is an invaluable tool for decision makers, whether military or civilian, at every level from grand strategy down to tactics. This is not to say that simple prescriptive ‘lessons’ can be drawn from history. However, military history does provide a databank of experience which, with care, can be drawn upon to inform decision making. Almost every military situation has an ‘approximate precedent’: something like it will have happened at some point in the past. Best practice, based on careful study of the past and codified in doctrine, can provide valuable guidelines for decision-makers. In times of shrinking or stagnating defence budgets, it is essential to demonstrate why it is necessary to spend money on historians. In short, what the Higher Command and Staff Course (HCSC) calls the ‘so what’ factor is all-important. A lecture on a particular campaign might be very interesting, but it needs to be demonstrated why a military practitioner needs to know about it. Military historians – or people who use military history, which is not necessarily the same thing at all – have a direct impact on individuals and institutions that shape and carry out policy. Such an approach might alarm fellow historians who come from different branches of the discipline. And they would have a point: such a use of history is clearly open to abuse. At worst, it can become prostitution of scholarship. It certainly invites the question of the reliability of the history being used. The British services, the Army in particular, are a pragmatic, empirical organisation, until very recently suspicious of theory and doctrine. Colin McInnes has, somewhat controversially, argued that the British Army sees

The British Army in the Era of Haig and Montgomery

The performance of the British Army in the two world wars has been the subject of much scrutiny in both scholarly and popular history. The latter has long been dominated by the perception of an underperforming army fighting under incompetent leadership in a futile First World War, in contrast to a more successful and effective force supporting a just cause in the Second. Yet, John Buckley and Gary Sheffield argue, sound scholarly research paints a much more nuanced picture of an institution that between 1914 and 1945 underwent a rich learning process that must be understood in its entirety.

From San Carlos to Stanley: The Falklands Land/Air Operations

From the perspective of 2006 the land campaign fought by the British Army and the Royal Marines in the Falklands conflict appears both dated and forward-looking. It was fought without the benefit of two factors today taken for granted – formal doctrine and institutionalised jointery – but although it took place in the depths of the Cold War, it anticipated the era of expeditionary operations that commenced in the 1990s. The story of the land fighting is well covered in Lawrence Freedman’s tour de force. However, this is not its primary focus, which he explicitly states is ‘British policy and strategy’ (vol. II, pp. xxi–xxii). Thus his examination of the land and supporting air operations occupies a relatively modest proportion of the book. While Al Haig’s shuttle diplomacy is recounted in minute detail, for example, 45 Commando’s attack on Two Sisters is covered in less than two pages. Since readers might have been preconditioned by other Official Histories to expect a particular kind of book, it is perhaps helpful to examine what this one does not attempt to do. Clearly, the Falklands Official History is not intended to serve as an account of record. A Falklands veteran who reads the book hoping to see his name in print is likely to be disappointed. In this respect Freedman’s Official History is different from others in the genre, notably the Australian official histories of the two world wars by C. E. W. Bean and Gavin Long. These placed great emphasis on the impact of individuals on events and contained a significant number of mini-biographies of prominent figures. In contrast, Freedman avoids such a personality-driven approach and, in particular, stresses that ‘it has expressly not been my task to highlight the failures of individuals’ (vol. II, p. xxiii). This leads to some anomalies, such as his reluctance to identify the officer in charge of the Welsh Guards on board the illfated Sir Galahad on 8 June – who refused to disembark his troops despite repeated requests to do so – even though the name has appeared in other published accounts. It would be instructive to know the rationale behind the decision to be sparing in the use of such names – whether this is the result of official policy, or a self-denying ordinance on the part of the author. The Falklands Official History is not a detailed operational narrative along the lines of J. E. Edmonds’s multi-volume history of the Western Front during the First World War. What Freedman provides are accurate and informative, but concise, accounts of land and air actions. His approach more closely resembles that of the campaign volumes of J. R. M. Butler’s official British history of the Second World War, which tended to paint the ‘big picture’ while being sparing on tactical detail. Indeed Butler stated that the seeker after ‘detailed narratives’ must consult ‘unit or formation histories’. Similarly, Freedman points the reader towards individual

Restructuring the infantry

On 3 December 2004 RUSI hosted a Discussion Panel on the Restructuring ofthe British Infantry. The two featured speakers were Brigadier jamie Ba/four, Director ofinfantry, Ministry ofDefence, and Dr Gary Sheffield, Senior Lecturer, joint Services Command and StaffCollege. and Kings College London. The Panel was chaired by Colone/john HughesWilson. This article is an edited version of the proceedings, including the disCllssion that followed the two

Book Review: Haig’s Intelligence: GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918 by Jim BeachHaig’s Intelligence: GHQ and the German Army, 1916–1918. By BeachJim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2013. xvi + 369 pp. £65 hbk. ISBN 978 1 107 03961 2

Pattee argues that by overlooking these imperatives, what ‘historians who fixate on the significance of Jutland fail to realize is that British naval strategy, successfully executed during the first year of the war, elevated the Royal Navy to a dominant position’, while Jutland ‘merely upheld’ this dominance (p. 206). The eradication of commerce raiders facilitated the movement of Dominion troops to the European theatre, allowed trade to proceed normally, and secured British finance, successes which ‘compelled Germany to view the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare as its only strategic option’ (p. 194). While Pattee displays an impressive grasp of the diplomatic and economic context, by ignoring the recent cultural turn in naval history he overlooks the notable influence of colonial navalism within imperial defence strategy. The Colonial and Imperial Conferences between 1887 and 1909, supported by the propaganda of ‘naval theatre’ (see Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, 2007), raised the issue of colonial contributions towards the empire’s naval defence, which culminated in the 1910 Naval Defence Act which established the Royal Australian Navy. Some explanation of this and its impact on his thesis would have been enlightening, considering the RAN’s warships feature prominently in Pattee’s assessment of Pacific operations, slightly undermining his attempt to redress Eurocentric interpretations of the war effort. His methodology also hinders him by relying entirely on documents located in the former metropole, while primary source material from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa could have painted a more nuanced picture of Dominion responses and motives which did not necessarily dovetail with Whitehall’s, as evinced in disagreement over ‘local’ naval defence strategy when the Australian Auxiliary Squadron was established (see Daniel Owen Spence, ‘Australian Naval Defence and the 1887 Colonial Conference: Context, Policy and Reaction’, International Journal of Naval History VI, 2007), and briefly alluded to by Pattee himself when discussing Australia’s preference for selling meat to the US, where it attracted higher prices (p. 182). With German documents also absent, Pattee is left to glean Wilhelmine perspectives through a filter of secondary literature (particularly in chapter 2, which examines German foreign policy). Nevertheless, At War in Distant Waters provides an important advance in our understanding of the global dimensions which made the 1914–18 conflict the First ‘World’ War.

The Challenges of High Command in the Twentieth Century

This collection began life as a series of papers given to a conference organised jointly by institutions with considerable interest in high command in an international context: the Strategic and Combat Studies Institute, the Joint Services Command and Staff College (JSCSC), and the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The conference was hosted by the JSCSC and held at Bracknell in October 1998. The authors were given liberty to focus on the aspects of command that they wished to highlight, and the result is a multi-faceted exploration of the subject of high command.

British High Command in the First World War: An Overview

The First World War presented Britain with military challenges unique in its history. It is the only time Britain has ever played in the ‘premier league’, fielding as part of a coalition a Continental scale army that took on the main enemy force. In the years 1916–18 Britain was, in a way that was not true before those years and has not been true since, a military superpower. The first challenge of high command was to develop, from scratch, effective administrative machinery for conducting a total war. There was little in the way of informal doctrine and next to nothing in recent British history to guide the soldiers and statesmen of 1914. Not surprisingly, the relationship between the politicians and the military was to cause major problems throughout the war.

Book Review: The British Army and the People’s War, 1939-1945:

Between 1939 and 1945 the British army received large numbers of articulate and educated civilians as conscripts. These men were the sons or younger brothers of the men who had `done their bit’ in the trenches, 25 years before. They were products of a more questioning and democratic society, and consequently were a less deferential and more cynical group than their forebears, and, for that matter, the average pre-war recruit. Many believed that `Colonel Blimps’ of all ranks dominated the army, and some were prepared to complain about it ± to the Daily Mirror, or to their MP. How the army responded to the challenge posed by this new type of citizen soldier is the subject of Jeremy Crang’s excellent new study. In some ways The British Army and the People’s War, 1939± 1945 is mistitled, as it is really a social and organizational history of the army at home. It does not deal with operational matters, or the social history of the army overseas. Viewed from another angle, the title is highly appropriate because British soldiers of the Second World War were mostly civilians in arms, almost a caste apart from the regular of® cers who continued to dominate the army. Crang deals with the military response to the problems posed by a people’s war through a series of case-studies of of® cer and other rank selection, of® cer± man relations, of® cer promotion, the soldier’s working life and army education. The most salient fact about the British army in the period from Dunkirk to D-Day is that a very large part of it was training in the UK. The campaigns in the Mediterranean and Far East absorbed a relatively small proportion, unlike the Western Front in 1914± 18, where virtually from beginning to end the army was engaged in extensive and bloody operations. The principal foe of the average British soldier was thus boredom rather than the Germans. Maintaining the morale of this force became a major task, and perhaps complaints about boot-bulling, petty authority and other forms of `bullshit’ assumed an importance that would have been missing if the citizen soldiers had been engaged in a life-or-death struggle. As Crang makes clear, the army did change, although not at the speed that some would have liked. Nor were reforms universally applied. The British `army’ was in fact a heterogeneous collection of regiments and corps, and commanding of® cers of individual units could and did simply ignore instructions from above that they disliked. The hero of the book is General Sir Ronald Adam, the AdjutantGeneral from 1941 onwards. This apparently `old school’ soldier, an old Etonian hereditary baronet gunner, proved to be the `People’s General’, as Crang aptly dubs him. Adam was a liberal-minded, Daily Mirror-reading, Labour-leaning military leader who was instrumental in carrying through a series of progressive measures ± the introduction

The Prewar Army: the Auxiliary Forces and Debates on Discipline

Two distinct ‘strands’ of discipline and officer-man relations coexisted in the prewar British army. The previous chapter discussed the Regular strand but here, using a similar approach, the focus is on the Auxiliary forces, which consisted of Yeomanry (cavalry) and Volunteer (from 1908 Territorial) infantry and artillery units. In 1908 the Yeomanry merged into the newly created Territorial Force (TF). Although technically disbanded in 1908, many Volunteer units simply changed their name, and there was much continuity between the old Volunteer Force and the TF.1

Officer-Man Relations and Discipline in the Regular Army, 1902–14

The social composition of the prewar Regular army had a major impact on the nature of the officer-man relationship. Broadly speaking, ‘Kipling’s army’ recruited from the highest and lowest strata of British society. The social gulf between officers and Other Ranks was very wide.1 Edmonds, the British official historian of the Great War, claimed that recruitment was aided by ‘the compulsion of hunger’.2 Various estimates of the proportion of unemployed men enlisting in the army ranged from 70 per cent in one area to more than 90 per cent for the country as a whole.3 Skilled and unskilled labourers accounted for 24 and 44.5 per cent respectively of men joining the army in 1913 and a further 25.5 per cent of recruits came from other working-class occupations such as carmen and carters, outdoor porters, and domestic servants. Professional men/students and clerks constituted only 1 and 3 per cent respectively.4 Thus the intake of recruits in a not untypical year came almost entirely from the working classes, with labourers, rather than artisans, predominating.