William J. Philpott

Why the British were really on the Somme: A reply to Elizabeth Greenhalgh

In recent years a `revisionist’ view of Britain’s political and strategic role in the First World War has developed. Works by David French, Keith Neilson, David Dutton and this author have stressed the coalition nature of the First World War and the constraints which it placed upon Britain’s policy makers and military commanders. These authors have moved the debate on Britain’s wartime policy and strategy away from the school of historiography which studies British political and military decision making in a vacuum, and have attempted to evaluate the extent to which a `national’ policy was possible in the context of a close military alliance, developing what Neilson characterizes as `a new aallianceo view of British strategy’. Elizabeth Greenhalgh’s War in History article, `Why the British Were on the Somme in 1916’ , re ̄ ects both this revisionist trend and another revisionist trend in First World War historiography, the reevaluation of the battle® eld performance of the British army, by scholars including Tim Travers, Gary Shef® eld, Robin Prior and Trevor Wil-

Anglo-French defence relations between the wars

Alexander, Martin, Anglo-French defence relations between the Wars (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp.xiii+231 RAE2008

The Anglo-French Victory on the Somme

The British historiography of the 1916 battle of the Somme fails to engage with the alliance dimension of the campaign. This article considers the battle in the strategic framework of the Allied General Offensive agreed on in 1915, and puts it in the context of French and British strategic, operational and tactical progress on the western front in the First World War. In particular it brings out the significant French role in the planning and conduct of the battle. It concludes that the battle was a victory because it turned the course of the war in the western allies favour.

The Allied Blockade of Germany

Blockade by land or sea of an enemy’s overseas trade was a long-established weapon of war. It targeted the enemy’s home front, knowing that in a long war imports and exports were vital. In 1914, an Entente blockade of Germany’s overland trade was difficult, but the Royal Navy controlled the two routes in and out of the North Sea — the English Channel and the Faroes gap — through which passed the vast bulk of Germany’s merchant shipping. Thus, a naval blockade could starve Germany of world trade. Moreover, Germany’s strategy of keeping its surface fleet in port during the war abandoned its seaborne foreign trade to the Royal Navy.

Strachan, H. (2014). The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War

Synthesising the vast, expanding, and evolving historiography of the First World War is, as the editor of one of these volumes knows, a Herculean task. By the time Professor Strachan completes his ...

Heathorn, S. (2013). Haig and Kitchener in Twentieth-Century Britain: Remembrance, Representation and Appropriation

Arguments about the cultural memory and representation of the First World War in Britain have been a staple of cultural history for some time, such that scholars are starting to dig deeper into the component elements of the images, myths, and memories of war. Stephen Heathorn’s study of two iconic British wartime leaders, early war Secretary of State for War Lord Horatio Kitchener and later war commander-in-chief Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, engages not just with the wartime legacy but also in Kitchener’s case with his wider imperial dimension. It is his contention that their representation has become ‘part of an ongoing cultural struggle over how the First World War and the values on which it were [sic] fought ought to be remembered’ (p. 235). Heathorn looks at a number of themes from a comparative perspective: the image of each early twentieth-century ‘hero’ and the way that image was subsequently cast—literally, in his thorough examination of the two men’s statuary representation in the imperial Valhalla that is Whitehall—and adopted, adapted, or undermined by subsequent generations in the culture wars which unfolded in the contentious aftermath of the First World War. Heathorn therefore is less concerned with his subjects’ historical reality and more with how their image has been altered as Britain itself has adapted in the decades after 1918. There will probably never be agreement on Sir Douglas Haig, the ‘butcher of the Somme’ in many people’s eyes as well as the victor of 1918 in the opinion of revisionist military historians (and of Haig himself). Why should there be given that there is now no national memory of the war, but a contested remembrance that is being revisited once again as the war’s centenaries pass? Yet both these judgments remain valid, because Haig was a man who changed during wartime just as the war itself evolved. Indeed, the author posits that Haig’s statue in Whitehall unveiled after his death was intended to embody both sacrifice and victory at the same time, thereby reconciling the two strands of national memory. But, as Ramsay Macdonald, himself a strong pacifist, noted on Haig’s death (p. 149): ‘To some of us war is such a terrible calamity that the man whose name is associated with it

Attrition: How the War Was Fought and Won

It is a historical truism that the First World War was a war of attrition. Yet few, then and now, actually appreciated exactly what a war of attrition is, and what it meant for the armies and societies that fought one. Attrition is, perhaps, the other strategy of the Great War: the strategy that was engaged and worked by both coalitions after military stalemate set in, the process by which the Entente Powers engaged and defeated the Central Powers. Someone who probably did understand was Herbert Asquith, Britain’s prime minister until December 1916 and the man responsible for organising Britain’s war effort as the empire engaged with this novel and unexpected war of attrition. When he visited the Somme front in summer 1916, Asquith harped on a great deal on the fact that what the British public wanted to hear of was geographical gains of towns and territory, on a large scale, and large bags of prisoners; and that a successful fight that only involved an advance of a couple of thousand yards and the slaughter of a large number of Germans did not appeal to them. They wanted something tangible.1

L. Sondhaus (2011). World War One: The Global Revolution

The First World War had a profound effect on the nations which waged it and left a difficult legacy for those which survived or emerged from it. Sondhaus’s hypothesis that the war was revolutionary therefore is entirely plausible, at least if we do not worry, as the author does not, about the semantics of what exactly amounts to revolutionary change. A “military revolution” certainly occurred; political fractures, some precipitated by actual revolutions, resulted in almost all belligerents and many neutrals; the war’s economic and social changes and consequences were profound; culture was reworked. In this excellent new textbook we have an up-to-date, engaging account of all those shifts. Sondhaus has packed a lot into his pages, and this text deserves a prominent place on reading lists for First World War and general twentieth century history courses. This is a straightforward introductory textbook which in 15 chapters follows a chronological line through the European campaigns from 1914 to 1919 with excursions into the home fronts, the wider world war and the war at sea. The narrative is supported with brief chronologies, extracts from key documents, numerous (clear) sketch maps and illustrations, “perspectives” boxes discussing key historiographical debates, short supplementary bibliographies and five short stand-alone “daily life” essays on war experience: life in Anzac Cove; trench warfare; Lenin’s sealed train journey to Russia; life aboard a U-boat; and the legacy of the trenches—a slightly eclectic mix perhaps, and lacking a home front study. These furnish generous material for further discussion in the classroom. Sondhaus ranges widely both geographically and thematically in his global history. As a specialist historian of Austria-Hungary, his book in particular addresses the eastern European states and their campaigns, emphasising the centrality of the Central Powers to the course and nature of the war more fully than many previous textbooks, which focus predominantly on the western struggle between France and Britain and Germany. This, Sondhaus suggests, will lead to a “superior summary account” (p. xiii). As someone who writes on the western war, this reviewer learned much about the other

France's Forgotten Victory

France won the First World War. This simple fact is all but forgotten in the English-speaking world. Either the combination of blockade and the now efficient British citizen army on the one hand, or the democratic masses of America in uniform on the other, is said to have delivered the coup de grâce to Germany. In fact, France’s belligerence and determined four-year endurance were the real foundations of Allied victory. The trials of invasion and occupation; the strains of mass mobilisation; the acceptance of horrific losses at the front; the steady popular will to victory; the resilience of the republican political system when faced with total war, despite deep civil–military cleavages; a firm and focused leadership of a diverse politico-military coalition; and above all a brave, modernising army allowed her to win. It was an enervating struggle and – particularly if viewed as it often is through the refracting lens of her next encounter with Germany in 1940 – one that effectively ended France’s standing as a great power. In that respect it was a pyrrhic victory, but it was a worthy and well-won victory nonetheless and one that is overdue for proper analysis.

Book Review: The Embattled Self: French Soldiers’ Testimony of the Great War. By Leonard V. Smith. Cornell University Press. 2007. xi + 214 pp. US

War in History 2009 16 (4) the range of countermeasures the authorities recommended to restrict liaisons as much as possible. Finally, in his concluding chapter, Fogarty examines the paradoxes of republican policy, predicated on the acquisition of civic rights in exchange for military service to the nation, and shows how when this tenet was applied in a colonial context, egalitarian doctrine was consistently subverted by racial, cultural, political, and economic considerations. Wide-ranging and informative though the author’s account is, it could also be improved in minor ways. At times the thematic organization of this book, revolving around race and republicanism applied in multiple contexts and examined with geographic specifi city, itself subject to variable historiographical constrains, is cumbersome. More signifi cantly, although republicanism was in the ascent in the metropole by the beginning of the twentieth century, older hierarchical political traditions often held sway in many of the civic institutions created to govern colonials overseas. Moreover, many of the offi cers most responsible for fashioning wartime policy in the colonial army were drawn from military and religious backgrounds that were by no means sympathetic to republicanism. In this regard, the apparent contra dictions between the commitment to republican egalitarianism and the maintenance of racial exclusivity are perhaps not as paradoxical as it fi rst appears, and warrant further study. Still, through his meticulous research, the breadth of his study’s scope, and his valuable comparative perspective, Fogarty has made an ambitious and enduring contribution to the literature about the French use of colonial peoples during the First World War. In so doing, he puts us all in his debt.