7
Case Study II: The RMA of the First World
War
The First World War has no close rivals as a theatre of controversy for combative
historians. Despite the passage of more than eighty years since the guns fell silent at 1100
hours on 11 November 1918, intellectual firepower ranging over many aspects of the war
is livelier that ever. To the longstanding debates on the war’s origins and precipitating
causes,1
and the merits or otherwise in its characteristic higher generalship,2
have been
added disagreements about the skill with which the war was conducted tactically and
operationally. To a social scientist whose professional focus typically is on the near
future (e.g. the contemporary RMA debate), it can be quite startling to realise that
virtually every major question one can ask about the First World War is as yet not settled
beyond reasonable doubt by scholarship. Citing a stream of innovative studies which
began to appear in the 1980s, Williamson Murray claims persuasively that it was only
with the appearance of those recent works
that we have finally began to understand the World War I battlefield. We still do not have
an equivalent work [to those by Lupfer and Travers] for the French, Italian or Russian
armies. If historians who possess the documents and unlimited time have taken seventy
years to unravel the changing face of the battlefield, one should not be surprised that the
generals had some difficulty during the war.3
Fortunately for our study, much of the historians’ combat about the First World War,
though fascinating, falls short of posing a potential threat to the integrity of these
proceedings. Indeed, some of the more traditionally active zones of historians’
contentions seem notably unlikely to shed much useful light on strategic history. For
example, it is not obvious that further argument about Sir Douglas Haig’s style of
command, and performance in generalship, can yield more nuggets of clarification—
unless such argument is tied closely to study of the effectiveness of his army.4
Similarly,
finely grained comparison of German and Allied (especially British) military-technical
competencies as contributions to combat proficiency also stand in dire peril of missing
the all-important strategic point. Specifically, the armed forces of the Allies did their
strategic job well enough, while those of the Central Powers did not. It is all too easy for
careful historians of the tactical and the operational conduct of the First World War so to
lose the plot of a necessary strategic perspective that ironically they mirror in their errors
those of their German subjects. Some of the new scholarship on the First World War,
heralded by the appearance in 1981 of Timothy Lupfer’s paean of praise for the changes
in German tactical doctrine, has been vastly impressed by German military excellence. In
defence and on offence, we are told, the German Army had the combat edge. The literary
arguments are powerful, while the unilateral detail of German achievement is telling
indeed. There is, however, a need somehow to account for the embarrassingly
inconvenient fact of German defeat. To staple together in an analytically convincing way
the odd couple of alleged tactical excellence and strategic incompetence is a task beyond
most historians. For example, there is something deeply unsatisfactory about these
summative thoughts by Bruce Gudmundsson:
That the excellence that was achieved in the realm of tactics did not win the war for
Germany does not make the revolution that occurred between 1914 and 1918 any less
significant.5
Gudmundsson sacrifices a major strategic truth—that German arms did not fight well
enough to win—in order to record a minor one—that a revolution in tactics was effected.
Semi-plausibly he proceeds to argue that
The failure of the German Army in 1918 was not a failure then of German tactics at
the squad, platoon, company, battalion, regimental, division, or even army level, but a
failure of German operational art, German strategy, and German national policy.6
By analogy, a sports journalist might extol at great length the multidimensional skills
of a football team in all aspects of the playing of the game, while blaming the strange fact
of persistent defeat on the coach, team management, and the schedule. If tactical
superiority should have led the way to operational and then strategic, for ultimate
political, success in any great conflict, it was in the First World War.7
Armies that
reliably win tactically, which is to say fight more effectively than do their enemies, win
wars. It is really as simple as that. They may not win elegantly or cheaply, but still they
win. A relevant moral of this analysis is to the effect that when we read expert studies
which purport to show the amateurishness and general clumsiness of the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF), contrasted with Teutonic military skill and dexterity, what
seems not to add up truly does not compute. We need to remember not only what
Clausewitz wrote about war being a duel but also that History, unlike some historians,
does not award marks for style.
The test of an army is how well it fights. The test of strategy is how well it uses force
to meet the demands of policy. Our focus here is upon how, and how well, the major
belligerents in the First World War learned the trade of modern warfare. More
specifically, across the many dimensions to strategy what choices were made which were
intended to exploit areas of relative strength and offset those of relative weakness? The
RMA theme itself usefully directs enquiry to military performance overall. The theme of
strategic behaviour emphasised here provides a constant reminder that military
performance cannot be assessed intelligently save with reference both to the enemy and
to the possibly fluctuating political purpose of it all.
Although one needs to be alert to the temptations and sins of patriotic historiography,
it is scarcely surprising that the reputation of the BEF of 1914–18 should have grown by
leaps and bounds as the result of the close scrutiny it has received by historians of recent
years.8
One would like to say it was inevitable that a new breed of military historians
eventually would notice that there was something askew about the orthodox picture. How
did upper-class Edwardian bumblers,9
rigidly and unimaginatively leading a docile mass
of wartime amateurs (volunteers and then conscripts),10
manage to beat the supposedly
tactically excellent principal military force of the continental superpower of the period?
Obviously, the favourable (im)balance of resources of most kinds was important. But
Strategy for Chaos 152
could it be that among the British ‘butchers and bunglers’ of 1914–18 were men who
were indeed up to their jobs of leading an army which knew its business by 1917–18?11
Today, the ‘butchers and bunglers’ image of 1914–18 generalship has been belatedly
demolished as the nonsense that it largely is. Nonetheless, some military historians are
prone to veer towards judgements which implicitly appear to rest upon a beau-ideal
notion of proper generalship for the period,12
while conceptual rigidities can bedevil
historical assessment. Just as the grand idea of a First World War RMA is a long
retrospective scholar’s invention, so the idea that by 1918 two substantially rival concepts
of warfare—traditional infantry and artillery-led, versus mechanical—contended for
dominance, also is the product of speculative theory. Tim Travers, the leading advocate
of the thesis that two styles of war beckoned the BEF in 1918,13
commits a classic
scholarly error by criticising the British High Command for failing to pursue more
consistently a character of combat packaged conceptually by himself in the 1980s and
1990s.
This chapter proceeds schematically as did Chapter 6. The candidate RMA of the First
World War is advanced for understanding within the framework of the standard nine-step
RMA ‘life-cycle’ presented earlier. That functional, but also substantially historical and
largely descriptive, discussion14
is succeeded by brief commentary on how this alleged
RMA worked as strategic behaviour.
THE GREAT ARTILLERY WAR15
The leading edge of military-historical scholarship on the First World War today engages
in sharp fire-fights on everything save for the relative significance of its subject.
J.P.Harris is not especially controversial when he states as fact that 1914–18 ‘witnessed
the most rapid evolution in the art of war yet known’.16
Though now near-orthodox
among scholars, this claim would have seemed no less than startling as recently as 1980.
Needless to add, perhaps, the new tactical and operational scholarship on the First World
War has yet to penetrate far into the coffee-table and documentary television markets, or
indeed into a general public consciousness educated by the supreme awfulness of the
worst day in British military history (after King Harold’s defeat in 1066), 1 July 1916, the
first day on the Somme.17
Harris’s judicious claim repeats the opinion expressed by
Jonathan Bailey in an extraordinarily influential study. Bailey, significantly a very
serious artilleryman as well as a bold historian, has asserted that
Between 1917 and 1918, a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) took place which, it is
contended, was more than merely that; rather it amounted to a Military Revolution which
was that most significant development in the history of war to date, and remains so. It
amounted to the birth of what will be called the Modern Style of Warfare with the advent
of ‘three dimensional’, artillery indirect fire as the foundation of planning at the tactical,
operational and strategic levels of war. This was indeed so revolutionary that the
burgeoning of armour, airpower and the arrival of the Information Age since then amount
to no more than complements to it—incremental technical improvements to the
efficiency of the conceptual model of the Modern Style of Warfare—and they are
themselves rather its products than its peers.18
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 153
Far from Bailey’s argument being challenged, the years that have elapsed since he wrote
the words quoted have seen his view extensively endorsed. His conceptualisation of what
was effected in 1917–18 was, so it seems, just what the world of historical scholarship
was waiting for.19
It required an artilleryman-historian to have the confidence to place the
‘revolutionary’ label on what widely had come to be appreciated as a period of
exceptionally rapid change. So what did occur in the art of war in those terrible four
years, and why?
The RMA of the First World War was invented and carried through by great military
machines which found themselves baffled and frustrated by the failure of the extant
legacies of previous RMAs to deliver tactical and operational, let alone strategic, success.
The character of warfare which failed in 1914–16 may be described as Napoleonic with
an industrial base. Following the Napoleonic model, ‘the German method of strategy’ of
the second half of the nineteenth century produced swift army-, even regime-, smashing
victories.20
The method embodied excellence in staffwork, in short-range logistics, much
hard marching, mobile firepower, and some bold operational artistry (not to mention the
good fortune of truly incompetent foes). German military studies believed they had found
in classical sources, but above all else in Napoleon’s signature manoeuvre sur les
derrìeres, the magical elixir which guaranteed success. Envelopment, even double
envelopment (après Hannibal’s bloody triumph at Cannae), was vital for annihilation. As
was to happen again, in 1940–41, German military planners before the First World War
exaggerated the degree to which their (not so recent) victories were achieved by the
genius in Prussian method, rather than by luck and enemy folly. However, even if
Germany’s high military reputation at home and abroad was entirely well merited, a
familiar pattern of competitive emulation had asserted itself by 1914.
After 1870 every European army adopted the Prussian formula. They introduced
conscription, expanded their railways and telegraphs, procured magazine rifles, machine
guns and quick-firing artillery, set their general staffs the task of planning offensive wars
in painstaking detail, and assigned a recklessly bowdlerised version of Clausewitz to their
war colleges… Forgetting that the Napoleonic ‘revolution in military affairs’ had lost its
punch once every other army in Europe adopted it, these generals went to war in 1914
labouring under the ‘short war illusion’; they were somehow convinced that their
planning, armaments and tactics would defeat the enemy, even though the enemy
possessed virtually the same technologies and doctrines that they did.21
Geoffrey Wawro, whose words those are, captures most of the relevant context for the
military crisis of 1914–18. The problem was not simply that the mainstays of the German
method of war had been copied abroad, but also that that method could no longer succeed
in the confines of the strategic geography of western Europe, unless, that is, the enemy
made and persisted with operational level errors of truly Homeric proportions.22
In
August 1914, with its operational and tactical recklessness, France did its best to flatter
the potential of a style of warfare which ordinary military competence should thwart
without great distress.23
By imperfect analogy, the mass armies of industrial Europe that
marched to war in 1914 (having detrained at their frontiers) were not unlike the armies of
1809–12, or perhaps the great nuclear war machines of the superpowers from the late
1950s to the close of the Cold War. In each of those historical cases, there were reasons
Strategy for Chaos 154
structural to the context why rapid and decisive military victory either could not be
achieved at all, or in the nuclear regard could not be secured at tolerable cost. With
hindsight-foresight it is child’s play for historians to identify solutions to problems
which, to the historical actors, were revealed as such only cumulatively, piece by piece.
In practice, the RMAs of the early 1800s, 1914–18, and 1945–89, all carried the seeds of
their own self-limitation. The Napoleonic RMA could not overcome its technical and
human problems of operational-level command in its gigantic, but disaggregated, armies;
the RMA of the First World War was limited by technical problems of real-time
battlespace command and especially by the absence of robust means for rapid
exploitation of initial tactical success; while the nuclear RMA, as we shall see, was
substantially confined in its strategic utility by the sheer, excessive, destructiveness of its
weapons.
This chapter tells how yet another modern style of warfare was invented, perhaps
discovered—since almost all of its constituent elements already were present in 1914–
16—when the contemporary model failed dismally in the field in war. As noted already,
the dominant paradigm of modern war in 1914 was thoroughly Napoleonic. Field guns
laid directly over open sights would soften up the enemy’s infantry; friendly infantry in
waves or columns would then advance alone to the assault; and finally cavalry would try
to exploit the infantry’s success and turn the enemy’s retreat into a rout (that is, if he was
not double-enveloped, i.e., surrounded, and compelled to surrender). By 1918 that
paradigm was long lost and buried together with its victims. From spring 1917 to the end
of the war, an increasingly mature new paradigm of land warfare had indirect artillery
fire enable decentralised combined-arms combat teams of infantry to seize and hold bitesize
chunks of the enemy’s defended zone. Tanks may or may not be used to crush
barbed wire, depending upon the army in question, the task, and the terrain, while aircraft
are variably useful, depending upon the weather and time of year (in daylight). This
‘modern style of warfare’ of 1917–18 vintage has been the model for regular land-air (or
air-land) combat until the present day. Such modern war takes as a given the likelihood
that the enemy has no flanks to be menaced (which is not always the case, of course).
Instead, the mission is to achieve penetration of what amounts to a continually fortified
zone.
Unlike some other military historians who are quick to award more points to one,
rather than another, variant of this new paradigm of land warfare, Bailey wisely argues
that:
The interaction between the strategic setting and available technology still governs the
fundamental choice—discerned in 1918—at the operational and tactical levels of war;
between manoeuvre supported by firepower and firepower supported by manoeuvre.24
In other words, there was no set formula, no all-cases correct way, to employ the tactical
elements in 1918 for superior military effectiveness.25
Nonetheless, strategic history does
record unambiguously that the Allied practice of RMA, inter alia, in 1917–18 as strategic
behaviour proved conclusively superior to the rival German effort. One must never forget
that history crowns as victor neither the belligerent who achieves understanding of the
most elegant style of contemporary war that is feasible, nor even necessarily the
belligerent who can best practice that style. War is not only about superior military art.
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 155
After all, military art has to serve a political master via strategic direction. The need to
emphasise this point is one reason why RMA theory (and practice) is apt to mislead if it
is developed in isolation from the theory (and practice) of strategy.
RMA LIFE-CYCLE
Preparation
By way of sharp contrast with the Napoleonic RMA, the RMA of the First World War
did not amount to the inspired command of a well-nigh ready-fashioned military
instrument. Rather did the parents of RMA between 1914 and 1918 have to make the
revolution (in fairly distinctive national variants) in response to the manifest military
crisis created by the abject failure of existing ways in war. A wide gulf divided British
(maritime) from German (continentalist) strategic history in the century separating
Waterloo from First Ypres. In part as a consequence, large differences separated British
and German strategic and military cultures. The RMA effected in the First World War
nonetheless was to reflect a generally common military enlightenment. A multi-year (we
will not say long) war is a great equaliser of military skills. An RMA carried through in
wartime enjoys a pace and conclusive realism in field testing that precludes scope for
much of the debate that peacetime innovation can attract.
This RMA was not the product of one man, or even of several men (note its lack of
eponymity), and it did not have as its centrepiece some arguably ‘dominant’ new weapon
or technology. It did, however, have a dominant category of weapon, albeit not a new
one, in the artillery. It would be technically true, but trivialising, to claim that just about
every machine and military method or skill that played a significant team role in the
RMA of 1917–18 either existed physically in earlier form, or at least had been conceived
by fertile imaginations (e.g. the tank), prior to the war.26
With respect to this RMA,
although we can label developments over the course of the preceding century as RMApreparatory,
it would be more correct to see those years as preparation for what occurred
in action as a general military crisis in 1914–16. The raw material from which the RMA
would be fashioned in the midst of war was of course more or less present as
potentialities in earlier years.
The political, social, technological, and industrial forces that found expression in the
battle-shaped competitive military instruments of RMA of 1917–18 were the same forces
which, guided by a different paradigm of large-scale modern war, produced the
‘trenchlock’ of 1914–16. If firepower especially in the forms of indirect artillery
bombardment and automatic weapons was key to the unravelling of fortified fronts, it
was the developments in firepower that had enabled flankless fortified fronts to be held
against the assault craft of the day. It follows that the war waged in late 1917 and 1918
can be traced in its fundamental preparation to the great changes which gave birth to the
modern state, to the modern idea of the national security community, and the industrial
revolutions of coal and iron, and then steel, oil, and electricity. The Military Revolutions,
or RMAs, of c. 1600 to c. 1900 ultimately found military expression in mass conscript
armies, which were mobilised and then supported by rail, were equipped with the best
weapons that modern science and technology could devise, and were commanded and
Strategy for Chaos 156
administered by general staffs of variable excellence. Alas, the factors just cited
comprised the fuel of military, leading to strategic, and political, crisis. The new weapons
and other useful devices (e.g. barbed wire) invented and developed from Waterloo to
Ypres, when employed in warfare on a large scale against a fairly symmetrical foe, had
the cumulative effect of denying the power of decision to the fight.
Preparation for what, in retrospect, well warrants ascription as the RMA of 1917–18,
took the form of three years of trial and error on offence and defence as the belligerents
struggled to design, test, and rearm for a practicable paradigm of flankless land warfare.
That brief period of wartime preparation provided both new tactics for combined-arms
warfare and, no less essential, the quality and quantity of machines and munitions
necessary for new tactics to be applied. Focus on the RMA of the First World War must
not obscure the significance of mass. By 1918, the two very tired sides in the war in the
west were by and large more than competent in the tactical conduct of land warfare,27
with each national army inventing and practising the form of RMA that best fitted its
circumstances. Probably it is no exaggeration to claim that although neither had a notable
edge in military prowess after four years of war, that condition of rough equality enabled
the superior resources of the Allies to function as an uneven playing field. It would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance of the conclusions reached by Ian Malcolm Brown
in his path-breaking study of British logistics.
Geddes’s reforms of the winter of 1916 and spring of 1917 [brought in as DirectorGeneral
of Transportation to reorganise BEF communications] released the constraints on
both operations and strategy. From 1917 onwards, and particularly in 1918, the very
excellence of the BEF’s administration largely freed Haig and his subordinates to
innovate and make offensive plans much more rapidly…the impact of administration in
1918 may be called subtly profound—it is not obvious, but it allowed the BEF to launch
a series of material-heavy offensives in 1918 that, along with the rest of the allied effort,
made clear to the German high command that the allies had become capable of winning
the war on the battlefield.28
The BEF’s logistical and general administrative excellence became deadly as the British
Army overall became truly competitive with the Germans in fighting skills.
One should not need to add that the campaigns of 1914–16 were not intended as
preparation for an RMA in 1917–18 which would resolve the tactical problems of taking
and holding ground in the face of modern firepower. Such teleology is a conceit of the
retrospective historian or theorist. In the successive years from 1914 to 1917, either both
sides (1914, 1916) or the Allies only (in 1915, France; in 1917, France then Britain)
believed that it had cracked the code for strategically decisive military success. Grim
though it is to characterise the war in this way, the four years of the conflict can be seen
as a race for each belligerent between, on the one hand, the acquisition of education in
modern war and the raising of the military instrument to apply that education and, on the
other hand, the progressive depletion of the moral and material resources to prosecute the
combat. War weariness at home and at the front could impose a lethal enervation upon
armies which had, at last, found fairly reliable tactical ways to fight well.
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 157
Recognition of challenge
It would be a grave teleological error to work backwards from the new style(s) of land
warfare of 1918 to the point of departure in 1914, and interpret the intervening four years
of bloody military education as a race to be first to a finishing line called competence in
modern war. At first, the armies of 1914 did not know that they were not competent.
Moreover, when all parties’ ways in warfare failed to deliver even a remote semblance of
victory, it was less than self-evident to nearly everyone that the necessary course of
instruction and softening up of the foe must extend over three to four years.29
To clarify
that point yet further by analogy: the task of frustrated military men in 1914–17 can be
likened to the mission of mountaineers committed to ascend Mount Everest, except that
they do not, and cannot, know the height of the mountain. By way of an unsettling
postmodern thought, our Mount Everest for the Great War analogy has no stable altitude.
With the inestimable value of hindsight, we can appreciate much of the whole scale and
difficulty of the climbs that the military machines were ordered by policy to attempt from
1914 to 1918. Such knowledge is strictly a privilege granted by historical perspective.
Objectively speaking, certainly the German, British, and French Armies recognised
and rose as far as conditions allowed to meet the challenge of modern war. But that claim
represents an Olympian overview. As late as September 1918, for example, it was less
than crystal clear to Allied soldiers just how much of a challenge the German Army still
posed (e.g. must we fight on through the winter and into 1919?).30
Contrary to the
argument of some historians, Tim Travers in particular, it is not persuasive to suggest that
in the Hundred Days campaign of August-November 1918 the BEF demonstrated a lack
of reliable grip on the challenge of modern war.31
That only modest use of tanks was
made by the BEF in the closing three months of the war reflected battle-field conditions
and the availability of machines, not an absence of enthusiasm for a properly
‘mechanical’ style of modern war.
RMA theory has yet to offer much worth reading on the subject of ‘revolutionary’
behaviour as a response to challenge that is explicitly acknowledged. Writing historically,
one size does not fit all cases. It can be difficult to ‘get the RMA right’, perhaps even to
effect the right RMA, if one is not sure of the question. For example, if the atomic bomb
was the answer, was there a question worth addressing with respect to German and
Japanese atomic weapon research?32
Recall that although early in the Second World War
there had been excellent grounds to be anxious about German (and Japanese) research in
atomic physics, the grounds were notably less solid for actually detonating the nuclear
RMA in action in August 1945—by which time the Allied policy rationales included
military expediency and diplomatic effect, not plausibly possible Japanese atomic bombs.
Fast forwarding with the same question, ‘if an information-led RMA is the answer today,
what is the strategic question?’ How well defined, persuasive, and important is the
challenge that the makers of a particular RMA acknowledge and strive to overcome?
Of the candidate great RMAs (or MRs) examined in some detail in this book, that of
1914–18 was directed literally at the most concrete of existential challenges. The tactical,
and hence the operational and strategic, stalemate on the Western Front presented a clear
and all too present danger to political goals. The Napoleonic RMA was pulled fullthrottle
into life by the ambitions of one man who inherited a military system which did
Strategy for Chaos 158
not need to raise its game very far in order to be in a league of military effectiveness all
its own, for a while at least. The nuclear RMA was pushed into reality by political fears
which, though rational and reasonable, rested upon evidence and argument about enemy
activity of a decidedly speculative kind. In the 1990s, the information-led RMA occurred,
if it did, apparently bereft of significant political or strategic propulsion. The RMA of
1914–18 could hardly be more different.
The fundamental challenge in 1914–18 was supremely tactical in nature and scarcely
required active probing thought for its recognition. The belligerent armies in the west
could not outflank each other laterally, or vertically over-head. It followed that they
needed to discover reliable means to penetrate the enemy’s front and then exploit the
break-in to secure a breakthrough for the achievement of operational-level success.
Definition of challenge to tactical success emerged rapidly from the time when Helmut
von Moltke issued the order to ‘entrench and hold’ above the River Aisne on 10
September 1914.33
Though conceptually constant, the tactical challenge that the RMA of
1914–18 had to overcome was supremely dynamic. As the belligerents learned fitfully
how to attack, so also they learned how to defend. Moreover, given that the defence is
structurally advantaged in land warfare, and never in modern times more so than when
railways could provide operational reinforcement more rapidly than footpower could
penetrate deep battlezones,34
the side typically playing defence (the German on the
Western Front) characteristically was playing on a field with a favourable tilt. As the
Allies’ art in attack improved, impressively if unsteadily, from 1914 to 1918, so—alas—
did the Germans’ art in defence.
The challenge recognised in late 1914 was to devise ways, and acquire the military
means, to break into and through a thinly scraped broken line of trenches. But by spring
1917 the task was to penetrate a three-zone elastic defence averaging seven miles in
depth wherein a thinly held forward outpost realm served as a breakwater for a ‘battle
zone’ or main line of resistance (MLR), comprising probably three lines of trenches and
other (all around) fortified positions, which covered the artillery and the counterattack
divisions which were held in and behind a ‘rearward zone’.35
Where feasible the ‘battle
zone’ would be sited in terrain masked (dead ground) from the Allied attacker, and
artillery would be well integrated with the defensive scheme. The Germans’ emphasis
was on flexibility. By way of a sharp contrast with their expensive tactical practice in
1916 at Verdun, and especially on the Somme, the new German defensive doctrine after
winter 1916–17 sought to defeat Allied assaults on the MLR, not to hold on to, or
promptly recapture, every last foot of lost territory. Defending infantry could disperse
into shell holes to avoid much of the enemy’s barrage, if it was of the ‘lifting’ kind (from
one linear target to another). They would hold their positions in the battle zone pending
the arrival of counterattack formations, which should be able to defeat an enemy that had
achieved an offensive break-in. That enemy would be heavily attrited in numbers,
exhausted, and unable to mount a cohesive defence. Such was the core of the theory of
defence. Every zone in the defence system would be protected by ever more expansive
aprons of barbed wire. As just noted, where geographically practicable the more serious
elements of the defence would be sited on reverse slopes, hidden in the remains of
woods, or built into the ruins of the urban architecture of the region.
The fact that all war is a duel, and that there is a constant dialectic between offence
and defence, meant that the RMA of the First World War was a race to innovate so as to
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 159
make strategic progress towards a receding finishing line. The hastily improvised
defences of 1914 were a poor joke when compared, say, with what Friedrich von
Lossberg designed for the so-called Hindenberg Line in winter 1916–17. But so also was
the art of attack of 1914–15 when compared with the complex orchestration of all-arms
(sometimes) in 1917 and 1918. While the ignorant armies learned how to prevail, they
learned also how to deny victory to the foe.
Parentage
The RMA of 1914–18 was authored by a cast of thousands. The tactical re-education of
armies millions strong effected over the course of four years was very much driven ‘from
below’ at what, following a literally Homeric suggestion, might well be called the
working level of the war machines.36
The rival high commands merit respect for not
notably impeding innovation, indeed for providing such positive encouragement as their
respective military cultures permitted. It should be unnecessary to add that military
failure or disappointment on the grand scale yielded a context which proved a great
enabler for bold experiment. With more or less assistance from on high, the RMA
cumulatively was constructed and implemented by relatively junior officers, rather than
by the names familiar to domestic publics from the newspapers (synonymous with ‘the
media’ for 1914–18).
We are not short of names for the honour roll of parents of the RMA of 1914–18, but
to provide such a listing risks misleading the reader. In both the German and the British
Armies (the twin foci for the purposes of this case study) the process of tactical reform
entailed constant dialogue between ‘line’ and ‘staff’. Moreover, that dialogue was hugely
decentralised, as regiments/ battalions, divisions, specialised corps, and armies each
applied their experience in gargantuan training networks. Behind the static lines, ‘trench
(-zone) locked’ from the North Sea to Switzerland, a complex architecture of battle and
other training schools of all varieties proliferated.37
The RMA was never pursued according to a clearly articulated unified vision or
doctrine. The contribution of no single person, document, or even concept of operations,
neatly captures the revolution holistically. The theory and practice of direct and predicted
artillery fire, preferably delivered unpreregistered (on the real targets), for Jonathan
Bailey’s three-dimensional way of war, is the closest approximation provided to date to
what lies at the heart of the RMA of 1917–18.38
His artillery-oriented interpretation of the
course of the war is by far the most convincing explanation of what changed militarily,
and why, in those years. Eighty-plus years of memoirs and scholarship have delivered no
better theory than Bailey’s.
Following Bailey, we should recognise the leading artillery colonels and generals as
most truly the parents of this RMA. Haig and Ludendorff, even such army commanders
as Hubert Plumer, John Monash, and Henry Rawlinson, are not the heroes of this
revolution. Instead, if names we need, the roll of honour must include, for the Germans,
Colonel Georg ‘Durchbruch’ (‘Break-through’) Bruchmüller (Der Durch Bruchmüller)
and Captain Erich Pulkowski,39
while for the British the names of most note include
Generals Birch, Holland, Uniacke, and Tudor. The latter certainly were senior men,
GHQ, Army, and corps-level Royal Artillery advisers, but they were not, and have not
become, household names.40
Given that there was an important mechanised dimension to
Strategy for Chaos 160
the British and French version of this RMA, it is appropriate to add to the list of parents
of the RMA the names of Ernest Swinton of the Royal Engineers, most plausibly
described as the inventor of the ‘tank’, and J.F.C.Fuller, the leading theorist on the use of
the tank.41
With respect to the increasingly decentralised and combined-arms focus for
infantry attack, the best-known name for theory remains Captain André Laffargue of the
French Army, whose modest study, The Attack in Trench Warfare, probably has been
accorded undue significance.42
The practice of infantry attack, emphasising flexibility in
the co-ordination of combined arms from the battalion down to the platoon and even
squad levels, is associated most closely by repute with Captain Willi Rohr, the leading
spirit in the German development of stormtroop tactics.43
For the defence, although the
initial inspiration (in 1915) allegedly was French, the principal nominee for the hall of
fame has to be Colonel Fritz von Lossberg, who as Chief of Staff of the German Third
Army in 1915–16, and subsequently wherever his expertise was most needed, served as
the quintessential ‘fireman’, designing and effecting systems of elastic defence in depth.44
The Hindenburg Line of universal eponymous note should really be known as the
‘Lossberg Line’.
The true parents of the RMA of the First World War were thus not commanding
generals, or civilian politicians, who demanded the invention of a new, more effective,
style of land warfare. Instead, they were the captains, majors, colonels, and one- and twostar
generals who developed, or at least encouraged, the best contemporary military
practice, as unfolding experience revealed to be the case, and who led intra-war reform
by a process of example, laissez-faire and persuasion. However, no matter how widely
we cast the net to recognise the vast and diverse scope of this wartime RMA enterprise, it
is important not to dilute appreciation of the central, literally essential role of indirect (i.e.
unobserved) and increasingly unpreregistered predicted artillery fire, and hence of the
men who innovated with that arm of service.
Enabling spark
Artillery was the adjustable tool which, more than any other complementary element,
unlocked the linear fortresses of 1917–18. The artillery key required both quantity and
quality, and it needed skilful, certainly averagely competent, infantry to exploit its
success. However, it would not be correct to argue that artillery was the decisive weapon
in 1914–18. Artillery did not decide who won the war. But Allied competence, and better,
in artillery did decide that their overall advantages in resources could be translated into
military effectiveness for a strategically favourable outcome. Such was German and
Allied artillery prowess by late 1917 that, ceteris paribus, limited military success became
fairly reliably feasible.45
When gross tactical errors were made, as for example when the
French crowded their forward line of defence along the Chemin des Dames with troops
(27 May 1918), then the artillery ‘enabler’ truly could open a dazzling prospect of
operational victory. To enable victory to be won is not, of course, to ensure its
achievement. British and German artillery in 1917–18 could create an opening for the
manoeuvre force to exploit for decisive operational-level advantage, if only that force had
been truly able to manoeuvre to win the deep battle.
The artillery of 1917–18 could enable success if the best technical practices making
for accuracy were followed; if it was employed in sufficient mass; if it was controlled
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 161
flexibly as the shape of battle altered; if geographical-tactical circumstances were
permissive; and if the co-operating arms played their combined combat roles with
sufficient skill and adequate weight.46
In other words, the near-perfection of artillery
techniques and material by 1917–18 did not constitute a silver bullet certain to deliver
victory. The leading reason was that here, as historically so often, belligerents engaged in
a protracted conflict could not unilaterally invent, and then with the element of surprise
practise, a devastatingly novel way in war. In wartime the enemy is alert to tactical
change and already is mobilised to cope with it. Isolated changes in tactical practice—for
example, the German introduction of chlorine gas at Second Ypres in 1915—typically
yield only isolated and temporary advantage. The Great War did not follow any
discernibly nonlinear course as a result of some individual technical tactical catalyst.47
Full demonstration of the belated triumph of comprehensively scientific gunnery was
achieved almost serendipitously. The BEF planned a great raid at Cambrai in November
1917 to breach the Hindenburg Line, a raid designed primarily to test the massed use of
tanks for the first time. The terrain in front of Cambrai was judged to be good tank
country, but only if the ground was not pitted with thousands of shell holes prior to the
effort of the tanks to advance. A further reason to eschew any version of the ever more
monumental artillery bombardment characteristic of the material ‘massification’ of the
war in 1916–17 was the need to preserve surprise for the tank-led assault. The BEF
secretly gathered a total of 478 tanks for the raid. By the close of the first day of the
battle, 179 were out of action, though only 65 because of enemy action.48
The story of the
initial success at Cambrai (nearly four miles gained) appeared principally to be the tale of
the tank. However, useful though the tank had proved to be when employed in large
numbers, particularly for crushing belts of barbed wire, the real story of Cambrai was
about combined arms. If any one element threatened to unlock the German front at
Cambrai, and show the way ‘to the green fields beyond’, it was the artillery. The key
tactical ‘enabler’ was the artillery rather than the tank. While Cambrai had been intended
to showcase the potential of the tank, in fact it demonstrated—to risk exaggeration—a
near perfection of predicted artillery fire. As much by accident as by wise intent, the
grand design for Cambrai, shaped to privilege the tank, happened to require the artillery
to make a statement about how far it had progressed since the Somme in 1916 in
scientific gunnery.49
Military effectiveness for strategic effectiveness is made from all of the dimensions of
strategy. The argument at this juncture amounts to the claim that certainly British, and
generally also German and French, artillery could ‘unlock’ field-fortified armies by late
1917 and 1918, other factors permitting. The qualification is vital, not merely dutiful or
decorative. The best gunnery minds, methods, and equipment enabled military success:
they sparked what now is known as the RMA of the First World War. But this artilleryled
RMA could not succeed in the field by means of artillery knowledge, method, and
material acquisition alone. In the same way that some corps in the BEF offered cultural
resistance which impeded adoption of German- (and French-) style tactics of defence in
depth,50
so notably large elements in the German Army in the west declined in practice to
obey orders and adopt the ‘Pulkowski method’ to achieve accurate predicted
(unpreregistered) artillery fire.51
It is one thing to know how to wage modern war, it can
be quite another actually to be able to do it across the whole army. For another example,
the excellence of German infantry assault technique in 1918 is well established: indeed, it
Strategy for Chaos 162
was demonstrated on a modest scale in 1917 at Caporetto (20 October) and in the
counterattack at Cambrai (30 November). The problem was, first, that most of the
German follow-on infantry attacks in the great offensives of 1918 did not employ socalled
stormtroop tactics, and, second, that elite stormtroopers suffered unsustainable
losses.
If the artillery revolution of 1917–18 that sparked the RMA was to be allowed to
enable victory to be won, then the whole army, and the society and government behind it,
had to play their parts also. At least until the age of the nuclear-tipped ICBM (and
probably not even then), wars could not be won by artillery conducting deep battle in
isolation. With reference to the artillery, it is quite apparent that this ‘enabling spark’ for
RMA taught itself through more than three years of war, 1914–17, how to do the job that
the persisting stalemate unexpectedly revealed to be necessary. The artillery required
scientific method, the right equipment and ammunition, sufficient quantity for quality to
tell, and competence by co-operating arms for success in the whole team endeavour of
modern land warfare.
Most of the scientific techniques needed by the artillery in the conditions of 1914–18
were not invented in those years. Nonetheless, it required the necessities of what
amounted to siege warfare for theory and what once had been only exceptional practice to
be adopted as standard operating procedure. Recall that in 1914
Artillery training was based on the assumption that the normal method of shooting would
be over ‘open sights’—that is, much as a man would fire a rifle. The gun layer would
look along his sights at a target that he could see from where he was standing. Obviously
it was expected that the enemy would do the same.52
Such practices proved suicidal, even in August-September 1914. ‘Direct fire was given
up and virtually never used again.’ But if the enemy—infantry, guns, or whatever—could
not be seen, how could guns be laid upon him? The answer was summarised thus by a
superior study-memoir:
In conditions such as those of the last war artillery could only be used effectively if they
had (1) good maps, (2) their own position accurately located, (3) the position of enemy
guns accurately located, and (4) means of laying their guns accurately on these targets
without previous registration.53
How were these facilities to be provided? The answer, for the BEF, was the ‘Field Survey
Battalions, R.E.—(1) by the Map Sections, (2) by the Topo. Sections, (3) by the
Observation Groups [for gun ‘flash spotting’] and Sound Ranging Sections’. As
contrasted with the ‘open sights’ firing at Le Cateau in August 1914, the state of the art in
artillery use in 1918 would achieve can accuracy of 80 metres at a range of 4,000 metres
through prediction, a similar performance (in terms of accuracy if not range) to modern
guns [1987]’.54
For the perfection of the military instrument, calibration to check for
barrel wear on each gun became standard. Ammunition batches were tested for variations
in manufacture. Meteorological reports were consulted for changes in air temperature
(and hence density) and for wind speed and direction. Gun sites were surveyed
scientifically and accurate bearings were taken from known locations in enemy
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 163
positions.55
Accurate maps of enemy-held terrain were drawn and updated as aerial
reconnaissance allowed photography from above. Enemy guns—typically not a target in
pre-1914 artillery doctrine, and not a priority as late as the Somme in 1916—were located
by sound and muzzle flash, as well as by direct observation from the air. The quantity,
quality, variety, and sophistication of ammunition (including shell fusing) was a
revolution itself in 1914–18, while the number of heavier guns, especially of the howitzer
type (for higher-trajectory plunging fire), was increased exponentially.56
Similarly, the
ratio of artillerymen to infantry in armies shifted dramatically, as the artillery’s role
changed from a useful adjunct to infantry battle to a literally vital enabler if the infantry
was to move forward at all or hold its ground.
Whatever the exact character of RMA favoured by different belligerents from battle to
battle in 1917–18 (i.e. allegedly mechanised, or infantry-artillery), or stamped with
approval by later armchair generals, one feature they all share is dependence upon the
artillery fire-plan. In 1917–18, as in any period, there was an abundance of reasons why
grand military designs might fail on the day. Distinctively unique to this RMA of the
First World War is the fact that if the artillery performance was poor, the prospects for
success would hover between improbable and impossible.
Strategic moment
The idea of a strategic moment can sit oddly with a long view that might rather regard
such particular instances more as false dawns than as the reliable herald of revolutionary
effectiveness through new ways in warfare. The reason for the apparent paradox that a
strategic moment can be, indeed usually is, succeeded by military disappointment, resides
in the very nature of conflict as a bilateral (or more) struggle. Some of the theoretical
writing about RMA misses the Clausewitzian point that ‘war does not consist of a single
short blow’.57
Definitions of RMA that require ‘a dramatic increase—often an order of
magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed
forces’, in Andrew Krepinevich’s words, do not fit well with historical evidence which
expresses the paradoxical logic of strategy.58
Airy generalisations about RMA are prone
to mislead theorists into the error of forgetting that technological and tactical
transference,59
as well as more or less parallel discovery,60
will reduce the longevity of
Krepinevich’s optimistic ‘dramatic increase’ in military effectiveness.
Even quite plausible strategic moments can herald military performance which fizzles
after a flashy start, rather than continues to dazzle as its executive military instrument
matures in prowess. Indeed, because military effort is not autarkic, but is applied in a
contest, it is always possible, and sometimes is probable, that a strategic moment
genuinely worthy of the title will raise the curtain only on a more modern version of
attrition.61
The merit in this argument is illustrated with unusual clarity in the case of the
First World War RMA. Several candidates vie for coronation as the strategic moment in
this RMA. There are three German and also three Allied candidates for the strategic
moment. The possible German strategic moments were: Oskar von Hutier’s attack on
Riga (1 September 1917); the attack by Otto von Below’s Fourteenth Army (with six
German and eight Austro-Hungarian divisions) at Caporetto (24 October 1917); and
Ludendorff s great ‘Michael’ Peace Offensive (opened on 22 March 1918). The Allied
candidates were: the attack by General Julian Byng’s Third Army at Cambrai (20
Strategy for Chaos 164
November 1917); the relatively modest assault by General John Monash’s Australian
Corps (under the command of General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army) at Hamel (4
July 1918); and Rawlinson’s spectacular offensive at Amiens (8 August 1918). Other
candidates could include French (and American) performance at the opening of the
Second Battle of the Marne (18 July 1918), or the breaking of the Hindenburg Line by
Rawlinson’s Fourth Army (with the set-piece action commencing on 29 September
1918).
The relative abundance of supportable candidates for election as the strategic moment
of the First World War RMA is of no particular significance. Indeed it would be a trivial
endeavour to devote space and energy to a detailed comparison of the merits in each
candidate. What really does matter for our analysis is that fact that each side had a
strategic epiphany. Unfortunately, the approximately parallel strategic epiphanies meant
that neither side was likely to be able to exercise and then exploit its particular versions
of the RMA du jour into the zone of decisive military effect. For the Allies (in this case,
the British), the balance of argument supports the consensus among RMA theorists that
Cambrai was the moment, notwithstanding the painful disappointment suffered with the
successful prompt German counterattack and then the temporary, albeit frightening,
defeats of spring 1918. For the Germans, the most plausible strategic moment was the
enormous, though ultimately empty, victory at Caporetto.62
These choices are not only
historically persuasive in the light of long hindsight, but they endorse dominant
contemporary opinion also, which is much more gratifying. The BEF’s tank-led, but
artillery enabled, brief triumph at Cambrai, following the undisguisable failure of Third
Ypres, prompted the British prematurely to ring their church bells for the first time since
4 August 1914. As for Caporetto for the Germans, in Bruce Gudmundsson’s telling
judgement: ‘The successful exploitation of the breakthrough at Caporetto proved to
Ludendorff that the German Army had developed a tactical system capable of breaking
the deadlock of trench warfare and thus permitting the resumption of manoeuvre at the
operational level.’63
Operationally reviewed, Caporetto and Cambrai in October and November 1917 led
nowhere directly. But both events showed the way forward to responsible soldiers at the
time. They showcased new styles in land warfare which, with the errors of novelty
reduced, might (perhaps should) deliver the overly long-anticipated strategic victory.
Whereas von Hutier’s success at Riga over-whelmingly was an operational-level
triumph64
—albeit with the vital assistance of sound artillery technique centrally directed
by Bruchmüller—both Caporetto and Cambrai were, for the time, quite extraordinary
tactical victories. They can be seen as dress rehearsals for the main event that was to be
Ludendorff ‘s four-step grand offensive in 1918. However, such teleology would be
unwise. These two German successes were both shaped vitally by unique circumstances.
Caporetto, for all its impressiveness, was a success in mountainous terrain against an
Italian Army, which, though adequately equipped, suffered from appalling leadership. To
defeat a demoralised Italian Army, led by one of the war’s least competent commanding
generals (General Luigi Cadorna), offered no guarantee of later success against the
Anglo-French legions in France. At Cambrai, on 30 November, General von der
Marwitz’s Second Army applied the best in current artillery and infantry practice to pinch
out the salient (five and a half miles) seized by Byng’s Third Army between 20 and 29
November. Whereas the German artillery on the Isonzo at Caporetto had been
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 165
concentrated in counter-battery duties against the extensive Italian artillery,65
at Cambrai
the principal task was to provide a creeping barrage in direct support of the infantry.
Between them, Caporetto and the Cambrai counterattack told the German High
Command that at last they had a winning ticket. Specifically, they had found and
practised a method of offensive war with centralised, but tactically flexible, artillery
prowess and decentralised infantry assault skills. It seemed probable to the Germans that,
working well together, their new infantry and artillery tactics, when effected in the
necessary mass, should reliably produce so significant a level of tactical success as to
deliver operational victory. Strategic and political triumph logically and inexorably
should follow.
The great British Cambrai tank raid on 20 November 1917 was the Allies’ strategic
moment, even though it showcased a more mechanised vision of future land warfare than
would be the general experience in 1918.66
If the German use of artillery at Riga,
Caporetto, and then in the Cambrai counter-attack, was typically excellent, then the
BEF’s artillery performance at Cambrai was awesome. With no preliminary
bombardment, or even registration firing, which could alert the enemy, British artillery
secured a firepower dominance that allowed the tanks and infantry to advance further,
and more cheaply, than had been possible in the war to date on the Western Front. This
limited attack, and the German counterattack, encouraged both sides to dream and plan
for success tomorrow. However, the operational, strategic, and political context of 1917–
18, as well as the very nature of strategy, would limit the scope of practicable
achievement.
Institutional agency
The military instrument that conducts an RMA at the sharp end in the face of battle is the
product and expression of organisations with cultures which both help and hinder the
effective conduct of warfare. The temporal and human dimensions of strategy and war
impact upon strategic performance in ways that historians frequently neglect to notice.
The RMA of the First World War showed institutional and intellectual-doctrinal
adaptation in the face of temporal and human constraints unprecedented before or since.
In order to rate the strategic performance of German and British Armies in 1914–18, it
is important to recognise how steep was the learning curve they had to ascend, how short
a time they had in which to adapt, and how severe were the impediments of all kinds
which generated friction for them. On the temporal front, it is sobering to appreciate that
the executors of this RMA had only two to three years in which to complete their task.
The agents for RMA in the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic and nuclear cases enjoyed
respectively 23 and 42 years in which to adapt to modern war. The information-led RMA
of current controversy is today a story with an active life of more than a decade, and is
still running. The contemporary RMA debate may be suffering from terminal enervation,
but its real-world referents are very much alive.67
What is so impressive about the
organisational and tactical-doctrinal adaptations of 1914–18 is that they were
implemented under duress in wartime conditions.
It is true, of course, that large-scale intensive battle was not continuous, and that the
two sides showed different (though naturally interlocking) patterns in primary operational
and tactical focus upon offence or defence. Nonetheless, innovation had to be effected
Strategy for Chaos 166
either in the actual, or in the anticipated, shadow of battle. The states, societies, and
military organisations with their preferred doctrines were allowed the better part of two
decades to learn how to wage modern war in the 1790s and 1800s. They had a similar
span of years to identify the requirements of what was hoped to be ‘safe (enough) nuclear
strategy’.68
Moving on, states have now had a decade and still counting to comprehend
the information-led RMA. By way of contrast, the leaders in 1914–18 had to perform
literally while under the gun (that was firing). Even when we turn to the mechanised
RMA(s) of the Second World War, we find that the German Army enjoyed two
potentially useful ‘time-outs’ for doctrinal second thoughts, in 1939–40 and 1940–41.69
The British Army in that war was not tested on the grandest of scales between June 1940
and June 1944, notwithstanding the educational traumas experienced in north Africa and
Italy.70
The US Army, and especially the US Army Air Forces, were granted ringside
seats to observe the dos and don’ts of modern war as perpetrated by others. In the Second
World War, only the Soviet Red Army was obliged by an unforgiving temporal necessity
to adapt, borrow, and innovate, much as had the armies of 1914–18.71
An important consequence of the temporal dimension of the First World War shows
itself also in a human dimension which registers as a cumulatively enervating, even
operationally disabling, level of casualties. The armies of 1914–18 had to adapt
organisationally and doctrinally while under extreme time pressure and with an
instrument that was suffering transformative casualties.
Readers must judge for themselves where they pitch their opinions between
admiration and criticism for the strategic performance of the military profession in 1914–
18. The experience of the Second World War and then the nuclear-shadowed Cold War
can promote an unhistorical loss of perspective. In less than four years, in the Great War,
the principal belligerents effected a scope and scale of societal and economic
mobilisation for as total a war effort as it was judged social stability could stand. Looking
to the sharp end of the effort, the military institutions of state had to adapt to a character
and style of war for which they were utterly unprepared. Then, having discovered the
awful facts of mass warfare, they had to innovate a style of combat to break out of the
stalemated box of that mass warfare. It is amazing that both sides succeeded in large
measure.
The fact that the Allies won attests more to a nature of strategy and war that
commands respect for quantity, than it does to any inherent superiority in the Allied, as
contrasted with the German, way in war. Dennis Showalter is almost exactly correct
when he argues that ‘[n]one of the combatants succeeded in establishing a clearly
decisive, clearly superior style of war by November 1918.’72
We must say ‘almost’,
because wars cannot be won by style, superior or offensive. Indeed, many historians
believe that the German Army waged tactically the better war, if one may so express it,
even though it lost in the end. It is a vital theme of this book that strategic behaviour is a
holistic undertaking and can be assessed properly only in that way. The Allied, especially
the BEF’s (of 1918), way in land warfare was not always elegant, but it did express a
style that their total resources could support satisfactorily, while the German way did not.
The institutions and ideas needed to wage the Great War, as the character of that
conflict revealed itself sequentially in 1914–16, were invented in improvised fashion
from organisations and cultures that set out in August 1914 to wage a quite different kind
of war.73
Although much of the administering and tactical behaviour was the product of
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 167
initiatives at local working and fighting levels, states and armies had to adapt to the
prolonged conduct of war on the grandest of scales judged feasible. Jerky newsreel film
of quaint uniforms, suicidal-looking linear infantry assault, and well-fed senior
generals—in the context of the terrible casualty statistics—is frequently deployed to
illustrate a commentary alleging monumental incompetence by nearly all those in charge.
With an omniscient hindsight, latter-day would-be Haigs and Ludendorffs rush to
negative judgement. Notwithstanding the passage of more than 80 years since 1918, it is
noticeable that no-one as yet has been able to identify practicable short-cuts to victory in
1914–18. Some scholars argue that victory, and defeat, should have been served at lower
cost. It is claimed that the Allies ought to have made more regular and extensive use of a
‘mechanical’ style in combat, and should have limited their offensive ambitions to try to
‘bite and hold’, rather than effect a breakthrough for deep exploitation.74
The former was
doable in 1917–18, while the latter was not.
It is no part of this analysis to engage directly with today’s critics of German and
Allied performance in the war. However, it is our purpose to show that both sides
effected an RMA, perhaps a military revolution, and that their strategic behaviour was
impressive by any plausible historical standard. Dennis Showalter is persuasive when he
argues that
European systems…adjusted rapidly, comprehensively, and successfully to the demands
of mass warfare. States and armed forces manifested throughout 1915 a palpable sense of
wonder that conscripts were reporting, factories were producing, and fighting was
continuing, at least for the moment. They projected as well the image—and to a great
degree the reality—of a culture of competence.75
A BEF scheduled to contribute six divisions to co-operate with the French, if the Cabinet
agreed, grew to comprise 60 (British and Empire) divisions. French and German armies,
anticipating an operational level replay of the swift campaign of 1870, had to recover
their balance after the definitive failure of their (pre-) war plans in 1914 and adjust to the
certainty of action for another campaigning year. We must be alert to the historians’ trap
of, in this case, judging leaders in 1914–15 in the light of our knowledge that the war
lasted until 11 November 1918. First 1914 was to be the year of decision (for both sides),
then 1915 (for France and Britain, and Germany in the east), then 1916 (for both sides),
then 1917 (for the British, at least), then 1918 (for the Germans, and ultimately the
British), and even 1919 (for the French and Americans).
Both sides adjusted to the extended conduct of mass warfare, and then they adjusted
impressively to the limitations of mass, of sheer quantity, and had to learn how to
manage, integrate, and use the new technologies and tactics by the mass armies that had
been created. It is true that the German Army was always infantry-led in its style of war,
notwithstanding wide recognition of the artillery expertise of Bruchmüller (and his
methods).76
Also, it is true that the Allies adjusted to the stalemate of mass versus mass
with a more machine-led style of combat.77
November 1918 tells us who adjusted most
effectively to the realities of modern war: in other words, whose strategic (means-ends)
behaviour was superior. That point aside, each principal belligerent performed prodigies
of military, inter alia, innovation while under fire.
Strategy for Chaos 168
Although there were notable differences between the German and British variants of
the RMA of the First World War, they both coped plausibly and generally effectively
with the novel common tactical problems of the era. Both learned: how to use
machineguns in large numbers (even to the point where a machinegun barrage would fire
indirectly for unobserved effect, creating a ‘bullet storm’ to protect an advance);78
how to
use (and oppose) tanks; how to conduct trench and counter-bunker warfare entailing the
development of mortars, ‘bombs’, hand and rifle grenades, flamethrowers, and light
machine-guns; how to use gas cylinders and then gas shells; how to lay artillery indirect
fire, preferably without prior local registration; how to conduct air warfare of all kinds,
and much more. Both sides taught themselves decentralised combined arms tactics (with
many new weapons) at platoon and section levels, and how to combine infantry, artillery,
and aircraft in offence and defence. In addition, to mention dimensions frequently taken
for granted by historians of tactical, operational, and strategic art, the entire enterprise of
grande guerre had to be financed and efficiently supplied with the necessary human and
material resources. Needless to say, perhaps, the requisite administrative and logistical
skills for the war which unfolded in real time for the belligerents, had to be invented,
borrowed, or discovered near-instantly.79
We also should note that political leadership of
a high order of competence was necessary to keep the combatant societies up to the mark
for a trial which, even as late as early autumn 1918, appeared to have no end.
Instrumentality
The previous, current, and next steps in our RMA life-cycle (institutional agency,
instrumentality, and execution) may be likened successively to sword-making, large-scale
sword production, and swordplay. It was suggested immediately above that the
institutional agents on both sides for the First World War RMA performed miracles of
organisation, administrative innovation, and doctrinal adaptation. However, miracles take
time. No matter how generally praiseworthy were the organisational agents of RMA, and
regardless of the military merit in the new ideas discovered and honed in 1915–16, not
until quite late in 1917 did either side on the Western Front begin to command a plausibly
potentially winning scale of military power of requisite combat competence.80
It would be foolishly reductionist and therefore misleading to claim that the
technological dimension of war was decisive in the conflict. It would not be misleading,
though, to refer to the First World War as the great artillery war, at least in the sense that
artillery proved to be the only key that reliably opened the tactical door to tactical success
(and any operational success, should that prove feasible). Technology for superior
artillery performance was by no means synonymous with that performance. The guns of
1914–18 certainly needed technological support from metallurgy, chemistry, electronics
(for communication), meteorology, survey, and aviation. They also needed rigorous
industrial quality control for consistency in high-quality manufacture, technical
competence in gunlaying, and tactical excellence for the devising of fire plans which
would work synergistically with the other elements in the combined-arms team (infantry,
tanks, cavalry, aircraft). Knowledge and technology, though vital, could not produce
tactical success. To win, the armies also needed numbers (of everything).
The German and Allied military instruments which carried through the First World
War RMA demonstrated time and again in 1914–17 that they were not (yet) instruments
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 169
for victory. Although one can point plausibly enough to poor, even some plainly awful,
tactical and operational performances year after year in 1915, 1916, and 1917, it is
extremely unlikely that either side all but threw away by incompetence a genuinely
glittering opportunity to win. On the geography of the Western Front, neither side
enjoyed a net military effectiveness between 1914 and 1917 such that victory was
reasonably probable. Battles, even campaigns, could be lost, certainly drawn, but tactical
gain and loss had no immediately major operational, let alone strategic, consequences.
Attritional warfare is like that.81
The Germans were beaten on the Marne in September
1914, but they retired in good order and dug in for four years. They failed to turn, or
break through, the left of the Allied line around Ypres in October-November, but the
outcome was a stalemate born of exhaustion, not any significant German retreat. FrancoBritish
offensives were entirely repulsed in 1915; they tested most expensively the
solidity of the territorial status quo in the war. In 1916 on the Western Front, everybody
failed in their sundry objectives; the Germans and French at Verdun; the British, French,
and Germans on the Somme. In 1917, the French failed miserably on the Aisne, while the
British did well at Arras and Messines, but fought themselves to a standstill in the mud at
Third Ypres in the autumn. Cambrai in late November saw tactical success, first for the
BEF’s surprise tank raid, and then for the Germans’ counterattack; but again brief tactical
success for each side led precisely nowhere, operationally and strategically—or at least
so it seemed. Since decisive operational manoeuvre was not possible on the flankless
Western Front, it is hardly surprising that dramatic evidence of military progress was not
easy to find in the phase that Douglas Haig called ‘the wearing out fight’.82
It took both sides three years to learn sufficient of what they needed to know about the
changing character of modern war so as to have ready to hand a method, actually
methods, to win. That comprehension was bought with the casualties and material
resources expended from 1914 to 1917. The RMA of this great war, as applied in the
conditions of the period by its authors (i.e. not as it can be assessed today for the quality
of its lasting contribution to the art of war),83
could deliver in the west strictly tacticallevel
success which could only cumulate by attritional results to show operational, and
then a clear strategic and political, outcome (an armistice reflecting the fact of German
military defeat). The essential quality in military method necessary to win was of course
dynamic, as both sides learned comprehensively the trade of modern war. The rival
armies improved in their absolute military prowess from 1914 to 1917, but unfortunately
for the prospects for swift decision, military effectiveness in war is always a relational
variable. As military solutions evolved, so alas did the military problems.
Properly holistic appreciation of how and why the war was won (lost) in 1918
underlines how essential it is to approach an RMA as strategic behaviour. It is necessary,
but not sufficient, to argue that the Allied armies, led by the BEF,84
won because they had
mastered the art of war for 1918; neither is it sufficient to claim that the BEF was the
leading military instrument of victory because of the relative material abundance behind
it. Nonetheless, J.P.Harris is right to remind us that ‘British artillery in 1918 also had the
luxuries of seemingly limitless quantities of ammunition and an abundance of guns.’85
The superiority of mobilised resources was strategically significant because by late 1917
Allied armies were ‘proficient enough’, or better, in the skill with which those resources
were used in battle. On the ‘adversary’ dimension of strategy, in 1918 the Allies fought
not only with a German Army effecting an infantry-artillery (i.e. unmechanised) version
Strategy for Chaos 170
of the common RMA of the time, but also, critically, with an enemy increasingly short of
manpower and eventually increasingly low in fighting spirit. Morale will not defeat steel,
as the campaigns of 1914 and 1915 demonstrated, but if it is in short supply it lowers the
quantity and quality of performance required of an enemy for victory. Manpower and
morale were in perilously short supply in all armies on the Western Front in 1918, save
only for the Americans (who had other problems—lack of skill and equipment in
particular). The outcome in November speaks eloquently to many of the critics of the
Anglo-French ‘way of war’ who forget that war is about the entirety of strategic effect
and its consequences. Victory in 1918 was achieved by the overall superior raising and
combat direction of military means.
The ‘German RMA’ of the First World War, for all its much lauded elegance in
stormtrooper infantry tactics and the ‘Pulkowski method’ in silent artillery registration,
unarguably failed the strategic test when exercised in 1918. Between March and
November of that year the German Army literally bled to death. That massive
haemorrhage was not the result of ill-fortune, rather was it the inevitable consequence of
the adoption of a style of infantry-led assault in a tactical context that predictably did not
allow for operational exploitation for victory by manoeuvre. On top of the butcher’s bills
from the hideous attritional struggles of the first three years of the war, ‘the German
RMA’ squandered the surviving strength of the army. It is worth quoting Tim Travers at
some length on the fate of the German military instrument of RMA in the last nine
months of the war.
It is not always recognised how depleted the German Army on the Western Front had
become by late 1918. The German Official History estimated that from 18 July to the
Armistice, the German Army had lost 420,000 dead and wounded, and a further 340,000
as prisoners of war, for a total of 760,000 casualties, plus an unknown number of
desertions or refusals to serve, which may have been as high as 750,000 to 1 million. This
was on top of the 1 million or so lost between March and July 1918, during the German
offensives, so that the German Army suffered a possible total loss of some 2,760,000
casualties and deserters during 1918. Moreover, the highest losses occurred in the
Mobilisation or Attack divisions, containing the elite of the German Army.86
Ludendorff committed his army to a desperate offensive with what amounted to reckless
abandon in 1918, transferring a million men in 62 divisions from the East (though leaving
half a million second-line troops), to give himself a temporary numerical advantage on
the Western Front before the Americans could arrive in war-winning numbers.87
He
demonstrated conclusively, if inadvertently, that when military means and ends are out of
balance, defeat must ensue if the enemy is good enough at modern war to stay on its feet
and weather the initial storm. Germany’s lack of depth in mobilisable manpower in 1918
rendered its preferred style of infantry-heavy RMA a desperate adventure, given the
tactical conditions of the time (including the particular strengths of the enemy).88
Execution and evolving maturity
The British and German Armies were both, in their distinctive ways, highly competent
and adaptable organisations. On the British side, prewar, the embarrassing early errors in
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 171
South Africa in 1899–1900 were rapidly corrected and the Boer republics were decisively
defeated militarily in 1901–02.89
As a generalisation, the quaint notion that the British
Army in the early years of the century was officered by professionally slothful amateurs,
more interested in gentlemanly sporting pursuits than the theory and practice of war, is an
absurd canard. This allegedly ill-officered army, comprising large numbers of hard-case
regulars who were all-but civilian unemployable, successfully waged continuous smallunit
warfare around the globe against a bewildering array of military cultures. Zulu
warriors in Natal, Waziri tribesmen along India’s north-west frontier,90
Boer irregulars on
the high veldt, fanatical Dervishes in the Sudan—the British Army took on these, and
scores of others, and almost invariably won. It mastered mountain, desert, high-plains,
littoral (amphibious), and jungle warfare.91
If these were military incompetents, they must
have been extraordinarily lucky to emerge victorious as often as they did.
Of course, the British Army, the principal military instrument of one version of the
First World War RMA, had some signature weaknesses. In point of fact it had the kind of
weaknesses one would expect from an ‘army’ that year in and year out did not operate as
such. It functioned by regimental garrison around the Empire, only occasionally needing
to concentrate force at a divisional (let alone multi-divisional) level. The army was
parochial, in-bred, and so ridden by ‘cap badge’ loyalties as seriously to inhibit inter-arm
co-operation. Nonetheless, it was a flexible and effectively economical instrument of
imperial rule. It is worth repeating some facts central to our story. First, this British Army
between 1906 and 1914 prepared an expeditionary force for possible European
continental employment comprising six all-arms (primarily infantry) and one cavalry
division, approximately 120,000 men.92
On mobilisation in August 1914, the BEF
initially was composed of just 110,000 men. For some comparison, in November 1918,
notwithstanding suffering two and a half million total casualties (world-wide)—dead
(723,000), wounded (1,662,625), and POW’s (170,389)—Sir Douglas Haig commanded
a BEF ration strength of 1,794,000.
The bare statistics are startling enough, but it is worth noting that this BEF of 1914–18
which ‘[i]n technical, tactical, operational and administrative terms…developed into an
army of great sophistication, more advanced in some respects than any of its
contemporaries’,93
had to be rebuilt comprehensively after the opening rounds of
fighting. The Official History tells us that ‘[i]n every respect the Expeditionary Force of
1914 was incomparably the best trained, best organised, and best equipped British Army
which ever went to war.’ Unfortunately, as it notes also, ‘[w]here it fell short of our
enemies was first and foremost in numbers.’94
Both British and Germans (and, of course,
French, Russians, and Austro-Hungarians) suffered grievous loss in 1914, but the impact
was disproportionately severe upon the much smaller army. That BEF which deployed to
France with only 110,000 men in mid-August suffered casualties totalling 86,237 by 30
November (official close of the First Battle of Ypres).95
German losses naturally were
much higher,96
fighting as they were all along what had become a Western Front, as well
as in the east, but then the German Army mobilised nearly four million men in early
August. The German Aufmarsch towards the west was effected by no fewer than
1,600,000 men.97
In 1914, the Germans were defeated operationally, and noticeably
bloodied, but most of their prewar regular army was intact: not so for the BEF.
Both the BEF and the German Army had to learn how to wage land warfare on the
greatest of scales, and in so doing they carried through different variants of an RMA. The
Strategy for Chaos 172
benefit of a wartime context is the prompt feedback on relative effectiveness of new tools
and methods, and the self-evident urgency of military need for change. A downside of
wartime is that real-time pressures to do well enough today, especially when—as in the
BEF case—one is learning for the first time how to provide for and run a mass army, can
leave little time or inclination to think systemically. In other words, while an RMA is
likely to require the reconceptualisation of military problems, the pressures of real-time
war encourage getting on with the familiar job (e.g. if 500 guns firing for two weeks were
insufficient, let us try 1,000 guns for three weeks). Also the problem of conceptual
innovation, and then detailed execution, is compounded if the limited stock of the most
effective people continually suffers from combat attrition on a large scale.
In some opposition to the argument advanced immediately above, it can be argued that
radical change into the RMA zone is greatly facilitated by the fact that armies can be
transformed by heavy casualties in a prolonged conflict (not that the First World War was
a long war by grande guerre standards). One can suggest that although the BEF
temporarily lost much of its erstwhile (highly professional) tactical skill in 1915–16
because of ‘massification’ by the sudden huge civilian influx, the exponential expansion
of 1914–17 did create opportunities for new men to learn new skills for a new context.98
The Official History quoted above concedes that the British Army of 1914, for all its
virtues, could not stand comparison with the Germans ‘in the matter of co-operation
between aeroplanes and artillery, and use of machineguns’.99
By summer 1918 the BEF
was probably the most skilful army on the Western Front at the combining of arms in the
offensive mode in land warfare. It is well worth noting that the most justly celebrated
element in the German RMA of this period, the raiding style of stormtrooper infantry
tactics, was developed by the Pioneers (each corps had a Field Pioneer Battalion), who
were not unduly burdened by prior notions of proper infantry tactics and weapons.100
The Allied and German RMAs of the First World War were invented and applied,
piece by piece, including some steps backwards, throughout the war. Scholarly efforts to
compare the quality of, say, the British and German ways in war of 1917–18, let alone to
consider in isolation how well each did absolutely, are thoroughly misconceived. Just as
no country (except possibly the United States today) is likely to be equally militarily
proficient on land, by sea, and in the air, so the BEF and the German Army had
distinctive areas of relative strength and weakness. Those areas could change somewhat
over time with mobilisation, experience, casualties, and the performance of the foe. For
maximum clarity, let us identify the most salient facts.
By 1918, both sides in the west had learned by the most painful of educational
experiences all that they could realistically be expected to know about the ‘grammar’ of
modern land warfare.101
Each knew the contemporary trade of war. The BEF and the
German Army of 1918 had mastered the contemporary art of the offensive, while the
BEF was still improving in its grasp of how best to defend. With British defensive
weakness admitted, and plainly demonstrated (March and May 1918), still German
military effectiveness on the offensive was insufficient to turn tactical into operational
success. Each national army implemented as generically common an RMA as its
geopolitical, material, and military-cultural contexts allowed. Finally, viewed properly as
strategic behaviour, the Allied, especially the BEF’s, RMA, better matched available
means to desired ends than did the German variant.
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 173
Year after year from 1914 to 1918 the two sides were learning roughly in parallel how
to attack and how to defend. Because the Germans had seized so large and important a
fraction of French territory (and virtually all of Belgium), they enjoyed the tactical and
operational advantages of being, as it were, in possession. The Allies had to attack if the
Germans were to be expelled, and they had to attack frontally because there were no
operationally exploitable flanks to the Western Front. It is unsurprising that by necessity
the Germans became true masters of the defence; they launched great offensives in the
west only in 1914 and 1918.102
The attack at Verdun in 1916 was designed to seize easily
defensible terrain that would oblige the French Army to bleed itself to death trying to
recapture. Unfortunately for their performance according to the grand means-ends
equation of strategic accounting, for two years (1914–16) the German Army adhered to a
tactical doctrine of prompt counterattack to recover all lost ground, a doctrine which had
the inexorably nasty consequence of roughly equalising the levels of casualties suffered.
From 1915 until early 1918 the German experience on the Western Front tended to the
defensive, while the Allies were primarily on the offensive. This contrast mattered, and
never more than in what transpired to be the year of decision, 1918. The way in which it
mattered most was with respect to artillery. German artillery was good and better than
good, especially when directed centrally by Bruchmüller, but it was not as good on the
offensive as was the artillery of the BEF, and neither was it as numerous (though of
course it was assembled to provide local superiority to support attacks). Everything
matters in combined-arms warfare, but in the First World War artillery for the side on the
offensive mattered more than anything else.
As indicated much earlier, strategic performance is the product of the values on all of
strategy’s dimensions. As with the belligerents coping with the Napoelonic RMA
discussed in the previous chapter, and the leading participants in the nuclear RMA in the
next one, the contestants in 1914–18 were working fungibly with substitutions. Neither
side wanted or needed strictly the best infantry, or artillery, or air corps, rather did it
require sufficient military effectiveness to secure strategically significant advantage. In
greater or lesser measure, with few exceptions both sides engaged in, or at least
attempted, the same activities. This is not surprising. After all, in all significant respects,
the belligerent great powers were members of the same ‘civilisation’. The ‘German way’
in military matters had been extensively, even slavishly, copied abroad between 1871 and
1914. What were the most significant features of the RMA of the First World War which
were executed by trial and error over such a short span of years? In summary form they
were as follows.
1. Infantry tactics devolved from centralised synchronised movement by battalions,
down to company, platoon, and even section (squad, in US terminology) levels.103
2. The decentralised ‘combat team’ platoons of late 1916 to 1918 were microcosms of
combined-arms warfare.104
Rifle platoons were yesterday’s story. The platoons of 1917
and 1918 had cross-trained specialists in the (light) machinegun (Lewis gun), riflegrenade
and hand grenade, and rifle. Infantry tactics in theory differed little among the
armies on the Western Front. Both sides employed linear ‘waves’ and columnular
‘worms’ as tactical conditions mandated, while an insistence on low density in attack and
also in the outpost zone of a multi-zone elastic defence system was common to all armies.
3. The artillery that prior to 1914 was regarded as, and shaped to be, a useful precursor
to infantry action on an infantry-dominated battlefield was by 1917–18 transformed into
Strategy for Chaos 174
‘queen of the battlefield’. It was the artillery, vastly augmented in numbers and improved
almost beyond recognition in its effectiveness against all kinds of targets (especially other
artillery), that functioned as the key to the tactical breaking opens of the Western Front
for both sides. However, no matter how improved it became by 1918, artillery could not
open the front to decisive operational-level manoeuvre. Much of the artillery’s
effectiveness in 1917–18 depended upon care in set-piece preparation which could not be
achieved in the real-time flow of battle, beyond the initial assault. Even if the ground was
not too boggy for the artillery to advance in support of the infantry, time was required for
preparation and co-ordination of each new fire plan for the guns in combined-arms
combat. The time needed to bring up the field artillery and to prepare fresh fire plans was
time that the enemy generally could employ to even better effect improvising new
defences and bringing up reinforcements (including the advance of locally held counterattack
formations). The logic of this tactical situation was that, given the absence of any
practicable means of speedy mobility in exploitation by assaulting infantry, offensives
could only proceed step by halting step, or by ‘bite and hold’, as the method of the
limited offensive came to be known.
4. Finally, the RMA of the First World War depended vitally upon the large-scale
acquisition of new, or greatly improved, weapons and weapon support systems.105
Although this RMA was about the skilful combination of arms and the competent
administration of huge armies and their infrastructure, it was all enabled by achievements
on the technological dimension of war. The artillery needed the right kinds of
ammunition to deny mobility to enemy troops, to neutralise hard targets, and (with the
‘106’ instantaneous surface ‘graze’ fuze available in 1917) to be effective against
resilient surface objects (e.g. barbed wire). Even if the ammunition were appropriate, the
artillery had to be able to hit targets that it could not observe directly; moreover, it needed
to be able to do so at the first attempt, without the registration firing which revealed
operational intentions. The accurate maps, the ability to locate enemy batteries (from the
ground and the air) and take accurate bearings on them, and the means and methods for
centralised (at division, corps, and army levels) command and control of the guns simply
did not exist early in the war. Suitably sensitive microphones for the crucial task of
sound-ranging on the noise of enemy firing, for example, were available only late in
1917. For the all-important infantry platoon, the building block of manoeuvre by 1918,
this RMA provided new LMGs, new hand grenades and rifle-grenades, and
flamethrowers. Battalions acquired the new three-inch ‘Stokes’ mortar, a vital aid to the
infantry against an enemy which often could be reached only by a plunging trajectory of
fire, and which could not be supported in follow-on assaults by howitzer-type guns,
because the soft or cratered ground precluded their rapid forward movement. In addition,
we must note the development of air power for all purposes,106
generically the invention
and application of modern chemical warfare, the invention and exploitation of the tank,
the (very incomplete) process of motorisation of army transport, and the extraordinary—
but still modest—development of radio.
German failure to develop the tank is not difficult to explain, but it was to prove
costly. It is scarcely surprising that a Germany typically on the defensive in the west from
November 1914 until March 1918, acutely disadvantaged in the contest of mobilisable
resources and strongly confident in the skills of its infantry, should have decided not to
try to emulate Allied efforts to construct large numbers of tanks. However, given that
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 175
Germany’s gun park was none too abundant, the absence of tanks meant that imprudently
heroic performance was required of the infantry and the artillery. Tanks crushed barbed
wire; in their absence the wire barrier zones had to be overcome either by prolonged
bombardment—which sacrificed surprise and impeded mobility in the infantry assault
and forward advance of field artillery—or by the infantry themselves, which cost time
and unsustainable casualties (as the offensives in 1918 were to demonstrate).
With the exception of the tank, the Allied and German variants of this RMA showed a
persuasive parallelism. Intellectual and technological transfer, as well as independent
near-simultaneous discovery, meant that both sides came to share a generally common
understanding of how modern land warfare had to be waged for successful offence and
defence. By preference and in part by necessity, the Germans were relatively more
dependent on the tactical skills of their infantry than were the British or French. But both
sides waged a style of war in which new weapons and new technical skills with older
weapons were literally essential. By 1918, elite assault infantry in all the armies in the
west, well down to the platoon level, carried their own diverse fire support forward into
the attack. As noted earlier, the winning margin for the Allies in 1914–18 lay not in
development of an inherently superior style in warfare, a ‘better’ variant of RMA. Rather
did the Allies win because in their refinement of an RMA they enjoyed a decisive edge in
mobilisable resources which enabled them to press on to the point of military victory.
Feedback and adjustment
Simple models of RMA have to be so reductionist as to be simply misleading. In one of
the wisest brief commentaries on the process of innovation, Vice Admiral Arthur
K.Cebrowski advises that ‘transformation is a journey, not a destination—a process, not a
goal—a continuum, not an achievement’.107
That statement conceals its profundity under
a cloak of apparent banality. When applied to the historical experience of RMA in the
First World War, Cebrowski’s rhetorical dictum rapidly shows its mettle. The RMA of
the period truly was a journey without a predetermined, or pre-determinable, destination.
Although the leading belligerents had mastered the art of war of their day by 1918, that
day evolved as conditions moved on. Moreover, if there is merit in the long retrospective
view of some historians that by mid- to late 1918 the BEF had created, indeed had
become, ‘an entire weapons system’ of all arms (with the emphasis upon firepower),108
RMA and strategic performance can be disjoined. Only experience could teach the armies
of 1914, 1915, 1916, 1917, and early 1918 that they had yet to ‘get it right enough’.
Elegance in combat style does not guarantee success. A considerably flawed (by what
standard?) way in warfare might have produced sufficient military effect in 1916 or 1917
to meet the strategic requirement for victory.
The perspective I am contesting is that which reflects a characteristically teleological
historians’ fallacy: specifically, that the belligerents invented and all but perfected the
modern style of warfare in 1916–18. The Commander in Chief of the BEF, Sir Douglas
Haig, certainly believed that his forces were good enough at fighting for expansive goals
to be envisaged for 1916, 1917, and 1918. In common with social scientists attempting to
peer into the future, historical figures cannot know where the winning tape is for
achieving full maturity in a contemporary RMA. Indeed, since that RMA is apt to appear
seriatim in real time, it may even be less than self-evident to its contemporaries that
Strategy for Chaos 176
revolution is not evolution and that there is a winning tape in a military contest of finite
duration. Conflicts are only exactly finite to historians, who can look and note how long
they lasted. It is useful both to think of some historical experiences as cases of RMA, and
(as here) to postulate a life-cycle to those cases. But also it is necessary to soften the
categories of such analysis with recognition of the sense in Cebrowski’s reminder that
‘transformation is a journey’.
The RMA journey explored in this chapter was pursued under the active discipline
provided by a competent enemy which itself was embarking on that RMA quest. In
Chapter 6 we showed how the grand French rampage of 1792–1815 in part was thwarted
militarily by the fact of eventually offsetting RMA behaviours. Such also is the story of
1914–18. Both sides learned how to conduct modern warfare, and neither enjoyed a
sufficient lead in overall military effectiveness (for strategic effectiveness) as to be able
to short-circuit a process of cumulative decision by attrition. Whether or not German
infantry and combined-arms skills were superior is an issue of no real moment. The
unarguable fact is that the Allies were always good enough in the totality of military
effectiveness to ensure that their military quality and quantity remained tolerably
competitive with the enemy. In due course, the Allies evolved a modern style of warfare
that was good enough, or better, to make conclusively effective use of their superior
mobilisable resources.
It is true, as Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson argue in their pathbreaking biographical
study of contemporary operational art, that military learning could be erratic.109
This is
attributable to individual human flaws, certainly to weaknesses in how armies process
new information, but it is also the result of the very structure of war. Manifest failure in
the field, as by the BEF in 1915 and 1916, revealed readily enough what did not work in
particular cases. However, that failure is less likely to reveal what should work well
enough tomorrow. For the BEF, the principal military lesson of 1915, and even 1916,
appeared to be that it needed more of everything: more men, more guns, more shells (at
least more shells that exploded). Although the value of new technologies and improved
methods was not at all discounted, the quantitative deficiencies, particularly the need for
higher material quality (for example, in shell reliability), were so apparently obvious as to
risk overshadowing the relative significance of the need for an RMA keyed to better
methods in warfare.
Both sides had to adjust to changing military conditions not only as post-combat
assessment suggested to be optimal, but as resources and changes by the enemy allowed.
The conduct of an RMA in battle experience therefore required adjustments in two
directions. German and Allied strategic behaviour each had to express a dynamic
adjustment to the behaviour of the other. In addition, each side’s strategic behaviour
expressed a dynamic adjustment between its evolving ‘warcraft’ and its domestic context.
The BEF in particular adjusted to its growing manpower crisis in 1917–18 by adopting a
style of firepower-led, sometimes mechanised, warfare which played to Allied industrial
strengths. Germany, under Ludendorff’s strategic misdirection, adjusted to the conditions
of 1917–18 by adopting a style of elite infantry-led warfare which lacked the quantity and
even quality of firepower (given the lack of mechanisation) to hold casualties down to a
bearable level.110
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 177
STRATEGIC BEHAVIOUR
Table 7.1 reveals the case for thinking about RMA on the one hand in the contexts of
particular time and place (i.e. historical agent), and on the other hand in the context of
strategy and war as a whole. The table asserts the strengths and weaknesses not so much,
at least not primarily, of the generic RMA of the First World War, but rather of that RMA
as developed and executed by Germany and Britain. Some of the strengths and
weaknesses signalled in the table were not inherent in this RMA, but instead were
endemic to the particular condition of Britain or Germany as historical agents of
revolutionary military change. For example, Germany’s debilitating weakness in the
dimension of organisation for strategy-making and conduct did not derive in any sense
from the character of the RMA. Germany simply did not possess policy-making, policyadvising,
or policy-reviewing machinery worthy of the name. German policy, and grand
and military strategy, such as they were, emerged from the shaky personal choices of the
Kaiser as Supreme War Lord as shaped, and by mid-1916 as definitely bypassed, by
whichever military faction was on top of the High Command. The appalling performance
of imperial Germany in high policy and grand strategy must not be confused with the
merit or otherwise in the German variant of the contemporary RMA. Our insistence upon
examining RMA experience as strategic behaviour protects us against the twin fallacies
of RMA analysis pursued either free of the contexts of actual historical agency, or
innocent of strategy’s nature. That nature to which, for example, organisation for
strategy-making is vital, always has the potential to explode the nominal promise in
RMA.
As in Chapter 6 the discussion here highlights the story coded in the table. Seven
points serve to explain the judgements expressed in the table.
First, both German and British societies proved remarkably adaptable to the
unprecedented demands of what became near-total war.111
Both had large, industrially
disciplined workforces, and as the character of the war altered in favour of technology
under the pressure of RMA, so the peasants and other country lads who had been
regarded as prime soldier material before 1914, were overtaken in desirability by those
more familiar with machinery. The efficacy of social control was certainly strained by the
experience of (fairly) protracted war, but it did not fail significantly until summer 1918
for Germany, and it never did fail for Britain. Notwithstanding anti-nationalist socialist
ideology, increasingly severe civilian economic hardship, sharp military disappointments,
and general war-weariness, the domestic truce (Burgfriede) of August 1914 just about
held through the ‘turnip winter’ of 1916–17 and into the following year.112
Germany did
not lose the war because its army was stabbed in the back by traitors at home. It is true
that the Allied blockade, and poor official handling of the prolonged food crisis, in the
context of a seemingly endless and unwinnable war, caused domestic demoralisation.
Also, it is true that many soldiers returned from the east after the winter 1917–18 more
than a little infected with Bolshevik slogans and attitudes. Nonetheless, insofar as one can
distinguish cause from consequence, both German society and its army (and navy)
suffered a crippling blow to their morale not because of a general war-weariness, but
rather because the hopes and even expectations for final victory in the unfortunately
named Kaiserschlacht (Kaiser’s battle) of the great Peace Offensive of 1918, were so
cruelly and unexpectedly dashed.
Strategy for Chaos 178
Table 7.1: The RMA of the First World War:
Strategic Dynamics
Dimensions Britain Germany
People S S
Culture
Politics S W
Ethics W
Economics and logistics DS W
Organisation W W
Military administration S S
Information and intelligence S S
Theory and doctrine DS
Technology DS S
Military operations S DS
Command W DS/W
Geography S W
Friction
Adversary
Time S W
Key: DS Defining strength of this RMA
DS/W Both relative strength and weakness
S Strength in this dimension
W Weakness in this dimension
Evidence of societal unrest is easy to locate, but less easy to interpret. For example, an
undoubtedly war-weary Britain lost six million working days to strike action in 1918; the
comparable figure for Germany was only 1.452 million. Niall Ferguson claims on good
evidence that ‘[w]ith the exception of Russia, British labour relations were quite simply
the worst in the war: neither Germany, not Italy, nor France suffered as many strikes.’113
But what is unarguable is that both German and British societies proved willing enough
to take the strain necessary to see through the conduct of their particular contemporary
variants of RMA. As also had been the case with the Confederate States of America, the
belligerent that lost suffered a truly combat-damaging loss of morale only as a result of
military failure in the field. The rival armies were allowed ample scope by their
respective societies to show what they could and could not do.
Second, although the political, ethical, and organisational weaknesses of Germany tell
us nothing about this RMA per se, they do reveal a great deal both about why Germany
was obliged to implement the RMA at all, and why it was unable to exploit the
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 179
consequent military effectiveness to the point of victory. The principal belligerents of
1914–18 were obliged by military necessity to discover and give very large-scale
expression to ‘the modern style of warfare’. This RMA occurred, certainly occurred when
it did, because of the bilateral campaign failures of 1914. We can trace the duration of the
First World War to many causes, but the poor quality of German policy- and strategymaking
assuredly merits high ranking among them. German policy created a truly
strategic conundrum. Its high ambitions overshot its military means, while its ability to
improve those military means in the course of the fighting was never sufficient to bridge
the strategic gap. Germany attempted to do too much with too little, and then proved
unable or unwilling either to adapt policy to military reality or to shift military
effectiveness to meet the political demand. This is what strategy is all about.
The operational expedient of the invasion of France through Belgium in the so-called
Schlieffen Plan all but guaranteed that Germany would add the global sea power that was
the British Empire to the list of its active enemies. Such an addition translated as a foe
that Kaiser Wilhelm’s Grande Armée could not defeat in continental warfare (recall
Napoleon’s like dilemma and, later, Hitler’s).114
As if that were not strategic peril
enough, in 1917 the operational expedient of unrestricted U-boat warfare brought into the
enemy’s column the extra-European great power which could restore an Allied cause that
was financially bankrupt, short of moral uplift, and becoming desperately pressed for
manpower for soldiering and war industries.
Although Germans could be confident that their belt buckles were right to assert Gott
mit uns, repeatedly they placed themselves ethically on the back foot by, to give the
leading examples: invading neutral Belgium; behaving initially with exemplary brutality
in that invasion; introducing poison gas to the battlefield; initiating the ‘strategic’
bombing of civilian centres; and sinking merchant (including passenger) ships without
the warning required by international maritime law. German self-description as ‘huns’,
on top of the kinds of misbehaviour just cited, greatly aided Allied efforts to demonise
the foe. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that except in the Balkans and the Turkish
Empire, the First World War never became the kind of ideologically sanctioned total war
to which the Second World War in the East (and the Pacific) descended.115
The doctrine
of strategic (and military) necessity has some practical authority, but appeal to its grim
sanction imposes moral costs, that then become material costs, on strategic performance.
Third, in a war that operational art cannot win in one or two smashing campaigns,
logistical-economic and administrative excellence is likely to be promoted to the status of
key enablers of victory. Prussian, then German, war planning was rightly widely admired
in the nineteenth century. As the saying goes, the Prussian/German way in war
preparation was the market leader, because the market follows success. Indeed, to be
competitive in the front rank of belligerents in European land warfare, states and their
armies often had no other practicable choice than to copy the Prussian/German example.
Employing railways, the telegraph, and new small arms (rifles, generically—and field
artillery), general staffs learned how to conscript, train, equip, feed, and move as much of
the male population of the nation as political culture and social anxiety could tolerate.
Unfortunately, ‘the battle is the payoff’. The whole object of the military expressions
of the industrial and political nationalist revolutions that were the armies of 1914, was to
serve as the instrument of swift operational decision. The general, if modest, superiority
of German logistical skills for mobilisation and the organisation of the Westaufmarsch
Strategy for Chaos 180
(and much smaller eastern),116
was negated by much multi-level ineptitude (political,
strategic, operational). It transpired that logistical planning for the great war-winning
offensive in the west was a geographical and military absurdity. As Martin van Creveld
argued, German logistics was ‘the wheel that broke’.117
To its cost, Germany learned that
although modern Britain had no experience in continental warfare on the largest of scales,
in its civilian society that great commercial and industrial empire had all the skills
necessary for the mobilisation and administration of a quite extraordinary war effort.118
As British military skills improved in 1916–18, so the strategic significance of superior
economic strength asserted itself.
Fourth, to list information and intelligence as a relative strength of both sides is
probably the most debatable of all the judgement calls in this comparative assessment.
There were operational-level surprises in August 1914: the advance of the German armies
on the right wing across the Meuse and Sambre (and the deployment of reserve with
regular divisions),119
and the German decision not to hazard the nominally greatly
outnumbered battle line of the High Seas Fleet in the southern North Sea.120
Subsequently, however, both sides prosecuted their RMA variants with typically
increasingly accurate information about the enemy. This was to be expected, given that
the principal battlespace comprised a near-static condition of siege warfare for four years.
Variably aggressive trench raiding (particularly to take prisoners for interrogation), aerial
reconnaissance by tethered balloons and aircraft, and signals interception (of telegraph,
telephone, and radio),121
as well as enemy activity of all kinds, eventually yielded a
minutely detailed picture of the foe. Operational surprise was attainable (e.g. by the BEF
at Cambrai on 20 November 1917), but more often than not the best that could be
achieved was tactical.
Intelligence could be poor, as when Douglas Haig was misled by his senior
intelligence adviser in 1916–17, Brigadier General John Charteris, into believing that the
morale of the German Army was critically fragile. Vital tactical information could be
erroneous, as when the BEF’s infantry advanced on the Somme on that fatal 1 July 1916,
confident that the unprecedented quantity (but alas not quality) of the preceeding artillery
bombardment had erased much of the German wire.122
Considered overall, however, the
structure of land warfare in this period was strongly resilient to the effect of advantage
and disadvantage in the intelligence arena. Both sides performed well enough in this
dimension of war. Even when they performed poorly, the ability of a defender to recover
tactically and operationally from a setback, or to exploit an advantage, was so limited by
the contemporary deficiencies in cross-battlespace mobility and communications that
defeat was not likely.
Fifth, if intellectual superiority in ‘warcraft’ could assure victory, then Germany
should have won the First World War (and then a Second World War, which of course it
would not have needed to wage) in short order. If we bracket for unified consideration
theory and doctrine, military operations, and command, we have in view the core of
German military excellence. It was Germany’s performance on these three among
strategy’s dimensions which enabled it to stand off close to the rest of the world in both
wars, all the while allied to junior partners who were a net strategic liability. German
military culture encouraged a happy marriage between centralised military theory and
doctrine and decentralised discretion in command. That discretion, expressed as
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 181
Auftragstaktik, or mission command, was prudent because the army was educated by and
in authoritative doctrine and tactical battle drills.
The German Army had planned to win the Great War by excellence in operational
art.123
Operational envelopment was not merely the leading method, it was close to an
article of faith. In practice, when the grand envelopment in the west attempted in AugustSeptember
1914 failed, the Germans had to discover how to wage and win the war
tactically. This they did, with an imagination and determination that many recent
historians have judged impressive indeed. The German Army excelled in combined-arms
tactics, especially in infantry-led methods for effective attack and the defence in depth,
while it was second to none in its grasp of artillery methods (though the BEF actually
practised those methods better).
In some contrast to the Germans, the preferred British way in war was characterised
by the fairly ad hoc and local development and adoption of such theory and doctrine as
experience revealed to be useful, and by the rough equation of command with centralised
control at the operational level. As David French, among others, has observed, the British
were far less tolerant, and were far more fearful, of the prospective chaos of battle than
were the Germans.124
Whereas the German Army’s answer to the systemic challenge of
chaos was devolution in command discretion for well-trained soldiers,125
the British
answer was an attempt at firm control from above (division, corps, and army levels).
Given the persisting strength of the German Army in doctrinal development, hard
training, and tough selection for troop leadership positions, there can be no doubt that its
style of decentralised military operations yielded a systematic advantage in the conduct of
continental military operations. The German problem, of course, is that victory in war is
not awarded by an impartial judge to the belligerent that fights most elegantly. War is
waged both holistically, on all dimensions simultaneously, and most probably against an
enemy which, though inferior in some respects of style in warcraft, still is competent
enough almost to hold its own, ceteris paribus. So it was with the belligerents and their
rival RMA variants in the First World War. The relative weakness of the BEF in its style
of battlefield command found ample compensation in material and financial strengths.
Neither side’s personnel in truly high command (military and political) qualifies for
elevation to the history’s Hall of Fame of Great Captains. Nonetheless, German politicalmilitary
leadership repeatedly proved itself singularly strategically incompetent, while
Allied leaders were adequate. That difference was decisive.
Sixth, the armies that had gone to war in 1914 comprised essentially a riflearmed
infantry mass lightly assisted by field artillery and cavalry. The technology then applied
to the task of securing military decision was only modest. No army was ignorant of the
tactical implications of the technological changes of the previous half-century for modern
war, though all were found severely wanting when the great test came. Each army
believed that it had found a good enough solution to the age-old structural problem of
combining fire with movement. This terrain has been well ploughed by historians. Suffice
it to say that the advent of breechloading magazine-fed rifles using smokeless powder,
machineguns, quick-firing (i.e., recoilless) field artillery, and barbed wire, appeared to
point to a solution lying in the synergy between decisive operational (flanking)
manoeuvre, and, once fire superiority was established, offensive spirit in tactical dash
(when frontal assault could not be avoided).126
Strategy for Chaos 182
Both sides were obliged by ‘trenchlock’ evident in the west by the winter 1914–15 to
invent or refine both light, infantry-portable weapons suitable for the assault and also the
heavy plunging firepower necessary to destroy—later, to neutralise—bunkers and
concrete blockhouses. Similarly, both sides had to acquire the heavy artillery capable of
conducting ‘deep battle’ against the enemy’s artillery and counterattack formations (held
well to the rear). Bailey summarises thus:
A ‘rule of thumb’ developed, that reserves should be held 9 kilometres to the rear,
capable of counter-attacking within two hours of the start of the attack. The shape of the
battle-field thus came to be determined by the range of artillery.127
As noted already, the artillery had to learn not only how to fire accurately at targets it
could not itself observe directly, but also—for surprise effect—how to fire accurately
without prior registration shots against those targets. British military organisation,
technology, and methods achieved a modest level of superiority in artillery effectiveness
over the Germans by late 1916 (the close of the Battle of the Somme), an advantage that
grew in weight and significance in 1917 and in 1918.
Although the Great War was an artillery war, perhaps the artillery war, still there were
significant limits to what even excellent artillery could achieve. No matter how modern
the artillery technology and technique in 1917–18, the guns could only strike reliably
with precision when they knew exactly where they themselves were, and where the
enemy was. Advancing infantry, no matter how well supported by artillery, must soon
outdistance the range of that support. While the infantry consolidates its limited gains,
waiting for the artillery to advance so it can support the next phase of attack, the enemy
has time to move troops up by train to reinforce the crumbling sector of its front (tanks
were not an adequate substitute for artillery). Both sides employed aircraft in the ground
attack role. The Germans were especially systematic about it, using ‘battle flights’
(Schlachtstaffeln) literally in waves, wingtip-to-wingtip, as a form of flying assault
artillery at Cambrai in 1917 and in spring 1918 to help punch holes in the British front.128
German and British performance on strategy’s technological dimension is recorded
here respectively as a strength and a defining strength. Although the Germans did well,
the BEF did better. Given that the BEF had to expand from six to sixty divisions, enjoyed
no recent tradition of excellence in the conduct of large-scale continental combined-arms
warfare, and lost most of its ‘regular’ military expertise with the casualties suffered in the
battles of 1914–15, it is unremarkable that it settled upon firepower in its several variants
as the key to unlock the German front. The German Army did not despise firepower, but
the combination of relative disadvantage in material resources and a great tradition of
victory through operational (largely infantry) manoeuvre in combined-arms combat, led
to a style of warfare rather less dependent upon firepower than that of the BEF. This
generalisation ceased to hold as summer turned to autumn in 1918. Infantry losses in the
offensives of March-July meant that the fighting power of the German Army depended
more and more upon the artillery and machinegun assets of a defence starved of troops
(certainly starved of troops willing to stand and die).
From rifle-grenades through light machineguns, to sensitive microphones for soundranging
on enemy artillery, to gas shells, (fairly) mobile radio sets, and specialised
combat aircraft—to cite but a handful of items from the short list—the First World War
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 183
was a conflict of invention.129
The most obvious technological differences between the
belligerents in the west lay in the (near-) absence of tanks on the German side. This
deficiency mattered tactically, but it does not even begin to explain why the Allies won
the war. The outcome of the conflict was not determined technologically; both sides
performed well enough, or better, in that regard. It was the case, however, that the modest
Allied advantage in artillery skills, wedded to the greater depth of their resources pockets,
enabled them to persist with a style of combat that must win by attrition—always
provided their societies would be willing to continue paying the bill.
Seventh and finally, the strategic geography of the First World War translated as a
playing field systematically tilted to the German disadvantage. Germany’s geostrategic
constraints had unfortunate temporal implications for its prospects of success. The
location of Germany, that yielded the nominal advantage of the central position (or
interior lines)—Napoleon’s preferred situation, as interpreted by Jomini130
—also meant
actual or potential war simultaneously (and geometrically eccentrically) on two fronts. To
compound the problems created by a statecraft which failed to prevent a Franco-Russian
alliance (1891, 1894), Germany proceeded to pursue a hollow Weltpolitik in part via the
grand-strategic instrument of a High Seas Fleet, which had the obvious potential to add
Britain to its list of enemies.131
Shackled to the ‘corpse’ that was its Austro-Hungarian
ally,132
Germany in 1914 required of its military machine a quite extraordinary
performance if its comparative structural weakness in strategic geography was not to
have lethal consequences when exploited over time by its enemies. The strategic
geography of the war allowed Germany close to a single-front focus only in AugustSeptember
1914, and then in 1918 after the Russian collapse. Even in those contexts,
Germany lacked the military weight to win in the west. Selectively superior military
skills could not deliver victory in 1914–18, unless, that is, the enemy buckled from within
or committed egregiously awful operational-level errors. The truth is that from 1914 to
1918 Germany either did not know how, or was unwilling, to extricate itself from a
multi-front war that it could not win against a stronger coalition, which, courtesy of its
dominance of the sea lanes, commanded access to most of the world’s economic assets.
Jonathan Bailey is right: the RMA of the First World War was the birth of the modern
style of warfare.133
But novel as the truly combined-arms combat of 1918 was when
compared with the largely sequential use of artillery, then infantry in 1914, the rules and
lore of strategy applied to both. It is true that the national variants of the RMA as
practised by the German Army and the BEF in 1917–18 were each absolutely militarily
more effective than the older combat style. The significance of that claim is much
diminished, though, by the recognition that each belligerent needed to be more effective
in the field, given the near-parallel improvements scored by the enemy. The German way
of war arguably was more elegant than the British, as these matters might be marked by a
military purist, but such a claim would be a double absurdity. First, we know that the
British (and Allied) RMA worked best strategically, because the Allies won. Second, the
German and the British Armies did not really pick a preferred form of RMA; rather did
each side’s distinctive social-cultural and economic-material contexts settle upon the
form of accessible RMA that it found fitted best its geostrategic and military-cultural
conditions. It was no accident, as Marxist writers used to observe, that the British style in
land warfare—cautious, centrally controlled, firepower-led, and heavily mechanised—
showed marked similarities between the two world wars. A similar claim for the Germans
Strategy for Chaos 184
also is persuasive. As the belligerent weaker in resources of all kinds, yet enjoying the
central position in Europe, Germany showed little more than commonsense in its
dominant desire to win wars by dazzlingly swift and decisive operational manoeuvre.
We have seen how the RMA of the First World War, in common with its Napoleonic
predecessor, did not confer decisive strategic advantage. Both of the historical studies
presented thus far support the proposition that RMA, defined in Chapter 1 as a radical
change in the character or conduct of war, is governed by strategy. Napoleonic France
and Ludendorff’s Germany failed to innovate in ways that would allow a new style in
war to dominate the total means-ends nexus of strategy. We turn next to our third and
final case, the nuclear RMA, to see if the strategic meaning of its life-cycle has been as
revolutionary in practice as half a century of theory and commentary typically has
asserted.134
NOTES
1. See Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1952–57); H.W.Koch (ed.), The Origins of the First World War: Great Power Rivalry and
German War Aims, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1984); James Joll, The Origins of the First
World War (London: Longman, 1984); and R.J.W.Evans and Hartmut Pogge von
Strandmann (eds), The Coming of the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
2. For contrasting views of probably the most controversial of reputations of the ‘Great
Captains’ of the war, see John Terraine’s classic defence, Douglas Haig: The Educated
Soldier (London: Hutchinson, 1963), and the effort at professional demolition in Denis
Winter, Haig’s Command: A Reassessment (London: Viking, 1991). There is considerable
merit in Robin Neillands’ sympathetic popular treatment, The Great War Generals on the
Western Front, 1914–18 (London: Robinson, 1999); while the essays in Brian Bond (ed.),
The First World War and British Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), cover
the British ground admirably, if not always persuasively.
3. Williamson Murray, ‘Armoured Warfare: The British, French, and German Experiences’, in
Murray and Allan R.Millett (eds), Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 8 n. Murray cites Timothy Lupfer, The Dynamics of
Doctrine: The Changes in German Tactical Doctrine During the First World War,
Leavenworth Papers 4 (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Combat Studies Institute, US Army
Command and General Staff College, July 1981); Timothy Travers, The Killing Ground: The
British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1987); and idem, How the War Was Won: Command and
Technology in the British Army on the Western Front, 1917–1918 (London: Routledge,
1992). To that short list of outstanding innovative studies, one should add the following:
Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power: British Army Weapons and Theories
of War, 1904–1945 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982); Bruce I.Gudmundsson,
Stormtroop Tactics: Innovation in the German Army, 1914–18 (New York: Praeger, 1989);
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Sir
Henry Rawlinson, 1914–18 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); idem, Passchendaele: The Untold
Story (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Bill Rawling, Surviving Trench
Warfare: Technology and the Canadian Corps, 1914–18 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1992); David T.Zabecki, Steel Wind: Colonel Georg Bruchmüller and the Birth of
Modern Artillery (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994); Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the
Western Front: The British Army’s Art of Attack, 1916–18 (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1994); Jonathan Bailey, The First World War and the Birth of the Modern
Style of Warfare, Occasional Papers 22 (Camberley: Strategic and Combat Studies Institute,
Case study II: The RMA of the first world war 185