G. D SheffieldBesprekingen

Amazon Library binding: ISBN 10:1502644657 ISBN 13: 978-1502644657
Physical Hardcover: ISBN 10: 1725404687 ISBN 13: 9781725404687

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"The First World War was a just and necessary war fought against a militarist, aggressive autocracy. In Britain and the United States it is a forgotten victory. It has remained forgotten for too long."

With this conclusion, the author ends this work which embodies the arguments of the critical mass of modern day historians of the Great War who, taking into account the experiences and knowledge of people at the time, rather than relying on hindsight, have challenged the view that the war was wholly futile and pointless, a pure and simple chaos consisting of trenches, mud and poetry, with little to choose between the warring states. The battles of the Western Front rightly remain the core focus of this and any other history of the war, but the growing role of technology such as tanks, aeroplanes and more efficient artillery and explosives in turning the tide of the war are also covered. The war at sea, often overlooked, is also vital in understanding how Britain was able to keep the Channel open for the supply of the army in France and Belgium. Crucial are the lessons learned after the horrors of the Somme in 1916: following this, the BEF and Haig underwent a "learning curve" or at least a sometimes erratic "learning process", involving better co-ordination of artillery and infantry and better use of communications, which bore fruit as the war of attrition eventually ground down their opponents' resources. Thus the war in 1917-18 was of a very different character from its course in the preceding years, though this was by no means of course a simple linear improvement in the Allies' fortunes. This is a fascinating and very readable exploration of issues connected with the Great War.

There is, or was for a long time, a popular view in Britain of the First World War. It was of idiotic generals uncaring about the fate of their men herding them off time and again to futile attacks which accomplished nothing but leaving many of them dead. July 1st, 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme, when the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties for small territorial gain, was the apotheosis of this.

This view of the war has now been largely discredited in serious historical circles. As Gary Sheffield argued in a previous book, [b:Forgotten Victory|1377496|Forgotten Victory - The First World War Myths and Reality|Gary Sheffield|https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1356463786s/1377496.jpg|1367429], the British Army went from a small, colonial police force in 1914 to a mass army of 2 million men which played perhaps the major part in winning the war in 1918. This was no small achievement and the men and their commanders responsible deserve to be remembered as more than either boobs or butchers.

This book focuses on the battle of the Somme in that thesis. Rather than a disaster followed by a pointless slogging match, Sheffield makes the convincing case that the Somme was a major staging post on the British Army's journey to a war winning force in 1918. In short, the Somme didn't win the war, but the war would not have been won without the Somme.

Adequate summary of the war, barely. Contrived theme, which has been overdone.

There has been a particularly obdurate myth – emerging partly in the 1920, but with almost irresistible force in the 1960s – that the British Army during the Great War was a force comprising “lions lead by donkeys”. A key element of this myth is that Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force from 1915 onwards, was the iconic donkey – a dimwitted, hidebound, callous leader almost diabolically indifferent to the suffering his brutally anachronistic search for a “breakthough-followed-by-cavalry-exploitation” victory over the strategically much more adept forces of the Kaiser. Although not the first to attempt to dispel this myth – and historically insupportable myth it is – Gary Sheffield is the latest and to my mind most effective.
Sheffield carefully removes plank after plank in the bridge of lies that leads us from Lloyd George’s self-serving near-slander in the 1920s to the Blackadderesque parodies of Haig’s leadership in from the 1960s through the 1980s. Haig, he painstakingly demonstrates, was a thinker, an innovator, a forward-looking army (and cavalry) reformer and – within the bounds of military propriety – a man deeply concerned with the wellbeing of the officers, NCOs and other ranks who served under him. To be sure, as Sheffield points out, he had grasped the character of war in the early twentieth century – he knew that defeating the Germans would require “wearing them down” through attritional battles like the Somme, Messines and Paschendaele. And he had sufficient imagination to grasp that that the butcher’s bill would be very expensive indeed. But he also believed (correctly) that the cost of defeat would be intolerable for Britain and that everything possible had to be done to defeat the German foe. To that end, he devoted all of his considerable energies to fighting and winning not some imagined or hoped-for war, but the actual war at hand -- the only war possible given the technical realities of the time.
Was he successful? Sheffield argues yes. Contrary to the myth of the hidebound cavalryman, Haig is portrayed in The Chief as a careful military innovator promoting all sorts of technical, tactical and operational innovations that eventually proved decisive on the battlefield. And at the strategic level, Haig certainly adapted and learned from his early experiences (the Somme in particular), but right from the start he knew what had to be done to win the war. And on more than one occasion, his campaign strategy nearly paid dividends. If you don’t believe this, consider that two successive German commanders-in-chief reported, during and after the war, that Haig’s offensives more than once came close to breaking the German army in the West. They were probably in a better position to know than Lloyd George or the subsequent armchair critics of Haig.
Sheffield is at pains to point out, however, that Haig was far from perfect. He was a man – and indeed a man of his times – and made some very costly mistakes. Sometimes these were just the kind of mistakes limited human beings make when confronted with new challenges and the fog of war. But if Haig had one enduring flaw it was that throughout almost his whole tenure as C-in-C he adhered to closely to the doctrine of trusting his subordinate commanders – of not interfering with the “man on the spot”. Sometimes this worked very well indeed. But at other times the man on the spot was not up to the challenge and failed to implement Haig’s operational vision.
Bottom line: this is a very well-written and illuminating book. If you are at all interested in grasping or participating in the debates – especially lively in the UK this year – regarding how the war should be remembered, this is essential reading.

Good, workable history of the First World War, with some good photos.½

I found this book an incredibly exciting read because it changed the way I thought about the Great War. I had shared the conventional wisdom that the war had been a tragic, futile shambles - Sheffield, whilst agreeing that all wars are tragic, argues (and successfully in my view) that Britain's involvement was necessary and that although a steep learning curve had to be climbed it was by no means a shambles. This book is also a must for anyone studying the war poets in Eng. Lit.