Battle Tactics of the Western Front: The British Army's Art of Attack 1916-1918 by Paddy Griffith. Yale University Press, 1994.
This book sets out to do a great deal of damage to the standard interpretation of the British army's participation in World War I as an unmitigated disaster, with lines of men ordered forward in parade ground lines by incompetent generals to be slaughtered by artillery and machine gun fire. The author, a former faculty member at Sandhurst, argues that previous scholarship has artificially focused on the first two years of the war, "the time of greatest amateurism, blundering, and fumbling." This book sets out to examine "how well or badly" the more mature British army conducted its tactical operations in the second half of the war. Taking a clearly revisionist position, the author examines the evolution of British infantry tactics from the battle of the Somme through the end of the war and concludes that the failed techniques of the first half of the war were gradually replaced by tactically sound (even skillful) methods which culminated with the sustained offensive in the autumn of 1918.
The author is concerned primarily with 'minor tactics,' those "ploys or arrangements that are agreed upon for use by a small group of soldiers," and 'grand tactics,' the "fighting methods used within the brigade, division or the army corps." But his analysis is not strictly limited to those areas and he is not hesitant to reject commonly held wisdom concerning not only the tactics, but the technologies and overall operations and leadership of armies on the Western Front. In Griffith's analysis artillery represented "a far greater technical change than the machine gun and the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was not tactically superior to the later conscript armies, the BEF's supposed skills in "fire and movement" were never displayed "if they existed at all." In examining German operations, Griffith argues that Ludendorff's March 1918 offensive succeeded not because of superior "stormtrooper" tactics (which Griffith characterizes as unsophisticated), but because of the British army's inexperience on the defensive. And in certainly a controversial analysis, the author finds that the British cavalry was not "reactionary" in its approach to tactics and even in 1918 it was the one arm (not the Tank Corps) that promised to sustain a completely mobile breakout if one was to ever occur.
Griffith is also not hesitant to credit the British army with developing the tactics and technologies necessary to successfully sustain an offensive campaign during the latter half of the war. Trench raiding was an essential part of infantry tactics and the British excelled at these types of operations, discovering "the key points of modern assault tactics" (infiltrations, forward deployment of automatic weapons, decentralized initiative, organic infantry firepower with rifle grenades and bombs, covering smoke, etc.) even before the Somme. The author rejects the characterization of the army leadership as conservative and hidebound, citing their consistent and aggressive support for everything from improved automatic weapons and the 3-inch smoothbore infantry (also known as Stokes) mortar to the much troubled tank. British development and use of gas dwarfed the German's generally "clumsy and ineffectual " efforts. He finds that by 1917, the BEF's artillery was exceptional and when combined with the effective sound ranging technologies it gave the British unparalleled advantage in counter-battery fire. Griffith argues that battles were carefully planned and that new technologies and techniques were consistently applied, but that infiltration or maneuver tactics were only possible on the Western Front when defenses were weak or incomplete (for the Germans this was in March 1918 and for the allies in the Hundred Days before the Armistice.)
But despite marshaling impressive evidence to support his assertions, Griffith is sometimes guilty of overstatement. Extolling the improvements in British artillery he credits it with virtually the same characteristics to identify, attack and destroy as modern precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and declares that the air-artillery combination of spotting and firepower created a "deep-battle" zone remarkably similar to that found on today's battlefield. Griffith is also guilty of some equivocation on British army leadership, particularly that of Haig, declaring at one point that that he, Haig, should have been sacked after the Somme, but then later attributing many of Haig's problems to the "incompetence" of politicians like Lloyd George dabbling in military affairs. Griffith is also to be commended for including extensive notes and a useful bibliography, but photographs of some of the technological apparatus ( for example the Livens projector) would be useful.
Minor criticisms aside, this is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the British army in World War I. It provides a useful balance to previous accounts that ignore or omit the changing abilities and operations of the BEF. More importantly to the overall scholarship of the War, Griffith makes a good case for bringing the battlefield back into some level of prominence when discussing the course and outcome of the war. I highly recommend this book to those with an interest in World War I. For the general reader of military history and today's serving officer, this book serves to highlight the grave difficulties and great costs to a military organization that is forced to adapt to a difficult situations, rather than having anticipated changes and thereby avoiding some of those costs.
Maj (Ret) Budd Jones, USAF
Maxwell AFB, AL
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