Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities

A common view of the First World War in both the United States and the United Kingdom is that it was a conflict marked by incompetence and ineptitude, and was futile in that it settled nothing, leading directly to the Second World War. Gary Sheffield challenges these views in this well-written, informative work that is aimed towards the general reader. Sheffield certainly has the credentials to write this account. He has authored, co-authored and edited five other book on military history before this one and all have concentrated on the Great War. He has taught at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, the Joint Services Command and Staff College, Shirvenham, and now is faculty at the University of Birmingham. Sheffield's argument is straightforward. On the first page of his introduction, he states "The First World War was a tragic conflict, but it was neither futile nor meaningless." He also adds that "against a background of revolutionary change in the nature of war, the British Army underwent a bloody learning curve and emerged as a formidable force. The victories of 1918 were due to this process and rank as the `greatest series of victories in British military history.'" The major focus of this book is on the development of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). Sheffield devotes the early potion of the book towards explaining why the Army was put into the field. While war poets might write about the waste of their experiences, Sheffield shows that this view was not representative of most who served in uniform. Nor is this view accurate given the context in which government and military leaders made their decisions. The United Kingdom acted in 1914 with negative objectives--preventing the German domination of the European continent--which they achieved at war's end. The British suffered horrible losses early in the war when the inexperienced army entered into combat. British generals had no intention of committing their troops until the army had finished its expansion, had staff officers who knew how to operate and effectively run large organizations, and found ways to use the various weapons they as a system. The problem with these plans is that the Germans refused to cooperate. The British Army went into combat sooner than its generals might have liked because they had to take pressure off the French Army. The war was a stalemate because both sides were evenly matched and neither had any significant advantage in tactics or technology to overcome their enemy. According to Sheffield, both the Germans and British came to the same solution: develop new methods. The Germans won the race to be first in the field with new tactics. Their spring offensives of 1918 failed because they had not found a way to break the defensive power of artillery and because the British had adopted defense in depth--something they had learned, ironically, at the hands of the Germans. Although the allies suffered a number of defeats, the British sco

We in the English speaking world tend to have all sorts of distorted views about WW1, that rarely reflect the reality of the war. WW1 is the only case of the English speaking countries spending most of a war fighting the main enemy army. In WW2 we only fought a significant fraction of the German army for about one year of a nearly six year conflict (six weeks in 1940, 11 months in 1944/45). So we think that the the mobility of WW2 led to less bloody fighting than WW1. That this is not true is borne out by examination of rifle company casualties in Normandy, Cassino, Hurtgen Forest, the Ardennes etc, which are comparable to rifle company casualty rates at the Somme. Despite its mobility WW2 featured horrendous casualty rates, particulalry on the Eastern Frint where most of the fighting took place. The fact is that the Allies had the strategic imperitive to attack, as the German Army occupied large parts of France and Belgium. There was nowhere to outflank them on the Western Front as the trenches went from Switzerland to the Channel. Creative attempts to avoid the Western Front lead to fiascoes like Gallipoli and Salonika. Should the Western Allies have sat back and not attacked while the Germans beat the Russians? Ceded part of France to the Germans? It should be noted that until 1918 that no one solved the problems of the attack. The much lauded German generals used pretty much the same tactics as the much despised British generals when required to attack, with much the same results. Look at the German attack at Verdun for example. Every nation had its first day of the Somme, just that for the other nations they took place in 1914. The French were massacered in the border battles, the Germans at First Ypres, the Russians at Tannenberg and the Austrians in Galicia. Turkish casualties exceeded Allied casualties at Gallipoli, despite being mostly on the offensive. There was little alternative to a battle of attrition. The possibility of a breakthough was minute due to the ease that defenders could reinforce a threatened area by rail, compared to the difficulty that an attacker had in moving up forces accross the trench lines. This book describes the British army's learning process and the key role that it played in the final battles of 1918. This is not to say that huge mistakes weren't made and that some offensives shouldn't have been shut down earlier. It does recognises that Haig, for all his faults was the commander who recognised the opportunities in late 1918 and finished the war well before most expected it. The book does suffer from an Anglo-centric approach. I think that its points would be better reinforced by comparisons with other nations' learning curves, tactical approaches and problems. All in all, a thought provoking book.