Big Wars and Small Wars

The British Army and the Lessons of War in the 20th Century

Hew Strachan, Hew Strachan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134233274
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is a fascinating new insight into the British army and its evolution through both large and small scale conflicts.

To prepare for future wars, armies derive lessons from past wars. However, some armies are defeated because they learnt the wrong lessons, fighting new conflicts in ways appropriate to the last. For the British Army in the twentieth century, the challenge has been particularly great. It has never had the luxury of emerging from one major European war with the time to prepare itself for the next.

The leading military historians show how ongoing commitments to a range of 'small wars' have always been part of the Army's experience. After 1902 and after 1918 they included colonial campaigns, but they also developed into what we would now call counter-insurgency operations, and these became the norm between 1945 and 1969. During the height of the Cold War, in 1982, the Army was deployed to the Falklands. Since 1990 the dominant tasks of the Army have been peace support operations.

This is an excellent resource for all students and scholars of military history, politics and international relations and British history.

1 Between the South African War and the First World War, 1902–14

Edward M. Spiers

In analysing the value of colonial operations for large-scale warfare, the experience of the South African War (1899–1902) represents an ideal starting point. Although a colonial campaign in essence, and Britain had fought colonial campaigns recurrently (and often successfully) throughout the nineteenth century, this war differed in scale, character and duration, evolving into an unprecedented challenge for the Victorian army. That army was used to short, decisive, and relatively inexpensive campaigns, but the South African War lasted thirty-two months, involved 448,000 men from Britain and the empire, and cost £230 million and almost 22,000 British and imperial dead. The defeats of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso (the ‘Black Week’ of 10–15 December 1899), the disaster at Spion Kop (24 January 1900), and a series of costly, sometimes inconclusive engagements were seen at the time as harbingers of reform – ‘we have had no end of a lesson, it will do us no end of good’, wrote Kipling.¹ The reforms that followed both during the war and after, particularly the wide-ranging reforms of Richard B. Haldane as Liberal Secretary of State for War (1906–12) and the contingency and mobilisation planning of the newly formed General Staff, have been seen as producing ‘incomparably the best trained, best organised and best equipped British Army that ever went forth to war’ in 1914.²

Those who have retold this ‘conventional story’,³ somewhat maligned as a ‘triumphalist narrative’,⁴ have taken account of several caveats raised by contemporaries and by subsequent historians. These caveats may serve as a conceptual matrix since they almost certainly apply mutatis mutandis to the legacy of other colonial conflicts. First, the Boer War was described as anomalous and so few lessons for future wars could be drawn from it. The well armed, highly mobile Boers were not regular soldiers. After the loss of their capitals, they resorted to guerrilla warfare, trading space for time and using local conditions – atmospheric clarity, lack of natural obstacles and the expanse of the veld – in their long-range firing and ‘hit and run’ tactics. British mobility suffered, losing 350,000 horses (about 67 per cent of those employed) during the war as heavily-laden, English-bred horses disliked the ‘thin, reedy, bitter grass’ on the veld and succumbed to the deadly horse sickness of the wet months at lower altitudes.⁵ Cavalry commanders, keen to exonerate their arm from wartime criticism, emphasised the abnormality arguments before the royal commissioners on the war, but, in making this case, Major-General J.P. Brabazon somewhat marred the argument by advocating that the main lesson of the war was the need to restore the war axe.⁶

Second, some emphasised the dangers of over-reaction as less than 400 men were killed in ‘Black Week’ compared with nearly one thousand at Isandlwana (1879) and a similar number at Maiwand (1880). Was not British expeditionary strategy based on ‘strength in depth’ and did not the army recover from these defeats as it had done on previous occasions and win a war over 6,000 miles from home?⁷ Surely the war had positive aspects; Viscount Wolseley, the Commander-in-Chief, praised the call-out of reservists and the expeditionary achievement of sending 47,000 men to South Africa: these were ‘the very ablest soldiers & thoroughly equipped for war’.⁸ By contrast France, as Jay Stone notes, had to rent shipping from Britain in order to invade Madagascar in 1895, the Germans could not even send a battalion to the international operation on Crete in 1897, and the United States experienced severe logistical difficulties in invading Cuba in 1898.⁹

Third, Edwardian army reform was generated not simply on account of the South African experience. Ian Beckett, Stephen Badsey, Howard Bailes and others argue quite reasonably that the army was in a transitional phase even before the South African War. As drill books were being modified, tactical innovations practised and new forms of armament considered, the colonial experience, far from stimulating reform in some areas, merely hastened processes already in the pipeline.¹⁰ Fourth, irrespective of whether reforms were generated by the war or simply accelerated by it, Tim Travers asserts that some of the worst features of the Victorian army persisted into the next conflict. He claims that the army ‘learnt slowly’ during the period 1900–14, that it altered some of the lessons of the Boer War and the Russo- Japanese War to fit a ‘traditional ideal’ and so suffered from a personalised command, with its damaging rivalries and frequent dismissals, and poor staff work leading to cover-ups in the Great War.¹¹ Beckett adds that the military interference in policy-making during the Boer War, examined so fully by Keith Surridge, was ‘repeated on a far greater scale during the First World War’.¹² Finally, Haldane’s claims that the army had been reformed from 1906 onwards with a continental commitment in mind have now been fully debunked, with widespread recognition that Britain’s imperial commitments remained a primary concern for most of the pre-war period.¹³

All these caveats contain a kernel of truth, and in some cases much more than a kernel, but they hardly detract from the importance of the Boer War as catalyst for reform. The South African War, like all wars, was anomalous in some respects but it provided a major tactical challenge that would certainly dominate military concerns in the Great War, namely the crossing of fire zones swept by smokeless, flat-trajectory fire from magazine rifles. Although British forces had faced modern breechloaders on the Northwest Frontier in 1897, the scale and shock of the South African experience was unprecedented. As Sir Neville Lyttelton remarked,

Few people have seen two battles in succession in such startling contrast as Omdurman and Colenso. In the first, 50,000 fanatics streamed across the open regardless of cover to certain death, while at Colenso I never saw a Boer all day till the battle was over and it was our men who were the victims.¹⁴

If this was no ordinary war for the British army, the shock effects were magnified, as Stephen Badsey explains, because the Boer War was also a major media war with over seventy reporters at the front by early 1900: ‘The Boer victories of “Black Week” ’, he argues, ‘derived their importance from their impact on politics and public opinion in London’.¹⁵ This is certainly true but the repercussions were magnified partly because ministerial spokesmen shared Wolseley’s confidence at the outset of the war, partly because the conflict became much more protracted than anyone had imagined, and partly because the counter-insurgency techniques – including farm-burning and concentration camps – became highly controversial and were denounced as ‘methods of barbarism’ by Sir Henry Campbell- Bannerman, the leader of the Liberal opposition.¹⁶ This was not merely a colonial conflict but also a highly political and contentious conflict, one that established the issue of army reform, if not its precise scope and meaning, on the political agenda.

After the early defeats and the upsurge of political controversy, reform flourished both in South Africa and at home. The colonial context, though, hardly determined all the proposals, still less their evolution in the post-war years. British gunners, for example, had entered the war convinced that they needed European-style, quick-firing artillery. Wartime criticism that they had been out-ranged by the Boers, and humiliated at Colenso (where they lost ten guns in a precipitate forward deployment within 900 metres of the enemy without infantry support) was merely used by the Director-General of the Ordnance, Sir Henry Brackenbury, to persuade the government of the case for rearmament. However, the Boers had never used quick-firing guns, and the only quick-firers in South Africa were the naval guns (the 4.7 inch and 12-pounder) that were too heavy for field use. Accordingly an order was placed for German Erhardt guns and, after trials with them, a three-year programme of rearmament was launched in January 1901. In other words, the war was merely a means of justifying rearmament with a 13-pounder for horse artillery and the 18-pounder and 4.5 inch howitzer for field artillery. The perceived lessons from South Africa were very general, namely ‘greater mobility for horse artillery, increased fire power for field artillery, and a longer range capability for both’.¹⁷

Similarly when Lord Roberts superseded Sir Redvers Buller in South Africa and issued his ‘Notes for Guidance in South African Warfare’ (26 January 1900), these tactical precepts, including careful reconnaissance before an attack, more use of cover and extended formations, avoiding artillery positions within range of an enemy’s infantry, the use of continuous rather than sporadic bombardments, more marching and better care of horses by cavalry, and the delegation of responsibility to battalion and company commanders in the field,¹⁸ bore all the hallmarks of lengthy service on the Northwest Frontier. Nor were these precepts uniquely understood by the Indian Army as the threat posed by smokeless, magazine rifles had been extensively debated in British military circles throughout the 1890s, and some officers had advocated changes in drill, training and tactics. The faulty tactics in South Africa, argues Howard Bailes, ‘were not a consequence of the Aldershot teaching of the 1890s. They arose from a failure to act in accordance with it.’¹⁹

Like Badsey, who makes a similar point about some cavalry units practising dismounted action in the 1890s, they both agree that the Boer War erupted before these ideas became widely accepted.²⁰ This qualification is crucial: as the new tactical precepts were contentious, they were not part of a regularly practised doctrine. The home army had not engaged in largescale manoeuvres for twenty-six years until the purchase of 41,000 acres on Salisbury Plain under the Manoeuvres Act of 1898. Hence while some cavalry units practised dismounted duties in the 1890s, the Cavalry Drill of 1898 allocated only five pages out of 460 to the topic and contrasted it with ‘normal’ mounted action. The new ideas had not convinced Lieutenant- Colonel Martin, the Commanding Officer of the 21st Lancers, who led his men on the disastrous charge at Omdurman and was quite unrepentant afterwards.²¹ Nor had they persuaded Buller, the pre-war Adjutant-General who, after listening to a lecture on the possible effects on tactics of new weapons in February 1899, remarked ‘when improvements are made in military arms and tactics they almost always follow along the same lines’.²² Where the war provided a vital spur to reform was in discrediting some senior officers and in elevating others like Roberts and his supporters. During his eleven months in South Africa Roberts dismissed twenty-one senior officers, including eleven of the seventeen cavalry commanders, promoted reform before various royal commissions and select committees, and sought its implementation through post-war drill books and training.²³ He had political backing, too, as successive Secretaries of State – Brodrick, Arnold Forster and Haldane²⁴ – all endeavoured to meet public expectations, as expressed in Parliament and the press, about the need for army reform.

How effective were these reforms, bearing in mind that virtually every facet of the military system came within the review of various royal commissions and parliamentary committees? There were inquiries into issues such as the degeneration of the imperial race, the education and training of officers, the War Office, and the Militia and Volunteers. The royal commission on the war, chaired by the Earl of Elgin, sat for fifty-five days and asked 22,000 questions of 114 military and civilian witnesses. Its bulky, twovolume report, published in August 1903, may not have proposed many reforms but it provided plenty of ammunition for reformers. One commissioner, Lord Esher, a confidant of the king and of the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, produced a more forthright set of recommendations in subsequent reports from his War Office (Reconstitution) Committee (January and March 1904).

Once again the specific reforms of higher defence organisation and the War Office had little to do with the South African War. Both the concepts of a Committee of Imperial Defence and a General Staff had been raised by the Hartington Commission when it inquired into the ‘Civil and Military Administration of the Naval and Military Departments’ and reported in 1890. The war simply enabled resistance to these ideas to be swept aside: the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) was formed by Balfour in 1902 (and later gained a permanent secretariat) and the post of Commander-in-Chief was abolished in 1904 to be replaced by a Chief of the General Staff (CGS). In due course the ‘managerial revolution’ in the War Office was completed by the creation of a General Staff and an Army Council.²⁵

However, none of these reforms ensured that Britain would be better prepared for a continental conflict. In the first place, the imperial focus predominated, with the CID devoting fifty of its first eighty-two meetings to the defence of India. Even after the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907 the CID continued to assume that 100,000 men might need to be sent to India, and the defence of India against a potential Russian threat remained a prime concern until 1910 at least.²⁶ Second, the institutions were only as good as the men appointed to serve in them, and the first CGS, Sir Neville Lyttelton, proved, as John Gooch observes, a ‘disastrous’ appointment.²⁷ His successors were more effective, and two Directors of Military Operations, John Spencer Ewart and Henry Wilson, were ‘Continentalists by orientation’. Their efforts, particularly those of the francophile Wilson, greatly enhanced Britain’s preparations for mobilisation in 1914, belying the charge that ‘All Staff work in the decade before 1914 was bedevilled at every turn by the conflict between the new contin...