Leadership In Conflict 1914–1918

Matthew Hughes, Matthew Seligmann

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 1990
• Print ISBN: 9780850527513
• eBook ISBN: 9781473815902
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The First World War was a conflict in which personality and character mattered. Its course and outcome were decided by determined individuals who had to make momentous decisions in very trying circumstances. As battles raged on land, sea and air across Europe, Africa and Asia, the Generals and politicians tried to steer a course to victory. It was never easy and they often disagreed on the best strategy. Yet, men's lives depended on the outcome.This collection of authorative essay examines these disagreements, portraying the decision-making process on both sides in the Great War. The personalities involved are now household names: Haig, Foch, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the German Kaiser, William II.

---

Contents

---

Foreword:Professor Brian Bond

Introduction: ‘People and the Tides of History: Does Personality Matter in the First World War?’

by Matthew Hughes and Matthew Seligmann

Part One: The Allied Powers on the Western Front

Chapter 1: ‘For Better or for Worse: Sir Henry Rawlinson and his Allies in 1916 and 1918’

by Peter Simkins

Chapter 2: ‘Marshal Ferdinand Foch and Allied Victory’

by William Philpott

Chapter 3: ‘Major General W. C. G. Heneker: A Divisional Commander of the Great War’

by J.M. Bourne

Chapter 4: ‘The Battle for the Skies: Sir Hugh Trenchard as Commander of the Royal Flying Corps’

by David Jordan

Part Two: Germany at War

Chapter 5: ‘Helmuth von Moltke: A General in Crisis?’

by Annika Mombauer

Chapter 6: ‘East or West? General Erich von Falkenhayn and German Strategy, 1914–15’

by Robert T. Foley

Part Three: America at War

Chapter 7: ‘“Black Jack” Pershing: The American Proconsul in Europe’

by David Woodward

Chapter 8: ‘James Watson Gerard: American Diplomat as Domestic Propagandist’

by Matthew S. Seligmann

Part Four: The Italian Front

Chapter 9: ‘General Luigi Cadorna: Italy and the First World War’

by James F. Gentsch

Chapter 10: ‘Personalities in Conflict? Lloyd George, the Generals and the Italian Campaign, 1917–18’

by Matthew Hughes

Part Five: The Home Front

Chapter 11: ‘National Party Spirits: Backing into the Future’

by Keith M. Wilson

Chapter 12: ‘“Regeneration” Revisited: W.H.R. Rivers and Shell Shock during the Great War’

by Denise J. Poynter

Part Six: Royalty at War

Chapter 13: ‘King George V and His Generals’

by Ian F.W. Beckett

Chapter 14: ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II: The Hohenzollerns at War’

by Matthew Stibbe

---

Foreword

---

Having edited collections of essays on the First World War and contributed to other volumes, I am all too well aware of the difficulties and possible pitfalls involved. Quite apart from the inevitable problems of deadlines and wordage, there are the more serious challenges of achieving a coherent structure and presenting fresh, original work to a readership which, though keen in principle, may suspect that the subject matter is already familiar to them.

The editors of Leadership in Conflict 1914–1918 emerge with a good deal of credit on these criteria. True, some of the Western Front commanders re-assessed here, notably Foch and Rawlinson, have been much studied recently, but the worthwhile contributions on these controversial figures are complemented by two on the less well-known Sir William Heneker and on Trenchard as commander of the Royal Flying Corps. There are original – and critical – reappraisals, both based on doctoral research, of Moltke the Younger and Falkenhayn, but an opportunity has been missed to re-assess German commanders in the latter part of the war, or in other theatres.

Two essays are devoted both to the United States and Italy which all admirably sustain the volume’s focus on civil-military relations and domestic politics as distinct from operations. It is again a matter of regret that space permits only one representative commander from each country to be studied (Pershing and Cadorna). One would have welcomed more than two contributions devoted to the ‘Home Front’, stimulating though these are. The volume concludes strongly with two excellent reappraisals of the roles and influence of the monarchs of Britain and Germany. Ian Beckett, in particular, has drawn on a wide range of sources, notably the royal archives at Windsor Castle, for a judicious reappraisal of the role of King George V.

Thus, so far from leaving the impression that this is just another canter over well-trodden battlefields, this lively collection which is mostly a showcase for a new generation of historians, opens up exciting possibilities for further research and publications along the lines developed here.

Brian Bond

(Professor of Military History at King’s College London and President of the British Commission for Military History)

Introduction

---

People and the Tides of History: Does
Personality Matter in the First World War?

Matthew Hughes and Matthew Seligmann

---

‘The death of one person is a tragedy. The death of a million people is a statistic.’

(Joseph Stalin)

‘Millions of individuals,’ to cite the words of Professor Derek Beales, ‘have found no defence against the juggernauts of history: the Cathars of Montaillou, the American Indians, or in the twentieth century those who fought in the trenches …’¹ That the First World War was one of these so-called ‘juggernauts’, a movement so powerful that no one single soul could hope to influence, let alone deflect, its course single-handedly, seems at first glance self-evident. It entailed such a massive array of force and forces that clearly no one person could be its master. It was such an overwhelming combination of the dislocative and destructive that it could not help but engulf the participants in their millions. Those caught up in the grasp of this colossal cataclysm were the masses and not the singular or the solitary.

Making sense of so vast a movement has led some historians to seek explanatory devices of comparable scope and grandeur. The bigger picture, it seems, when it is on the scale of the First World War, has required a gazetteer no less massive. As we will see, masculinity, agriculture, modernity and capitalism have all been wheeled out to serve as the base for a comprehensive explanatory model of the conflict. In this sense, the complaint of the nineteenth-century French historian, Monod, that ‘historians are too much in the habit of paying attention only to the brilliant, clamorous and ephemeral manifestations of human activity, to great events and great men, instead of depicting the great and slow changes of economic and social institutions …’² does not apply to current historical treatment of the Great War. Historians have long viewed the war as one of history’s ‘juggernauts’ and have all too often reached out for broad generalizations.

Is this situation satisfactory? To some historians this answer is clearly in the negative. If we return, for example, to the quotation from Derek Beales, it is clear that it is just such assumptions about the explanatory power of trends – ‘the mythology of trends’ he calls it – that he is trying to resist. As he perceptively comments: ‘It must be remembered on the other side that the juggernauts are powered and directed by men …’³ In other words, excluding acts of God, many, if not most, of the events of history are the product of some form of human agency. The First World War, we would argue, is no exception to this rule. In saying this, we recognize that we are going against the currents of contemporary historical opinion, the tide of which is to stress the sweeping overview and, thereby, deliberately to marginalize individual experience.

An example of a book that develops a broad theoretical approach, incorporating gender and the primal instinct to kill, and in so doing has raised much interest and controversy, is Joanna Bourke’s recent Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare (1999). This volume builds upon ideas from her earlier work Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996) to suggest that men (and women) like killing, that institutional structures channel this aggressive urge, and that war – including the First World War – is a logical outcome of a society that emphasizes such macho virtues. This emphasis, which is also discussed in Niall Ferguson’s much noted The Pity of War, provides valuable insights into understanding conflict: in particular, it offers a psychological framework for explaining why soldiers fight.⁴ As a result, in this interpretation, the Great War becomes a testing ground of masculine virtues and identities.

Another recent example of the way in which the First World War can be rendered subordinate to a single overarching historical principle is Avner Offer’s The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989). Focusing on agricultural production and distribution, it examines the war in the light of food supplies. For Offer, the First World War was ‘not only a war of steel and gold, but a war of bread and potatoes.’⁵ In particular, the way in which these could be interdicted by enemy action and/or increased by domestic regulation and control is used as an explanatory device for the war in general.

Also germane to any discussion of overarching approaches to the First World War are those interpretations that focus on the issue of modernity and the war’s role in ushering in a new era. This is an exciting area of inquiry that has produced some substantial scholarly advances. Works by Modris Eksteins, Volker Berghahn and Stephen Kern, for example, have done much to alter our understanding of the extent to which the First World War represented a caesura in modern history.⁶ However, best known in this context – perhaps because of his role in the well-received television documentary series ‘1914–18’ – is Jay Winter. In his work Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning he looks at popular reactions to the tragedy of the Great War, and examines how ordinary people expressed grief through various mourning processes. He shows that ‘the universality of bereavement in the Europe of the Great War’ was such that these grieving processes had the effect of changing societies irrespective of national frontiers. This approach challenges Paul Fussell’s classic The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) which approaches changes in postwar society through the wartime experience of the educated class and their use of the ironic style in their later literary output.⁷

Not all of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents