Changing War

The British Army, the Hundred Days Campaign and The Birth of the Royal Air Force, 1918

Gary Sheffield, Peter Gray, Gary Sheffield, Peter Gray

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441199522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Erster Weltkrieg

In 1918, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) played a critical role in defeating the German army and thus winning the First World War. This 'Hundred Days' campaign (August to November 1918) was the greatest series of land victories in British military history. 1918 also saw the creation of the Royal Air Force, the world's first independent air service, from the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. Until recently, British histories of the First World War have tended to concentrate on the earlier battles of 1916 and 1917 and often underplayed this vitally important period. Changing War fills this significant gap in our knowledge by providing in-depth examinations of key aspects of the operations of the British Army, the Royal Air Force and its antecedents in the climactic year of the First World War. Written by a group of established historians and emerging scholars it sheds light not only on 1918, but on the revolutionary changes in warfare that took place at that time.

1

Command Culture and Complexity: Third Army during the Hundred Days, August–November 1918

Jonathan Boff

In the late summer and autumn of 1918, the British army on the Western Front went on the offensive. It had now to fight a war radically different from the trench deadlock to which all sides had become accustomed, as a measure of mobility returned to the battlefield. The Hundred Days campaign of August–November 1918 was no Blitzkrieg. For instance, the average daily advance made by General Sir Julian Byng’s British Third Army, one of the most active of the attacking formations, was about three-quarters of a mile. The most it moved forward in a single day was just six miles. Nonetheless, the return of relative mobility confronted commanders with a series of new challenges.

One of the most pressing was the exercise of command and control. The increased tempo of operations placed a premium on rapid intelligence and speedy decision-making. However, communications remained a major constraint. The extensive fixed line networks of the trenches were soon left behind, and, although ‘the BEF was employing a much more flexible and sophisticated communications system than it had ever done before, tenuous communications were still having a profound impact on its operations’, as Brian Hall has shown.¹ New technology offered no quick fix. Wireless, for example, remained in its infancy. Inexperience bred over-long messages which jammed the net. On average wireless messages took 40 minutes to arrive compared with the 55 minutes for those carried by pigeon.² So, of the 869 messages passing through the Guards Division signals office on the day it attacked the Hindenburg Line, 27 September, only six went by wireless.³

The only way to maintain the pace of operations was to recognize the limitations of the signals system and to work around them. If the chain of command could not be made to work faster, the best way to make decisions more quickly was to reduce the number of links in the chain. One way to do this was for senior officers to go forward and exert more hands-on control, but this was rarely practical. Another was for control to be devolved to more junior commanders, free to use their own initiative. Before the attack at Amiens-Montdidier in early August 1918, General Marie-Eugène Debeney, commanding French First Army, approved all acts of initiative in advance, whatever their outcome.⁴ Martin Samuels and Tim Travers have argued that the British army was incapable of this kind of delegation and relied instead on ‘restrictive control’, whereby commanders received detailed orders which they were to carry out to the letter.⁵ Other historians disagree, and suggest that decentralization was a feature of operations in 1918, although they differ about how this was achieved. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson’s seminal work on General Sir Henry Rawlinson, for instance, argues that decentralization was driven from the bottom up. Rawlinson became increasingly marginal to success as the expertise of his subordinates grew and so ‘the nature and extent of his job contracted’.⁶

For J. P. Harris and Niall Barr, however, decentralization was contingent on circumstance, rather than on the expertise of subordinates. In their view, during set-piece assaults, ‘as a command level Army was crucial’.⁷ In less-structured operations, however, responsibility was inevitably devolved, and army and corps HQs sometimes became little more than spectators. Then again, in Andy Simpson’s view, devolution of control was the result of deliberate policy choice in line with the pre-war principles of Field Service Regulations Part I: Operations 1909, reiterated in the SS 135 pamphlets issued in 1916–18.⁸ This chapter analyses delegation in British Third Army’s operations during the Hundred Days. It studies the three kinds of operation that Sir James Edmonds identified as making up the campaign: set-piece assaults on well-prepared positions, improvised attacks on field positions consisting of fortified localities and trenches and pursuit.⁹ It argues that historians have underestimated the complexity of British command, that this complexity is rooted in less formal factors and that these need to be studied more closely.

Planning for set-piece attacks was carried out according to a well-established process laid out in SS 135 The Training and Employment of Divisions, issued in January 1918. This laid out a seven point top-down planning process, with orders cascading down the organization and each successive lower level of command responsible for filling out details within the objectives set to them.¹⁰ SS 135 was not designed to be used alone, however, but in conjunction with other, pre-war, manuals such as Field Service Regulations Part I (Operations) and Part II (Organisation and Administration), and Infantry Training 1914. These stressed the importance of delegation: ‘it is essential that superior officers, including battalion commanders, should never trespass on the proper sphere of action of their subordinates.’¹¹ Orders should state the object, but leave the method of attaining the objective to the subordinate, as the ‘man on the spot’ likely to have the best knowledge of local conditions. Further, subordinates should be trained to use their ‘initiative in dealing with unforeseen developments’, and, if necessary, they had not only a right, but a positive duty, to depart from or vary their orders.¹²

Third Army’s attack on the Hindenburg Line on 27 September typifies the British approach to set-piece attacks. Informal planning at GHQ and army level got under way on 8 September, with corps and divisions warned for further operations on the seventeenth. Third Army issued formal orders on 20 September, which then trickled down through corps, divisions and brigades, each holding a series of conferences to work out details and co-ordinate where necessary. The battalions slated to lead the assault received their final orders during the course of 25–26 September. The process fits SS 135 closely: a top-to-bottom cascade of orders, growing increasingly detailed as one moves downstream.

There were, however, significant points of divergence from doctrine. First, the written record makes the process appear considerably more centralized than was the case. In practice, lower level commanders sometimes played an important part in the planning process. On 17 September, for example, VI Corps asked its divisional commanders for their opinions on 11 detailed points concerning the proposed operations. They were asked whether they considered the second objective achievable, and whether that should be conditional on the Canadians taking Bourlon Wood.¹³ Divisions were being asked for their input not only on the methods to be used to achieve their objectives but also on the feasibility of those objectives, and on matters of co-ordination between corps.

Secondly, the prescription that commanders ‘should never trespass on the proper sphere of action of their subordinates’ was inconsistently applied.¹⁴ 2 Guards Brigade, for example, although told to choose their own objectives beyond the first, and instructed to decide the pace of the barrage (in theory, both divisional responsibilities), then found Division ‘suggesting’ an attack on a single battalion frontage and ‘suggesting’ lines for assembly, for jumping-off and for the final protective barrage.¹⁵

Thirdly, SS 135 allowed for corps to exercise a ‘quality assurance’ function, approving divisions’ plans.¹⁶ Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Haldane (VI Corps) did indeed vet – and sometimes reject – those of his subordinates.¹⁷ Likewise, Lieutenant General Sir Cameron Shute (V Corps) produced a ten-point critique of one of 21st Division’s plans.¹⁸ There is, however, no evidence of other corps commanders doing the same and Haldane’s diary suggests that the practice remained controversial: ‘It has been, before now, a question whether a copy of orders should be sent to the commander of the next higher formation. In my opinion it is essential.’¹⁹

How well did the command system cope with improvised attacks in ‘semi-open’ or ‘open’ warfare? From 23 August to 3 September Third Army fought a confused and scrappy battle driving east around Bapaume. In place of set-piece attacks, planned and sometimes rehearsed at relative leisure, with nights dedicated largely to relief, resupply and rest, fighting became near continuous. Attacks, ordered at short notice, were often launched with little or no reconnaissance. These were days of near-constant pressure on the Germans, and progress of some kind was made by Third Army almost every day from 23 August, although the New Zealand Division occupied Bapaume, seven miles from the 21 August front, only on 29 August.²⁰ Many of the 39 brigade attacks undertaken were, in themselves, unsuccessful. The cumulative impact, however, was a factor in the German decision to withdraw to the Hindenburg Line during the night of 2/3 September.

Third Army, on the whole, responded well to the need for faster reaction times, largely by simplifying the command process. As a battalion commander in 99 Brigade (2nd Division), wrote:

The orders for this attack were given to me personally on the ground by Brigadier General E. Ironside . . . and corroborated in writing on a sheet of paper torn out of his notebook. I mention this as a good example of a commander giving his orders verbally on the ground and the written corroboration being only a few brief paragraphs giving all the necessary information, thus avoiding the mass of written orders which had become so fashionable at this period of the war.²¹

This enabled operations to be mounted quickly. At 09.30 on 24 August, for example, 99 Brigade received orders to attack Mory Copse. By 10.15, Ironside had drawn up a fire plan with the artillery commander. He then rode around to his battalion commanders, the tanks and the brigade on his flank and was r...