Learning to Fight

"I have to declare an interest here because she is a student of mine. Thinking purely about the military history of the war, a lot of it has been caught up with debates about the ability or otherwise of the armies, particularly the British Army, to learn how to fight this new kind of war. The traditional trope, if you watch Oh! What a Lovely War or read C. S. Forester , is that it’s lions led by donkeys: brave Tommies let down by these butchers and bunglers who are their generals. In the last 30-odd years, there’s been a bit of a fight back against that popular view amongst professional historians. They’ve pointed out, ‘Well, considering the problems they faced, the British Army did a remarkable job of learning and improving such that by 1918 they were capable of going toe to toe with the German army—the best in the world—and beating them consistently.’ And therefore there must have been some learning process that was going on and the idea of butchers and bunglers is not as true as popular opinion would have it. This argument has been going back and forth for a generation or so. It probably more or less represents the academic consensus that there was a ‘learning curve’ (the shorthand that’s used). But the argument had got a bit stale, in my opinion. What Aimee came along and did was say, ‘Well, actually, we’re thinking about this in too narrow a frame. We’re thinking about it almost exclusively in terms of the Western Front. We can’t do that. What we need to do is think about the British Army as an institution and a very representative institution of British society at the time.’ Because this whole argument also has a wider resonance, because one of the stories of Britain in the 20th century is of its decline, that the establishment was incapable of change. The army is a microcosm of that. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So you’ve got to look at the whole army and see how lessons that were learnt in one place — the Western Front, say —were then applied in Palestine or Mesopotamia or vice versa. What she also did was to say that academics have done a lot of work explaining what was learnt, but no one’s really explained how the learning process operated. How did these lessons get transmitted and how did people learn new stuff? She gets into that. Ultimately, the picture that comes back is much more complex than people had thought. It could be accident, it could be design, but the army came up with a whole range of different methods for disseminating information and lessons learned. Some of them are very formal and stratified, part of the hierarchical structure; some are very informal, people sticking up a sign on the notice board in the officer’s club saying, ‘I’ve got some thoughts on this, if anyone wants to come and have a chat with me come along.’ She’s managed to reconstruct some of these networks, especially the informal ones, which is an incredibly difficult thing to do. So, she’s given us some new ways to think about this. The two armies had very different ways of going about it. The Germans were much more programmatic and centralized in the way that they tried to do it. Their self-image was that they were very good at learning. I don’t think they were. I think they were too programmatic. They were very good at uniformity and systemization, but that made them a bit predictable, which can be a problem. “Change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it” The British were a lot more ad hoc. Sometimes that can be a bad thing. Sometimes you need uniformity and systematization, and the British couldn’t always manage that. But the real point—and the same is true for any organisation—is that change is easier to effect if you go with the cultural grain of the organisation rather than cutting across it. The British Army with all this ad hocery looks terribly haphazard, but actually it suits the way the British Army works. A bit. It comes back to the point I was making earlier about people thinking about it as a British experience. It wasn’t all about the British. Even on the Western Front, a lot of the time it was about the French—never mind all the other fronts. In the English language historiography at least, we’ve tended to write the French ally out, to a large extent. A few people have tried to put them back in, but a lot of the time it’s written about as a British experience. Well it isn’t, actually. Britain is the junior partner, militarily. They’re the senior partner politically, but they’re the junior partner militarily on the ground in France and Belgium."