‘Relieving pressure’ was not about fear that the enemy might attack, it was about the fact that the enemy was attacking. Let’s take the example of the first battle of the Somme. At the time, the German army was inflicting horrendous casualties on the French (and to a lesser extent itself) at Verdun. The BEF could either sit there and wait for their ally to get knocked out of the war (see: 1940), or attack, even though everyone with a brain thought that they weren’t ready.

I have absolutely no problem in asserting that WW1 was a giant zero-sum cock-up. As far as I’m concerned, humanity went to hell on August 4th 1914 and is still there. But the British general staff were not idiots. They may have been evil, but they were not stupid, and anyone who thinks that they were is that much less likely to ever help getting us out of hell.

We’re afraid the enemy will attack some place important and win something important while slaughtering lots of our troops. So instead we’ll attack over here, where the enemy has little to gain. And he’ll use up his munitions slaughtering us and so he won’t have it to spare to attack the important target.

It makes a peculiar nightmare sort of sense.

They had to wait almost four years before generals got anything right, and that is what the British public were and still are correctly very indignant about

More importantly, nobody won WW1. Some benefited from it, such Finland and Lithuania, and arguably the USA, but there was no victor

Most of them lost outright

Far from being inherently unworkable, the generals’ strategy did actually work. They won. Pretty much everyone accepted this at the time, even Ludendorff. It’s not surprising that Ludendorff changed his tune soon after and spoke of ‘a stab in the back’: what is surprising is that so many people still take the old fascist’s word for it.

Please, read anything written on the BEF in the last 20 years by a military historian, then come back. Robin Pryor is the most critical of Haig, so why not start with him? But even he is likely to put the boot into your ideas about WW1.

And on what scale did they squander their blood and treasure!

That is why this form of revisionism is so unconvincing.

But it doesn’t end there, because their tactics were miserable as well, almost until the end. Even a laymen would see that. No person of average intelligence or above would repeat costly operations that are known not to work, would they.

Which is why the people of Britain rightly perceived and still perceive the “blimps” to have been incompetent. It’s also why the British Army to this day teaches—even to the lowest ranks—that that kind of engagement is STUPID

However, I agree with you on the political aspects

” Battle of x”
UK Web
Mons 918 27,000
Loos 11,300 64,000
Somme 95,300 185,000
Ypres 10,300 63,200
Amiens 2,700 17,900

That’s a first cut. Are you in a position to get hold of Todman’s ‘Great War, Myth and Memory’? If not, I’ll have to get back to you in a few days.

How does Amiens meet your criteria of accurately perceived ‘pointlessness’? How about Mons?

By the way, here I agree with the military aspects of Gary Sheffield’s revisionism. I don’t agree with the political aspects of it. When I talk about ‘pointless’ (or not) I’m talking in purely military terms, not political terms. Rosa and Ramsay were right.

It’s pretty obvious that in 1914 they weren’t expecting the Schlieffen Plan they got, because Joffre waited to see what the Germans were up to before making his own plans. He suspected that they might come through Belgium, but was not certain that they would.

If there’s any evidence that Joffre knew of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914, and thought that the Germans would use it, then I’d love to see it. So would the editors of the Journal of Military History. The last word on the topic (so far) seems to be this article by Robert Doughty:

‘French Strategy in 1914: Joffre’s Own’ in The Journal of Military History, Vol. 67, No. 2, (Apr., 2003), pp. 427-454

Upshot:

“Joffre’s strategy suffered from several flaws, the most serious of which stemmed from assumptions that the Germans would not drive across Belgium deep into the French rear, and that they would not integrate reserve units into their leading forces.”

ie: he didn’t know how strong the right wing was going to be. He didn’t know about the Schlieffen Plan. QED. Amazing what you can find out if you use the fruits of up-to-date historical research, isn’t it?

History is an interesting academic discipline precisely because it’s obviously relevant. Everyone’s an expert. This is often frustrating to professional historians like me, but it’s a nice problem to have.

Oh, good lord. There wasn’t a Schlieffen plan, until December 1905. Almost everything else you wrote earlier about the Plan was also wrong.

I found this easily. link href=”http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1473-8104(193305)12%3A3%3C409%3AUPALDL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Bbritta” rel=”nofollow”>http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1473-8104(193305)12%3A3%3C409%3AUPALDL%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Bbritta:

“It contains interesting information about the way in which, in the spring of 1904, the French first became acquainted with the Schlieffen plan….”

I don’t have access to the actual article. I notice that the link itself includes the string “britta”. There is a possibility that the person you’re arguing with has been publishing on the topic, and is not simply misinformed at a basic level.

link2 href=”http://cnparm.home.texas.net/Wars/Marne/Marne01.htm” rel=”nofollow”>http://cnparm.home.texas.net/Wars/Marne/Marne01.htm
“==Apr.—- > A spy slips an early version of the Schlieffen Plan to the French (though the episode may have been a ruse) -~ rising concern in the French Army over the possibility of a war with Germany ” Another claim about this 1904 event.

link3 href=”http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll3&CISOPTR=2001&filename=2002.pdf” rel=”nofollow”>http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/p4013coll3&CISOPTR=2001&filename=2002.pdf
“The French were well aware of the German plan to attack using a strong right wing as they were given the plan by a German staff officer in 1904. (34)”

It seems to me that Britta is not insane to believe this. It could be wrong, but it isn’t just Britta making it up. There could have been a plan similar to the Schlieffen plan in 1904 that got revealed to the french, whether it was a proto-Schlieffen plan or not. In general terms the germans didn’t have a lot of good alternatives, though lots of details of the plan were open to innovation.

see: German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (Yale, 2001)
http://www.amazon.com/German-Atrocities-1914-History-Denial/dp/0300089759
Absolute Destruction: Military Culture And The Practices Of War In Imperial Germany (Cornell, 2005)
http://www.amazon.com/Absolute-Destruction-Military-Practices-Imperial/dp/0801442583

Oh, good lord. There wasn’t a Schlieffen plan, until December 1905. Almost everything else you wrote earlier about the Plan was also wrong.

chris williams: “By 1918, some generals had actually worked out how to make attacks on trenches work. They attacked and drove the enemy back for good. They won on the battlefield. That’s interesting and important, but has gone down the memory hole.”

It may be diminished by our long perspective, but it did not go down the memory hole, at all, at the time. Quite the contrary. Storm troopers loomed large in the popular imagination. Tanks became the obsession of some key young career officers, from Patton to DeGaulle.

chris williams: “With the usual proportion of exceptions, WW1 generals were not incompetent.”

I have to disagree with this. Competence was a central issue during the war and in making sense of the war afterwards, for good reason. It would take a book, not a blog comment to tease out the how and the why competence was so clearly lacking, and so much in question, and the answer would contain many subtleties.

Technological capabilities had clearly outrun military training and traditions—much more in some countries than others. The mixed state of technological advance played a role: the industrial capacity to mass forces had outrun the communications and control capability to manage and direct them adaptively. Moreover, military strategy and tactics were inadequate to the industrial scale and firepower involved.

The questioning of political and military elite competence was a central aspect of the World War as a revolutionary event, overthrowing the old order and the unearned privileges of its social classes. Just as WWI was the culmination of Europe’s long ambivalence over absolute monarchy after 1789, WWI was also the culmination of a parallel ambivalence over the organization of the military after Valmy (1792).

The fog that surrounds questions about who was competent and who was not was a critical dynamic of the war. That fog is exemplified in continuing debates about the wisdom of Gallipoli, but there were many such controversies over events and persons, and one of the peculiar features of memory of the Great War was that people never seemed to get a useful or accurate moral narrative out of its failures: the wrong lessons were often drawn.

The French loved Joffre, who epitomized incompetence on many levels. Verdun convinced the French of the usefulness of fortification, inspiring the Maginot Line. Neither the Belgians nor the Dutch nor the French grasped the lesson of the Schlieffen plan, even after that full-scale demonstration. Kitchener, who actually seems to have known his business, was treated by the British as an annoying gadfly, while Haig and French . . . well, what can be said? The Italians decided that they had been on the wrong side, after all. And, the Germans, in the greatest blunder of all, convinced themselves that they had been winning all along.

For the Americans, WWI was more about the mass mobilization at home than about actual fighting in Europe, and more about victory and defeat in the diplomacy of Versailles than about battlefield manuever. And, the Americans generally seemed to learn from the experience. WWII mobilization was much better, and the American plan for afterwards was also far more sensible.

You may not agree with my historical interpretation, but it’s based on far more than Black Adder. One of my favorite books about the lead up to WWI is “The Long Fuse.”

This seems to me to be a total misreading. I’d suggest that people remember the Somme battles (Like Verdun, Ypres, Bullicourt, Poziers, Messine, Vimy Ridge, Cambrai and dozens more) as bloody slaughter on both sides, serving only to move the trenches a few hundred yards in one direction or the other. I doubt if 1 in 100 could tell you which of these was a “victory” for one side or the other. I certainly couldn’t. If I’m wrong about this, maybe some of CTs British readers could set me straight.