Casemate 76

Command and Control on the Western Front; The British Army's Experience, 1914-1918:

Edited by Gary Sheffield and Dan Todman. HB, 223 pp. 17 b/w photographs, 4 maps. ISBN 1-86227-083-X. £20.00.
Published by Spellmount Ltd, 2004.

A new generation of WWI scholars has succeeded in demonstrating that Field Marshal Haig and his subordinate commanders were not all the butchers and bunglers described by John Laffin. This book is a series of nine papers relating to aspects of the command system, from GHQ through Corps, Division, Brigade and finally to Battalion level. A detailed study of a complex subject, the book throws a new light on an area of the direction of the war which has been largely unknown. There is a wealth of primary material, and the various authors have mined it well, showing that the British Army progressed and developed from the small army of 1914 to the vastly bigger and more professional outfit which rolled back the German army in mid to late 1918. The war moved from mobile operations to the positional warfare of the trenches, and back to mobility again in the breakthrough of 1918, which commanders had to come to terms with. After the catastrophe of the Somme, lessons were learned and training and operational procedures devised, to ensure that it never happened again.

This is an important, profoundly scholarly book which is essential reading for anyone with an interest in both World Wars, for it is important to remember that the generals who commanded during WWII, served their apprenticeship twenty-odd years earlier.

Gil Dowdall-Brown.