Learning and Adapting: The British Army from Somme to the Hundred Days Campaign/Amiens

Abstract

Over one hundred years on from the end of World War I (WWI), traditionally referred to as the First World War or the Great War in Britain, the British Army’s fighting performance in it remains deeply controversial. This is particularly true of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) fighting on the Western Front. In the first two years of the war, it moved from a small professional force to a large citizen army, all at a time when the character of warfare was undergoing a profound shift. On 1 July 1916 the opening of the Battle of the Somme was one of the darkest days in the army’s history as nearly 60,000 casualties were suffered for limited gains. Two years later, the BEF, along with its international allies, achieved one of history’s great victories when the Germans capitulated and asked for an armistice having been forced back over one hundred miles between 8 August and 11 November, during the Hundred Days Campaign. In the decades following the war, the British Army’s improved performance on the battlefield was increasingly overlooked as public views on the war slowly coalesced around a conception of futility, reaching its peak amidst the backdrop of the 1960’s anti-war movement. However, revisionist accounts began to emerge in the 1950s, and they increased exponentially in later decades thanks to the declassification of the official British archival records in the 1960s. These argue that the BEF underwent a painful “learning process” as it adapted to the unprecedented challenges of mass industrialized warfare through the application of new techniques, such as the creeping barrage, alongside the integration of new technologies, like tanks, gas, and airplanes, together forming an imperfect, but reasonably effective, combined-arms system. Scholars continue to debate the precise speed of this change, the Edwardian culture of the army, the capabilities of the BEF’s senior commanders, the underlying mechanisms that led the army to learn lessons, the influence of Britain’s French allies, and the errors made by their German enemies. Thus, a more balanced, less polarized picture has emerged of an army inconsistently adapting to the challenges the modern battlefield posed; in doing so, it got much right but also a lot wrong. Focusing on the BEF and its performance on the Western Front, this article will examine some of the key texts that have shaped the evolution of the historiography and hopefully encourage the green shoots of new scholarly thought.