Abstract
<em>Based on British and French archive material, this paper seeks to contribute to the limited “coalition warfare historiography” by exploring a neglected but revealing aspect of Franco-British chemical warfare between 1915-1918: Intelligence sharing. A contextual overview of the two allied intelligence services prior to and following the outbreak of war highlights their complementary strength and global reach. The tactical and strategic significance of French and British intelligence failures at the time of the first German poison gas attacks in April 1915 is examined and contrasted with subsequent allied experience. The discussion focuses upon the two most productive sources of allied intelligence information, mainly reports from secret agents and enemy prisoner of war interview digests. The volume, quality and detail of this material, and its importance to the Franco-British gas war effort are underlined. The article demonstrates how closely and effectively the two allies co-operated by exploiting their shared intelligence data to successfully anticipate German initiatives and to mitigate the searching battlefield challenge posed by an enemy whose technological superiority and resource advantages were evident especially during the earlier periods of the gas war on the Western Front.</em>
Highlights
While 2014 saw the commemoration of the much vaunted centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, 2015 marks the one hundred anniversary of the introduction of modern chemical weapons on the battlefield
Based on British and French archive material, this paper seeks to contribute to the limited “coalition warfare historiography” by exploring a neglected but revealing aspect of Franco-British chemical warfare between 1915-1918: Intelligence sharing
The article demonstrates how closely and effectively the two allies co-operated by exploiting their shared intelligence data to successfully anticipate German initiatives and to mitigate the searching battlefield challenge posed by an enemy whose technological superiority and resource advantages were evident especially during the earlier periods of the gas war on the Western Front
Summary
While 2014 saw the commemoration of the much vaunted centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, 2015 marks the one hundred anniversary of the introduction of modern chemical weapons on the battlefield. Despite being almost entirely unprepared to conduct such a form of warfare, Britain and France hurriedly responded to the enemy challenge and retaliated in kind five months later at Loos and Champagne respectively, albeit from an inferior resource and technological position. During the gas war of 1915-1918 the French army alone deployed 11 tons of poison gas. For their parts the British and Commonwealth armies used 6,000 tons while the Germans expanded a far greater tonnage of gas against the allies than the combined Franco British totals. The chemical war added pressing new imperatives for closer cooperation between the two major western front allies, one area of which forms the subject of the present discussion: intelligence sharing
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