Imperial General Staff Research Articles

Static and Dynamic Strategy Making: Egypt, Singapore, Dill and Brooke

In 1941 Britain faced the strategic dilemma of how to apportion forces between the defence of the British Isles, the Mediterranean and its interests in Australasia. Determining the priorities between these theatres and the required balance of forces was the cause of disagreement between Churchill and his successive Chiefs of the Imperial General Staff, Sir John Dill and Sir Alan Brooke. Ultimately, Brooke was successful in maintaining the trust of Churchill, and retained his job; while Dill was unsuccessful and was sacked. This paper examines the different analytical processes, static and dynamic, that Dill and Brooke employed to determine strategy.

‘This is not the sort of man we want in Palestine today’. New evidence on the appointment of Alan Cunningham as High Commissioner of Palestine

ABSTRACT The decision-making process behind the appointment of General Alan Cunningham as High Commissioner of Palestine in November 1945 to replace Field Marshal Lord Gort has been difficult to explain. Cunningham’s record as a failed wartime general and backwater administrative commander were scant preparation for an important political position in Mandatory Palestine. Newly located files indicate Vice Chief of the Imperial Staff Archibald Nye listed Cunningham among a series of possible candidates for consideration by Prime Minister Clement Atlee. Terror attacks in Palestine, American pressure over Jewish refugees, the need to secure additional American loans, and the covert Anglo-French intelligence war in the Middle East, pressured Atlee to make a quick decision. After some confusion Cunningham was selected and Chief of the Imperial General Staff Alan Brooke approved. Haste and personal connections therefore brought about a critical appointment that shaped the end of the Mandate.

British World Policy and the Projection of Global Power, c.1830–1960. Edited by T. G. Otte (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 326 pp. $29.99

This book, published in honor of the late Keith Neilson, tackles the issue of Britain’s world power status, and its decline, from a variety of interesting angles. Its scope is more ambitious than the dates in the title suggest, as both Otte’s chapter about the Foreign Office (fo) and Kathleen Burk’s about Britain’s economic networks in South America deal with the period since 1800. The geographical coverage extends beyond “the British world” to include Japan as well as Russian views of Britain. Some, although by no means all, of the twelve chapters engage directly with Neilson’s work. For example, John H. Maurer, in his assessment of the British response to Imperial Germany’s naval expansionism before 1914, concludes, “As Keith Neilson argued, Britain was no weary titan but a formidable Great Power, fully capable of competing in the international rivalries of that troubled age and beating back challengers, its leaders committed to playing the leading role on the world stage” (172).One of the volume’s strengths is the way in which the contributors negotiate the balance between recognizing the reality of Britain’s long-term relative decline and acknowledging the ways in which the country continued to exercise its muscle even as its options shrank. Douglas E. Delaney’s chapter about the Imperial General Staff and the Dominions in the interwar years is especially illuminating in this respect. This was an era of financial stringency when the Empire was also subject to forces that weakened Whitehall’s (already limited) control. Yet although Dominion politicians had little appetite to continue the burden sharing of World War I in time of peace, inexpensive and politically opportune techniques continued to facilitate coordination of the various armed forces, including the sharing of information, exchanges of officers, and intelligent use of Staff Colleges. Thus, “in spite of the near-breakneck demobilization that followed the First World War, widespread war-weariness, declining defence budgets, and growing dominion autonomy, the British general staff managed to keep some long-proven strands of military cooperation intact” (228). This situation was of value when war came again in 1939.Such an approach is useful because historians’ attention can often be monopolized by episodes of drama and crisis at the expense of the study of the workaday or routine behavior that underpinned the successful projection of power. Otte’s chapter about the fo, which is exemplary in this respect, deals with the fo’s internal procedures surrounding the accumulation of policy-relevant knowledge. On the one hand, it developed a reasonably efficient system for processing paper, but on the other, as business grew in both speed and volume, the organization was sometimes stretched to its breaking point. Enormous backlogs piled up. Moreover, as one civil servant sagaciously observed in 1891, “You cannot invent a machine into which documents can be put at one end and conclusions ground out at the other by turning a handle” (99).The same is true of the writing of history; happily, all the authors in the book succeed in applying common sense and wisdom to the fruits of their archival industry. They do not, however, engage in any methodological reflection or interdisciplinary inquiry. Because historians are prone to assume that the use of archives is well understood and without need of explicit justification, they sometimes undersell their own work. In her chapter, “Views of War, 1913 and 1949: Second Thoughts,” Zara Steiner (who died not long after this book was published), however, remarks about changing assumptions within the historical profession since she first approached the topic of attitudes about the outbreak of World Wars I and II in a seminar paper of 1972: “The original paper was critically received; many members of the seminar believed that historians should not deal with the issue of public opinion” (174). In this way, the book obliquely raises the interesting question of what aspects of current historical practice will look strangely antiquated in fifty years’ time.

Command of the Army, Charles Gwynn and Imperial Policing: The British Doctrinal Approach to Internal Security in Palestine 1919–29

This article explores, through a case study the nature of ‘imperial policing', its myriad problems, and the issues confronting the chiefs of the Imperial General Staff as they sought to maintain security against falling budgets and increasing nationalist unrest across a variety of theatres in the period 1919–39. In particular it examines the significance of Charles William Gwynn's (1870–1963), short book Imperial Policing (London: Macmillan, 1934), especially his observations about managing unrest in Palestine in 1929. This work and the official manual of the same title were not the first to offer advice about the containment of civil unrest or the neutralising of insurgency, but it was perhaps one of the most influential of the interwar period and was candid about some of the problems that confronted British forces in the empire. Military Aid to the Civil Power (MACP) was rarely if ever popular with the army, but Gwynn's work at least drew attention to a problem that the army was frequently forced to confront. Several studies have, in recent years, applied scholarly analyses to the tactical and operational issues of MACP, but it is harder to find investigations into the command of ‘imperial policing’, where senior officers had to maintain internal security in regions across the empire with very limited resources under the spotlight of unsympathetic politicians and international media. The relative success of that effort is explored in this article.

Autocracy Defeats Military Reform on Eve of First World War

AbstractSteinberg reconstructs the history of the Russian Imperial General Staff during the final decades of the autocracy and highlights the reformist vision of War Minister Alexei Kuropatkin. The aim of the reformers was to create a general staff on the Prussian/German model that would allow Russia to fight the new wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, wars marked by increasingly large conscript armies and the application of ever more lethal weaponry made possible by Europe's industrial revolutions. The reforms also focused on officer education and aimed at creating leadership for the management and coordination of the troops in wartime. Unfortunately for Russia, these reforms foundered on the resistance of the autocrat himself and the structure of privilege that gave family connections and noble privilege power over merit and competence. They also met resistance from an older tradition of military leadership and education that favored elan over technical expertise with modern weaponry. The first test against a modern enemy during the Russo-Japanese War ended in humiliating defeat and the marginalization of the General Staff Academy by Nicholas II and his entourage, save for his uncle, the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich. Even with the Grand Duke's encouragement of the reformers, what they could accomplish was too little and too late for the next large confrontation that sealed the fate of the Russian Empire, World War I.

Securing the Colonies for the Commonwealth: Counterinsurgency, Decolonization, and the Development of British Imperial Strategy in the Postwar Empire

On the 26th of July, 1956, Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, the chief of the imperial general staff, sent a memorandum to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the colonial secretary. He suggested that the parachute battalions slated to leave Cyprus at the end of the year be replaced by two light artillery regiments rather than infantry. This was not, he explained, due to the changing nature of the conflict in Cyprus, nor to any apparent need for more heavy weaponry, but because the British infantry battalions had finally succumbed to the burden placed upon them since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, at the time of his writing, Templer revealed that there were only nine infantry battalions remaining in the United Kingdom that had been resident there for a period of more than twelve months, three of which were already earmarked for internal security operations in Somaliland. With a reserve of only six battalions and with tensions in the Suez Canal region rising, Templer simply could not afford to send more infantry to Cyprus.1 As chief of the imperial general staff, Templer was under increasing pressure in

ANTHONY CLAYTON. The British Officer: Leading the Army from 1660 to the Present. New York: Longman. 2006. Pp. xiv, 271. $32.95

The officer corps of the British Army always has been a singular organization. While much has changed in recent years, traditionally officers have been largely drawn from the higher social classes. Some regiments required their officers to possess a considerable private income. Snobbery was rampant, with some unfortunates deemed socially unacceptable hounded out of their regiments. There was a cult of effortless amateurism, with bookishness frowned upon, and even the discussion of “shop” (i.e. the profession of arms) was banned in the Mess. Yet there is another side to the story. There has often been a place for the gifted but impecunious officer who had risen from the ranks. One, William Robertson, rose from a private in the 16th Lancers to serve as the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the professional head of the Army, for much of World War I. The British Army has an impressive, although not unblemished, record of accomplishment in small wars and counterinsurgencies, and after distinctly shaky starts in both world wars, the Army was able to adjust to the very different demands of large-scale high intensity warfare with considerable success. All this suggests that the reactionary, technophobic “Colonel Blimp” figures must have coexisted alongside at least some highly effective, progressive, and adaptable officers. This tension between these two faces of the British officer corps is a rich field for the historian.

Les états-majors des armées napoléoniennes

The staff officers of the armies of Napoleon ; During the course of the Napoleonic wars the French army benefited from superbly well organised military staffs at all levels, to support the command. At the top of the organisational pyramid stood the Imperial General Staff. This consisted of three bodies : the ‘Imperial Household’, the ‘Emperor’s General Staff’, and the ‘War Administration’. The military staffs of subordinate formations (army corps and divisions ) were divided into three in exactly the same manner. Whatever level one examines in the Napoleonic French army, the staffs all shared the common characteristic of providing the commanding general with the means to plan and direct the movement of his formation’s constituent units. It was this that made possible in that era the material and technical ‘way of war’ that Napoleon pursued. Within each of the military staffs there were specialists, adjutant-majors and their assistants, who ran the offices that generally dealt with non-tactical business, whilst the other officers (including the aides-de-camp to the generals and Napoleon’s personal adjutant officers) took care of observation missions and troop inspections, and acted as courriers -roles that did not require specialist training.

Guy Mountfort, 1905–2003

Guy Mountfort, 1905–2003

‘A modern Major General’: General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the imperial general staff

(1999). ‘A modern Major General’: General Sir Gerald Templer, Chief of the imperial general staff. Contemporary British History: Vol. 13, Whitehall and the Suez Crisis, pp. 29-45.

Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War

Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War

David R. Woodward. Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War. Westport, Conn.: Praeger: dist. by Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn. 1998. Pp. xiv, 230. $59.95. ISBN 0-275-95422-6.

David R. Woodward. Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: Chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War. Westport, Conn.: Praeger: dist. by Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., Westport, Conn. 1998. Pp. xiv, 230. $59.95. ISBN 0-275-95422-6. - Volume 31 Issue 2

Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War

Field Marshal Sir William Robertson: chief of the Imperial General Staff in the Great War

Lord Brookeborough and the Andrews’ Premiership

LORD BROOKEBOROUGH AND THE ANDREWS’ PREMIERSHIP BRIAN BARTON lord brookeborough was prime minister of Northern Ireland for twenty years—longer than either of his predecessors or his successors. He was a member of the Northern Ireland cabinet for an unbroken period of thirty years, a tenure unequaled by anyone either at Westminster or at Stormont before or since. His importance in the history of Ulster arguably ranks along with that of Carson or Craig. Yet, when beginning work on his biography , I was surprised to find that no study of his long life had been written or attempted; nothing existed beyond newspaper interviews conducted in his declining years and his own brief unpublished (and unfinished) autobiography . Historians have preferred to focus on the inception of the state or on the present “troubles,” neglecting the period of his premiership. Possibly they have been discouraged by fears of insufficient source material. Also, Brooke has suffered from a negative, unattractive image. His years as prime minister are frequently dismissed as barren, a time of “change without change” unlikely to repay prolonged, painstaking research.1 He has been dismissed as a bigot, a lazy man, and a schemer who intrigued his way to the premiership.2 I intend to review the validity of these unflattering assumptions with regard to the early part of Brooke’s career. Inevitably Brooke’s social class, family background, and Fermanagh upbringing exerted a powerful, formative influence on the individual. The experience of the Brookes closely conformed to that of the Anglo-Irish gentry as a whole. They first came to Ireland from England (Cheshire) in the late sixteenth century, their precise antecedents uncertain. Initially they acquired land in County Donegal. The family received estates in FerLORD BROOKEBOROUGH AND THE ANDREWS’ PREMIERSHIP 78 1 Patrick Buckland, A History of Northern Ireland (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1981), 82. 2 Terence O’Neill, The Autobiography of Terence O’Neill (London: Hart Davis, 1972), 40: “those who met him imagined that he was relaxing away from his desk, what they didn ’t realise was that there was no desk.” That is the best known put-down of Brooke. managh as reward for military service rendered in quelling the 1641 insurrection . Over the next ten generations the family preserved its property , tending it at least competently. Over this same period the family’s most prominent characteristic had been its impressive record of military service. During the present century, fifty-three members of Brooke’s family served in World Wars I and II, twelve of whom sacrificed their lives, including two of Brooke’s own sons. Lord Alanbrooke was the most famous figure of the group; his biographer, David Fraser, described him as the “best Chief of Imperial General Staff ever produced by the [British] army.”3 In addition, the Brooke family had a strong tradition of political activism. Within Fermanagh, its members have fulfilled, through successive generations, their proscribed social role— acting as magistrates, lords lieutenant, and sheriffs. From the eighteenth century, they also sporadically represented the county in parliament. During the late nineteenth century their response to the mounting Irish nationalist agitation was unanimously and aggressively unionist, “standing up for the protestants and for Ireland.” In the 1860s, Brooke’s grandfather armed reliable tenants against the threat of Fenian violence. In the early 1900s, his father threatened to distribute the contents of his armory in the event of Home Rule being enacted. In December 1912, his family helped organize the Ulster Volunteer Force within the county, in sharp contrast to many local gentry who were initially inclined to hesitate.4 Sir Basil Brooke was born at Colebrooke on 9 June 1888, the eldest of five children. The estate was the “great love” of his life; eighty-five years later, in deference to his wishes, his ashes were scattered over the demesne.5 While his mother was “kind and gentle,” his father was, he recalls, “a truly Victorian parent”; orders had to be obeyed, and the farmyard was a prohibited area in case the facts of life were gleaned at too early an age.6 His early career broadly followed familiar paths trodden by innumerable sons of the Anglo-Irish gentry. After attending private...

Henry Wilson’s Mischief: Field Marshall Sir Henry Wilson’s Rise to Power 1917-18

Henry Wilson rose from being, in the summer of 1917, a general who had failed to distinguish himself in the war to become the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in the spring of 1918. He rose because he was confident that he alone amongst his fellows understood the correct path for Britain to follow if it were to avoid disaster in the war; but also because by his political intriguing he ensured that Lloyd George could not ignore him. An understanding of the process by which Wilson became C.I.G.S. is important not only because it helps us to reach a better understanding of a general important in his own right, but also because the Wilson intrigue was a crucial part of Lloyd George’s battle with the generals, and an excellent illustration of the kinds of considerations which often underlie crucial decisions in time of war.

The Offensive and the Problem of Innovation in British Military Thought 1870-1915

In January 1910, at the annual Staff College conference of General Staff officers, the Director of Staff Duties, Brigadier General Kiggell, remarked that after the South African war (1899-1902) the War Office had come to the conclusion that fire power was the decisive factor in battle, and that therefore the sword and bayonet were out. 'But this idea is erroneous', declared Kiggell, 'and was proved to be so in the late war in Manchuria [1904-1905] Everyone admits that. Victory is now won actually by the bayonet, or by the fear of it.' At the same conference the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), General Sir William Nicholson, pointed out that formal doctrine now no longer stated 'the decision is obtained by superiority of fire', but instead 'a superiority of fire makes the decision possible.'l In the years immediately before the first world war, therefore, and at the highest levels, the British army was turning against the concept of fire power as the central factor in modern war, and towards more traditional principles.2 This attitude was not so strong as to prevent the War Office from experimenting with automatic rifles and machine guns, nor was there lacking a solid core of fire power supporters such as Major McMahon and Captain J.F.C Fuller, while the musketry training of the British Expeditionary Force certainly reached high levels before 1914. But fundamentally, the lessons of fire power as demonstrated in South Africa and Manchuria were not taken fully to heart, and indeed a regression took place between 1900 and 1914. Why should this be so? Possible answers may emerge from studying the debate on the introduction and development of a weapon that was the essence of fire power the machine gun.3 After noting the initial reaction of

VIII. The Establishment of the Cabinet Secretariat

In the aftermadi of replacing Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916, David Lloyd George forged a greater change in the style of administration than in the content of the British Government's actions. Not until the spring of 1918 was he able to secure the replacement of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, ‘Wully’ Robertson, and even at that time he dared not move against the all-too-entrenched commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir Douglas Haig; meanwhile, die war of deadly attrition persisted in France and Flanders.

The Imperial General Staff and the Military Policy of a "Continental Strategy" during the 1911 International Crisis

The Imperial General Staff and the Military Policy of a "Continental Strategy" during the 1911 International Crisis

The Maurice Debate 1918

In the view of at least one historian, the Maurice Debate played a significant part in the demise of the Liberal Party, and, in a more tortuous manner, contributed to the subsequent fall of David Lloyd George.1 Yet it has not been well served by historians, who have either ignored or distorted it. It finds no mention in Sir E. L. Woodward's recent study.2 In a necessarily brief survey, A.J.P. Taylor concludes that it was an act of 'revenge' by Sir Frederick Maurice after his dismissal by Lord Milner from the post of Director of Military Operations.3 Since Sir Henry Wilson, then Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had made it clear to Maurice some time before Milner's arrival at the War Office on

The Turn of the Tide: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

The Turn of the Tide: A History of the War Years Based on the Diaries of Field-Marshall Lord Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff.