Lions led by Donkeys

Freddy, No its not. Still trying to send that one.

 

Trying to read up on WW1 more at the moment, can't help feeling that the war poets have a lot to answer for regarding the apparently distorted popular view of 'Lions and Donkeys'.
So far I lean towards Haig getting a very poor deal from history, and as for politicians and the Generals, Max Egremont's excellent biography of Major General Spears seems to confirm that the two can often be largely
inextricable.

Cheers,
Adam.

 

And you shouldn't put the blame on haig. He was told that a massive artillery barrage would kill all the Germans at the Somme. He believed them. Result? carnage.

 

Haig in my opinion was as about as a competent general as Hitler was in WWII. Throw enough troops into enough battles and eventually you will win a few, That's all that happened with him. Even looking back at his comments after the war, he still believed that cavalry armed with saber's would have won the day O.O.

And in 1918 when they gained the big defeat over the Germans, Whose tactics did he use?.. Those of an Australian and Canadian, John Monash and Arthur Currie.

He served his country and should be honored for it, But praise should not be given to a man that couldn't lead a division safely... His incompetence should be acknowledged and learned from. The idea of throwing away hundreds of thousands of lives needlesly is not a way to lead, As Monash stated ... the true role of infantry was not to expend itself upon heroic physical effort, not to wither away under merciless machine-gun fire, not to impale itself on hostile bayonets, nor to tear itself to pieces in hostile entanglements—(I am thinking of Pozières and Stormy Trench and Bullecourt, and other bloody fields)—but on the contrary, to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources, in the form of guns, machine-guns, tanks, mortars and aeroplanes; to advance with as little impediment as possible; to be relieved as far as possible of the obligation to fight their way forward; to march, resolutely, regardless of the din and tumult of battle, to the appointed goal; and there to hold and defend the territory gained; and to gather in the form of prisoners, guns and stores, the fruits of victory.

My apologies if this offends some people, But being Australian i like to say it straight, No beating around the bush.

 

No offence here...But I'd put most of the general staff into the same bracket as Haig. All commonwealth or Empire troop staff officers as well...And add to that the French and Allied staffs. Then I'd throw in the politicians and the rabble rousers back home.

 

Maybe read this, if the subject genuinely interests, and you're prepared to step outside of cliché and oft-repeated mythologies.
It is excellent:
Mud, Blood and Poppycock: Britain and the Great War Cassell Military Paperbacks: Amazon.co.uk: Gordon Corrigan: Books
Personally, I found it a fine counter to the stereotypes, mid c20th politicisation, and sometimes plain ill-informed works of Clark etc.
(It also makes one wonder at the power of a strong middle-class literary elite in shaping the historiography of a war... The Angry young man was not a purely 50s phenomenon.)

Lighter maybe, but also well worth a go:
Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front: Amazon.co.uk: Richard Holmes: Books

The men who fought the war did not, on the whole, apparently have the view of it that seems to have permeated much of the populist perception.
Thankfully the well-supported revisions of the last 20 years seem finally to be taking a decent grip for anyone with more than a passing interest.

~A

 

Depends which book you read Poopy...I have one I'll dust off from bookshelf with letters and views of the guys in the trenches at the time...I suppose you can get whatever view you like of history depending on who you read. I don't go much for ww1..too big ...bit like eastern front in ww2...I admit as much...But I do go for reading the vetrans letters and views...But I suppose if you find a book with such a collection, you aint going to find them praising the general staff... I'll give it a dusting and find out its name...Not one in there from over a thousand stand with Haig and his ilk.

 

Found it 1914 1918 voices and images of the Great War Lyn Macdonald

Plenty of Lions in there...plus a few well worn donkeys...

 

The thing is, mate, in WW1 historiography, it'd always depend on who compiled such a book, and when.There are/were so many agendas attached which almost completely subjugated the military history to a single sociological viewpoint, it became politically correct to only adhere to or tell that view.This is where good quality revisionism has it's place, though the issues have become so ingrained for some that it becomes a case of clinging almost religiously to a particular dogma.

The more I've read on the first war, from Clarke to Corrigan, the more I'm convinced that it's the likes of Corrigan who are on the money, and the old Lions and Donkeys saw is an insult to not only the officers, but also to the men they often died alongside of.


Ah, you've posted the book while I struggled this out on the phone. I think Mcdonald proves the case somewhat. She never wrote a book that wasn't intrinsically dedicated to the lions/donkeys view.

 

Exactly....Bit like the ones who portray the opposite...I tend though not to look at it from her but read the words of the guys she quotes...She could be being selective but I've just looked again myself and one or two Haik and Kitchener quotes...their own words are donkeyish.

 

There's a lot of power in that statement and this shaping gets done all the time. One of the rogues mentions Napoleon's famous and telling quote, "History is a set of lies agreed upon."

To which the Duke of Wellington may have replied, "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do; that's what I called 'guess what was at the other side of the hill'.
Napoleon did not guess what was on the other side of the hill so well at Waterloo.

Great point.

 

Again, all good points. But as to looking at this...I'm indeed looking at it not from recent histories...But from quotes of guys and girls who were there...We then get into the thing about vets memories. But as there are no vets around from the time I'm reading from the folk in the trench, in the factory in the boiler room, not f rom the last 20 years but when the guy wrote it. I'm just reading quotes, they may be memories, but they are mostly memories written at the time. If we are looking at what the folk at the time thought...It wavered...much as any time else...Historians are different they are selling their story of history, not quoting their own one off 5 minutes or more of smell, noise and anger etc...They start off with were off to kill the hun...by the end of ww1 its stuff the squire and his front pew at the church...I'll not be doffing me cap to im no more. The writers may not be as elequent..bit like me then...but they were there. They are their words, and history acannot and will not ignore em...

 

Maybe so, but the chaps who now portray the different line all at some point began with the Lions/Donkeys viewpoint as pretty much all they were presented with.
The difference is that they evolved their views through what I'd see as a rather more diligent look at the evidence, including what the men present in the mud were saying, both during and after the war, possibly in a less selective, more neutral, manner than those that have gone before.

I think you'd like 'Tommy', Urqh (the Holmes book). Nice style of writing, and very much focused on the boots on the ground. (Dunno if you've read his 'Redcoat'? That's a decent read too, and I'd say sort of part of a series.)

 

Don't want to get too deep into this...I understand what Poopy is saying...he knows I do....I know there is a perception of all conflicts that comes to the fore. All officers in ww1 including the general staff cannot be looked on as donkeys, as much as all troops involved were lions. Through war and war and today's wars...We latch onto what we look for I know that. But today's historians cannot ignore the views and quotes of those involved at the lower level as much as they cannot ignore those involved at the higher level to make their case. My case still resides in the view that their were indeed donkeys...Maybe not as much as I would like there to be but there were, just as there are today. However we cannot like I have stated before on ww2 bomibing, propose today's morals and leanings on yesterdays peoples and timelines. There is a middle ground...As much as I would state the ww1 poets of sassoon etc were not the folk to read for a full story of the happenings of trench warfare...I'd rather the cpl in his mud quote his poetry without the for king and country, for god and the right...Donkeys did indeed exist...as did the lions...probably in equal number to today.

 

I think that's a sound point.
They did, they do, they always have.
But I'd say that WW1 doesn't hold so exclusive a Monopoly on the former as many seem to paint it.

(Hey, 9 years and 70+ posts about WW1 without a single line of poetry! Good stuff eh. )

 

Then there was Spions Kop....

 

Careful, you might catch the attention of this bloke

Is that what we want?
Is that what we really want?

 

I did have it in mind....but I have an answer....The Cuban Spanish war.....Whatever that was...I have a defence.

 

Late to the thread but read most of it, so here goes with a few points that I think will help further the view:

The generals were about the same as the generals of history ... some 'clunkers', some clever, most average.

1. There had been no general European war since the days of Napoleon, and other wars had been limited affairs.
Franco - Prussian War (bad generalship here with Napoleon III)
Austro - Prussian War
Crimean War
Some Balkan Wars/ Colonial Wars (hardly solid preparation for a 'Great War')

2. All the generals had to deal with new and rapidily changing technology.
telephones/radio
'advanced' artillery & shells
barbed wire
trenches/mining tunnels (very old - more familiar to a 1700 commander, or a Lee-Grant of US Civil War)
machine guns
planes
poison gas
u-boats
tanks
Every new innovation required new experience to determine how to properly use/ avoid these items, at the cost of lives.

3. There were also serious political issues that had to be faced.
The Russians are the first to come to mind, with the series of upheavals that ended in a full-blown Revoution and civil war.
The Austro-Hungarian Army had constant problems with defections.
The French Army had a rather serious mutiny.
Public relations, propaganda, news service to the 'home fronts', as well as political leaders sensitive to pressure at home had to be dealt with.

4. Political problems took many forms, as the previous line refers to, but also the relationship between the allies is a factor.
The Germans had to constantly 'shore up' the Austrian Army, sending off badly needed divisions at key moments.
The British attack to relieve Verdun.
The French 'shore up' of the Italian Front.
The Russian attacks to help hold the Western Front.

There were some blunders that were staggering. A short list---
The botched attack at Gallipoli, The 'mud attack' in Flanders, Tannenberg/ Lemberg, The Marne, Verdun ,Zimmerman's telegram (and maybe worse, his assertion that Germany was well within it's rights), the 1918 "Peace Offensive".
There were some successes. Convoys to combat the u-boats, British rationing, Brusilov's Offensive, Mesopotamia.

But in retrospect both failures and successes stem more from the above lists then from any general's brillance. The nature of this war was set by the defensive power of the railroads, machine guns, and other technology.The generals tried to break a deadlock as best they could. They looked for other fronts to open up where they might find an advantage. They tried to find new tactics and weapons: poison gas, Nivelle's 'walking barrage', Falkenhayn's Verdun (more than attrition, a psychological attack of types),tanks. But the very nature of the war foiled them.

Trying to juggle all of the above, as well as sending all the required supplies to the front (from muntion production to biscuits), had to have been an impossible task. What would you ask of these generals? What more could they have done? Better rest/leave and a few other things like that would not change the nature of the war. So it remains, what could they have really done better? They were all in over their heads.

Favorite comment on WW1 and WW2-
British soldier in WW2 asked what it was about said, WW1 was to stop all wars, this one is to start them up again.

 

The generals were about the same as the generals of history ... some 'clunkers', some clever, most average.

And I think that can actually be the last word on it, the correct word and one I can certainly agree with. Excellent post.

As to quotes etc..my faveourite is the ticket to P...armaments minister introduced it in factory up north I believe due to gossiping women....Cheeters led by asses...Did I really say that...ooops....Famous poem from a worker then circulated via Red Cross on ministers ticket to P....we fought a war for the right not to have a ticket to P...I think that about sums up my view....tongue firmly in cheek before Tommy Atkins comes on forum on next post....