The Somme

  But the assurances of Kitchener and Lloyd George were meaningless. Kitchener did not seek out details from Haig as to how he intended to conduct the battle – this despite the fact that Rawlinson had warned the War Minister in March that Haig might attempt a foolhardy operation designed to break the German line at a blow. Nor was Lloyd George aware of how Haig intended to use the munitions and guns supplied him or whether they would be sufficient for the front and depth of defences to be assailed. In short, having sanctioned the operation, the War Committee was never certain about the nature and purpose of what they had sanctioned.

  When battle was joined, the committee's performance rapidly deteriorated. It was clear from discussions held with Hankey as early as 3 July that its members were uneasy about the high casualties and the lack of progress on the Somme. Yet in committee these same members always accepted without question the casualty figures supplied to them by Robertson. The figures on the German side were often inconsistent and sometimes downright unbelievable. Into this latter category fell the figures given by Robertson to refute the Churchill memorandum of early August. Here was a chance for the War Committee to assert its authority and question whether 1,250,000 Germans could have been laid low on the Somme when only 160,000 British had become casualties. The committee not only ducked this question, they formally sent their congratulations to Haig on the development of the battle.

  Why was the civilian leadership of Britain acting in this extraordinary way? They almost certainly failed to voice their concerns because of the lack of a clear alternative. Closing down the operation on the Somme was hardly an option, with the French still hard-pressed. Moreover, the Russians seemed to require a continuance of the British offensive if their successes against the Austro-Hungarians were to continue.

  In the months that followed, the War Committee, despite mounting concern, did nothing. In this period the definition of what the Somme was meant to achieve kept being altered. By early September the pretence that significant amounts of ground were being gained had ceased to be credible. With the crushing of Romania at the end of the period it could hardly be said that German troops were being kept away from the Eastern Front. From then on, the only justification for the continuance of the battle became the killing of enemy troops. And this at a time when it was only too obvious that the chief military adviser to the committee was supplying it with sets of enemy casualty figures that were becoming less and less believable.

  Then in early October Haig (of all people) supplied the committee with an excuse to close the battle down. In a memorandum he asked for permission to continue the offensive. Most members of the committee were by this time thoroughly alarmed by the drain on British manpower and its likely effect on the ability of the country to continue the war. Yet they not only passed up the opportunity Haig had given them, they failed even to discuss his request. This was the moment when the civilian leadership indicated in the most dramatic way that it had lost the nerve to assert its authority over Haig and Robertson. A threat to resign on the part of the CIGS over renewed civilian interest in Salonika resulted in much huffing and puffing, but no action The battle ran its muddy, bloody, and inconclusive course. The civilian leadership therefore failed the men for whom they claimed to be trustees. The soldiers who became casualties in their hundreds of thousands fought well in a good cause. But they deserved a plan and competent leadership as well as a cause.

  Epilogue: The End of It All, November 1916

  I

  On 3 November 1916, the War Committee of the British cabinet held an unscheduled and unusual meeting. No agenda paper was issued. And a major section of the conclusions was handwritten, not (as was customary) typed. These sections carried the directive ‘Not to be printed or circulated’.1

  The initiator of this gathering was Lloyd George, with Hankey proposing to him that it should consist only of cabinet ministers unaccompanied by advisers. (‘This had been my suggestion to Lloyd George,’ Hankey confided to his diary, ‘so that he might air his views freely unhampered by the presence of that old dragon Robertson.’) Lloyd George's action reflected his dismay at the way in which the war was proceeding. And it gave expression to his determination that matters must be conducted by different methods to different ends. With the benefit of hindsight, this meeting may be seen as the opening episode of a process by which, within a month, Asquith would be forced out of office and Lloyd George would become Prime Minister.

  II

  Lloyd George began the gathering by reading a telegram which he had received from a leading Romanian statesman, M. Take-Jonescu. It took the form of an appeal directly to Lloyd George.

  Romania, the writer stated, had been at war for two months, and had suffered heavy casualties. The cause of Romania's difficulties, ‘which every day become more forcible’, was ‘lack of heavy artillery’. ‘Our front is enormous; we cannot indefinitely replace heavy guns by infantry attacks.’ Only one country could make good Romania's lack of artillery, given that Russia had insufficient for its own needs. ‘We have asked help of England; they do not give it us.’

  Lloyd George had drafted a reply, which was approved by the War Committee. It recognised the ‘serious need’ for the Allies to give every support to the ‘gallant Roumanian Army in their terrible struggle for the defence of their country’. The Western Allies had recently sent 90,000 additional troops, with appropriate weaponry, to Salonika, raising the force there to 450,000. It had also sent to Romania 400 machine-guns. But it was difficult to send more heavy guns, ‘owing to [the] urgent necessity for keeping up heavy pressure on Germans on the Western Front in order to prevent their detaching fresh divisions from the West to join the forces attacking Roumania’. But they were sending several batteries to Russia to use on the Romanian front, and with French aid would send as many further guns ‘as restricted transport facilities will allow’. Thereby the condition of Allied forces on the Eastern Front, as concerned heavy guns and ammunition, ‘must continue [sic] steadily to improve from now onward’.

  This set of communications was intended by Lloyd George to introduce a wide-ranging survey of the ‘General Military Policy of the Allies’. Again, Lloyd George produced a document addressed to him. Its author was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Lloyd George had asked Robertson, for the benefit of the War Committee, to provide his judgement on ‘the probable duration of the war’.

  Robertson found this request ‘very difficult’. The duration of any war, he suggested, was hard to estimate. And this conflict, with its wide-ranging objectives and its vast involvement of non-military matters (such as ‘large questions of international finance and commerce’), was particularly difficult.

  Further, many matters were not subject to accurate estimation. The Allies might have greater manpower than their adversaries. But what did this signify when Germany had the advantages of interior position and could totally dominate the actions of the Central Powers, whereas its opponents were alarmingly diverse?

  Russia is corrupt, badly armed and administered, and will not improve her communications; Italy refuses to move men from her own country; Rumania runs away.

  As far as the Western Front was concerned, ‘we and the French have been steadily gaining a moral[e] and material ascendancy over the enemy’. And as far as Britain was concerned, ‘it is still within our power to put more men and more guns into the field’. With these, and as long as Britain did not ‘fritter away our efforts in non-vital theatres’ and Russia could be supplied with heavy artillery, it was possible to hope that ‘the pressure upon the enemy on both fronts will not be less severe’ than heretofore. But

  we cannot hope for a conclusion in our favour unless and until we make full and appropriate use of all our resources. We have not yet taken the steps to this and we ought to take them at once.

  III

  Lloyd George characterised this missive as ‘one of the most serious documents on the war that he had read’.

  He proceeded to put his own gloss on it. He s
tated bluntly that Britain was not getting on with the war. The enemy had recovered the initiative, was in occupation of expanding territory, and had four million men in reserve. ‘At no point had the Allies achieved a definite, clear success.’ The Somme campaign had possessed three objectives: to relieve Verdun; to break the German line or capture some strategic objective; to pin German troops to the Western Front and so enable the Russians both to succeed themselves and to safeguard Romania. Only in the first respect had it fulfilled its purpose. On the second and third, it had clearly failed.

  So how was the war to be brought to an end? What was the plan? As concerned the policy of attrition, ‘the losses of the Allies were greater than those of the enemy’. Germany was more careful of its men and was prepared to abandon territory. The Allies, fighting for their own land, could not do this.

  Lloyd George then referred to a variety of difficulties facing the Allies. There was the current shipping problem and the ‘growing danger from submarines’. There was the food situation and the financial situation. There were threats to the solidarity of the Entente. And there were problems on the home front: the public expected victories, and would experience severe disappointment when it realised that no victory was likely to result from the Somme battle.

  Lloyd George insisted that, as far as the public was concerned, responsibility for the conduct of the war rested with the politicians, and above all with the War Committee. He proposed therefore that a meeting should be called between the responsible political leaders of Britain, France, and Italy ‘to take stock of the situation’. It would then confer with its Eastern ally to settle strategic differences between them (for example there was the view of General Alexieff that ‘only a victory over [the] Germans in the Balkans can have a decisive influence in the war’). Lloyd George proposed a small conference of ministers from Britain, France, and Italy, followed by a military conference in Russia.

  These remarks opened the way to a discussion of considerable note. Above all, the War Committee expressed ‘general agreement’ with the ‘general tenor’ of Lloyd George's remarks, although some members considered them ‘unduly pessimistic’. In particular:

  It was generally agreed that the offensive on the Somme, if continued next year, was not likely to lead to decisive results, and that the losses might make too heavy a drain on our resources having regard to the results to be anticipated.

  In a powerful comment on the disappointing outcome of the long and bloody endeavour on the Somme battlefield, the War Committee agreed ‘that we should examine whether a decision might not be reached in another theatre’. And the projected conference of representatives from Britain, France, and Italy was to consist just of political leaders, without military representatives.

  IV

  Lloyd George, as Hankey noted in his diary, was delighted with the outcome of the meeting, and not least with its judgement upon the Somme campaign. His response is noteworthy, particularly as the verdict here passed on the Somme campaign by the political masters who had authorised and watched over it was devastating.

  In the opinion of the Secretary of State for War, ‘We were not getting on with the war’, ‘the enemy had recovered the initiative’, ‘at no point had the Allies achieved a definite, clear success’, and the ‘policy of attrition’ had inflicted greater losses on the Allies than on their enemies.

  It may be deemed a grimly realistic assessment. In all probability, it was the crucial factor (admittedly in company with many other alarming events) that had reduced the Asquith government to such ill-repute that a change of regime was imminent. It appeared to lead irresistibly to the conclusion that the massive Western Front offensive of 1916 would also be the last. For it seemed irresistibly to follow that the War Minister – shortly to become Prime Minister – would not, after casting so negative a judgement on the Somme endeavour, authorise another such undertaking.

  Lloyd George had been coming steadily to this conclusion. Back in September, while visiting the Western Front, he had made dismissive remarks concerning Haig's conduct of the battle. And one month after taking over the Prime Ministership, he would tell his private secretary:

  Haig does not care how many men he loses. He just squanders the lives of these boys. I mean to save some of them in the future.... I am their trustee.2

  That meant, apparently, that there would not be another Battle of the Somme.

  But it is necessary to notice a countervailing matter. We have observed that, in August, the back-bencher Winston Churchill had led the way in producing statements convincingly condemnatory of the Somme strategy. The marked deficiency of Churchill's paper had lain in its failure to suggest any alternative, and preferable, way of proceeding. The same was glaringly the case with Lloyd George's strictures in November. After all, there was no reason to believe that his proposed assemblage of political leaders from Britain, France, and Italy would come up with a radically different way of conducting the war. The Balkans had provided no consolation in 1916. The Italians had needed rescue from many misfortunes. The Russians were a spent force. And Romania was an already-past calamity. So where, if not on the Western Front, would the British launch an attack?

  Yet there was no question that Lloyd George, in supreme command, might place Britain on the defensive and allow its allies to bear unaided the burden of undertaking offensive operations. Back in June, Lloyd George had been driven to advocate an attack on the Somme by the near-collapse of France, Britain's only dependable ally. If France was to be kept fighting, Britain must remain a conspicuous participant in an offensive strategy somewhere.

  Further, the huge groundswell of opinion in Britain favourable to Lloyd George's assuming leadership in the war had not been generated by a desire to run down Britain's involvement in the fighting. It sprang from the conviction that he alone could end ‘wait and see’ and devise the combative means to carry the war to victory. That is, he was expected to engage in a yet more ruthless mobilisation and employment of Britain's resources. This expectation appeared soundly based. As he had made clear in mid-1916, when President Wilson had appeared ready to propose a negotiated peace, Lloyd George would have no truck with half-measures or limited commitments. This, he insisted, would be ‘a fight to a finish, to a knock out’. The war under his direction would result in triumph, but apparently without the loss of British lives entailed in the methods of Sir Douglas Haig.

  This failure to propose any concrete alternative to the Somme strategy would in the following year produce grim consequences. In 1947, Britain (along with France) would – notwithstanding the accession of a British Prime Minister opposed both to a Western Front strategy and to the military commander who conducted it – prosecute yet further large and unproductive offensives on the Western Front. So despite the negative judgement on Britain's 1916 strategy delivered, on Lloyd George's incentive, by the War Committee during the last days of the Somme campaign, that tragic endeavour would not prove the nadir of British strategy in the First World War.

  Notes

  1 The Context

  1. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs VI (London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1933), p. 373.

  2 ‘Absolutely Astonishing’

  1. In June 1915 the War Council had become the Dardanelles Committee. In December of that year it became the War Committee.

  2. All quotations in this chapter are taken from the minutes of the War Committee of the British cabinet for 18 May 1916. They are to be found in the series CAB 42 in the Public Record Office.

  3 Decision-making, January–February

  1. War Committee Minutes 28/12/15, CAB 42/6/14, Microfilm copy in the Australian Defence Force Academy Library.

  2. War Committee Minutes 23/11/15, CAB 42/5/20.

  3. Dardanelles Committee Minutes 30/10/15, CAB 42/4/20 and War Committee Minutes 15/11/15, CAB 42/5/12.

  4. See the minutes and conclusions in CAB 42/6/14.

  5. See ‘Note By Mr Balfour on the Minutes of the War Committee, December 28, 1915’, dated 29/12/15
in CAB 42/7/5 and another memorandum by Balfour dated 27/12/15 also in CAB 42/7/5.

  6. Ibid.

  7. See ‘Note by the Secretary of State for War’ 8/1/16 in CAB 42/7/5.

  8. For the comments by Asquith, Austen Chamberlain, McKenna, and Lloyd George detailed below see War Committee Minutes 13/1/16, CAB 42/7/5.

  9. For the discussion that follows see the War Committee Minutes for 22/2/16 in CAB 42/9/3.

  4 Decision-making, March–June

  1. War Committee Minutes 10/3/16, CAB 42/10/9.

  2. War Committee Minutes 21/3/16, CAB 42/11/6.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. War Committee Minutes 23/3/16, CAB 42/11/9.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Ibid.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. See Chapter 5.

  12. War Committee Minutes 7/4/16, CAB 42/12/5.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid.

  16. See the discussion of this matter in the War Committee Minutes 28/4/16, CAB 42/12/12.

  17. War Committee Minutes 10/5/16, CAB 42/13/6.

  18. War Committee Minutes 17/5/16, CAB 42/14/1.

  19. War Committee Minutes 18/5/16, CAB 42/14/2.

  20. Ibid.

  21. War Committee Minutes 26/5/16, CAB 42/14/11.

  22. Ibid.

  23. Ibid.

  24. War Committee Minutes 6/6/16, CAB 42/15/4.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid.

  29. War Committee Minutes 7/6/16, CAB 42/15/6.

  30. War Committee Minutes 21/6/16, CAB 42/15/10.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Ibid.

  33. Ibid.

  34. War Committee Minutes 22/6/16, CAB 42/15/11.

  35. War Committee Minutes 30/6/16 CAB 42/15/15.