On the other hand the generals could not have been tactically inept and blind to the minimal gains that some attacks were having because as the war progressed new tactics and innovative ways of attacking were brought to the front line and used with great effect. Ideas like the rolling barrage where men would creep behind shells that were continually firing while inching forward, another idea was night attacks where men would attack enemy positions during the night to minimise allied casualties. There was certainly a learning curve involved with this war and mistakes were made but then were not repeated again, like reflective tags given to allied soldiers on the Somme in 1916, they were thought to be a mistake after it gave the Germans something to shoot at when the allies were retreating so the generals decided not to use them again. Source D supports this view, it was written by John Terraine in “To win a war: 1918 the year of victories”. It does not contain many facts about the war in 1918 but he does argue his point, his neutral approach towards the argument may have been obscured because his book is “To win a war: 1918 the year of victories” he may have exaggerated some arguments to make his book more exciting to sell more copies.
During the war many people claimed that the Allies were slow and unoriginal when it came to new technologies, and when the Generals financed a design that worked, they used it too soon so it was inefficient and ineffective. Many people in the army thought that the tank which, if used properly, would have been a devastating weapon, was used too early and therefore did not live up to its full potential. They were first used on the 15th September 1916 in the Battle of the Somme when 49 tanks were to take part in the offensive but at the end of the day only 10 tanks were still serviceable and seventeen tanks had failed to start at all, many officers thought that if the army had spent longer on producing this weapon then it would have had greater success. It was not only new technologies that gave the British Generals headaches; they also failed to see the importance of weapons that were available to them from the onset of the war. At the beginning of the war, even after he had seen how devastating against infantry they could be, General Haig said that each division in the British army should only be equipped with two machine guns, but David Lloyd George, the prime minister at the time, said that they army should take whatever number Haig said and square it, multiply it by two and square it again. This left each division with sixty-four machine guns, but even by the end of the war there was only forty two to a division.
During the Great War many areas of technology improved a great deal. Manned flight, flamethrowers, gas warfare and tank warfare were at the forefront of British technological advances. Before the war aircraft were used for reconnaissance and the RFC, or the Royal Flying Corps, consisted of 4 battle squadrons, one of which was a balloon squadron, which had been in operation since 1881. In the early days of the war the RFC was still being used for reconnaissance and there was no hostility between enemy aircrew, until in early 1915 when a French airmen pulled his revolver out and took a pot shot at a German aircraft but left him uninjured. Since then both armies took an active interest in improving the quality and fire power of their aircraft, in 1915 a French engineer managed to combine the propeller and machine guns mechanisms on an aircraft to make the gun fire in between each propeller. In the air the allies were certainly the underdog until the British army began to design new planes such as the , , , and and then the death tolls started to decline among British pilots. At the end of the war the British had near total air superiority over the Germans and were able to support ground attacks with up to 1,500 aeroplanes at once, and the newly formed Royal Air Force consisted of 4,000 combat aircraft and had 115,000 men employed in its service. The British also introduced the idea of the tank, so called because the British said that they were working on a new type of water ‘tank’. It was an idea made when the generals decided that they were losing too many men for the amount of ground being made, so they designed a massive moving machine that could crush barbed wire and have machine guns mounted on board. Not only was this an effective way of gaining land, it also scared the defending Germans, so much so that they began to flee and only the innovative Germans thought to fight back using flamethrowers. This approach to building new weaponry is shown in source B, which is written by Gary Sheffield. It shows how the British Generals encouraged the development of many kinds of weapons in all dimensions of warfare. This source has no reason to be biased because Gary Sheffield is a professional historian and making any exaggerations would not benefit him in any way because he lectures at the King’s College, London.
The British Generals got more criticism for other things as well, including their lifestyle, their distance from the men and the naivety that they had as to what the conditions were like. The Generals stayed miles back from the front line in relative luxury compared to the soldiers on the front; they stayed in chateaux of their choice and were rarely disturbed by enemy fire or attacks. They were also disliked because of the way they acted towards the men; they would develop a plan of attack without thought to what they were attacking or the casualties that any one battle group would incur, on the first day of the Somme one British regiment suffered 92% casualty rate. Many men also disliked the way that the generals viewed war and they way that they thought the men almost enjoyed fighting. This view is shown in the poem ‘The General’, written by Seigfreid Sassoon, who served in World War One and was awarded for his bravery. It shows the discontent that the lower ranks of the army adopted for the generals in the lines ‘He’s a cheery old card,’ grunted Harry to Jack, As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack, But he did for them both by his plan of attack”. This shows how the Generals had little idea of what the soldiers went through and for this the men eventually grew to dislike them. The last line shows how the Generals were reckless with the lives of the soldiers and this further affected the moral of the army
The British Generals did, however, have reasons to shows that they were competent and qualified leaders. One of these reasons is the fact that the allies won the war and, even before the intervention of the American Expeditionary Force and its massive capabilities, the British and French armies had fought the German army to a standstill along the western front. The American army did bring fresh number of troops and brought moral but the British and French armies had held off, for three years, what was thought to be the most efficient and effective army of the time. An army that had been preparing for this war since the conception of the Schleiffen Plan in 1905. Not only this but the British army had suffered the least casualties out of the five main countries involved in the war. Britain suffered 3,100,000 casualties, France suffered 6,100,000 casualties, Russia suffered 9,100,000 casualties, Austro-Hungary suffered 7,000,000 casualties and Germany suffered 7,100,000 casualties. These statistics show that the British Generals must have been leading their troops in a manner that was at least equivalent to their adversaries because Britain was in the war from the onset, as were these countries and they committed a similar number of troops and yet Britain still suffered fewer casualties.
Looking at the evidence presented I have come to the conclusion that, under the circumstances, the British army had the best Generals available to them from the onset of the war. I have come to this conclusion because the British army, before the war, had never fought a large-scale war using such advanced weaponry and had never fought such a technologically advanced enemy before. The German army had been preparing for this war for nearly a decade before war was declared and when it was, the British Generals had to use a relatively inexperienced army made up of men from other professions and they had only 100,000 professional soldiers and these men were nearly wiped out in the first battle of Ypres. The Generals themselves were inexperienced in this type of warfare as well, they had been used to battling armies in the colonies that didn’t use guns so cavalry regiments were still needed and artillery was less useful, but now it was the other way round and cavalry regiment had to be used in support and artillery played a much more important factor, many of the Generals were reluctant to use cavalry less as well because many of them were ex-cavalry officers so this may have affected their thinking as well. I think that Haig and the other Generals adapted as quickly as they could have considering what type of warfare they had been used to and what type of warfare they expected so the title ‘donkeys’ is an unfair interpretation of the conduct of British Generals in World War One.