Greenhalgh E. Victory through Coalition Britain and France during the First World War

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

Being ‘past mistress in the art of putting together coalitions in which

others fight for her’, Britain would much prefer that France pay the

human price.

Vallie`res was prepared to give Haig himself the benefit

of the doubt and accept his promise that he would do what was necessary,

but with Haig still ‘quibbling [tergiverse]’ after the conference of 14

February which settled the plans for the Somme campaign he wrote in

his diary on 21 February: ‘Thus is cynically revealed British policy, ready

to allow its Allies to be wiped out, in the hope of arriving at the negotiating

table with its army intact in order to impose its wishes. Perfidious Albion –

today as in the past, there’s no better way to put it!’

It seems barely credible that, having appointed such a man to such

a delicate task, Joffre should have maintained him in place. It is difficult

to know how much credence he placed in the reports he received

(see below) and so the question arises: did Joffre share his chief liaison

officer’s suspicions (suspicions which may have already taken root in

Joffre’s mind through working with Lord Kitchener during 1915); or,

not sharing them, did he consider the British contribution so small as to

make Vallie`res’ personal opinions irrelevant? Whatever the answer, the

head of the MMF met none of the criteria for successful liaison work.

Mutual understanding and unity of purpose were unlikely to be achieved

by the holder of such opinions. Since Haig’s diary gives no hint of the

feelings that Vallie`res expressed so forcefully in his own diary, one can

only conclude that candour and frankness were entirely missing as well.

Liaison worked better at the lower levels of command. Colonel Eric

Dillon was appointed to liaise with Foch’s Northern Army Group and

began his work on 17 May 1916. His diary record of his experiences

reveals a growing appreciation of Foch and his methods. At army head-

quarters, Capitaine Serot worked with Rawlinson’s Fourth Army and

Capitaine Renondeau with Gough’s Reserve, later Fifth, Army. Edward

Spears was liaison officer with General Fayolle and the French Sixth

Army. There was also an exchange of artillery officers: Commandant

He´ring liaised first with GHQ and then moved to Fourth Army in

April; and Maunsel was attached to Fayolle’s headquarters.

At army and army group level, liaison work was essentially practical; it

involved travelling back and forth between the competent authorities and

settling disputes. For the Somme Battle there was a direct telephone link

Diary entry, cited in Vallie`res, Au soleil, 142.

Diary entries for 24[?] January and 21 February 1916, cited in ibid., 142, 145.

Liaison, 1914–1916 93

between Fourth and Sixth armies.

At corps level, the arrangements for

liaison between the French and British units alongside each other at the start

ofthecampaign(XXandXIIICorpsrespectively) were as follows: there was

a direct wire between the two headquarters; a captain from XIII Corps

general staff was attached to XX Corps HQ, while a French lieutenant

carried out the same function with XIII Corps; there was also direct liaison

at divisional (30 Division and the French 39 Division) and brigade level. The

latter, between 89 Brigade and the French brigade on the left of 39 DI,

operated through the French divisional HQ. These arrangements were

checked by Dillon on 24 June and reported to Haig as ‘highly satisfactory’.

III

These careful arrangements reflect a recognition on the British side at

least that communication might be improved. At the end of 1915 the

CIGS had asked Clive ‘to arrange for closer ‘‘liaison’’ between Chantilly

and London’ since the two staffs were engaged on preparing independent

plans for similar operations.

The military attache´ in Paris, Colonel

Leroy Lewis, wrote to Lord Esher that a bureau was being set up in

Paris for closer Franco-British liaison, and that he, Lewis, wanted no

English meddling with the ‘delicate work’. Clive recognised also that

there was ‘lots of work to be done; for hitherto there has been no

‘‘touch’’ between the W. O. & their[?] Hdqrs’.

On the French side, however, despite Joffre’s administrative changes in

the autumn of the previous year, there is little sign of any questioning of the

role and methods of liaison officers within the MMF for the 1916 cam-

paign, although Foch’s notebooks show that he at least was thinking about

what a coalition war should be. ‘The Coalition has no system of war, that is

to say, a collection of directions [coordonne´es] to prepare and then carry out

a combined war’, he wrote in May 1916.

This lack of questioning of the

MMF’s role probably reflected the sense of military superiority which was

such a feature of Franco-British relations, added to the fact that the MMF

had been in existence since the start of the war and probably felt no need to

reconsider its role, unlike the thinking going on amongst the British.

Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of

Sir Henry Rawlinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 182.

XIII Corps War Diary, June 1916, p. 20, WO 95/895; Dillon diary, 24 June 1916; Haig

diary, 26 June 1916, WO 256/10.

Haig diary, 26 December 1915, WO 256/6.

‘Private and Personal’ letter, Leroy Lewis to Lord Esher, 22 January 1916; letter, Clive to

Esher, 9 January 1916: both in ESHR 5/51.

See the entry for 3 May 1916, Fonds Foch, carton 10, 1K 129, AG.

94 Victory through Coalition

Clive put this thinking into practice by spending some time talking with

the newly appointed Dillon, sorting out roles and methods. Importantly,

Dillon was based at Foch’s HQ and not with GHQ as Wilson had been.

Thus his role was firmly practical rather than strategic. Dillon was at a loss

to know what to do at first. He confided to his diary less than a week after

starting his job in May 1916 that ‘one feels one is doing nothing’. By the

end of the month he had decided that his job was to ‘talk a lot and say

nothing’. At the beginning of June he had a long talk with Clive about his

task; he also set up liaison procedures at Rawlinson’s Fourth Army HQ,

and came to an arrangement with the Director of Military Operations at

Haig’s HQ, General Davidson.

One of Dillon’s greatest problems was not with the French, but with

the experienced British liaison officer with the neighbouring Sixth Army,

Edward Spears. Spears was somewhat of an outsider amongst the mem-

bers of the hermetic club that was the professional British Army.

Educated in France and speaking the language fluently, he gave the

impression to his fellow officers that he had ‘a swollen head’ and ‘talked

awful nonsense’.

Matters came to a head with ‘an awful row’ in June,

when Dillon insisted that Spears’ reports should be copied to him as well

as being sent to GHQ, and that GHQ would take no action on anything

Spears wrote without verification from Dillon. Even so, Dillon thought

that Spears was still talking ‘a lot of damned nonsense’ at the end of

June.

For his part, Spears bitterly resented being, in effect, put under-

neath Dillon, not surprisingly since he had been acting highly successfully

as a liaison officer with three successive French armies since the outbreak

of war.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Vallie`res should have felt so

alienated from his alliance partners when British liaison officers could get

on with each other so badly.

Once the battle began on 1 July, and the liaison officers at lower levels

came into their own, Dillon again felt that he lacked a definite role. After

spending 2 July at Haig’s and Rawlinson’s headquarters he wrote that his

day had contained ‘nothing very much from my point of view’. He even

found it difficult to extract ‘information on any subject whatever’ from

the head of the GAN’s operations section.

Moreover, Vallie`res stopped

his fulminations against British motives and confined himself during July

to passing on information about British intentions, achievements or

Diary entries, 21 and 31 May, 5, 7 and 9 June 1916, Dillon diary.

Diary entries, 26 May and 2 June 1916, ibid.

Diary entries, 18, 19 and 27 June 1916, ibid. See also Max Egremont, Under Two Flags:

The Life of Major-General Sir Edward Spears (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997), 84.

Spears diary, 15 June 1916, Spears papers, acc. 545, box 59, CCC.

Dillon diary, 10 July 1916.

Liaison, 1914–1916 95

failures, supply of munitions and effectives, and joint decisions taken at

meetings between the French and British commanders. His only inter-

vention in practical matters of liaison procedures had come just before the

battle began, when he warned the British chief of staff not to use inter-

preters as liaison officers as had happened in 1915. The results, he

claimed, were indiscretions and incorrect interpretations.

It became obvious during the course of the first month of the cam-

paign that Joffre’s revised methods of 1915 were insufficient for the

much greater needs of the joint offensive. No longer could an army

liaison officer such as Spears manage to drive about the countryside

seeing people and delivering messages. The roads were too congested

and the distances too great, and so divisional liaison officers were

appointed.

These divisional liaison officers were made permanent in

November, just as the corps liaison officers were permanent, because

Joffre appreciated that the role was too important for frequent changes.

He wrote to Haig, with a statement of the obvious, that the ‘necessity

for direct liaison between the neighbouring French and British

Divisions had made itself felt right from the start of the Somme

Battle’. Haig concurred with the decision to make such officers

permanent.

It will be remembered that Joffre had abolished the divisional liaison

officers the previous year so as to claw back the officers thus engaged for

other duties, and also so as to reduce the opportunities for ‘gossiping’.

The decision thus directly reversed the earlier one; but the person of

Vallie`res may have been a factor in this. Presumably his attitude towards

the British would ensure tighter control than Huguet had exercised over

divisional liaison officers.

There was a significant change in procedures in August when the

difficulty of dealing between the two elements on the British side – namely

the Fourth Army commander and GHQ – and the three French – namely

GQG, Foch’s GAN and Sixth Army – was solved by in effect eliminating

Joffre and GQG. To Dillon’s great satisfaction, it was arranged that

Rawlinson would deal with Fayolle, and that Haig would deal with

Foch.

The change was welcomed by Esher who felt the previous system

Vallie`res to Chef d’EM Arme´es Britanniques, 25 June 1916, EM MMF/Brit,

Correspondance, [d]1, 17N 332.

Brigadier-General E. L. Spears, Prelude to Victory (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), 49.

Joffre to Haig, 8 November 1916; Haig to Joffre, 10 November 1916: both in EM MMF/

Brit, Correspondance, 17N 332.

Dillon diary, 15 August 1916. Haig’s diary entry for 16 August 1916 (WO 256/12)

implies that he and Foch agreed to ignore a letter from Joffre ‘containing certain

‘‘directions’’ ’.

96 Victory through Coalition

reflected a ‘want of sound principles of liaison’.

Furthermore, continu-

ity was maintained as new units moved into line. Lord Cavan, for exam-

ple, insisted on keeping the French XX Corps liaison officer when his

corps took over from Congreve’s XIII Corps as the unit next in line to the

French, at the extreme right of the British line, even after XX Corps itself

was relieved.

Having achieved greater efficiency in liaison procedures in August,

Dillon again felt that he had little to do as the preparations for the next

push were being made in early September. Indeed, consultation over

planning between the French and British went on over the heads of

both Dillon and Vallie`res.

Finally, in November, the battle petered

out as the weather worsened.

It is difficult to judge how much Joffre was influenced during the planning

and conduct of the Somme campaign by the reports he was receiving from

the head of his mission to the British Army, Vallie`res, who sent frequent

and lengthy reports to his commander-in-chief. What overall impression

of the motives and actions of the British – that is, those who came to play

the major role in the Battle of the Somme – would Joffre have gathered

from regular reading of Vallie`res’ reports?

During January and February the manpower question predominated.

Britain, especially in the person of Robertson, was delaying the commit-

ment of men to France in order to reduce casualties. By the time the full

extent of the German onslaught at Verdun was realised, in March, the

emphasis had shifted somewhat. Now there were signs that Haig was

prepared to think through the forthcoming battle and to commit troops,

despite a degree of complacency over French resistance at Verdun,

whereas the British government was still dragging its feet.

Thus, during the first quarter of 1916 Vallie`res’ reports reflected

French command’s problems over getting the British to supply the re-

placements for the French losses of 1914 and 1915, albeit with a degree of

movement towards an appreciation of Haig’s commitment, derived from

the experience of three months of working closely with GHQ staff. There

was a marked change in April, as the frequency of reporting dropped

Esher diary, 16 August 1916, ESHR 2/16.

Cavan to Commander XX Corps, n.d., EM MMF/Brit, Correspondance, [d]2, 17N 332.

Dillon diary, 3–6, 10, 28 September 1916.

Many of the reports are reproduced in AFGG. The originals are in operational records

(16N 2033), or mission records (17N 348).

Liaison, 1914–1916 97

greatly. Vallie`res submitted only two reports in April, the month when

Haig received permission from London to act as he saw fit in the coming

campaign.

Two possible reasons for this change suggest themselves. The Easter

Rising may have caused great heart-searching; or complaints about the

tenor of his reports may have surfaced. There is no evidence to support

either possibility. Haig refers to Vallie`res several times in his diary entries

during this month, and so it may be that he was simply too busy carrying

papers back and forth to compose vitriolic letters to GQG.

The reports of May and June again reflect French high command’s

preoccupation with hanging on at Verdun long enough to enable the

necessary preparations to be completed on the Somme, that is to say,

they concerned the date of the start of the battle. Once the battle had

begun, Vallie`res restricted himself to the necessary communication of

information and reporting on events, and there are few complaints about

policy. Indeed, there was even some praise for the British effort and a degree

of understanding that success had been limited by inadequate munitions.

As the battle slowed and became a series of local operations, Vallie`res

reverted during August to complaints that the British were constantly

postponing those operations, and that London was concerned about the

high casualty rate. In fairness, he also complained about Sixth Army

delays as well. The complaints continued the following month, when a

new element came to the fore: the British were showing signs of wishing to

be independent.

This element recurred constantly throughout October and November.

It was from October, Vallie`res later told the new CinC, Nivelle, that Haig

had ‘constantly avoided (in the most courteous and diplomatic manner

possible) any important discussion concerning the operation of his

Armies’.

This desire for independence manifested itself, in Vallie`res’

view, in the way the British wound down their operations, culminating in

the failure to cooperate in the French action planned for 4 November.

The tone of his reports of this incident is scathing.

By December the concerns of the early months of 1916 had resurfaced.

Not only were the British claiming an independent role, they were also

expecting to constitute the strongest army in 1917. Significantly, by the

end of December Vallie`res was claiming that he did not even know what

Haig was planning.

This analysis of the MMF reports as a whole brings out the French

concern that they were losing control over the Entente’s military

Vallie`res to Nivelle, 5 March 1917, cited in translation in Spears, Prelude, 562.

98 Victory through Coalition

contribution to the war effort. The predominance of the French Army

had been acknowledged up to the beginning of 1916, but Haig’s new

armies and the losses at Verdun combined to take away that predomi-

nance. Vallie`res’ often passionate denunciation of British motives simply

reflected French anguish as that realisation began to dawn. His attitude

paralleled that of Joffre and GQG as they attempted to impose their vision

of how the war should be conducted, when they no longer had the means to

impose it.

Dillon, on the other hand, recording his impressions of the British

withdrawal from the 4 November operation, rather took Foch’s side

and thought Haig wrong to back out. But he made an effort to get hold

of Foch and explain the British case, although he only managed to get

hold of Weygand ‘and stated a case which certainly did a little good’. By

the end of November Dillon could record that he liked Foch ‘more and

more’.

Clearly the ‘binding together’ of British and French actions was

carried out more successfully by the former than by the latter. Certainly

Haig wanted Dillon to stay on in his post,

but this was overtaken by the

removal of Foch and then Joffre at the end of 1916.

How much faith did Joffre himself place in the reports he was receiving?

On 23 October his war diary recorded at some length one of Vallie`res’

reports on the ‘current mentality’ of the British Army, but the account

ended with a question as to whether Vallie`res was not seeing things ‘in too

sombre a light’. The CinC would make up his own mind at a lunch with

Haig – when the verdict was in complete opposition to the liaison officer’s

conclusions. Joffre brought back to GQG ‘an excellent impression’ of

Haig’s determination to continue the battle all winter, in contradistinc-

tion to Vallie`res’ opinion that he would do as little as possible.

Conclusion

It is paradoxical that the British managed to appoint suitable men to

liaison positions (Clive, Dillon and Spears were particularly successful),

whereas the French, whose needs were much greater, especially after

Verdun began to take such a heavy toll in casualties, were either unable

or unwilling to find a successful head of mission. During the only joint

battle of the war it was the British who were trying to make liaison work,

whereas the French mission’s head saw his role as spurring on rather than

binding his allies.

Dillon diary, entries for 4, 5, 30 November 1916.

Ibid., 3 December 1916.

Guy Pedroncini (ed.), Journal de marche de Joffre (Vincennes: Service historique de

l’Arme´e de Terre, 1990), 145–6 (entry for 23 October 1916).

Liaison, 1914–1916 99

As in so many other aspects of the Franco-British relationship in 1916, the

Sommecampaignmarkedawatershed.British liaison methods evolved as

their armies grew in size and importance. Building on the experience of such

men as Clive and Spears who had retained their posts in the liaison service,

the newcomer, Dillon, was able to bring a definite, if restricted, influence to

bear on the methods employed. The French, on the other hand, had lost the

experience of Huguet and replaced it by the appointment of an unwilling and

antipathetic head of the MMF. Despite signs that Foch was thinking through

the implications of fighting a coalition war (‘I lost some of my admiration for

Napoleon when I learned what it is to fight a coalition war’), there were no

corresponding signs that the MMF was rethinking the role and methods

needed in the new conditions of a reduced French contribution to the battle.

Just as the British armies were taking over the principal military role in the

west, so they were also improving their liaison service so as to make the

alliance more effective. The French had signally failed to obtain the cooper-

ation they had wanted from the BEF in 1914 and 1915 – and their efforts via

the MMF in 1916 on the Somme were no more successful.

Undoubtedly liaison work was difficult. As Spears put it, a liaison

officer was ‘always being the devil’s advocate’ and ‘never being at one

with either side’. ‘Invariably, if he did his work conscientiously, the liaison

officer was explaining the point of view of one side to the other, and this

was seldom popular. The result was that, always a foreigner to the French,

he was apt to be viewed with suspicion by his own people.’

Huguet was

criticised – he got ‘a nasty wipe’ from Joffre for ‘being too pro-English’;

and Lord Esher noted, whilst praising his achievements, that he was ‘often

blamed by his own compatriots for being ‘‘too English’’ ’.

This was a risk

which liaison officers ran. Spears, for example, complained that he

seemed ‘to be forever taking the side of the foreigner’.

Not only was liaison work lonely, as Spears’ comments show, and open

to criticism for being too partisan, it was also looked down on, as being a

soft option, not fit for serving officers. Liaison officers safe at headquarters

aroused the envy and/or contempt of those in the front line.

Spears

himself made several attempts to be returned to his unit.

La Panouse

Spears, Prelude, 50, 49.

Wilson diary, 28 February 1915, cited in Callwell, Henry Wilson, I: 212.

Reginald Viscount Esher, The Tragedy of Lord Kitchener (London: John Murray, 1921), 56.

Spears, Liaison 1914, 340.

Jean-Charles Jauffret, ‘L’Officier franc¸ais en 1914–1918: la guerre ve´cue’, in Ge´rard

Canini (ed.), Me´moire de la Grande Guerre: te´moins et te´moignage (Proceedings of the

Verdun conference, 12–14 June 1986) (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy,

1989), 246.

Egremont, Under Two Flags, 42–3.

100 Victory through Coalition

likewise requested a return to active duty at the start of the war.

Vallie`res

was so furious at being appointed as head of the French mission that

he exclaimed in his diary: ‘I haven’t spent 35 years of my life working like a

Benedictine [that is, extremely hard] to have a shirker’s war in spheres

where the only confrontation comes between impassioned egoisms.’

Despite large numbers of, for example, former teachers of English hoping

to find safe work as interpreters in ports unloading British ships, the

MMF never seems to have found a head who was happy to fulfil the

role. Clive retained his post at Chantilly for virtually the whole war, but

there was no French Eric Dillon or Sir Sidney Clive. Even Clive left his

post for a field command near the end of the war, presumably because

future advancement depended on battlefield experience.

So there was little effective binding together of operations at the level of

high command. The personal antipathy of some commanders and the

imprecise nature of the command relationship worked against true and

close cooperation, especially in the war’s only joint battle on the Somme.

Although the liaison service had worked well at lower levels, the high

command decided that there would be no repeat of the 1916 experience.

The liaison service should have been able, after two years of war, to

alleviate and to obviate some of the difficulties of coalition warfare. As

Dillon remarked in the middle of the Somme Battle, the liaison officers

could do more.

Huguet to ?, 15 August 1914, Cabinet du Ministre, 5N 125, GB Te´le´grammes, [d]11.

Vallie`res, Au soleil, 148, citing diary entry, [?] February 1916.

Dillon diary, 14 August 1916.

Liaison, 1914–1916 101

5 The Allied response to the German submarine

Coal supplies and convoy – the 1917 shipping crisis

It was not only on land on the Western Front that Britain and France had

difficulties. The alliance was vulnerable at sea also. The risk came not

from defeat in a surface battle. Jutland proved that there was no need to

defeat the German High Seas Fleet; it could be contained in harbour. It

was the Allied and neutral merchant fleets that were at risk. If enemy

submarines were successful they might interdict supplies of coal and raw

materials that the French needed desperately for their enormous

munitions effort. The British needed food and grain imports from the

Empire and the Americas.

On the eve of war, four out of every five slices of bread consumed in the

British Isles were made with imported flour. Three of those five slices

were spread with imported butter.

Britain’s dependence on imported

foodstuffs was huge, and safeguarding the far-flung trade routes

represented an enormous challenge for the merchant marine and the

Royal Navy. That dependence was recognised well before August 1914,

and, immediately after the declaration of war, measures were taken to

protect supplies of wheat and sugar. Then industrial mobilisation created

the need for imported raw materials that competed with foodstuffs for

tonnage. If morale was to be maintained and workers fed adequately,

measures had to be taken to control profits, such as those made by

shipowners increasing freight charges. The Excess Profits Tax was one

such measure.

In France the problems were different, but just as acute. The French

were less dependent on imported food, because the country still had

a large agricultural sector that could be and was worked by women,

Gerd Hardach, First World War 1914–1918 (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 108–9; William

Beveridge, British Food Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), 359. See also

L. Margaret Barnett, British Food Policy During the First World War (Boston: George Allen &

Unwin, 1985); and Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, ‘Feeding the Cities’, in Jay Winter

and Jean-Louis Robert (eds.), Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pb. edn), 305–41.

102