Kitchener's War: British Strategy from 1914 to 1916 (review)

Kitchener's War is the fourth major work by George H. Cassar on the higher direction of Britain's war effort from 1914 to 1916 and his second in-depth study of Field-Marshal Lord Kitchener's term of office as Secretary of State for War. Unlike Cassar's earlier Kitchener: Architect of Victory (1977), this latest book does not deal in detail with Kitchener's role in the raising of Britain's New Armies or in the concomitant expansion of Britain's munitions industry, concentrating instead on the manner in which he responded to the unfolding challenges of the campaigns on the Western and Eastern Fronts and in the Cameroons, the Dardanelles, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Salonika, and East Africa. Although Kitchener's War contains little that is startlingly new—much of the same ground having also been covered, since 1977, by historians such as David French, David R. Woodward, Keith Neilson, Hew Strachan, and William Philpott—Cassar has nevertheless produced an extremely valuable reexamination of British strategy in the 1914–16 period, combining a robust, and generally convincing, defence of Kitchener's strategic policies and decisions with a thorough and judicious synthesis of existing scholarship in this particular field.

The author's claim that, without Kitchener, "the Entente would have lost the war" (p. 236) may be exaggerated but Cassar presents a persuasive case that, initially at least, Kitchener grasped the realities of the war, and of its global ramifications, better than most and strove mightily to shape a coherent strategy and consistent war aims designed to secure Britain's interests in the eventual peace settlement. While his primary concern was the defeat of the main German forces in France and Flanders, Kitchener regarded the Western and Eastern Fronts as virtually indivisible, devoting much of his attention to helping an often uncooperative and ungrateful Russia to procure the armaments required to sustain its armies in the struggle against the Central Powers. In the Middle East he sought to encourage an Arab revolt against Turkish rule with the object of establishing an Arab caliphate which would be sympathetic to Britain and which, in the postwar era, would safeguard the land route from Egypt to India against the ambitions of rival powers. However, as Cassar skilfully conveys, the multitude of issues facing Kitchener daily, and the crushing weight of responsibility he bore, progressively wore him down, diminishing his standing in the Cabinet and rendering him increasingly vulnerable to the interference of amateur strategists such as Churchill and Lloyd George—whose opportunistic schemes sucked the British Army into costly or unrewarding operations on Gallipoli and in Salonika.

To his credit, Cassar readily acknowledges Kitchener's faults and describes in some depth how the latter exacerbated his own problems by his secretiveness, distrust of politicians, reluctance to delegate, and neglect of the General Staff. The book is not without shortcomings. The author never adequately explains how Kitchener's recommended policy of "active defence" on the Western Front was supposed to lead ultimately to a decisive victory over the formidable German armies there, nor why the French should be expected to pursue such a course, considering the presence of the Germans on their soil and the immense scale of France's "blood sacrifice" in 1914–16. Similarly, Douglas Haig undeservedly remains a somewhat shadowy figure in this book, given his growing impact on strategy as British Commander-in-Chief in France from December 1915 onwards. Moreover, some of the maps are far too small and basic for a book dealing with global strategy. Even so, Cassar—using a wide range of archival and published sources—has written an authoritative, scholarly and thought-provoking study, providing professional historians and general readers alike with a new and timely counterbalance to the myths—propagated by Lloyd George and others—which have long exerted a malign influence on the historiography of the Great War.