The Legacy of the Great War: Ninety Years On

Two: Waging Total War: Learning Curve or Bleeding Curve?

61 Waging Total War Learning Curve or Bleeding Curve? Holger Afflerbach, University of Leeds Gary Sheffield, University of Birmingham Winter: Thank you all for coming to our second historians’ conversation about the First World War. When the text of these exchanges will be published in 2009, it will form the only book in our field in which conversation between historians replaces the individual voice. And in my thirty-eight years of teaching, I’ve come to learn that our profession is a collective; it’s less a sum of individuals and more a series of conversations that we have; conversations with colleagues and with students, conversations which are ongoing and filled with both collegiality and difference. Today we deal with military history, the history of strategy, tactics, operational history. We are in the midst of a long period of important research in this field. Over the last twenty years, there has emerged what some have called “the new military history.” It is my privilege to introduce you to two of the people who have been pioneers in this field, Holger Afflerbach of the University of Leeds and Gary Sheffield of the University of Birmingham. two 62 Holger Afflerbach and Gary Sheffield To structure this conversation, I suggest we divide the time we have into five different interrogations. The first focuses on civil-military relations . The question I’d like to pose is this: is it true that in all countries in the First World War, civilians lost control of how war is waged to the military? Is it the case that politicians could not master the generals , the admirals, in the waging of war? This first set of questions seems to me to be one that we can talk about in many different military contexts. The second one is a question about failure: can we define what constituted failure and by inference what constituted victory on the battlefield of the Great War? And I would like to put to the speakers the proposition that all major offenses in the First World War, except the last one, were failures, in that they did not yield the initial aim or stated objective of the generals who launched them.We’ll spend some time on this second facet of the military history of the war. The third question is this: was there a “learning curve” or was there merely what some scholars have called simply a “bleeding curve” in the First World War? Historians like Robin Prior have argued that there was no serious change in the way the British high command understood the conditions of battle from the beginning to the end of the war. The alternative position, which Gary Sheffield, I think, has established much more solidly than anyone else, is the idea of a learning curve. “Critics failed to acknowledge that the first of July 1916 was not the end of the British army’s experience of mass warfare, it was the beginning of it. The Somme marked the beginning of a steep learning curve in command and control as in many other areas.” The question as to whether commanders slowly but surely mastered a battlefield that no one had ever seen before is the third matter we should investigate. The fourth question I would like to put is this: does the term “victory ” lose virtually all meaning when casualties reach the one million mark, as in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme and Verdun? Similarly the German March 1918 offensive cost well over a million casualties. Do the staggering costs of these battles constitute more than just a change of degree of bloodshed in battle, but a change in kind, a change in the definition of what battle, indeed what war, is? The fifth matter for us to ponder today relates to how the war ended, to the strategic decision to end the war while Germany still occupied parts of France and Belgium and while the German army was still intact. Waging Total War 63 Why didn’t the Allies invade Germany and reach a total victory, requiring unconditional surrender, as happened in 1945? None of these questions is easy, but all are essential to an understanding of the military history of the Great War. To open the conversation , I would like to start with Holger Afflerbach, whose biography of the second man to command the Imperial German army in the Great War, General Falkenhayn, is...