Winning and Losing on the Western Front: The British Third Army and the Defeat of Germany by Jonathan Boff (review)

The end of World War I on the Western Front has never received the scholarly attention it deserves. Perhaps the problem was its lack of drama. Featuring a weakened and demoralized German army on its last legs, and a much larger and better supplied multinational force bearing down on it, the campaign‘s outcome might appear to have been preordained. In the end, the Allies beat the Germans not with some brilliant stratagem or elegant operational maneuver, but rather with good, old-fashioned attrition—and, to be frank, attrition has never been an attractive choice for military historians in search of an engaging topic. Not even the bestowing of the Napoleonic sobriquet “the Hundred Days” on the last three months of fighting in 1918—from the Allied breakthrough at Amiens on August 8 to the Armistice on November 11—has served to generate much interest. The fighting in those months was slow, grinding, and extremely bloody, and it looked anything but Napoleonic.

Jonathan Boff finds that assessment unwarranted, and has set out to prove just that point in his monograph. By and large he succeeds. The notion that the Allies merely ground the Germans down is only a part of the picture, he argues. They did enjoy a numerical advantage in terms of both men and materiel, he admits, especially with respect to new weapons like tanks and aircraft. But numbers were no more a guarantee of victory in 1918 than in any other era. The British army learned its lesson about thinking “too big” after the fiascos it had suffered on the Somme in 1916 and at Passchendaele in 1917. Attacks with limited objectives—carefully planned and practiced, lavishly supplied with intricately coordinated air, armor, and artillery support—became the order of the day, rather than grandiose attempts at breakthrough that invariably failed to materialize and only led instead to massive casualties. It was a difficult learning curve, but by 1918 the British army had finally mastered the essence of modern warfare: the use of combined arms.

Besides a new coordination of firepower, softer factors also played a role. More and more British divisional commanders had come to realize that their control of the battle ended once they had sent their men forward into German fire. They were now more likely to allow their subordinate commanders some leeway in determining how best to fulfill the mission. It was the British analog of the famous German concept of Auftragstaktik (usually translated as “mission command”), in which the commander devised a general mission, but then left the means and methods of achieving it to the lower commanders and the men on the ground.

The results were impressive, as Boff demonstrates. After years of launching futile attacks against prepared German defenses, the British Army finally managed to move forward, lever the Germans out of one position after another, and drive them back into open ground. Along with their French and American allies, they were able to conduct a bataille général under the unified command of Marshal Ferdinand Foch: a carefully sequenced set of nonstop attacks all along the Western Front that gave the Imperial German Army no respite, no time to rest or recuperate, and no opportunity to incorporate replacements. The collapse of the German army in the field forced its commander General Erich Ludendorff to demand that the government negotiate an armistice. The war had suddenly and improbably ended, and Boff argues that the victory was due as much to the newly developed fighting qualities of the Allied armies as to low German numbers or morale.

Boff’s research is solid, relying on archives located in Britain, Germany, and the Commonwealth countries, but the study nevertheless suffers from several limitations. For one, the focus of the monograph is not the entire British field force in Europe, but...