War in the Age of Technology: Myriad Faces of Modern Armed Conflict

8. The Elusive Victory: The BEF and the Operational Level of War, September 1918

chapter 8 ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ ✦ The Elusive Victory The BEF and the Operational Level of War, September 1918 Niall J. A. Barr The Great War on the Western Front was different in its conduct and character from any conflict that preceded it. Its officers struggled to make sense of a seemingly horrible conflict, which did not correspond to their training or to their preconceptions about the nature of war. Neither the Napoleonic conception of decisive battle, as greatly desired by French commanders, nor Count von Schleiffen’s strategy of an enormous enveloping maneuver bore fruit in the maelstrom of 1914. With the onset of trench deadlock , the battles fought on the Western Front became bloody attritional contests in which the manpower and resources of entire nations were put to the test. Michael Howard has noted that in the Great War, battle “acquired a frightful, Moloch-like existence of its own unrelated to strategic or political objectives.”1 Developments in technology had outstripped levels of tactical innovation. Yet the armies of the West slowly adjusted to the challenges of the Great War and in so doing began to lay the strategic and tactical foundations of modern war. Although the Great War gave birth to the main technological elements of modern maneuver warfare, such as sophisticated artillery techniques, section-level infantry tactics, and the development of tanks and air forces, it is difficult to find 211 clear-cut examples in the conduct of Great War that point toward the ideas of modern maneuver warfare. This can make analysis of the Great War beyond the level of “siege warfare” difficult and makes it no easier to place the war within the continuum of strategy , operations, and tactics that leads from Helmuth von Moltke to today’s idea of AirLand Battle. This chapter examines the planning, preparation, and execution of just one of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) attacks on the German army on the Western Front in the autumn of 1918. The British First Army’s assault on the Drocourt-Queant Switch Line on 2 September 1918 was only one of the many engagements fought by the BEF during the final Allied offensives, but this battle in particular highlights the difficulties in mounting a successful offensive operation during 1918 and reveals a great deal about the extent to which the BEF—and particularly its commander Field Marshal Douglas Haig—understood the new problems of modern warfare and the means that could be used to overcome those difficulties. In his survey of the Great War, the eminent military historian John Keegan describes attempts to study the learning process of the BEF from 1914 to 1918 as “a pointless waste.”2 At the same time, the battles fought by the BEF in the autumn of 1918 have remained relatively unexplored next to the traumas of 1916 and 1917. In British popular culture, 1918 remains the forgotten year of the Great War, and to a large extent the same is true in military historiography . Much remains to be researched and written concerning operations in 1918. In fact, it is in the last dramatic phases of the war—particularly the period known to the B.E.F as the “Hundred Days” from 8 August to 11 November 1918—that we can learn much about the problems of battle in the Great War and come to a deeper understanding not only of this first great technical-industrial conflict but also of its place in military history and the development of military theory and doctrine. General Sir Frederick Maurice wrote about the British successes during the “Hundred Days” soon after the war: niall j. a. barr 212 I am convinced that the achievement of the National Army of Great Britain transcends even that of her old Regular Army. . . . Starting on August 8, it fought uninterruptedly and victoriously for three months, driving the enemy back 120 miles, taking more than twice as many prisoners and more than three times as many guns as it had lost, and completely routing the German armies by which it was opposed . This is . . . an achievement to which no words can do justice.3 British soldiers in November 1918 understood that they had just won a great victory, but they did not tend to analyze this success in any great detail or profound way. While the soldiers took it for granted that they had won, the British people began to question the cost...