1917: Tactics, Training and Technology (review)

This excellent collection of eleven essays by leading historians is based on papers presented at the Australian Chief of Army's Military History Conference in 2007. Although more than half of the essays focus upon the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and its Dominion contingents, the volume also contains admirable papers on the American, French and German experience. The grim nature of the war on the Western Front, for Allies and enemy alike, in 1917 – particularly at Passchendaele in October and November – is rightly underlined and discussed throughout, but the positive aspects of those twelve pivotal months are similarly emphasised. As the editors remark in their Preface, the opposing armies on the Western Front continued, in 1917, to evaluate operational lessons in a search for better ways to wage the war and win it. Indeed, the 'technological, doctrinal and tactical advances made by 1917 and reinforced in many respects by the fighting that year laid the basis for the great Allied victory of the following year' (p. iv).

The above theme is picked up by Gary Sheffield in his masterly overview of the performance of the BEF and its Commander-in-Chief, Sir Douglas Haig, in 1917. Sheffield's judicious essay examines the case against Haig for his conduct of the Third Battle of Ypres, especially his decision to continue the offensive after 4 October, as well as considering the validity of Haig's post-war claims regarding the attritional effects of Passchendaele on the German Army. Sheffield argues that, whatever mistakes Haig committed in 1917, and however severely the BEF's morale was tested, the transformation of Britain's war economy, and concurrent improvements in organisation, training, tactics and logistics, enabled the BEF to develop fighting methods in 1917 that were triumphantly vindicated a year later. In equally objective papers, Robert Stephenson and Tim Cook respectively review the results of such developments from the perspective of the 1st Australian Division and the Canadian Corps. Both essays refreshingly avoid the nationalistic 'colonial supermen' strands that permeated much Common-wealth writing on the conflict twenty years ago. Glyn Harper's essay on the New Zealand Division ends on a more downbeat note, contrasting the 'masterpiece' of Messines in June with the 'massacre' of 12 October 1917, when more New Zealand losses were sustained than on any other day in that nation's history. The 'combat culture' and fighting qualities of the BEF's South African contingent, and the impact of 1917 upon it, are sensitively assessed by Bill Nasson, even if he curiously omits to mention that, in 1917, the South African Brigade served with the generally successful and innovative 9th (Scottish) Division. Robin Prior's study of the British High Command at Passchendaele is, as expected, deeply critical of Haig, for persisting with the campaign, and Lloyd George, for failing to stop it. The rather 'schoolmasterish' tone of Prior's essay is, however, somewhat at variance with the rest of the volume.

Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force, likewise comes in for considerable criticism. In a powerfully-argued case, Andrew Wiest accuses Pershing of stubborn refusal to learn from the experience of his allies and a misguided adherence to outdated doctrine and tactics, thereby condemning the AEF to an unnecessarily painful learning process in the Meuse-Argonne in 1918. Two other American scholars, Robert Doughty and Michael Neiberg, investigate the nature and extent of the French crisis of morale in 1917, separately high-lighting the key role played by Pétain in the recovery of the French Army, while Neiberg justifiably suggests that, of late, the French part in the victory of 1918 has been inadequately recognised by many historians. Robert Foley's outstanding paper on the German Army not only includes one of the clearest explanations yet of the major changes in German defensive doctrine and tactics in 1917 but also discusses the growing competition...