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Bruce Gudmundsson’s writing on German tactical innovation reveals his belief that it was a result of “decentralisation, trust of junior officers, a tradition of officer self-education”, engendering “a capacity for self-reform”.[1] He believes that this allowed the German army to shorten the cycle of development of tactical ideas. In contrast, his description of the British officer implies inexperience, credulity and a lack of guile. The sense is that the tactically naïve schoolboy was a hapless individual in an inferior system of warfare, kept that way by a centralised and rigid structure that did not trust him.
This essay examines Gudmundsson’s assertion through analysis of a specific example, concentrating on the performance of the officers of one infantry battalion, the 1st South Staffordshire Regiment, up to the end of their involvement on the Somme in July 1916. This early period has been chosen because the army largely maintained its pre-war structure and the “learning curve” was in its infancy: optimal conditions for Gudmundsson to be right. It could be said that the chosen battalion was unrepresentative of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF). It was of the regular army and as part of 7th Division saw more combat than most other units. After being all but destroyed in the First Battle of Ypres, the 1st South Staffords went into major set-piece offensive action on ten occasions, four being within the scope of this analysis, as well as undertaking a number of notable raids and local actions. These factors admittedly make the battalion’s experience different to many others and its use as a basis for analysing Gudmundsson’s point potentially inappropriate.
In most respects the battalion’s war reflected the changing circumstances faced by the BEF as a whole. It had to learn to cope with and exploit the same technological, firepower and tactical development as all other infantry units. It reorganised, developed new roles and skills and by Passchendaele was a very different unit to that which had arrived at Zeebrugge four years earlier. Due to combat losses the battalion employed several overlapping “generations” of officers that had to cope with these changes. Each generation undertook different training, arrived during dissimilar phases of fluctuating morale, prevailing attitudes and views on tactics. They found more or less battle experience around them and faced changing battle conditions. On this basis the battalion but would appear to be representative enough of the BEF for its selection for assessing whether its officers were “tactically naïve schoolboys” to be valid. Despite these structural changes the battalion managed to retain its regimental ethos and its industrial Black Country flavour, even once the introduction of conscription and the reorganisation of the training structure in 1916 meant that the drafts could originate from far afield.
The impression is of a tight-knit, regimentally proud unit, enjoying strong leadership from the dwindling core of regular Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) and in particular the commanding and company officers. The battalion was fortunate in that, other than for a short period in 1915, it enjoyed continuity of command, having only three Commanding Officers (COs) throughout the war, of whom two were pre-war regulars of considerable experience.[3] They were assisted by only five Regimental Sergeant Majors, all regulars, of whom two became casualties and two commissioned.
On arrival in Flanders the Staffords were led by Robert Ovens, a fiery, short, red-headed northern Irishman who was not above the odd practical joke. Commissioned in 1889, Ovens was a veteran of South Africa. Wounded at Ypres, he returned in mid 1915 and led the battalion through Loos and the Somme before being appointed to a brigade. Close to his junior officers, as evidenced by his emotional report on the deaths of many of them on the barbed wire of the Pope’s Nose at Hulluch on 25 September 1915, and proud of his regiment which he always referred to as the 38th, he does not seem to have been as effective at brigade level.[4]
Ovens was succeeded by Archibald Beauman, who took command in late 1916. Son of a Member of Parliament, he was the archetypal pre-war officer. Educated at Malvern College and Sandhurst, he rode to hounds and was an able sportsman. Beauman served with the 2nd Battalion in the war’s early months and came into the 1st as a company commander in spring 1915. He did well after promotion to command of 69th Brigade in 1918 and was recalled in 1940 to lead a force after Dunkirk. Beauman held the battalion together during a particularly trying period and appears to have engendered trust and loyalty among his junior officers. He also had an eye to selecting talented men for important roles, regardless of seniority.[5]
Officers joining the battalion undoubtedly benefited from this consistency and quality of leadership. Standards set by the regular officers were high and the sense of regimental paternalism strong; orders were articulate and demanding. It is notable that a period of poor morale coincided with short-lived and less capable battalion command in the early months of 1915, when inexperienced officers would have greatly benefited from the presence of an Ovens or Beauman. Most of the junior officers who landed with the original contingent at Zeebrugge in early October 1914 could hardly be described as schoolboys and whilst their war history is short, their performance reveals Gudmundsson’s description to be inappropriate. All regulars, the company commanders were Major Sidney Welchman, who had twenty years pre-war service including combat experience in South Africa; Captain John Vallentin, nineteen years a soldier, had also faced the Boers. Captains Charles Green and Clem Ransford, with thirteen years each, were experienced only in peacetime activities. Even so, a quarter of the subalterns were young and inexperienced. Second Lieutenants Charles Limbery, Dudley Twiss, Charles Burt and Henry MacGeorge – all of whom would develop into good Captains – each had less than four years in the army. Frederick Tomlinson, commissioned on 26 August, had received practically no training when he went to war and had to learn “on the job”.
The battalion was all but destroyed within a month of arrival. Many of the officers of the BEF might be justifiably described as tactically naïve at this time, for few had anticipated the realities of entrenched defence against the weight of artillery fire experienced at Ypres.[6] Some behaviours seem naïve in retrospect but are wholly understandable in the context of contemporary training and values. Battalion officers expressed concern when ordered to loophole the walls of farm buildings in order to hold the Ghent canal crossing at Swynaerde. After all, their training had deprecated damage to civilian property. Under intense pressure a few days later at Kruisecke,
“The line held under the deadly destruction of shell and machine-gun bullets for three hours, when by a ruse of the enemy behind them shouting ‘Retire!’, a few of the South Staffords obeyed”.[7]
Lessons were quickly learned and such things not repeated. In defence, the officers of the Staffords perfectly executed the tactics defined by Field Service Regulations and expressed in the infantry training manual.[8]
The regiment exhausted its pre-war stock of subalterns by the end of 1914. Most of those now arriving to replace losses were wartime volunteers with no military experience. Many had some experience with a school or university Officer Training Corps but they had not had time to be imbued with the regimental ethos and precious little opportunity to learn from the few veterans of Ypres. Among them was Harry Mackintosh, aged 24 years and in August 1914 an insurance official at Royal Exchange Assurance. Enlisting into the Artists Rifles, he was made a Corporal on joining and was commissioned into the Staffords on 15 November. It is hard to argue that he could have been anything but tactically naïve. The battalion’s large intake of novices such as Mackintosh, with the few elderly regulars found from commands in the Special Reserve, from the Indian Army or from exotic administrative postings around the Empire, constituted the weakest unit leadership of any period in the war. It is during early 1915 that the battalion officers as a whole and the structure into which they came most closely fitted Gudmundsson’s description. Fortunately, from a tactical perspective the most that was necessary at this time was expertise in digging in, baling out and dodging occasional shellfire and sniping. Mackintosh was unlucky, being killed in a salvo of four “coalboxes” on Well Farm on 21 March.
By the time the battalion went into its first organised attack at Festubert in May 1915, many of the first replacement officers had left, most being taken ill or otherwise removed. Their places to some extent were filled by returned Ypres wounded and, for the first time, men commissioned from the ranks. William Cooper, a former tin plate worker from Heath Town and a splendid NCO with eighteen years service, had been appointed Regimental Sergeant Major on 8 November 1914. His reward for being central to the rebuilding of the battalion was a commission in the field, although this may reflect officer scarcity as much as his own talent.
Festubert was a success for the Staffords insofar that it showed that a break into the enemy’s position was possible. Division, learning from the appalling mess at Aubers a few days before, substituted a hurricane bombardment for the slow, sustained one that had previously failed so dismally to subdue the defenders. The battalion decided to leave a Captain, four subalterns and 131 men out of the attack, an early trial of a concept that later became standard practice throughout the BEF. Attacking from a support position after the leading waves had melted away, the Staffords bombed their way down several hundred yards of German trenches, consolidating and then holding their position under heavy shell fire and counter attack for three days. This performance did come not from application of a calculated, disseminated “top down” offensive doctrine but from practical, local application of novel weapons and tactics and from spirited leadership at platoon and company level. There is a grit about the actions of the junior officers, notably the Ypres veterans, which is remarked upon by their peers in letters after the action. The battalion grew up at Festubert. Gudmundsson’s description is a long way off the mark.
In the months up to the “big push” at Loos, the battalion was scarcely out of the line, mainly holding the Givenchy sector. More Ypres wounded returned and in general the average length and intensity of front-line experience among the officers rose considerably. The CO, adjutant and machine gun officer were Ypres men and every company at Loos was led by one of them. Even so, more than half of the junior officers were as inexperienced and untrained as their counterparts of early 1915. Cecil Weitzmann is a representative case. Nineteen years old and the son of a solicitor, he had enlisted into the 3rd County of London Yeomanry as a Trooper in October 1914. After training in England, he was commissioned into the infantry and arrived just three weeks before the attack in front of Hulluch. The battalion could now be characterised as having a set of senior officers whose tactical awareness had been learned the hard way, leading juniors who had not had chance to learn much at all. Despite its first use of gas, smoke and “Chinese attacks”, First Army’s tactical approach to Loos would guarantee that most of them would not survive their first action.
The battalion officers had little chance to innovate or show their character at Loos. Divisional and Brigade orders were much more detailed, prescriptive and rigid than hitherto. In the case of the Staffords they required a frontal assault against a strongpoint – the Pope’s Nose – that in the event was barely touched by the preliminary bombardment and invisible through the gas cloud.
“The order "Get ready to charge" came down the line, and Lt Cooper, whose eyes had been on his watch, gave the order "Scouts and wire cutters advance", at 6.28am. Directly after, at 6.30, the order was given to the Companies to advance. C Company climbed up the ladders and advanced through the smoke, which was very dense. This, I may mention, was chiefly caused by smoke bombs, smoke candles and gas. There was also a thick cold mist and drizzling rain. There is very little to describe about the actual assault, but the facts stand out very clearly. To make a long story short, the gallant 1st South Staffords rose to their feet at 0628, advanced in extended order - about 3 paces interval between each man - and moved steadily forward against this almost impregnable position. They stormed it, and took the second or support line. And what remained of this magnificent old regiment moved on, and with other units mixed up with them, captured the Quarries. Some of them, with their CO, went on, up to about 50 yards of the German position in Cite St Elie”.[9]
The battalion lost more than 400 of 700 men who went into the attack. Of 21 officers involved, 18 were lost in the 500 yards to be crossed, necessitating another complete rebuild – and this time there were no Ypres veterans upon which to do so. But the army was learning and developments were such that, while the junior officers to arrive in the first half of 1916 were indeed in many cases young, they arrived with at a technical grounding that their predecessors lacked. The replacements for the likes of Cecil Weitzmann came through an increasingly well structured selection and training regime. They were supplemented by three veteran NCOs who were commissioned within the battalion.
In late 1915, 7th Division formed a Training School specifically for developing the leadership and tactical capabilities of its junior officers. Other Divisions followed suit, developing a comparable syllabus that began to give officers a broader appreciation of the way the army functioned.
“The … school is a fairly new institution. The fellow who is running it describes it as ‘a sort of working holiday’. You spend nearly a month … hearing lectures, working out field schemes, etc., then you go on a tour which includes Divisional headquarters, brigade headquarters, a battery of artillery, an aerodrome, etc. The object is to give the infantry an idea of how other branches of the army work. … We have lectures from various Johnnies who show us ‘how the wheels go round’ in the Supplies Department, Medical Services, etc., etc”.[10]
It is perhaps not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the all-arms tactics of 1918 had their genesis in the education of young officers at the Divisional schools in 1916. Exposure to other arms could only have a beneficial effect on the trainees and on their own ability to innovate. It is also notable that from early 1916 onward, battalion officers were increasingly away from the line at specialist schools and courses. Their tactical awareness was as advanced as the syllabus – in conjunction with their practical learning at the front – could make it.
In the months of spring 1916, more of the newly-arriving subalterns already had lengthy front-line experience. Percival Emberton is a good example. When he enlisted as a ranker in the 6th Battalion of the Black Watch at the age of 24 on 28 March 1913, Percival was employed as a civil servant with the Irish Land Commission. He arrived in France with his battalion on 2 May 1915 and soon saw action at Festubert. He was commissioned in the field on 14 June 1916 and joined the 1st South Staffords on that day, having more than a year’s exposure to trench warfare. In what proved to be his last letter home, he expressed a youthful optimism but knew enough to realise that he faced the possibility of his own death.
“After all, it is a good finish for any man. I am sorry not to have seen you all, but I am glad to have been in the beginning of the finest show yet. You will see that the way the war goes on from this – on it is bound to go –that we commence the beginning of the end”.[11]
Percival was killed in action during the successful attack on Mametz on 1 July 1916. This action was the first since Ypres in which the regimental officers could not be remotely described in Gudmundsson’s terms. Few officers had not previously experienced the tension of a set-piece trench attack or a raid.[12] There were many returned wounded among them, as well as those like Emberton who had fought while in the ranks. It was a wilier battalion that faced Mametz. But it was also a more empowered battalion, for its officers and those at the higher levels of command in 7th Division were learning their trade and being given increased freedom of action. Whilst Fourth Army might feel the need to issue prescriptive, restricting orders to formations of the New Armies under its command, XV Corps and 7th Division were experienced enough to adapt its orders to their own needs. Brigade passed the orders through by the ream, but the Staffords were able – one senses the influence of Ovens – to negotiate local changes. In consequence the battalion’s successful attack consisted of a short rush from a position taken up deep into no man’s land whilst the bombardment continued, with the use of Russian saps to provide an element of surprise and cover once it had lifted. It also assigned groups of men to “mop up” uncaptured points as the main force fought through the village and consolidated on the objective. These tactical decisions were partly made at Brigade and above and acted upon by the battalion, and were partly the choice of the battalion. They reflect a maturity of understanding of battle conditions and of relationship between the men “on the spot” and those planning at a higher level. They also reflect deep local tactical knowledge gained through several months of occupation of the same sector of front, which made men not only familiar with ground and the enemy’s dispositions but of their own comrades.
In this operation, it appears to have been the battalion’s four company commanders that emerged as the focal point for tactical decisions once the engagement had begun. So confident was he of success, Ovens went on leave and left the assault to his second-in-command, Major Morris. John Potter, a subaltern, was credited with being the first man into Mametz and was awarded the DSO for his leadership in the house-to-house fight through the ruins. It is difficult to spot tactical naivety here.
There were heavy losses at Mametz, just as there were two weeks later at High Wood and again in the Brewery Salient in an enemy counter attack at the end of August. In each case, new men arrived – and they were far better equipped in terms of tactical awareness: they had come through an Officer Cadet Battalion (OCB). In February 1916, a new system of training for officers was introduced at home, after which temporary commissions could only be granted if a man had been through a course conducted by an OCB. Entrants would have to be aged over 18 and a half and to have served as a ranker or to have been with an Officer Training Corps unit. The intensive training course lasted four and a half months. The OCB had an establishment of 400 cadets at any time, although this was raised to 600 - if the unit could accommodate them - in May 1917, and in total more than 73,000 fledgling officers were manufactured by these units.
Frank Crosse was typical of their early product. Son of a clergyman, he attended St Bees School between 1912 and 1915 and was in the Officer Training Corps there for two years, where he was reported to be an “Ardent lover of games. A leader. Rather above the average”. He joined the battalion after passing through an OCB, arriving on 22 September 1916 when the Staffords were rebuilding after the Somme. On 15 October 1916 – just three weeks later - he led a party of eight men on a successful trench raid across the River Douve near Messines, for which he was awarded the Military Cross. He was severely wounded near Beaumont Hamel on 24 November 1916, being hit by shell fragments in the buttocks and leg. In comparison with Harry Mackintosh and Cecil Weitzmann, he had been carefully selected, thoroughly trained before coming out to France, and joined officer comrades who had seen action on a number of occasions. Where his predecessors were at times a good fit to Gudmundsson’s description, Crosse and his “generation”, and the army into which they came, had left it a long way behind.
The battalion continued to have hard fights and none more so than those of 1917. The losses in officers continued high. The average age of replacements stayed roughly constant at 23 years, but the average accumulation of training and prior combat experience in the junior officers consistently increased over time until the battalion was practically annihilated at Tower Hamlets in late October 1917. This enrichment of experience was in part a natural consequence of the length of time in the field and the number of occasions on which the battalion went into action, but it was also due to a marked improvement in selection and training which began in early 1916. In the notable crossing of the Piave and Monticano in late 1918, a number of men who had been very junior subalterns in the latter stages of the Somme, who were the product of the improved training method and veterans of Croisilles, Bullecourt and Polygon Wood, led the battalion or companies. Several were highly decorated as a result. If they ever had been tactically naïve schoolboys, they had come a long way since.
The battalion’s experience reveals Gudmundsson’s description to be inadequate. There were times when short and inadequate training of new recruits and a rush to replace losses delivered to the Staffords men who could be said to resemble tactically naïve schoolboys. When this coincided with the fundamental re-establishment of the battalion after Ypres, when the supply of experienced senior regimental officers was at a premium, they came into a less well-led, more rigid and less trusting structure and their ability to innovate and improve was limited. The early months of 1916 saw an inflow of officers of splendid character but still of little training or experience, which was offset by a happy combination of them being led by experienced men in a confident and maturing command structure. Once the reorganisations of officer selection and training both at home and in France became effective, the general quality rose and in combination with accumulating experience of the old hands (which included the best rankers being commissioned), the description became increasingly inaccurate. Gudmundsson’s assertion is misleading, both as a commentary on the individual officer and as a reflection of the developing organisational flexibility and innovative nature of the BEF as a whole.
Footnotes
[1] Tim Travers, Review of ‘Stormtroop tactics: innovation in the German Army, 1914-1918 by Bruce I. Gudmundsson’, The Journal of Military History, 55 (2) 1991, pp.261-262
[2] The reply is by the Battalion’s Adjutant of late 1917, Alec Lee. He was then a 21 year-old Captain. The questioner is anonymous. The dialogue is contained in an untitled paper held in the regimental archive. The 1st Battalion was the former 38th Foot, converted in the Cardwell reforms of 1881.
[3] The third CO, William Richard English-Murphy, rose from being a subaltern on the Somme in 1916. He took command in Italy, where he performed splendidly in planning and leading the battalion’s extraordinary advance across the Piave and Monticano. After the war he went home to Ireland, dropped the “English” from his name, became a General in the Free State Army during the civil war and later served at the highest levels in the Dublin Metropolitan Police and the Garda Síochána.
[4] Ovens service record has not yet been released to the public and has been reconstructed from the Army List, London Gazette and medals records. His character is reconstructed from mentions in various correspondence from officers and men of the battalion, held in the regimental archive and the author’s private collection.
[5] An excellent example is his application to obtain 19 year-old Alec Lee from a minor role at 22nd Brigade. Lee, who went on to become a Major General and Colonel of the regiment, proved to be a capable subaltern, adjutant and company leader.
[6] It was not only juniors that faced something they did not yet understand. The Divisional CO, Major General Thompson Capper, and commanding officer of 22nd Brigade, Brigadier General Sydney Lawford, were later criticised for placing trenches on a forward slope at Broodseinde – a practice that would later be seen as a tactical risk.
[8] A comparison of the actions as described in the battalion war diary and as laid down in General Staff War Office, Infantry Training (4-Company Organization) (London: War Office, 1914) reveals remarkable adherence to doctrine.
[10] Michael Hammerson (ed.), No easy hopes or lies: the World War 1 letters of Lt. Arthur Preston White (London: London Stamp Exchange, 1991). White was in a battalion in 1st Division.
Bibliography of works consulted
Journals
Official and private papers
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