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Section from 'General Officers of the War', National Portrait Gallery, commissioned from a reluctant John Singer Sargent 1922
Too many men refused to take orders
Unlike the Royal Navy, the British Army proved itself over the course of decades incapable of taking new ideas on board. And at the heart of the problem was that too many men in the army refused to take orders.
Not the rank and file, you understand, who were executed for any refusal to march into a hail of bullets. But the officers. The reason was that they regarded themselves as gentlemen – and gentlemen could not be bossed around.
Historian Aimée Fox is sympathetic to the army. But her work has shown that the army’s senior officers strongly shared the ethos of the English gentleman.
He was an amateur, a sportsman (as in hunting, shooting and fishing). He was proud of his own virtue and the belief that everyone played by the rules of the game. But, crucially, all this left him offended if he was presented with any kind of command. Nobody could order him about.
To make it worse, as historian Tim Travers has written, ‘there was a strong tendency, firstly, to cover up errors during the war, secondly, to alter the military record, and thirdly, to achieve alterations in the subsequent Official History.’ So the shortsightedness and errors of the British gentlemen who were in command during the first war were consistently covered up, both at the time and subsequently.
Episode 02 - They refused to take orders
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As many as 250,000 boys under 18 joined the British Army during WW1
Hard to teach and many were unteachable
As a later commander of the British Army of the Rhine, General Sir John Hackett, described the British army in the First World War, ‘its officer corps was still the preserve of young men of good social standing who had the outlook of amateurs, which is what they mostly were. They were ill-paid … and so had to be of independent means. This means they were hard to teach and many were unteachable. They were not well trained and were expected to be neither industrious nor particularly intelligent ... As a foreign observer put it, among the officers of the British army bravery had often to compensate for lack of ability.’
One of the deepest causes of the catastrophe on the Somme in July 1916 was the British army’s failure to learn, either from decades of trench warfare before 1914, or from its experiences in the 2 years of war before the Battle of the Somme.
Its gentlemen officers were so preoccupied with snobbery and class that they could not be told what to do and they repeatedly ignored new technology and new thinking. Worse, they treated them with scorn.
The most obvious example on the Somme was the MACHINE GUN.
The British army would apparently never have bothered to develop the proper use of machine gun at all were it not for an ex-army chauffeur called Major Christopher Baker-Carr. Writing in 1929 Baker-Carr apologized that he still couldn’t tell ‘the whole truth’ because so many of the generals who’d blocked him from 1914 to 1916 were still alive – and could still pull powerful strings.
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There was no will to try new methods or weapons and no structure for sharing best practice
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British Vickers machine gun crew near Ovillers, the Somme. Both men wear anti-gas helmets, the gunner wears a padded waistcoat, enabling him to carry the hot machine gun barrel.
Machine-gun school. Better late than never
Baker-Carr was an old ‘dug-out’, as soldiers dragged out of retirement at the start of the war were called. He’d been doing a bit of teaching at the Army’s School of Musketry in Hythe, Kent and had taken a particular interest in machine-guns. When war broke out he was called up to go to France as a Major in the 7th Division.
Straightaway Baker-Carr pleaded with his commanding officers to double the number of machine-guns. Better late than never. But he was told to mind his own business. He might know more than anyone else about machine-guns but hadn’t he once been a chauffeur?
But, of course, as we’ve said, the middle-ranking British officers could do pretty much what they liked. One of the 7th Division officers now suggested that Baker-Carr should train a handful of men to use the few machine-guns they had. Baker-Carr had a better idea. He proposed setting up a machine-gun school for the whole army. The kind of thing – though he didn’t know it – that the Germans did all the time.
Baker-Carr's detailed proposal of Spring 1915 for a Machine Gun Corps with 20k guns and 40k men ended up in a box marked 'of no further interest.' He found it, covered in dismissive comments e.g. 'the machine gun is much over-rated'. His plan was only saved by Kitchener.
READ: From Chauffeur to Brigadier - Founder of the Machine Gun Corps & Pioneer of the Development of the Tank by C.D. Baker-Carr [US bookseller here]
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The Little Caterpillar,1904, Hornsby & Sons: 'the germ of the land fighting unit when men will fight behind iron walls' - Morning Leader in 1908
Armoured tractors considered too noisy and smelly to develop
Another obvious idea the British Army missed for years was the tank.
In 1906 the British Army were offered an engine with a chaintrack system – in other words caterpillar tracks – by David Roberts, managing director of the engine and machinery manufacturer Hornsby and Sons of Grantham. The prototype was underpowered and frail, but the idea was clearly a winner. The committee reckoned it was ‘the ideal tractor for military purposes.’
In 1908 it was trialed in front of senior officers, and shown to all the military attachés of the London embassies and legations. ‘Here is the germ of the land fighting unit when men will fight behind iron walls,’ wrote a journalist for the Morning Leader.
In 1910 one member of the Military Transport Committee proposed to Roberts that he try putting a big gun aboard his tractor, fitting it with armour plating, and turning it into ‘a complete fighting machine.’ Hurrah! The tank had arrived.
Except that the army had not paid Roberts enough to make the project worth carrying on - and he took it to America. The artillery gave his No. 3 prototype one single day of trials hauling its big guns and refused to use it, saying they couldn’t stand the noise and the smell. They would (as you may well imagine) stick to their horses. In 1911 the War Office therefore abandoned the idea of tracked vehicles for any purpose at all. Once the war began they were forced to buy Roberts's caterpillar tracks at vast expense from the American manufacturer Holts.
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