Lord Dannatt is perhaps the best known British general of the last half century. His high prestige stems from his image as a resolute leader who, during his time in command, was willing to challenge his political masters and fight for the interests of his soldiers. Since he retired as chief of the army in 2009, his reputation for defiance and integrity has helped him forge a successful career as a military commentator.
Yet the public’s respect for him is not universally replicated among the professionals and politicians who worked with him. To his critics, his egocentric thirst for publicity failed to match the quality of his judgment. “I’ve never known a man so lacking in self-awareness,” one senior officer who served with him told me recently. Nor was his army’s record in action impressive. Stumbling operations in Iraq and Afghanistan badly shook American faith in Britain’s military prowess. Moreover, as a pundit, he has not been distinguished by any originality of viewpoint or gift for vivid language. The propagation of conventional wisdom, wreathed in clichés, is his speciality.
These strengths and weaknesses come through in his new book, which analyzes how Britain’s ruling class squandered the British army’s victory in 1918 so badly that within little more than twenty years the expeditionary force was routed in France by the German Reich. Written jointly with the fine historian and former soldier Robert Lyman, Dannatt’s study puts forward the thesis that Britain willfully ignored the lessons of the remarkable triumph in the First World War and instead, desperate to avoid another conflict, slid into the cowardice and complacency of appeasement. In essence, the authors seek to answer the question bitterly posed in September 1939 by General Hastings Ismay, a key figure in the War Cabinet Secretariat and later Winston’s Churchill trusted liaison officer. As he recorded in his memoirs, at the outbreak of war Ismay felt
furious—furious with ourselves as with the Nazis. Less than twenty-one years had passed since the Germans had lain prostrate at our feet. Now they were at our throats. How had we been so craven to allow this to happen?
Dannatt and Lyman set out a host of potential explanations. One was the blindness to the scale of the British military’s achievement in overcoming Germany on the battlefield through its mastery of
an artillery-dominant offensive in which machine-gun equipped infantry worked closely with tanks, combat engineers and aircraft, deploying a sophisticated approach to warfighting in which a single weapon was crafted from many constituent parts.
Contradicting the fashionable view that the British Army on the Western Front was made up of “lions led by donkeys,” the account sheds light on the commanders’ innovative methods in breaking through the German lines. But the popular press, rather than extolling this success, focused on the mass slaughter of the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele, thereby feeding a public mood of revulsion, which in turn inhibited greater spending on armaments even after Hitler came to power.
In the wake of the horror at the trenches, pacifism became a serious political cause in Britain, while the Labour Party, in a long spasm of wishful thinking, put all its faith in the League of Nations and called for the abolition of the Royal Air Force. For reasons of political expediency, not even the center-right Conservatives, traditionally the party of strong defense, dared to run counter to this tide. As late as 1935, the Tory prime minister Stanley Baldwin felt compelled to assure voters that there would be “no great armaments.” According to the authors,
there was no money for military expansion, but neither was there any for innovation, combined-arms training or preparation for future expeditionary warfare.
Among other factors that weakened Britain’s capacity to wage a European war were the following: the overstretch in resources because of Britain’s imperial commitments; the lack of planning and imagination in the War Office; the preference of the electorate for welfare rather than defense; the guilt-tripping propaganda about the Versailles Treaty that blamed the rise of Hitler on the cruelty of the 1919 peace treaty; an absence of unity not only between the three services but also within the army, which was plagued by single-issue lobbyists and tribalism; the defensive mentality bred by France’s creation of a network of fortifications, called the Maginot Line, on its eastern frontier; and the long-term impact of the ten-year rule, introduced in the 1920s, which held that Britain would not be engaged in any conflict on the Continent for at least a decade.
These arguments are all made powerfully, backed up by thorough research. The authors have toiled hard in the archives to set out their case. But there is little that is new here. The impulse to blame spineless politicians for the failure to stand up to Germany and prepare for war is as old as the Hawker Hurricane fighter and as tired as inhabitants of an air-raid shelter during the Blitz. Yet again, Neville Chamberlain, first as chancellor, then as prime minister from 1937, is wheeled out as a deluded mediocrity who failed to meet the military requirements of the hour. “It was his repeated refusal to consider the creation and deployment of a war-fighting force that was the most cataclysmic failure of this period,” they write.
But is this really true? If the British Expeditionary Force had been twice as large in 1940, would defeat in France have been avoided, or would the disaster have been even greater? Given the brutal potency of the Blitzkrieg, pouring money into the British Army could have been an act of epic folly, especially if such growth had come at the expense of the raf and the Royal Navy. In fact Chamberlain had the military priorities correct. He concentrated government funds on building up the raf, particularly fighter defenses, through the creation of a chain of radar stations and the introduction of the Spitfire and Hurricane fast monoplanes. Chamberlain never receives the credit, but he was one of the key architects of the victory in the Battle of Britain, which changed the course of history. Furthermore, it was his shrewd handling of the economy as chancellor that pulled Britain out of the slump in the early 1930s and enabled the government to embark on the air-expansion program that ultimately saved Britain and the world. As always in orthodox histories, Chamberlain is condemned for appeasement, but how much choice did he really have? There was no appetite for war in 1938 in either Britain or France, and at least his policy bought time to rearm.
The book is written in a concise, straightforward style, but too many clichés riddle the text. So the concept of Irish self-government is “put on the back burner” in 1914, and the British Army “took its eye off the ball” in 1918. Tigers are made of paper, towels are thrown in, hats are hung, punches are not pulled, balloons go up, and countries are dragged “kicking and screaming” into the twentieth century. At one point, the book announces that “the problem was one of baby and bathwater”; at another Chamberlain is described as “the whipping boy for the policy of appeasement,” which does not really make sense.
In the final pages, the authors use the experience of the 1930s to urge a far bigger defense budget today in Britain. But that case would have been more powerful if the Ministry of Defence had not of late been so extravagantly wasteful, if spending priorities had not been so eccentric (epitomized by the creation of two vast aircraft carriers that need almost half of the Royal Navy for protection), and if the recent record of the British Army in combat, including under Dannatt, had been stronger.
