Customer Reviews

1918

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This is a book with a political axe to grind. The author basically wants to make the case for ignoring everything bad that happened in the war based on the logic that "we won". He wants to harken back to the triumphalism of the immediate postwar period complete with nationalist boasting about the British role. Everyone on the British side is a genius. Anything bad that happens isn't as bad as it seems. It gets to a point where the British are so brilliant that you wonder why the war didn't end in 1914.

He starts off with the German offensive of 1918. He puts a positive British spin on avery aspect of it. Diasters are heroic redeployments. Everything is a learning experience. The opposition gets little credit for anything. Everything leading to the moment where the great allmighty General Haig will unleash the secret British plan in preperation for years.

He begrudges the German offensives in 1918 even the status of a tactical victory. When the Germans move the front and inflict casualties, its meaningless. Of course the author's view of a tacitical victory completely reverses later in the book.

The author absolutely worships Haig. We get all the old garbage about the entire war being one big battle for Haig. Haig's slow developement of the great plan and how anything that went wrong was either the fault of the French or the Prime Minister. All events lead to the big push in 1918 when Haig became (according to the author) the great military victor in the entire history of Britain. Even in terms of defenses of Haig, putting him over Nelson and Wellington is just a wee bit much.

My perversely favorite quote from the book is "If the British Army had a doctrine then it was exemplified by the Field Service Regulations". For the few who have seen the field service regulations of the era, the conclusion from the statement would be that they had no doctrine.

When we get to the offensive of 1918, its all trumpets in the air and magic as the all-arms strategy simply melts away all the German armies. The honest simple tommies follow the master plan and tactics of Sir Douglas Haig over the top to victory. The American contribution is marginalized and minimized. The Americans have bad manners. The Americans make mistakes. The Americans are fools for not organizing their divisions along British lines. He goes out of his way to highlight individual incidents of bad things happening to American troops to make them look bad.

In the end, the book fails because its devoted to telling a patriotic British story rather than telling the story of the war. Good accounts bring balance, especially long after the conflict. Haig is neither genius nor fool. He was a man who was right sometimes are wrong other times. No one nation on the allied side can be singled out as the victor. And both sides in the war had successes and failures. The key is objective analysis. The book doesn't deliver. He might as well have reprinted one off the shelf full of patriotic accounts of the war written in the early 1920s rather than write a new one. The closest thing this reminds me of is some the triumphal we-won-everything Australian views of the war.

As an alternative, I'd recommend "To the Last Man" by Lyn Macdonald. It covers only the German offensive in 1918. But the accounts within are much more moving and far less political. Lyn Macdonald's books on the war have always been able to make the individuals who fought the war come alive without excessively diving into politics.

Well done, very detailed love 1st person type books. Not a huge problem
but you definetly know the author is British. Would recommend this book to all WWI buffs