Monty’s Memoirs & First World War Generals

I have recently begun reading ‘The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Montgomery’ and must admit I am finding it a very interesting read. People may not agree with Monty’s decisions or style but he sure did speak his mind. I am barely 100 pages in (I haven’t even read about El-Alamein yet) and have already read a few interesting things. Some of which link to a program I watched this morning. It is called ‘My family at War’ and this episode looked at Dan Snow and Natalie Cassidy’s families’ involvement in the First World War. This first aired about 3 years ago but this was the first time I’ve seen it. I was very interested in Dan Snows experience because his great-grandfather was a Divisional and later a Corp Commander in the conflict.

General Thomas D'Oyly Snow

TV Presenter & Historian Dan Snow

It was interesting to see Dan’s opinion on his great-grandfather and the views of historians and descendants whose relatives had died in the conflict under his command.  They all seem to agree that he was to blame and didn’t accept responsibility for the failures and thousands of deaths (Especially at the Somme) while at times blaming his men and lying to himself. I do not doubt that he did a bad job but that fact that people blame all the generals and say they should have known better or should have learned from their mistakes immediately is the part I have difficulty agreeing with. It is easy to point the finger but are we right to do so? This brings me to Monty’s book. 

Field Marshal B. Montgomery

Reading through the chapter on the Battle of France in 1940, I see that Monty does tend to criticise his fellow generals (as he always did). He didn’t doubt there effort, just there ability. I couldn’t help but notice similarities between the way the generals acted and their WW1 counterparts. They seemed to stay back from the main line with little or no communication. Admittedly this wasn’t out of choice and more to do with lack of equipment, mainly radios etc but the attitude of some generals and in particular the French were still wrong. This was 20 years after the end of WW1 and some generals still didn’t seem to have learned the lessons that conflict taught us.

The French mentality was terrible, they had dealt with the devastation of their country and people in WW1 and morale was very low and they wanted to avoid war at any cost.  The French High Command has a knack of preparing to fight a war the way the last one ended and this time was no different. Even though they knew the terrible things that would happen if they did fight with WW1 tactics they didn’t try to change things and the whole French army had this mindset.

It wasn’t just the French though, The Russians just flung their men, lightly equipped and ill-trained at the Germans and they responded in kind. And Rommel on the Western Front set up the Atlantic wall as a static (We will stop them at the waters edge!) type defence which was massively flawed (In my humble opinion). The Americans during the battle of Hurtgen forest that began in November 1944 were the same. The overall strategy has been criticised but the staff officers never went to see what was going on at the front.  They had no idea about terrain or enemy strength and dispositions and instead just threw more men into the battle, results never improved and the tactics weren’t changed before the end of the battle in early 1945. The casualty numbers were huge, particularly the ratio of attackers to defenders lost.

These were simple lessons that were still not learned 20 years later. The Generals in WW1 didn’t know any better and none of there staff ever went down to the front and they can only make decisions with the information they are given. Again they should have gone to the front themselves but they were not alone in not doing this and as I said it was no different at times in WW2.

The generals in WW1 were not trained for this kind of warfare and had no experiences from history to draw on for fighting with the new weapons available (Machine guns, far more accurate artillery, chemical weapons and of course the war in the air). Under the pressure from governments to deliver results you don’t have time to stop and look at what you’re doing. It was only after the war that people saw how devastating it was and as shown the lessons still weren’t fully learnt until over 20 years after the war.  

The only way I would blame the generals is if they were either malicious, which I’m sure certain generals were but they are not the norm and you have their kind in all wars. Or if they were negligent, I am not sure that many of them were as they tried to do their jobs to the best of there ability. It’s just that there weren’t equipped to do so.  

I would say it comes down to ignorance. They didn’t know any better and as everybody had the same mindset it wasn’t going to change easily. The only people that would have thought differently were the troops on the front, and they didn’t write truthfully to there families as they didn’t want them to worry (maybe they should have done) and the staff didn’t visit the front lines. It is easy for us today to blame the generals, hindsight is a wonderful thing. But in the same circumstances with the information and support available to us, I'm not sure we would have done any better.

Phew, rant now over. Just so you know I'm the type of person that if I walk into a room and two of my mates are ganging up on another in an argument I will always back that one up, no matter how much I disagree with them (I will always call my mates on bad arguments even if I agree with their overall viewpoint).

Well I’m glad I got that out of my system, I’m sure people out there will disagree with me. But that’s the thing about history, everybody interprets events differently. Make up your own mind; I hope I’ve helped you to do that. At the very least, I hope you’ve learned something.