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history alan allport Cabinet Table Generals Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain 1914–1945 By Robin Prior ( Yale University Press 832pp £30) Robin Prior, who turned eighty in 2022, was for many years a senior academic at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Now a visiting professorial fel- low at the University of Adelaide, he has spent a distinguished career writing about 20th-century British and imperial military history. His 2009 book on the Gallipoli campaign is regarded as one of the most incisive accounts of this confrontation, the historiography of which is noto- riously fractious. His more recent work on the British experience of 1940 is rightly acclaimed. Prior is a historian who has always had trenchant views. His new book, his most ambitious yet, is a wel- come distillation of a lifetime of scholarship. It is sure to inform, entertain and – no doubt as the author intended – occasionally provoke and annoy. A word of caution is in order. The book’s subheading is misleading. If Britain’s two world wars were about anything, they were about the mass mobilisation of the nation’s industrial, financial and human resources. But there is little here about the political economy of global conflict in a machine age. Nor is there much about the experience of war at the ‘sharp edge’ – you will find no mud, blood and poetry anecdotes from the trenches in these pages. This is war as seen from the perspective of Whitehall, or at least GHQ. Its cast is composed of admirals, air chief marshals, generals and (especially) politicians. It is the relationship between statesmen who made grand strategy and the senior hierarchy of soldiers, sailors and airmen who carried it out that clearly interests Prior. Whether one regards this as a narrowly restrictive or a refreshingly focused way of thinking about military history is a matter of taste. Prior has mastered his brief as he has identified it. He offers an interpretation of events that is lucidly and judiciously argued in great detail. A more accurate subheading might have been ‘Prime Ministers at War’, because situated at this book’s heart are the characters and judgements of the four men who led Britain from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945. Prior’s pen is wielded scrupulously, often censoriously. His chiding is at its fiercest when he detects defeatism, passivity or wishy-washiness. Mistakes are Sir Douglas Haig: butcher or great captain? (sometimes) forgiven. Weakness never. Neither H H Asquith nor David Lloyd George emerges well from his audit. Prior depicts both prime ministers as overwhelmed by the unprecedented nature of the First World War, in which offensive vigour seemed doomed when faced with the artillery shell and the machine gun. Asquith was poised enough to remove the ineffectual first commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, before the end of 1915. But he could conceive of no better alternative than French’s deputy, Sir Douglas Haig, who in addition to his other qualifications for the job boasted King George V ’s personal favour. Haig has enjoyed something of a rehabilitation in the eyes of First World War historians in the last twenty-odd years. The prevailing image today is less that of Butcher Haig, the obstinate, unimaginative chateau general presiding serenely over the needless slaughter of his own men, than of Great Captain Haig, responding to wickedly difficult operational challenges with verve, creativity and – ultimately – victory. Prior will have none of this. He is unmoved by the revisionism. He concedes that Haig was no technophobic dinosaur and that his orders betrayed flashes of insight into the sanguine realities of the conflict. But flashes only, stifled by brutal, unwarranted overconfidence. Haig’s plan for a great offensive on the Somme in summer 1916 was doomed from the outset. It was a fantasy of total victory unshackled from any consideration of the obstacles in its way. The result was 420,000 British imperial casualties sacrificed for virtually no ground gained. Moreover, Asquith meekly allowed himself to be locked out of the decision-making process and mutely acquiesced to all Haig’s demands. Prior calls this ‘the greatest dereliction of duty by any civilian authority in a world war’. Lloyd George replaced Asquith in December 1916. He, at least, had no illusions about Haig’s lethal bullheadedness. But despite railing and intriguing against the general in private, he could not summon up the courage to fire him. In early 1918, Lloyd George hit upon the tactic of withholding reinforcements. This, in Prior ’s view, forced Haig to prioritise machinery over manpower, and so to fight better battles. The final victories of that year, which precipitated Germany’s collapse in November, were thus the product of a belated reassertion of civilian control over the military. Conquer We Must ’s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f e v e n t s i s very far away from that of other recent histories, like Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front, which offers a far more sympathetic view of Haig (and it is a pity that we don’t get to find out what Prior thinks of Lloyd’s arguments). But given that ‘learning curve’ apologias for the conduct of the First World War generals have become the new academic orthodoxy, there is something undeniably bracing about such an unfashionable jeremiad. Literary Review | february 2023 10
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history From the Armistice, Conquer We Must jumps briskly to the late 1930s and Neville Chamberlain, whose record, rather like Haig’s, has enjoyed some modest recovery among scholars (though not the public) in recent years. Prior is just as unimpressed with attempts to see the architect of appeasement in a more flattering light as he is with the bid to redeem Haig. Chamberlain was ‘paral ysed with fear ’ at the thought of war, ‘ducked every opportunity to halt Hitler’s aggression’ and was ‘supine’ in the face of the Nazi threat. Ouch. After the disasters of spring 1940, Chamberlain gave way as prime minister to Winston Churchill, clearly the book’s intellectual and moral hero. Prior is no hagiographer. He recognises that Churchill made some serious errors throughout his long career, including the Gallipoli expedition of 1915, a disastrous attempt to fight war on the cheap. Prior criticises Churchill as prime minister for his obsession with mobility in war, which blinded him to the surer, if less spectacular, virtues of methodical, artillery-focused warfare (Montgomery’s forte). But after the twittering and procrastinating of his predecessors, it is rousing to see a results-driven war leader at last confidently hiring and firing generals. If Churchill ultimately could not persuade the Americans to back all of Britain’s policy goals (AngloAmerican diplomacy is an important theme of the second half of the book), this was due as much to the dwindling clout of the UK as to personal failure. This tremendous, sweeping study of power in wartime will not persuade its audience on every point but always impresses. The specificity of Prior’s approach leaves some questions unanswered, however. For a book about the wartime policies of a democratic state, the people are curiously absent. Politicians had to work within the confines of what was popular, or at least acceptable to the masses, as well as what was optimal. A consideration of public opinion might have allowed a more charitable reading of these prime ministers’ endeavours. Also, Prior rightly points out the ‘implacable nature’ of these national war efforts. Despite terrible sacrifices and humiliating setbacks, the British people never flinched from the goal of total victory in either conflict. But we don’t really find out why here. Whitehall’s view of the war can only tell us so much. zareer masani Golfing for Victo Spying on the Reich: The Cold War Against Hitler By R T Howard (Oxford University Press 384pp £25) Yet another book on the origins of the Second World War might seem excessive, but this one takes an original approach. Its focus is on the quality and accuracy of information obtained through espionage during the interwar period, especially among the main powers, and how far failures of intelligence contrib- uted to the war. Underlying all this was the mercurial nature of Hitler’s leadership and the inherent difficulty of anticipating either his next move or his ultimate foreign policy aims. The argument of this book is that the Western Allies turned a blind eye to Nazi Germany’s secret rearmament from 1933, in defiance of the major restraints on it imposed through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and then, in 1938, much overestimated Hitler’s military might. Having avoided military intervention early on to contain Nazi Germany, they also shirked a military showdown in defence of Czechoslovakia in 1938 before taking up arms following Hitler’s invasion of Poland a year later, by which time the German war machine was much better prepared. A lot of this is familiar ground. What’s original is the discussion of the often poor and contradictory quality of Anglo-French intelligence and Germany’s success at duping its rivals. Parts of this book read like an exciting cloak-and-dagger story revolving around the exploits of various military attachés, professional spooks and creative amateurs. We meet a team of Western spies who posed as golfers and played a competition at a Frankfurt club in order to gauge German public opinion. We read of a Nazi mission to Detroit to order tanks that could be smuggled out disguised as tractors. It was a world of confused loyalties, double agents and frequent exposure, with the prospect of grisly torture and execution by beheading for those unfortunate enough to fall into Nazi hands. In a pre-internet age, espionage was inevitably hampered by poor communications, necessitating the use of elaborate subterfuges and even invisible ink. There were frequent failures to crosscheck intelligence and analyse it professionally, especially if acquired from informal networks of businessmen, émigrés and political dissidents, as it often was. At the heart of the intelligence war was the love–hate relationship between the British and the French, with the latter constantly trying to entice the former into a formal treaty commitment. The British remained as reluctant to be embroiled in a continental war as they had been in 1914. They were also far more sympathetic to Germany than the French were with regard to the draconian penalties imposed on the Germans at Versailles, which they saw as having been driven by French revanchism. The French, though understandably concerned by the German threat, nevertheless failed to act against the Nazi occupation of the demilitarised Rhineland due to intelligence officials overestimating the strength of German fortifications. At the centre of all this was a remarkably successful German game of bluff, based on a far superior network of counterespionage. The Nazis successfully camouflaged, often quite literally, the rearmament of their air, naval and land forces, even using forests and fake industrial sites to thwart We s t e r n a i r r e c o n n a i s s a n c e . T h e n , s i g n i ficantly, we see Hitler changing tack in 1935 to overawe and intimidate his neighbours by exaggerating his military strength. Similar techniques were used to create fake fighter planes and tanks. This ploy was enough to dupe Britain’s pro-Nazi ambassador in Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who passed on his misleading intelligence to Neville Chamberlain. The exaggeration of German military strength and the corresponding underestimation of Czech military muscle resulted in Chamberlain’s diplomatic surrender to Hitler at Munich. february 2023 | Literary Review 11

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history alan allport

Cabinet Table Generals Conquer We Must: A Military History of Britain 1914–1945

By Robin Prior ( Yale University Press 832pp £30)

Robin Prior, who turned eighty in 2022, was for many years a senior academic at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Now a visiting professorial fel- low at the University of Adelaide, he has spent a distinguished career writing about 20th-century British and imperial military history. His 2009 book on the Gallipoli campaign is regarded as one of the most incisive accounts of this confrontation, the historiography of which is noto- riously fractious. His more recent work on the British experience of 1940 is rightly acclaimed. Prior is a historian who has always had trenchant views. His new book, his most ambitious yet, is a wel- come distillation of a lifetime of scholarship. It is sure to inform, entertain and – no doubt as the author intended – occasionally provoke and annoy.

A word of caution is in order. The book’s subheading is misleading. If Britain’s two world wars were about anything, they were about the mass mobilisation of the nation’s industrial, financial and human resources. But there is little here about the political economy of global conflict in a machine age. Nor is there much about the experience of war at the ‘sharp edge’ – you will find no mud, blood and poetry anecdotes from the trenches in these pages. This is war as seen from the perspective of Whitehall, or at least GHQ. Its cast is composed of admirals, air chief marshals, generals and (especially) politicians. It is the relationship between statesmen who made grand strategy and the senior hierarchy of soldiers, sailors and airmen who carried it out that clearly interests Prior. Whether one regards this as a narrowly restrictive or a refreshingly focused way of thinking about military history is a matter of taste. Prior has mastered his brief as he has identified it. He offers an interpretation of events that is lucidly and judiciously argued in great detail.

A more accurate subheading might have been ‘Prime Ministers at War’, because situated at this book’s heart are the characters and judgements of the four men who led Britain from 1914 to 1918 and from 1939 to 1945. Prior’s pen is wielded scrupulously, often censoriously. His chiding is at its fiercest when he detects defeatism, passivity or wishy-washiness. Mistakes are

Sir Douglas Haig: butcher or great captain?

(sometimes) forgiven. Weakness never. Neither H H Asquith nor David Lloyd George emerges well from his audit. Prior depicts both prime ministers as overwhelmed by the unprecedented nature of the First World War, in which offensive vigour seemed doomed when faced with the artillery shell and the machine gun. Asquith was poised enough to remove the ineffectual first commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, before the end of 1915. But he could conceive of no better alternative than French’s deputy, Sir Douglas Haig, who in addition to his other qualifications for the job boasted King George V ’s personal favour.

Haig has enjoyed something of a rehabilitation in the eyes of First World War historians in the last twenty-odd years.

The prevailing image today is less that of Butcher Haig, the obstinate, unimaginative chateau general presiding serenely over the needless slaughter of his own men, than of Great Captain Haig, responding to wickedly difficult operational challenges with verve, creativity and – ultimately – victory. Prior will have none of this. He is unmoved by the revisionism. He concedes that Haig was no technophobic dinosaur and that his orders betrayed flashes of insight into the sanguine realities of the conflict. But flashes only, stifled by brutal, unwarranted overconfidence.

Haig’s plan for a great offensive on the Somme in summer 1916 was doomed from the outset. It was a fantasy of total victory unshackled from any consideration of the obstacles in its way. The result was 420,000 British imperial casualties sacrificed for virtually no ground gained. Moreover, Asquith meekly allowed himself to be locked out of the decision-making process and mutely acquiesced to all Haig’s demands. Prior calls this ‘the greatest dereliction of duty by any civilian authority in a world war’. Lloyd George replaced Asquith in December 1916. He, at least, had no illusions about Haig’s lethal bullheadedness. But despite railing and intriguing against the general in private, he could not summon up the courage to fire him. In early 1918, Lloyd George hit upon the tactic of withholding reinforcements. This, in Prior ’s view, forced Haig to prioritise machinery over manpower, and so to fight better battles. The final victories of that year, which precipitated Germany’s collapse in November, were thus the product of a belated reassertion of civilian control over the military. Conquer We Must ’s i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f e v e n t s i s very far away from that of other recent histories, like Nick Lloyd’s The Western Front, which offers a far more sympathetic view of Haig (and it is a pity that we don’t get to find out what Prior thinks of Lloyd’s arguments). But given that ‘learning curve’ apologias for the conduct of the First World War generals have become the new academic orthodoxy, there is something undeniably bracing about such an unfashionable jeremiad.

Literary Review | february 2023 10

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