“Lions Led by Donkeys”: The Changing Historiography of the First World War during the 1960s

This year marks the centenary of the Battle of the Somme; the centenary of its ending having just passed on the 18^th of November. No “Boys of the Old Brigade” remain that can regale us of the Great War, the “Last Fighting Tommy”, Harry Patch, having passed away in July 2009 aged 111 and the last veteran of any country, Florence Green of the Women’s Royal Air Force, having passed away four years ago now, in February 2012 aged 110. Despite the passing of this generation into memory, much of what they fought for is still as hotly debated as it ever was. Questioning of what they had fought for had begun before the guns even fell silent, both within the popular mind and that of the academic, but the 1960s brought a new wave of interest in the First World War in the decade of its fiftieth anniversary.

Early academically-oriented histories of the Great War had focused upon broad-stroke military strategies, biographies of Generals, politicians and other key public figures and individual unit histories, which obtained a wide market amongst veterans as well as the wider public. The 1960s however, saw this new wave of historical interest turn away from the “top-down” approach of history and saw the beginning of the “bottom-up” history focusing on ordinary soldiers and their conditions, particularly spearheaded by the Marxist historians of the Communist Party Historians Group, formed in 1946, who placed particular emphasis on the class distinctions between the aristocratic general officers and the working-class Tommy.

By the 1960s, this revisionism had extended firmly across the political divide and in 1961, Alan Clark, a lawyer-turned-historian who would later have a colourful career as a junior minister under Margaret Thatcher, published his first and most controversial work, The Donkeys: A History of the British Expeditionary Force in 1915, which would unwittingly act as a beginning of a new wave of historiography surrounding the First World War. The title played upon the popular conception by many veterans that the Generals had been directly responsible for the virtual destruction of the pre-war professional core of the British Army and their failure to learn the lessons of battle had led to the brutal attrition of the trenches later in the war.

Clark was aided in his writing by Basil Liddell Hart, a First World War officer who had suffered being shot, gassed and having his entire battalion wiped out at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Turning to military history and theory as a result of his injuries (and later playing a key role in the development of armoured warfare), he was particularly opposed to the mind-set of Haig and other Generals and an advocate of the “lions led by donkeys” theorem, believing that any competent general would have understood from their traditional education in classical warfare that frontal attacks against a determined and well-placed adversary rarely succeed without massive casualties.

The book itself, as well as its author(s), came in for great criticism from contemporaries, including Haig’s own son, and historians John Terraine (whom we shall meet again in Blog No.2), Hugh Trevor-Roper (a one-time university tutor to Clark) and A.J.P. Taylor, all of whom wrote scathing reviews, criticising the work as slovenly and taking many of Haig’s own words and actions totally out of context to suit Clark and Liddell Hart’s own agendas. It was, however, immensely popular amongst many people, rapidly becoming an important text in British universities and becoming a bestseller amongst people on the street, sparking off a flurry of academic and popular histories of the First World War. It even was even (after legal wrangling to gain Clark royalties) used as part of the inspiration for the musical and film Oh! What a Lovely War, which we will look at in blog No.2.

In a decade where people were more open than ever before to questioning authority, becoming less deferential and demanding (rather than asking) for change and where some were even beginning to question the very moral and basis for their world, Revisionist and Marxist histories of the First World War tapped into a not uncommon view held by veterans and spread it to a wider audience than ever before, shaping the minds of a generation and fuelling the debate beyond the lifetimes of its actors and into the twenty-first century. 

Philip A. Bennett