This historical revisionism began with the identification and consideration of the concept of a ‘learning curve’ of improving British military performance from the army’s early and costly trench battles of 19, Loos and the Somme, to the successful British advance and defeat of the German army in 1918. This is a largely monographic literature, which has yet to be synthesised into a narrative of British military performance in the war. Hughes, Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East (London: Routledge, 199 (.)ĢFor several decades military historians in Britain have been re-examining myths and misperceptions about the British army’s effectiveness on the battlefield. 3 An early attempt to present these findings more widely can be found in G.The constraints of coalition war and comparative studies of military performance are emerging as the new historical paradigms for understanding the British experience of warfare between 19.
A century after the war British military history is only now starting to break out of the parochial channels steered since the 1930s. 2 Historians’ effort thereafter was focused on explaining the practicalities of adapting the British army to the demands of modern warfare, and the constraints upon British strategy. 1 To a great extent by the 1980s Britain’s war experience had become lost amid well-established cultural myths of the conflict: Dan Todman has examined the nature and import of such myths, of command incompetence, mud, futility and mass death. The military conduct of the land campaigns, especially that on the western front, was also subject to scrutiny before the archive were opened in the 1960s, largely by popular historians. Since the 1960s the men who went to war have been studied by social and cultural historians, although how they made war has only recently become a trend in historiography. By the 1930s soldiers and statesmen had argued the pros and cons of Britain’s strategy of ‘continental commitment’ – raising a mass citizen army to fight in France and Flanders alongside Britain’s French ally, rather than pursuing a more traditional maritime strategy. Todman, The First World War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005)ġThe parameters and issues of British military history of the First World War were largely set in the war’s immediate aftermath. 1 For an assessment of the state of the discipline before the recent phase of revisionism see B.J.
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