VICTORY TO DEFEAT
THE BRITISH ARMY 1918-40
BY RICHARD DANNAT, ROBERT LYMAN OSPREY PUBLISHING ISBN 978 1 4728 6086 6.
HB. 352PP. £25. 2023
This is a personal critique of two distinguished soldiers, taking a Commander’s perspective of how the British Army, “masters of the battlefield” in 1918 came to perform so badly in 1940.
WWI generals were not all dunderheads fighting the last war but had to learn and transition from mass infantry warfare of the Somme to the warwinning mobile integrated arms warfighting of the Hundred Days of 1918. Against a backdrop of postwar economies, Wall Street Crash aftermath, the trauma of WW1 casualties and ‘never again’ anti-war sentiment, Army Chiefs managed a shrinking army, policing the empire, garrisoning India and mandated territories, the Anglo-Irish War, and inhibited by the Ten Year Rule that ruled out major war planning.
Despite military theorists’ opinions, and Experimental Mechanized Force trials no effective warfighting doctrine emerged that would guide and instruct how to prepare for and fight future conflicts. The League of Nations had little influence on invasions in Abyssinia and Manchuria, nor Hitler’s territorial seizures and invasion of Czechoslovakia. Government budgetary restrictions prioritized Royal Navy and RAF: funding for a hastily assembled BEF was released only on the eve of war. The fall of Western Europe to the fast-advancing, disorientating combinedarms panzer divisions and Stukas showed the Wehrmacht’s “masterclass of 1940”. The British Army only formulated a warfighting doctrine near the end of the Cold War. In the epilogue the authors argue for increased defence expenditure following the Ukraine war as an “insurance premium”.