Unified Strategy
Lessons of Allied Co-operation, Naval, Military and Air, 1914- 1918. By Sir Frederick Maurice.- (Oxford University Press. Issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. los. 6d.)
THE chief lesson which emerges from this study of the Allies' attempts to reach agreement on the main problems of policy and strategy in the course of the Four Years' War is the sterility of strategic discussion when clear guidance on questions of policy is lacking. This lesson was exemplified by the Franco-British staff talks before the war, when the lack of a political agreement resulted not-only in the British General Staff being committed to a plan— the ill-fated Plan XVII—with which they were unfamiliar, but in the even more absurd and dangerous consequence of the British Admiralty and the British War Office being committed to mutually inconsistent plans, each in ignorance of the other's intentions. The evil was not wholly eradicated when, in the winter of 1917-1918, a long series of conferences on the best method of meeting the obvious dangers created by the elimination of Russia from the struggle led only to the creation of a theoretical General Reserve and to the actual transfer of one division to the Western Front. It was not until October, 1918, that "With everything going well there were no difficulties in co-operation." In the meanwhile, what seems in retrospect, and unless the really immense difficulties are fully appreciated, a painfully slow process of evolution had led to the formation of the Supreme War Council, which, meeting monthly, and consisting of the Prime Minister and one other Minister of the Principal Allied Powers, formulated the decisions on grand strategy in the last year of the war. Its short- comings, in the author's view, can be judged rightly only in com- parison with the chaos, mitigated by improvisations, which preceded it. "There cannot be much doubt," he says, "in the mind of any- one reading the account of the discussions which took place at the beginning of 1915 as to the form which our policy and strategY should take, and the story of the initiation of the Dardanelles cam- paign, that the task of the Allies might have been greatly lightened and the war materially shortened had there been in existence then body charged with reviewing allied policy and strategy as a whole.. General Maurice wisely rarains from drawing analogies in I" respect between this war, in which the political background differ9 so much, and the last. But he concludes that "If and when the organisation of international power for the maintenance of Peace is required, the first necessity seems to be the establishment of
supreme council, provided with a permanent secretariat." And, m connexion with the technique of the maintenance of peace equallY with that of the conduct of war, it is interesting to find him recording the view that "the easiest form of military co-operation to arrange is that of air forces, the most difficult is that of armies." This book will be found invaluable as a study of the technique of the higher direction of war. It is, in addition, and in spite of its impersonal style, a piece of living history. As head of the operations section at G.H.Q. and later as Director of Military Opera- tions at the War Office, the author was intimately connected with the events which he describes. He is a man as well as a historian, with partialities, preferences and convictions ; it need scarcely be said that he finds it easier to do justice to Haig or Robertson than to Lloyd George or Henry Wilson. But few histories can have derived more benefit and acquired fewer drawbacks from the author's personal acquaintance with the scene and the actors than
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