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Futile Exercise? - The British Army's Preparations for War 1902-1914 (Hardcover)
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Futile Exercise? - The British Army's Preparations for War 1902-1914 (Hardcover)
Series: Wolverhampton Series
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Total price: R866
Discovery Miles: 8 660
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Winner of the 2018 Arthur Goodzeit Book Award, presented at The New
York Affair Symposium. According to the official historian
Brigadier-General James Edmonds: `In every respect the
Expeditionary Force of 1914 was incomparably the best trained, best
organized, and best equipped British Army which ever went forth to
war'. There has been considerable debate over the extent to which
Edmonds' claim was justified, and to which the British Army had
learnt the lessons of recent events (above all, its chastening
experiences in South Africa). Conventional wisdom has it that the
British Army in 1914 was utterly unprepared for the development of
trench warfare from October 1914 onwards, and that it took many
lives and a costly `learning curve' for the British to come to
terms with the new conditions of warfare. Given that war was
expected in the decade before August 1914 - and that a great deal
of time and money was spent preparing for that war - it seems
obvious to ask why the British Army was not better prepared for the
war when it came. This raises important issues about how armies
learn from their experiences and how they prepare for the
unknowable - namely, a war - without employing bullets and shells.
How realistic and useful were the exercises and manoeuvres the
British Army used in the period between the end of the Boer War in
1902 and the outbreak of war in August 1914? The approach of most
historians has been either to ignore them, or to dismiss them as a
waste of time and money. The manoeuvres carried out between 1902
and 1913 featured large forces - sometimes as many as 45,000 men
and 12,000 horses - as well as guns, trucks, trains and the first
sizeable force of military aircraft ever employed in Britain. Many
of the names later familiar from the Western Front were involved -
Haig, French, Rawlinson and Allenby - as well as a great many of
the troops who would cross to France with the British Expeditionary
Force (BEF) in August 1914. Their efforts were witnessed by large
crowds, as well as politicians, representatives of foreign armies
and journalists (some of them `embedded' with army units); there
was comprehensive and opinionated coverage in the newspapers of the
time. What lessons were learnt, what value did these manoeuvres
have and how do they relate to the events of the war - especially,
its opening months? How does the British experience compare with
those of the continental armies, who also made extensive use of
manoeuvres in this period?
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