Too Important for the Generals - Losing and Winning the First World War

Allan Mallinson

ISBN 10: 0593058186 / ISBN 13: 9780593058183

Published by Bantam Press, London, 2016

About this Item

400 pages (xxiv, 376), appendices, index; publisher's black cloth with gilt titles on the spine; black pictorial dust-jacket. Fine, no writing, markup, labels or other defacements; unclipped jacket. Pictures show this actual book. UK orders are post-free.

Seller Inventory # 153172

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Too Important for the Generals - Losing and Winning the First World War
• Publisher: Bantam Press, London
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593058186
• ISBN 13: 9780593058183
• Binding: Hardcover/Hardback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Printing: First printing
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Military Affairs

About this title

Synopsis

"War is too important to be left to the generals," snapped future French prime minister Georges Clemenceau on learning of yet another bloody and futile offensive on the Western Front.

One of the great questions in the ongoing discussions and debate about World War I is why did winning take so long and exact so appalling a human cost? After all, this was a fight that, we were told, would be over by Christmas. Now, in his major new history, Allan Mallinson, former professional soldier and author of the acclaimed 1914: Fight the Good Fight provides answers that are disturbing as well as controversial, and have a contemporary resonance. He disputes the growing consensus among historians that British generals were not to blame for the losses and setbacks in the "war to end all wars"—that, given the magnitude of their task, they did as well anyone could have. He takes issue with the popular view that the "amateur" opinions on strategy of politicians such as Lloyd George and, especially, Winston Churchill, prolonged the war and increased the death toll. On the contrary, he argues, even before the war began Churchill had a far more realistic, intelligent, and humane grasp of strategy than any of the admirals or generals, while very few senior officers—including Sir Douglas Haig—were up to the intellectual challenge of waging war on this scale. And he repudiates the received notion that Churchill’s stature as a wartime prime minister after 1940 owes much to the lessons he learned from his World War I "mistakes"—notably the Dardanelles campaign—maintaining that in fact Churchill’s achievement in WWII owes much to the thwarting of his better strategic judgment by the "professionals" in WWI—and his determination that this would not be repeated. Mallinson argues that, from day one of the war, Britain was wrong-footed by absurdly faulty French military doctrine and paid, as a result, an unnecessarily high price in casualties. He shows that Lloyd George understood only too well the catastrophically dysfunctional condition of military policy-making and struggled against the weight of military opposition to fix it. And he asserts that both the British and the French failed to appreciate what the Americans’ contribution to victory could be—and, after the war, to acknowledge fully what it had actually been.

About the Author

Allan Mallinson is a former professional soldier and the author of the Matthew Hervey series of novels, which include Honorable Company and A Close Run Thing.