There was a fleeting moment, during the One Hundred Days battles that ended the First World War in France, in which successful all-arms manoeuvre by the British and Commonwealth armies, able to overturn the deadlock of previous years of trench stalemate, was glimpsed. But the moment, for the British Army at least, was not understood for what it was. With hindsight we can see that it was the birth of modern warfare, in which armour, infantry, artillery and air power are welded together able successfully to fight and win a campaign against a similarly equipped enemy.
Unfortunately in the intervening 20 years the British Army forgot how to fight a peer adversary in intensive combat. It did not recognise 1918 for what it was: a defining moment in the development of warfare that needed capturing and translating into a doctrine on which the future of the British Army could be built. The tragedy of the inter-war years therefore was that much of what had been learned at such high cost in blood and treasure between 1914 and 1918 was simply forgotten.
This provides a warning for our modern Army that once it goes, the ability to fight intensively at campaign level is incredibly hard to recover. co-authored by General Lord Dannatt and myself traces this loss of fighting knowledge after the end of the war, and explains the reasons for it. Knowledge so expensively learned vanished very quickly as the Army quickly adjusted back to its pre-war raison d’etre: imperial policing. Unsurprisingly, it was what many miliary men wanted: a return to the certainties of 1914. It was certainly what the government wanted: no more wartime extravagance of taxpayers’ scarce resources. The Great War was seen by nearly everyone to be
