4
Operational Art and Britain,
1909–2009
Hew Strachan
DOCTRINE AND OPERATIONAL ARTIn 1982, two former officers of the Royal Artillery, Shelford Bidwell and Domi-
nick Graham, published the first serious study of how the British army had both
waged and thought about war in the first half of the twentieth century. Bidwell, a
brigadier who had been commissioned in 1933 and had served in North Africa
and Italy in the Second World War, edited theJournal of the Royal United Services
Institutebetween 1971 and 1975. Graham, who also served in the Second World
War, but in Norway and North-West Europe as well as in North Africa, had
become professor of military history at the University of New Brunswick. They,
therefore, knew of what they spoke. TitledFire-Power: British Army Weapons and
Theories of War 1904– 1945 , their book blazed a trail so developed and widened by
subsequent historians in the following quarter-century that it can be easy to
forget the intellectual vacuum that preceded its appearance.
Three transformations have occurred since 1982. First, our knowledge of the
tactical and operational thought of the British army for the First World War in
particular (Graham’s special area of expertise) is now more complete than that for
any other major European army. Second, the British army has since acquired a
reputation for operational excellence which, even if somewhat tarnished since
2003, would have amazed both Bidwell and Graham, both of them witnesses to
the succession of reverses and humiliations undergone by the same army between
1940 and 1942. Third, much of that success has been predicated on the develop-
ment of doctrine, at least since 1989.
Bidwell and Graham began their study with an identification of the principal
deficiency in the British army of 1906. It lacked ‘what military men called “doctrine”:
the definition of the aim of military operations; the study of weapons and other
resources and the lessons of history, leading to the deductions of the correct strategic
and tactical principles on which to base both training and the conduct of war’. 1 Not
much had changed in their professional lifetimes. Writing the epilogue to their book
in 1981, they concluded that, ‘despite its achievements since 1906, the Army remains
what it was then,sansdoctrine and an unprofessional coalition of arms and services’. 2