‘operational art’ in a creative sense. Corps headquarters focused on planning
before action rather than command during it. The systems were scientific,
depending on early forms of operational research to analyse effects and to suggest
changes, and the essence in a mass army was on management not inspiration. The
progressive loosening of trench warfare in 1918 had a reverse effect. Institution-
ally, the need for mobility meant that the corps had to decentralize command
once more, giving divisions greater freedom, and allowing them more control of
their own firepower. But, in terms of strategy, words which had seemed lost in
1915–17 re-entered the considerations of planners. The biggest constraints on the
Allied advances in 1918 were logistic: a form of war which assumed fixed lines of
operations was replaced by one where the possibility of threatening those of the
enemy gave meaning to operational art once more.
Douglas Haig’s response to all this was to stress the continuing validity of the
Field Service Regulationsof 1909. On 22 August 1918, his headquarters issued
guidance for the conduct of future attacks which referred toPart I: Operations,
left to subordinate commanders’ decisions about how to attack, and sought to
reunite tactics and strategy. Advance guards were to identify enemy defences, and
thereafter ‘units and formations should be directed onpointsof strategic and
tactical importance some distance ahead...and they should not be ordered to
move on objective lines’. 50 Haig argued that the flexibility and adaptability of the
Field Service Regulations, their adherence to principles not doctrine, had been
vindicated by the outcome of the war. When he penned his final dispatch on
21 March 1919, he concluded that the First World War possessed ‘the same
general features and the same necessary stages which between forces of approxi-
mately equal strength have marked all the conclusive battles of history’. He went
on to refer to the ‘accepted principles of war’, to the ‘axiom that decisive success in
battle can be gained only by a vigorous offensive’, and to the ‘close and complete
co-operation between all arms and services’. 51
THE LESSONS OF THE FIRST WORLD WARHaig recognized changes but subsumed them within an overall framework of
continuity; others saw just change. Strategy in particular no longer meant what it
had meant to Jomini, and even to Clausewitz. The war had been won by alliances
and by the mobilization of national resources. J. F. C. Fuller and—in due
course—Basil Liddell Hart added the adjective ‘grand’ to the noun ‘strategy’ to
describe something more akin to policy than to what armies did within theatres
of war. The effect was to open out the possibilities for operational art more
explicitly to describe how armies were commanded. And Haig’s critics were
increasingly persuaded that it was to this level, that of army command, that the
principal traumas of the First World War could be attributed. The mass army was
ponderous, the staff system had generated predictability not imagination, and the
emphasis on firepower had worked against manoeuvre. ‘Armies, through their
Operational Art and Britain, 1909–2009 111