Tactics in crisis: The intellectual origins of modern warfare in the British Army, 1870-1918

There is a debate over the tactics used by British Army in the First World War, and the extent to which it assumed that civilian soldiers were incapable of learning sophisticated "fire and movement" tactics. Historians have not, however, looked very closely at the reasons why the British Army would believe that citizen under arms would be incapable of more advanced tactics. This study will examine the tactical and technological changes in the one hundred years after Waterloo, and how they interacted with British military culture to produce a paradigm of war that began to be challenged only by the second Boer War. The shift in this paradigm from a battalion-oriented view of combat to an appreciation of small-unit cohesion remained incomplete as the First World War ended.;Part of the explanation lies in the relationship between the British Army and the liberal state that was the United Kingdom. Modern society and industrialised warfare led to a sense of anxiety in the British officer corps, and this anxiety led to attempts by the career military leadership to reestablish control over its environment, even at the cost of military effectiveness. The first section of the thesis describes the various developments that led to the modern battlefield. The next chapter outlines the intellectual and cultural values of the prewar British officer corps as well as the culture of the regimental system of the British army. The third chapter follows the changes in British tactics between 1870 and 1914. An analysis of the growing alienation of the officer corps from the larger society follows: the career military's anxiety over the role of traditional military Elites in a liberal state, and its fear of British decline. This generalized anxiety is then linked to British training and tactics between 1914 and 1918. The conclusion sketches the lessons learned by the British Army from the war and the limits of British adaptation to those lessons.;The thesis uses sources such as the papers of Field-Marshal Sir AA Montgomery-Massingberd, General the Hon. Sir Charles Bonham-Carter and General Sir Ivor Maxse, Lieutenant-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, Major-General Sir Guy Dawnay and Basil Liddell Hart; government documents; tactical manuals and pamphlets; professional military journal articles written before the war; and memoirs.