Robin Neillands > Quotes

“In Britain, and in many parts of her former Empire, the blame for the death toll is generally laid on the incompetence and callousness of the Great War generals, especially the British generals. In France, they blame their politicians; in Germany, historians blame the Kaiser.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The British generals have been widely castigated for their actions in this war and their prodigality with lives; it is hard to find evidence that the French or German generals were any better.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“A total of 895,000 French soldiers died in battle during the Great War, but a further 420,000 died of wounds in the casualty clearing stations, from gangrene or septicaemia or some other sickness, much of it preventable.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“What any analysis of the first day on the Somme comes down to is the familiar lesson - that Western Front defensive positions could not be stormed and taken by any means currently open to the attacker. The British assault on the first day of the Somme was a classic example of a nineteenth-century attack, only with aircraft in the scouting role in the place of cavalry.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The collapse of morale in the French Army arose not because of the German attack at Verdun but because the French generals, specifically Nivelle, also adopted the doctrine of attrition, and fought with cran and élan, instead of intelligence.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“it is difficult not to wonder what the outcome would have been if the Entente had simply held its ground in France and Belgium and tackled Germany and Austria-Hungary by sending every piece of kit they could spare to the Russians - which is not unlike what happened until 1944 in the Second World War.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Many historians still cite Lloyd George's previously quoted comment that the European nations 'stumbled into war' as evidence that no nation was entirely free of guilt for the conflict, but a careful analysis of German plans and ambitions in the pre-war years by the German historian Fritz Fischer confirms the popular opinion that the root causes of the Great War were German militarism and political ambition - and that these roots had been established for some time.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The private soldiers of France were not well treated during the Great War; compared with their lot, the soldiers of the other armies on the Western Front were blessed with good food, reliable mail, adequate pay, frequent reliefs and regular leave.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“As time went by, matters improved; the armies, especially the British and French Armies, became better at staying alive while killing larger numbers of the enemy which, though hardly a matter for satisfaction in human terms, is what well-trained armies are supposed to do.”
― Robin Neillands, The Great War Generals on the Western Front, 1914-1918

“The secret of any advance through a well-defended and carefully prepared position in the Great War depended almost entirely on artillery. In spite of the popular image created by TV documentaries and military memoirs, the Great War was primarily an artillery war. Over 60 per cent of the casualties were caused by artillery, and only artillery - heavy artillery - could beat down the enemy defences, flatten the wire, stun his troops, knock out the defending batteries and let the attackers go forward.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Battles on the Western Front were invariably subject to the law of diminishing returns. Given sufficient artillery and manpower and a degree of surprise, an attack might succeed in taking some or all of its immediate objectives. Then the attack would falter; command and control would weaken, largely because of poor communications; the enemy, though initially stunned, would bring up reserves and any successes gained would either be hotly and expensively contested, or rapidly contained.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“As for Verdun, while the estimates vary, the most widely accepted figure is 377,231 French and 337,000 German - a total of more than 700,000 men.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing well. This is the by-now-familiar 'breakthrough' or 'bite and hold' argument and, since Rawlinson's view prevailed, his proposals are the ones to examine.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“most of the French generals were, indeed, totally indifferent to the welfare of the men, provided the attacks went in.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In August 1914, the BEF mustered two corps totalling four divisions (plus a cavalry division) from an Army which, at full strength, could muster eleven divisions. When the Battle of the Somme opened two years later, on 1 July 1916, the BEF could muster 58 divisions in 18 corps organized in four armies”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Total casualties on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, come to some 1,300,000 men, British, French and German. The British share in this total includes the losses incurred by the Empire and Commonwealth troops, from Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand, and amounts to some 400,000 men. The French lost 200,000 men on the Somme, to add to the more serious losses of Verdun. German losses on the Somme came to more than 600,000 men, killed,”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The decision on when to break off an attack, like the decision to launch it, is one requiring careful calculation and fine judgement. That said, Haig's judgement in fighting on into the early winter of 1916, when he could have stopped after Flers, is a clear error.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Pétain saw this fixation on attaque à outrance as one of the reasons French losses were so high, especially among the officer corps, and on taking over command of the French Armies in 1917, he dismissed the Grandmaison doctrine like this: 'Modern tactics are no longer Napoleonic tactics. They are dominated and controlled by the progress in armaments, by the extraordinary growth in fire power.' Even more extraordinary is the fact that this still needed pointing out to the French officer corps as late as 1917.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“the British infantry assault on the German positions north of the Somme began at 0730 hrs on 1 July 1916. A force of some 120,000 British soldiers of Fourth and Third Armies assaulted the German line between Maricourt and Gommecourt. Their attack was pressed home with great resolution - and at considerable cost. By the end of that day, 19,240 men had been killed outright and the total casualty figure, including the missing and those taken prisoner-of-war, amounted to 57,470 men.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed from the first as an offensive but major battles and offensives do not happen overnight.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“The regular lesson of the Western Front, one the generals seemed unable to learn, was that - using the currently conventional methods - most attacks simply did not come off, whoever carried them out”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“on the day the Somme battle opened, the French share of the offensive had shrunk to 14 divisions compared to 16 British divisions; this fact disposes of one of the lesser British myths, that the French only played a minor part in the Somme offensive. On the first day of the Somme, the French divisions on the right also did far better than most of the British divisions.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“This view - that Germany was not responsible for the outbreak of war - was maintained for the next two decades, during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, and was only finally refuted by the extensive researches made into the Wilhelmine archives at Potsdam by Professor Fritz Fischer, research which proved beyond any reasonable doubt that Germany had been planning a major European war for years and saw the Sarajevo incident, and the subsequent reactions of Austria-Hungary and Serbia, as a chance to start it.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“In the second week of June, two second-lieutenants were shot by firing squads drawn from their own companies, for allegedly failing to press home their attacks. Orders also went out that battalions abandoning positions or retiring during an attack were to be fired on by their own machine-guns or bombarded by French artillery. Some of these orders were actually obeyed but the resentment they caused far outweighed the influence they had on the front-line soldier.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Not so the French poilu. His pay was meagre, his food disgusting - though his wine was drinkable - his leave infrequent, letters from home often failed to arrive, and his life was all too often thrown away in frontal attacks that usually achieved nothing but an extensive casualty list. Much of this was simply due to poor staff work, to incompetence rather than indifference,”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“even today, 85 years after the battle, an average year of scavenging on the Somme battlefield provides the disposal squads of the French Army with 90 tons of dangerous ordnance.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916

“Physical bravery is essential in second lieutenants but dangerous in general officers. They should learn caution and judgement as they rise through the ranks; a general needs moral courage, not least the courage to make a hard decision and stick to it under pressure from his superiors and events.”
― Robin Neillands, Attrition: The Great War on the Western Front – 1916