Sir Henry Wilson, unheralded force behind Great War effort
Local interest in Sir Henry Wilson tends to focus on his Ulster-Scots ancestry, his politicking during the third Home Rule crisis (which had an adverse impact on his military career), his brief stint as MP for North Down at Westminster and as security advisor to the Northern Ireland government and his assassination on the doorstep of his London home by two members of London IRA in June 1922. However, this is to overlook his significant role in the Great War.
At the beginning of the Great War Wilson was Director of Military Operations (DMO) at the War Office and at its conclusion he was Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS), the professional head of the British Army. In the former role Wilson’s efforts ensured that the small British professional army in 1914 was better prepared for war than it had ever been.
Before his appointment as DMO in 1910, Wilson was a conspicuously successful and inspirational commandant of the Staff College. He took his students on battlefield tours of France and Belgium. He also spent much of his free time exploring the Franco-Belgian frontier with Germany, walking and cycling over the terrain where he anticipated the inevitable war between Germany and France would be fought.
An ardent Francophile and a fluent French speaker, he devoted himself to preparing the British army to take its place alongside the French, a conviction reinforced by his close friendship with the French general Ferdinand Foch, his opposite number at the French staff college.
On August 23 1911 (incidentally, the date three years later when the German army and the British Expeditionary Force would clash at Mons) H H Asquith, the prime minister, chaired a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). Richard Haldane, the secretary of state for war, Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, and Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, two of the rising stars of the Liberal Party, were also present.
As DMO, Wilson presented a brilliant exposition of the situation on the continent and persuasively outlined the purpose and plans for an expeditionary force – in effect putting ‘practical military flesh on the diplomatic bones of the entente cordiale with France’.
Having secured the approval of the CID, he perfected the ‘W-F’ (‘with France’) plan, which provided for the mobilisation of a British Expeditionary Force and its deployment across the channel to support the French.
Wilson fully appreciated that there was no military problem on the continent to which the appropriate British response was a mere six divisions.
Accordingly, he enthusiastically supported the unsuccessful campaign led by Earl Roberts for the introduction of national service before the Great War as necessary to confront Imperial Germany’s huge conscript army.
Despite the modest size of the BEF, Wilson still believed it would be sufficient to tip the balance of military strength in favour of the French and British, thus frustrating German plans for a quick victory in the west. This calculation was surely vindicated between August and the end of 1914.
Admittedly, on August 2 1914 Cabinet ministers assumed that the BEF would not be despatched to France. At this stage the expectation was that, as in previous conflicts in the 18th and 19th centuries, the British contribution would be naval, colonial and financial – paying other countries to do the fighting for them with at best only a modest military presence on the continent.
The Royal Navy was confident that it could maintain control of the seas and, in the long term, damage the German economy far more than the Germans could damage the British economy. However, this ignored the more immediate prospect of France being militarily defeated by the Germans.
Three days later a Cabinet committee decided otherwise. Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary, on the strength of Wilson’s strategic insight, believed that the BEF’s swift despatch could tip the balance between France and Germany and it needed to be sent quickly.
Wilson had planned in detail the transportation of an expeditionary force of up to six infantry divisions and one cavalry division to take up position on the French Army’s northern flank by day 13 of mobilisation.
Wilson went to France with the BEF as sub-chief of the general staff. At the end of 1914 Sir John French, C-in-C of the BEF, wanted to promote Wilson to be chief of staff, but this Asquith and Lord Kitchener, the newly appointed secretary for war, objected to because they mistrusted Wilson, regarding him as ‘a political general’ because of his involvement in the third Home Rule crisis. (While Asquith had no military nous, Kitchener had no political nous.)
As Sir Douglas Haig, French’s successor, shared their views, Wilson was kept out of key positions for most of the war.
When Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916, Wilson’s prospects improved because Lloyd George did not share Asquith’s evaluation of him and because Wilson’s pre-war strategic vision had impressed him.
Lloyd George was frustrated by the costly war of attrition on the western front, and the repeated failure of Haig and Sir William Robertson, the CIGS, to make any discernible progress. He also found Haig and Robertson disagreeable but liked Wilson, appreciating his shrewd intelligence and ability to explain the military situation intelligibly to civilians.
In September 1917 Wilson was appointed head of eastern command, a London-based position, which enabled Lloyd George to consult him unofficially and regularly on military and strategic matters.
By February 1918 Lloyd George had managed to appoint Wilson CIGS, thereby placing him at the centre of policy-making for the remainder of the war.
On one of Foch’s earliest visits to London before the war, Wilson allegedly introduced Foch to colleagues at the War Office by observing, ‘Mark my words, this fellow is going to command the Allied armies when the big war comes on.’
If true, and story may be apocryphal, this signifies that Wilson had accepted the principle of unity of command and identified the man for the job – although it was to take four years of war and the huge shock of the German offensive of March 1918 to realise it.