The British Army between the World Wars

How the victorious British Army of November 1918 became the defeated British Army of 1940 is the subject of Victory to Defeat. This is a story about failure: national, military, civilian, institutional, and human failure; failures of imagination and industry, and failures so consequential that the things that worked get crowded out of the picture. This book concentrates on the interwar British Army’s inability to get the right answer to the vital question: what is the nature of future war?

The authors’ qualifications are exceptional. Lord Richard Dannatt is a retired four-star general, a former Chief of the General Staff. Richard Lyman, also a retired soldier, has a Ph. D in history and is the author of over 20 books. Their opening section describes offensive operations in the last 100 days of the Great War. For the British Army, this was not only a triumph but a transition, between the desperate defense against the German 1918 offensives and the 1918-22 period’s interlocking crises – in the United Kingdom, throughout the Empire, and worldwide – none of which were amenable to solution by the defensive or offensive capabilities that had proven successful in 1918. It was soon apparent that the costs of the Great War prevented the British Army, much like successive governments or society as a whole, from acknowledging that another such conflict was possible or – after the rise of Hitler – likely, until after 1938 and Munich. The authors point out how the British Army buried the lessons of the Great War for years and did not even produce a service-level assessment until the 1932 Kirke Report. Fighting another great war was politically unthinkable and was certainly not part of the British Army’s preferred bureaucratic repertoire.

The interwar decline of British landpower was a logical result from continued imperial commitments and from a national strategy based in reliance on the League of Nations, the Locarno pact, and, finally, appeasement. All were embraced by Britain’s leadership as preferred alternatives to investment in an army that could repeat the victories of 1918. Nor could the interwar British Army present to successive governments a cohesive vision of the army they should be building, the nature of future war, or a process for achieving an effective operational doctrine.

The book compares the interwar years with the British Army’s experience between the end of the Cold War in 1991 and the Russian attack on Ukraine in 2023. In recent years, Dominic Cummings, a senior advisor to the prime minister, had argued that precision guided munitions such as cruise missiles and kamikaze drones rendered the British Army effectively redundant. The authors point at the inability to deter aggression starting in the Rhineland in 1935 – the last British troops had left Germany five years before – has found an echo in the difficulties much of NATO has experienced in responding to a renewed threat to European security.

The book is not a comprehensive history of the interwar British Army. Of the many failures covered, it concentrates on the failure to develop a force structure, doctrine, or capability for mechanized combined arms operations. This was certainly not the only area where capabilities eroded. For example, air-ground cooperation did not again achieve its 1918-level capabilities until 1942-43. The book does not address other parts of the story, including some where interwar decisions actually led to wartime effectiveness, such as the organization of 7^th Armored Division in Egypt, the original “Desert Rats”, able to carry out effective mechanized combined arms operations, demonstrated by the defeat of the Italian forces in the Western Desert in 1940-41. The British Expeditionary Force of 1939-40 was the first major army able to deploy and sustain itself in the field without relying on draft animals. Artillery remained a strength, even though the British Army went to war in 1939 with few of the heavy guns that had proven important in 1918 and antitank defense remained a major deficiency. Similarly, while the authors set out how the British Army responded to some of the many interwar-era conflicts (post-1918 Ireland) and the defeats in Norway and France in 1940, other conflicts receive little coverage. There is little on the late-1930s insurgency in Palestine; the deployment of two divisions from Britain gave advance warning – largely ignored – of the army’s limitations. The book gives relatively little attention to the Empire and overseas commitments that were the priority and preoccupation of the generals and politicians alike for most of the interwar years.

The endnotes show that the book is sourced largely from the extensive published literature. The War Office files in the UK National Archives are conspicuous by their absence, as is treatment of the limitations to the defense industrial base, which made modernization impossible for years for any of the services even had political leadership, resource allocation and doctrine not all been painfully inadequate. Some of these limitations were never resolved; the wartime British Army ended up relying on US tank designs and production. More tabular data, information on the allocation of funding between personnel, procurement, research and development and other requirements as well as organizational diagrams, especially of experimental and proposed mechanized formations, would all have been appreciated.

The British Army’s interwar approach differed considerably from that of the US Navy, another institution with limited access to resources, which claims that its wargaming in those years succeeded in identifying all the major challenges that it would eventually encounter during the Pacific war (with the significant exception of the kamikaze threat). In the interwar years, insights gained from these wargames were subject to real-world testing in fleet battle experiments and exercises.

The failures of the interwar British Army to think, learn adapt has applicability to its US counterparts. The US Army has, since the end of the Vietnam War, aimed at being a “learning organization”. Yet this could not prevent the Army playing a central role in the whole-of-government failures that marked the 20 years of conflict post-2001. Achieving national objectives through creating and implementing an effective grand strategy has proved as out of reach for the US in those years as it did for interwar Britain. As a result, burying hard-won combat lessons is back in effect, having been proven to be hardly limited to the 1920s British Army. This approach is echoed by the current attitude towards the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and counterinsurgency in general in the US military; no one wants to do that again and no one is looking to invest in maintaining capabilities or studying what worked and what did not. It is difficult and costly in time and resources for a military force to acquire capabilities or expertise but easy, cheap and quick to lose them in the absence of a specific, well-resourced effort supported by institutional goals and norms.

While not a comprehensive or in-depth study, this book makes the reader uneasy about what has happened to the British army in the decades since the Cold War ended (much of which applies to today’s US counterparts as well). This is a worthwhile and valuable history. Victory to Defeat wears its polemic intent on its sleeve, but it does so skillfully and without undercutting its value as history.

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Note: Victory to Defeat is also available in e-editions.

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