Can Obama avoid Lloyd George’s trap

[Strelnikov_]

Kennedy or George, sounds like we will soon know.


The obstacle to a second major Western Front offensive, to follow the Somme the previous year, remained the hesitation of the Prime Minister. David Lloyd George was oppressed by the rising tide of British causalities, already a quarter of a million dead, and the paltry military return gained by the sacrifice.

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In June Lloyd George formed yet another inner committee of the Cabinet, in succession to the Dardanelles Committee and the War Council, to assume the higher direction of the war. . . . It’s most important sessions, however, took place on 19-21 June, when (General) Haig outlined his plans and asked for their endorsement. Lloyd George was relentless in his interrogation and criticism. He expressed doubts all too accurate about Haig’s belief in the importance of the Kerensky offensive, questioned the likelihood of capturing the U-boat ports and enquired how the offensive was to be made to succeed with a bare superiority, at best, in infantry and nothing more than equality in artillery. Haig was unshaken throughout two days of debate. Despite Lloyd Georges fears about casualties, compounded by the difficulties in finding any more men from civil life to replace those lost, Haig insisted that “it was necessary for us to go on engaging the enemy . . and he was quite confident, be could reach the first objective,” which was the crest of the Ypres ridges.

This was the nub of the difference: Haig wanted to fight, Lloyd George did not. The Prime Minister could see good reasons for avoiding a battle: that it would lose many men for little material gain, that it would not win the war – though Haig at times spoke of “great results this year”, that neither the French nor Russians would help, that the Americans were coming and that, in consequence, the best strategy was for a succession of small attacks (“Petain tactics”), rather than a repetition of the Somme. He weakened his case by urging help to Italy as a means of driving Austria out of the war but his chief failing, unexpected in a man who so easily dominated his party and parliamentary colleagues, was a lack of will to talk Haig, and his loyal supporter Robertson, down. At the end, he felt unable, as a civilian Prime Minister, “to impose my strategical views on my military advisers” and was therefore obliged to accept theirs.

The consequences would be heavy. The “Flanders Position”, as the Germans called it, was one of the strongest on the Western Front, both geographically and militarily.

. . .

The point of Passchendaele, as the third battle of Ypres has come to be known, defies explanation. . . What is unarguable is that nearly 70,000 of his soldiers had been killed in the muddy wastes of the Ypres battlefield and over 170,000 wounded.



From “The First World War” by Sir John Keegan

[msongs]

1. Rudyard Kipling's famous quote on Afghanistan - must reading for Obama....

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.

Msongs

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2. ..