“If you think you know about the First World War, this series will make you think again.”

MICHAEL BAKER IS on a mission to change the way we think about the First World War.

According to the U.K.-based screenwriter-turned-podcaster, much of what the public imagines that it understands about the conflict is wrong. For decades, Baker argues, conventional wisdom painted an overly simplistic picture of the war — one of a pointless, prolonged slaughter presided over by a clique of thick-headed and callous generals.

“The popular British narrative about the First World War is that it was wasteful and futile. [It’s] the verdict of a handful of poets who fought in the trenches,” says Baker. “This view grew to prominence in the 1960s and continued to flourish during the recent centenary of the conflict.”

In recent years however, professional historians have come to a more nuanced understanding of the Great War. Yet somehow, the decades-old thinking about the conflict persists.

​That’s where Baker’s new podcast, Unknown Warriors comes in. The 10-episode series, which launched in 2019, enlists some of today’s leading historians on the conflict to help dispel the old myths and shed new light on a war the public continues to misunderstand.

“If you think you know about the First World War, this series will make you think again,” says Baker.

MHN recently caught up with Baker to talk to him about the podcast and what listeners can expect when they tune in. Here’s what he told us. 

MHN: Tell us how your podcast series sets out to reframe the way people think about the First World War.

During the recent centenary of the war, I was still teaching history full-time. Part of my job as head of department was to organize a rolling program of commemorative events over the four years. So every term I invited a professional historian to come and speak to the school on some aspect of WW1. What struck me forcibly at the time was how what these historians were telling us bore little or no relation to the still-dominant popular British narrative of the war, namely that it was all defeat, waste and futility, with the far too many casualties needlessly squandered for little real gain.

[pullquote]”The British preoccupation with their dead of the Great War not only skewed our view of a vast global conflict, but cast the generation who fought and lived through it as hapless victims to be pitied.”[/pullquote]

More than this, it seemed to me that the British preoccupation with their dead of the Great War – the British have built by far the greatest number of WW1 cemeteries across the world (in the Ypres Salient alone there are three to every square mile on average) – not only skewed our view of a vast global conflict, but cast the generation who fought and lived through it as hapless victims to be pitied rather than people of their own time and place. We were, I thought, projecting onto them our own contemporary moral and cultural values rather than trying to understand what they felt about the war from the standpoint of a very different society.

And thus was born the idea for this podcast series, which attempts to show that the popular British narrative of the war is now very out-dated and lags far behind current scholarship (and has for many years).

All the historians in the series are pioneers or leaders in their field and brought out books or articles to mark the centenary – though, as so often happens at major anniversaries, many of these publications came and went in a publishing blitz, making little impact. I felt these authors should be heard, they had something new and interesting to say.

MHN: Tell us about what sort of episodes listeners can expect.

The series starts with a tour (expertly led by Heather Jones) of the historiographical landscape. Though the popular British narrative drew on a trend that had gained traction as far back as the 1930s, arguably its heyday was in the 1960s, at the 50^th anniversary of the war, and it’s instructive to see how the social and cultural climate at that time (anti-establishment, anti-war – both nuclear and Vietnam – and egalitarian) helped shape a popular view of the conflict that chimed with the angry and agonized message of the war poets (Wilfred Owen in particular hit it big in the ‘60s).

It was only as new archives opened up and fresh historiographical approaches took hold (comparative, trans-national and global history) that a later generation of historians could unearth a much richer, more complex and more nuanced narrative.

A number of episodes in the series deliberately focus on the Western Front – because this is perhaps the most enduring aspect of the war’s popular appeal in Britain, albeit for mostly negative reasons.

[pullquote]”No one would deny that this was a tragedy, nor that British generals sometimes got it wrong.”[/pullquote]

Several contributors (Gary Sheffield and Jonathan Boff are perhaps the best known) show how a much more contextualized understanding of this key theatre – a challenging environment for all the combatant armies, not just the British – reveals not only the severe limitations under which command operated (not least in pre-wireless communications) but how, remarkably quickly if not always consistently, armies adapted and improved to a point where the Allied coalition was able to muster a sufficiently effective method of attack to drive the Germans back and force them to negotiate.

As Jonathan Boff explains, such an outcome was as much about a parallel German collapse – of morale, of manpower, of resources, and of leadership – which had been building since at least the end of the Somme campaign of 1916. So 1918, so often ignored or diminished in the traditional narrative, was very definitely a year of Allied victory, and was celebrated as such in Britain for some years after the war. It was only in the later 1920s and ‘30s, as the social and political climate changed, that a more sombre note began to prevail which prioritized the commemoration of the fallen.

Of course, a key element in the popular view of the war is the high British casualty rate suffered at key offensives like the Somme and Passchendaele (we tend to overlook the equally horrific French ordeal at Verdun). No one would deny (and no one in the series does) that this was a tragedy, nor that British generals sometimes got it wrong. But historians who have examined both the bigger picture of the Western Front and the detail on the ground now suggest a number of alternative perspectives on this issue.

Firstly, this was an unprecedented and complex war involving mass armies, so all sides in the conflict sustained huge casualties, not just the British. Indeed, overall German casualties were much higher and, on the Eastern Front, where Russians fought Austro-Hungarians and Germans, the casualty rate dwarfed anything in the West, as did Ottoman Turk losses in the Middle East.

Secondly, if British generals (and here is usually meant Haig) made mistakes, the German high command were also guilty of key operational misjudgements (the gamble of the 1918 spring offensives being only one) that greatly multiplied their casualties and, arguably, prolonged the war.

Thirdly, despite the above, and despite the land war never actually encroaching on British soil, the long-held British preoccupation with the culpability of its high command bears no parallel in the historiography of any of the other combatant nations (as Heather Jones makes clear). It remains, stubbornly, a peculiarly British interpretation, impervious to the fact that, as part of the Allied coalition, British armies helped win the war.

Lastly, though the Somme and Passchendaele are usually held up as examples of ‘pointless pain for pitiful gain,’ in fact, the mobile warfare of 1914 and 1918 saw much higher casualties. Moreover, as William Philpott makes clear, both battles (lasting months) were atypical of warfare on the Western Front, but equally the Somme in particular actually made a considerable and lasting impact on the Germans – their withdrawal to the more easily defensible Hindenburg Line in February 1917 being one outcome.

MHN: The ‘lions led by donkeys’ narrative that emerged over the decades has been persistent. Why?

This narrative has had a long gestation and is really inseparable from a protracted debate, which has consumed the British historiography, over Douglas Haig’s generalship on the Western Front. Even during the war itself there was some criticism of Haig, not least within government circles, in particular from David Lloyd George, who tried to get him sacked. But it was not until the 1930s, after Haig’s death (in 1928, when 200,000 respectful ex-servicemen filed past his coffin), that criticism began to become more widespread and more vituperative, extending by association to British command in general on the Western Front.

The military historian Basil Liddell-Hart, a great fan of Haig’s during and after the war, published The Real War in 1930, criticizing Haig for ignorance of battle conditions, for lack of realism, and for the hell he put his soldiers through. A far greater impact was made by Lloyd George’s War Memoirs in 1935-36 in which he accused Haig of egotism and incompetence, of a lack of vision and imagination, and of sending thousands to their deaths needlessly. This became, essentially, Haig’s popular reputation thereafter, despite the fact that Lloyd George’s account was less than truthful on many issues (he had, after all, been Haig’s political boss for the duration of his command).

[pullquote]”The Second World War, itself a reproach to the failure of the First, also served to reinforce the view that the Great War had been both pointless and badly managed.”[/pullquote]

But by the 1930s attitudes to the Great War were very different from what they had been. The war poets (Siegfried Sassoon, Owen and Robert Graves) – none of them typical either of British Tommies or their officers or indeed British writers of the time – had all been published by 1930, as had (in English) All Quiet On The Western Front, with the Hollywood film adaptation of 1930 making, arguably, an even bigger impact than the book.

Pacifism and appeasement were in the air – Britain had the largest peace movement in the world in the 1930s – and disillusion with the war’s outcome (it had not created ‘a land fit for heroes’, far from it) grew stronger as the Depression took hold.

The Second World War, itself a reproach to the failure of the First, also served to reinforce the view that the Great War had been both pointless and badly managed: the Somme – a gain of seven miles for 420,000 British Empire casualties – looked distinctly incompetent if not callous when compared to El Alamein (where a mere 5,000 were killed) or D-Day; equally, the heroics of Dunkirk and the Blitz or the unmitigated evil of the Holocaust – or indeed the Allied occupation of a comprehensively defeated Germany in 1945 – had no parallel in WW1, leaving the achievement of the earlier conflict even more uncertain.

When the 50^th anniversary of the First World War came round in the mid-1960s, the ‘lions led by donkeys’ trope – which actually had a long provenance, having been cited in earlier British wars – was given renewed impetus by Alan Clark’s The Donkeys (1961), a scathing attack on British command (under Sir John French and Sir Douglas Haig) at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Clark claimed the phrase was coined by the German high command to describe British Tommies, but later admitted he had made this up. However, the tag, redolent of class-ridden military stupidity, caught on, and was then amplified by the musical Oh What A Lovely War! in 1963 (a successful film version followed in 1969) – a witty, satirical take on the futility of the conflict given superficial authenticity by the use of songs popularised by the Tommies.

This hostile view of the British top brass was compounded by the prevailing anti-establishment and anti-war mood of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well as by a trend towards social history which saw bottom-up accounts of the First World War grab the attention.

Martin Middlebrook’s The First Day of the Somme (1971) poignantly retold in the men’s own words the destruction of the Pals battalions, while John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) contained a visceral chapter about what it was like for the ordinary soldier on the murderous July 1, 1916. Both books powerfully enshrined in the popular British narrative the notion that the first day of the Somme was the Somme, to the exclusion of the rest of this five-month long campaign and, Passchendaele apart, served to reduce the rest of the war on the Western Front, even Allied victory in 1918, to little more than a footnote.

Although there were professional historians in the 1960s and ‘70s (notably John Terraine) who countered the prevailing view of Haig and the generals as ‘butchers and bunglers,’ this popular narrative continued undiminished to the end of the 20^th century – given an added cultural boost by the comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth (1989).

It was only in the 1990s and after that a group of professional military historians, using newly opened archives at Kew, began to reassess the realities of command and control on the Western Front and put together a much more nuanced view that took into account the unprecedented challenges facing armies on all sides in this theatre of the conflict.

Notable among these historians was Gary Sheffield, two of whose books – Forgotten Victory (2001) and the more recent The Chief: Douglas Haig and the British Army (2011) – argued that the First World War had to be fought and won, and this outcome was achieved when the Allied armies finally overcame their mistakes and got their act together in 1918. While acknowledging that Haig made some costly misjudgements, Sheffield portrays a competent general who was above all a formidable war manager and must therefore be credited, with Marshal Foch, for playing his part in eventual Allied victory.

The current consensus among historians seems to incline towards this reappraisal, though you wouldn’t necessarily have known it during the recent centenary, which found it hard to get away from the simpler, more emotional narrative of the war which everybody could agree on – namely, that thousands of young men in trenches were slaughtered in terrible conditions. If the question of who was to blame and whether this slaughter was needless is less prominent than it was, it still lingers, influenced perhaps by the bad press the British Empire has also received in some quarters: like WW1, the empire was also, so this argument goes, run by a hidebound elite insensitive to those who served them.

MHN: What other new insights into the conflict will listeners gain?

As Heather Jones explains in an expert appraisal of the historiography, much of the work done by the current generation of professional WW1 historians reflects trends towards comparative, trans-national and global approaches to the war. This has inevitably given rise to new interpretations that have eclipsed the old Anglo-centric view.

Jonathan Boff’s account of the Western Front through German eyes yields some surprising twists to the more familiar British story. For example, it’s clear that for most of the war the French were regarded by the Germans as more of a threat than the British – who often lagged behind in getting their act together and, perhaps as a consequence, tended to suffer greater casualties.

[pullquote]”Allied victory in 1918 came not just because Allied armies got better at fighting the enemy, but because the German army simultaneously got worse.”[/pullquote]

Boff also debunks the notion (current at the time and since) that the German army was this sophisticated military machine, highly efficient, meritocratic and resilient. He argues to the contrary, citing an inflexible command structure plagued by factions and infighting that led to weaknesses inseparable from the Germans’ defeats. In the end, Boff concludes, Allied victory in 1918 came not just because Allied armies got better at fighting the enemy, but because the German army simultaneously got worse.

Another aspect of the war which has also benefited from a more global approach is the Indian contribution. Some 1.5 million Indians volunteered to serve in the Allied cause and fought across some 50 countries, and yet, as George Morton Jack tells us, most general histories of the conflict have largely ignored and misunderstood their role. He shows how a number of racially-inspired myths have grown up, notably that Indian troops were less able to cope on the Western Front (some 80,000 Indians served there from 1914 to 1918) than their European counterparts.

In fact, the Indian Army, the traditional peace-keepers throughout Britain’s far-flung empire, was a highly trained and experienced force which was deployed to the trenches as soon as they arrived in France (unlike the Canadians, who had to undergo training in England first). Many Indian soldiers had served on the North-West Frontier, so they were excellent snipers and proved resourceful trench raiders. Morton Jack claims that for a brief period, in the autumn of 1914, the dire British position on the Western Front was rescued by Indian forces.

He also reveals the somewhat schizophrenic mind set of ordinary Indian soldiers, caught between their British colonial masters, who paid them a regular wage and other benefits, and the pressures of growing Indian nationalism on the one hand and (for Muslim sepoys) the Turkish call to jihad against the Allies on the other. It meant that the British took care to prioritize the welfare of Indian troops on the Western Front, but Morton Jack argues that this was highly selective and part of a canny British propaganda exercise designed to represent the Empire as a benign colonial employer.

Two unfamiliar aspects of the war get an airing in the series, too.

Diana Preston shows how, despite pre-1914 international agreements to regulate the conduct of warfare, the combatants rapidly crossed key ethical red lines in a bid to gain the military advantage – first with poison gas, then with the sinking of passenger liners and merchant vessels, and finally by the bombing of civilians from the air. All three took place for the first time within a period of six weeks in 1915. In each case the Germans took the first step but the Allies soon followed suit.

By contrast, Taylor Downing examines shell shock as a phenomenon on the WW1 battlefield. Its incidence rose alarmingly at the five-month long battle of the Somme and so terrified the British Army, who saw it as a contagion that would sap men’s morale and effectiveness, that a brutal example was made of some units and the condition was simply expunged from casualty lists. It didn’t, of course, stop ‘war trauma’ from happening. But without a label, its existence could be denied. Significantly, the statistics do show signs of falling once mobile warfare resumed in 1918, suggesting that the fear and helplessness men felt under prolonged artillery bombardments was inseparable from their ‘sitting duck’ status in fixed trenches from which there was no escape.

Peter Hart reminds us that the traditional British narrative has obscured the fact that in 1918 the Allies won the war. He shows how this was achieved on the Western Front through the ‘all arms battle,’ a method of fighting in which the co-ordination of ground troops, artillery, tanks, cavalry (the only truly mobile forces on the WW1 battlefield) and, critically, air attack and reconnaissance reached a level of effectiveness previously inconceivable. The 2D wars of previous conflicts thus became a 3D war, with sophisticated air support for artillery being the crucial new dynamic.

Transnational history enables two historians to look at the ‘bigger picture’ – the war’s connection to broader developments in the 20^th century on the one hand, and on the other its expression of a stage in the growth of European mass industrial societies.

Robert Gerwarth explains that for the defeated nations of the war, 1918 did not mark the end of fighting and was a meaningless date. In central and eastern Europe, and in the former Ottoman empire, violence continued, perpetrated often by paramilitary groups and against civilians, as newly created nation states tried to uphold contested borders or left battled with right over the new ideology of Bolshevism.

We tend to regard the Second World War as the one in which civilians became legitimate targets on an epic scale, but in fact the racialized rhetoric behind such violence was already in play in the years after the First World War, with Jews and other minorities subjected to atrocities and displacement in widespread civil wars and pogroms well into the 1920s. So, what we call the ‘inter-war’ period, implying 20 years of peace between two great conflicts, now looks much more like a continuum, with the seeds of the Second World War plainly visible in the aftermath of the First.

William Philpott’s analysis of WW1 also suggests that, in its attritional nature, the conflict was much more like WW2 than most accounts allow for. As the combatant nations began to understand that this was a war that could take years, every resource of the societies involved was harnessed to support the armies in the field. This became therefore a struggle not for defence or conquest, as in previous wars, but for national survival, a ‘total war’ in which the victors would beat the enemy by exhausting his capacity to keep going. In such a struggle, the home front, and its ability to produce constantly the men and materiel required, was indispensable. As William Philpott sees it, in such an epic conflict between mass industrialized societies, huge and protracted battles between millions of men on  all sides, with the attendant high casualties, was not just inevitable but necessary to this kind of war of attrition.

Finally, the series ends by shedding light on the way in which memory and remembrance have shaped our view of the First World War.

Mark Connelly shows how later generations have invariably looked back at the conflict from the standpoint of their own time and place. So the Soviet Union, for example, only remembered WW1 as the crucible of the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, whereas the Irish have split along sectarian lines, nationalists commemorating the Easter Rising of 1916, unionists their loyalty to the British imperial struggle. As for the British narrative, Connelly suggests that there were always multiple voices reflecting a diversity of experience in the First World War, but we chose over time to prioritize only one of them, the angry view of the war poets. Nowhere is this better illustrated than at Ypres, which in the immediate post-war years became a hallowed shrine to the heroic and victorious efforts of Britain’s empire (to liberate France and Belgium), with the Salient attracting tourists and pilgrims alike to the 170 cemeteries built in the area in the 1920s. In the 1930s, as the tone of remembrance in Britain turned more sombre and the war began to lose its lustre, the heroism gave way to a focus on the dead and the (futile, some thought) sacrifice of a golden generation. Then the Second World War put the seal on this notion that WW1 was neither particularly heroic nor meaningful; as a consequence, Ypres faded from British national consciousness in the 1940s.

By contrast, Connelly explains, for Germany Ypres remained a site of heroic self-sacrifice (despite the lack of real evidence), a myth which the Nazis harnessed in the 1930s to suit their own chauvinistic agenda – and which the fall of France in 1940 vindicated. But then Hitler’s defeat in 1945 meant that Ypres, indeed the First World War as a whole, disappeared entirely from the German national psyche as a far bigger catastrophe engulfed the nation. For many modern Germans, their history of the early 20^th century struggles to compete with what started them on the road to this catastrophe, namely the rise of the Nazis.

MHN: The public’s appetite for the First World War seems insatiable. Why is this and why has the traditional popular narrative proved so enduring?

Part of the answer lies in the unique way in which this narrative of the war has developed and become embedded in our cultural identity. So we see the conflict as much through a fictional and imaginative filter (poems, novels, plays, musicals, films, and paintings) as through, say, the actual photographic images or diaries of the time, many of which merely serve to reinforce the fiction. Good as it is as a movie, I don’t see the Sam Mendez film 1917 taking us away from the popular narrative. Rather it plays on all the existing tropes. But you might then ask why the message became so embedded in this way.

Mark Connelly’s theory is that our island status has much to do with it. Although Britain had many wars over the centuries, they were almost all fought overseas (certainly in the 19^th century), most were low level affairs engaging small professional forces, and none of them touched British soil. By contrast, European states had long experienced a catalogue of conflicts which, in many cases, devastated their countries, often several times over.

So, for Britain, even though the First World War still did not really encroach on the British home front (some air raids apart), its unprecedented bloodletting of a volunteer mass citizen army was bound to have a huge impact on the British, who singled out the conflict as The Great War. Then, as explained above, the increasing focus on and reverence for the fallen of that war in the course of the 20^th century, allied to a growing view that they had died needlessly in many cases, has led to a heavily emotive, patriotic narrative that exists in a kind of vacuum – almost as if other combatant nations didn’t exist in the struggle. The modern trend to trace relatives who fought and died in the war has no doubt further reinforced this emotionalism, which Connelly believes may have got stronger rather than faded as those who survived the First World War died away.

Much as I hesitate to go down this route now, it’s arguable that Britain’s pull towards Brexit, to ‘standing alone’ once again, has its roots in a similar form of emotionalism that other European nations, so used to wars on their soil and therefore inclined to a union that may prevent them, find incomprehensible.

My hope is that Unknown Warriors will encourage listeners to think a bit more about the real history of the First World War – an altogether more diverse, more complex, and more modern narrative in every way.

CLICK TO LISTEN TO EPISODE ONE OF ‘UNKNOWN WARRIORS’