Field Marshal Sir William Robert Robertson, 1st Baronet, (29 January 1860 – 12 February 1933) was a British Army officer who served as Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) – the professional head of the British Army – from 1916 to 1918 during the First World War.
As CIGS he was committed to a Western Front strategy focusing on Germany. He had increasingly poor relations with David Lloyd George, Secretary of State for War and then Prime Minister. In 1917 Robertson supported the continuation of the Battle of Passchendaele at odds with Lloyd George's view that Britain's war effort ought to be focused on the other theatres until the arrival of sufficient US troops on the Western Front. Robertson is the only soldier in the history of the British Army to have risen from an enlisted rank to its highest rank of field marshal.
Early life William Robertson was born in Welbourn, Lincolnshire, to Thomas Charles Robertson, a tailor and postmaster, and Ann Dexter Robertson (née Beet).Bonham-Carter 1963, p. 1 He was educated at the local church school and later earned 6d a week as a pupil-teacher. After leaving school in 1873, he became a garden boy in the village rectory, then in 1875 a footman in the Countess of Cardigan'sShe was the widow of the infamous Lord Cardigan who had led the Charge of the Light Brigade household at Deene Park.Bonham-Carter 1963, pp. 2–4
He began his military career in November 1877 by enlisting for twelve years as a trooper in the 16th (The Queen's) Lancers.Woodward 1998, p. 1 As he was three months short of the official minimum age of eighteen, at the behest of the recruiting sergeant he declared his age as eighteen years and two months, these extra five months becoming his "official" age throughout his time in the Army.Robertson 1921, p. 2. Heathcote, p. 250 states that he was five months underage, which is not quite accurate.
His mother wrote to him: You know you are the Great Hope of the Family...if you do not like Service you can do something else...there are plenty of things Steady Young Men can do when they can write and read as you can...(the Army) is a refuge for all idle people...I shall name it to no one for I am ashamed to think of it...I would rather bury you than see you in a red coat.Bonham-Carter 1963, p. 5Mead 2008, pp. 53–54 On his first night in the Army, he was so horrified by the rowdiness of the barrack room that he contemplated deserting, only to find that his civilian clothes had been stolen by another deserter.Holmes 2011, p. 548
As a young soldier, Robertson was noted for his prowess at running and for his voracious reading of military history. He won company first prizes for sword, lance and shooting. Among the lieutenants under whom he served were future Lieutenant-General "Jimmy" Babington and "Freddy" Blair, who would later be Robertson's Military Secretary at Eastern Command in 1918.Robertson 1921, p. 2 He was promoted to lance-corporal in February 1879 and corporal in April 1879. As a corporal, he was imprisoned for three weeks with his head shaven when a soldier under arrest, whom he was escorting, escaped near Waterloo Station. Later, whilst serving in Ireland, he once kept soldiers under arrest handcuffed for a twelve-hour train journey rather than risk a repetition of the event.Bonham-Carter 1963, p. 28
He was promoted to lance-sergeant in May 1881 and sergeant in January 1882. He obtained a first class certificate of education in 1883, while serving in Ireland.Bonham-Carter 1963, p. 31 Robertson was promoted to troop sergeant major in March 1885 to fill a vacancy, as his predecessor had been demoted for making a botch of the regimental accounts and later committed suicide.Holmes 2011, p. 307
Junior officer Encouraged by his officers and the clergyman of his old parish,Heathcote, p. 251 he passed an examination for an officer's commission and was posted as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Dragoon Guards on 27 June 1888. Robertson later recorded that it would have been impossible to live as a cavalry subaltern in Britain, where £300 a year was needed in addition to the £120 official salary (approximately £30,000 and £12,000 at 2010 prices) to keep up the required lifestyle; he was reluctant to leave the cavalry,Mead 2008, p. 52 but his regiment was deployed to India, where the pay was higher and expenses lower than in the UK. Robertson's father made his uniforms and he economised on mess bills by drinking water and not smoking with meals, as pipes, which beside a few cheroots were all he could afford, were not allowed in the mess. He supplemented his income by studying with native tutors, qualifying as an interpreter—for which officers received cash grants—in Urdu, Hindi, Persian, Pashto and Punjabi.Woodward 1998, p. 2Robertson 1921, p. 42.
Promoted to lieutenant on 1 March 1891, he saw his first active service in 1891, distinguishing himself as Railway Transport Officer for the expedition to Kohat.Bonham-Carter 1963, pp. 34–35 He was appointed an attaché in the Intelligence Branch of the Quartermaster-General's Department at Simla on 5 June 1892. There he became a protégé of Sir Henry Brackenbury, the new Military Member of the Viceroy's Council (equivalent to War Minister for India), who was keen to beef up the intelligence branch of the Indian army, including mapping the Northwest Frontier. Robertson spent a year writing a detailed Gazetteer and Military Report on Afghanistan. After five years in India, he was granted his first long leave in 1893, only to find that his mother had died before he reached home.Bonham-Carter 1963, p. 32
In June 1894 he undertook a three-month journey via Gilgit and mountainous north Kashmir, crossing the Darkot Pass at over to reach the Pamirs Plateau at the foot of the Himalayas, returning to India in August by a westerly route via Chilas and the Kaghan Valley. On the journey he learned Gurkhali, later qualifying in this, his sixth Indian language.
He was promoted to captain on 3 April 1895. He took part in the Chitral Expedition as Brigade Intelligence Officer. He was described by Lieutenant-General Sir Robert Low, the expedition commander, as a "very active and intelligent officer of exceptional promise".Bonham-Carter 1963, pp. 35–38 After the relief of Chitral and installation of Shuja ul-Mulk as its Mehtar (ruler), Robertson was engaged in pacification and reconnaissance duties, but was wounded when he was attacked by his two guides on a narrow mountain path during a reconnaissance. One guide fired a shotgun at Robertson but missed. The other guide attacked him with Robertson's own sword (which he had been carrying, as Robertson had dysentery), but Robertson punched him to the ground, then drove off both attackers with his revolver; one was wounded and later captured and executed. The incident was reported and illustrated in the Daily Graphic and Robertson was appointed a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, which was, he later claimed, "then a rather rare decoration".
Staff College
Robertson then applied to attend the Staff College, Camberley. Unlike most applicants, he could not afford to take extended leave from his job to attend a crammer, and had he failed he would have been too old to apply again, so he rose between 4 and 5 am each day to study mathematics, German, and French with the assistance of his wife. He later qualified as an interpreter in French. He just missed a place, but was given a nominated place on the recommendation of Sir George White (Commander-in-Chief, India). In 1897, accompanied by his wife and baby son, he became the first former ranker to go there.Bonham-Carter 1963, pp. 39–40
Under George Henderson he absorbed the principles, derived from Antoine-Henri Jomini, Carl von Clausewitz, and Edward Hamley's Operations of War (1866), of concentration of physical and moral force and the destruction of the main enemy army. He passed out second from Staff College in December 1898 and was then seconded for service in the Intelligence Department at the War Office on 1 April 1899. As a staff captain he was the junior of two officers in the Colonial (later renamed Imperial) section.Woodward 1998, p. 3
Boer War and War Office With the start of the Second Boer War, Robertson was appointed as Deputy Assistant Adjutant-General to Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, the British Commander-in-Chief South Africa, on 15 January 1900. He was present at the Battle of Paardeberg (17–26 February 1900), the Battle of Poplar Grove (7 March 1900) and other battles in March and May. Robertson was promoted to major on 10 March 1900 and was mentioned in despatches on 2 April 1901.
He returned to the War Office in October 1900 and on 29 November 1900 was promoted brevet lieutenant-colonel for his services in South Africa. On 1 October 1901 he was appointed Assistant Quartermaster-General, responsible for the Foreign Military Intelligence section, on the recommendation of the Intelligence expert General Sir Henry Brackenbury, and worked closely with William Nicholson (then Director of Military Operations). Although Robertson was later to be a staunch advocate of Britain's concentration of effort on the Western Front, in March 1902 (before the Entente Cordiale) he wrote a paper recommending that, in the event of Belgian neutrality being violated, Britain should concentrate on naval warfare and deploy no more troops to Belgium than was needed to "afford ocular proofie. visible proof - the phrase is from Othello Act III Scene 3 of our share in the war". His suggestion did not meet with approval at the highest political level.Guinn 1965, p. 5. Salisbury thought it unlikely that Belgium would be invaded without support within Belgium, that it could not be predicted whether British opinion would support war, and that policy rather than the letter of treaties would determine whether Britain went to war to defend Belgium; he commented that, despite the treaties of 1856, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain had not gone to war to defend Turkey when she had been invaded by Russia in 1877.
Robertson was promoted to brevet colonel on 29 November 1903. Having been one of the oldest lieutenants in the army, he was now one of the youngest colonels, heading a staff of nine officers. In the later words of a contemporary, Robertson "became rated as a superman, and only key appointments were considered good enough for him".
Robertson was made assistant director of Military Operations under James Grierson and appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB) on 30 June 1905. In spring 1905, during the First Moroccan Crisis, Grierson and Robertson conducted a war game based on a German march through Belgium. They were persuaded that early and strong British intervention was necessary to slow the German advance and avoid French defeat.Tuchman 1962, pp. 55–56Guinn 1965, p. 9 In 1906 they toured the Charleroi-to-Namur area. In 1906 Robertson also toured the Balkans, where he was impressed by the size of the mountains, a factor which was later to influence his scepticism about the Salonika front during the First World War.Cassar 2011, p. 83