The History of the Great War Based on Official Documents by Direction of the Committee of Imperial Defence (abbreviated to History of the Great War or British Official History) is a series of concerning the war effort of the British state during the First World War. It was produced by the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence from 1915 to 1949; after 1919 Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds was Director. Edmonds wrote many of the army volumes and influenced the choice of historians for the navy, air force, medical and veterinary volumes. Work had begun on the series in 1915 and in 1920, the first volumes of Naval Operations and Seaborne Trade, were published. The first "army" publication, Military Operations: France and Belgium 1914 Part I and a separate map case were published in 1922 and the final volume, The Occupation of Constantinople was published in 2010.
The History of the Great War Military Operations volumes were originally intended as a technical history for military staff. Single-volume popular histories of military operations and naval operations written by civilian writers were to be produced for the general public but Sir John Fortescue was dismissed for slow work on the military volume and his draft was not published. Edmonds preferred to appoint half-pay and retired officers, who were cheaper than civilian writers and wrote that occasionally "the 'War House' foisted elderly officers on him, because they were not going to be promoted or offered employment but was afraid to tell them so".
In the 1987 introduction to Operations in Persia 1914–1919, G. M. Bayliss wrote that the guides issued by Her Majesty's Stationery Office (HMSO) were incomplete. "Sectional List number 60" of 1976 omitted the Gallipoli volumes but contained The Blockade of the Central Empires (1937), that had been Confidential and retained "For Official Use Only" until 1961. The twelve volume History of the Ministry of Munitions, the Occupation of the Rhineland (1929) and Operations in Persia 1914–1919 (1929) were included. The Imperial War Museum Department of Printed Books and the Battery Press republished the official history in the 1990s with black and white maps. The Imperial War Museum Department of Printed Books and the Naval & Military Press republished the set in paperback with colour maps in the 2000s and on DVD-ROM in the 2010s.
Background
Official history
The modern form of official military history began in the mid-nineteenth century with reports written as guides for later officers. The histories were detailed descriptions of events, were not easy reading for a lay audience and left judgements to the discretion of a mainly professional readership. After the First World War, the New Zealand government decided that its official histories should be written for the public, since it had fought in the war or supported the war effort. After the Second World War, the low academic standard of military education, especially in historical analysis, led to a view that professionally trained historians should write official histories, applying their academic training to explain why as well as describe what. Since many of the academics had participated in the war, they could be expected to have experience of military service and knowledge of the war to inform their writing. The contemporary view is that official history should incorporate the three points of view, containing the detailed description needed for works of military instruction but also to be suitable for a general readership and to show how participants tried to solve problems, drawing explicit lessons from their successes and failures.
None of the points of view to be served by the production of official history is immune to error, because work by a military historian can be fraudulent, distorting the record for personal or political reasons. Populist history can dilute the story to the point of worthlessness and civilian academics can be prone to select facts and interpretations according to their ideals, ideology and preconceived ideas. Military histories written as textbooks might be expected to have a basis in truth, necessary to teach useful lessons to students and the British Report of the Committee on the Lessons of the Great War (Kirk Report, 1931) drew on the published volumes of the British official history; conclusions in the report were incorporated into a new edition of Field Service Regulations. Operations might again be conducted in Iraq and Iran and official history volumes were produced against the objections of the Foreign Office. Military histories concentrated on the doings of national contingents, rarely referring to those of allied and opposing armies; comparative analysis is absent and national bias, due to ulterior motives like the temptation to myth-make, can also be found. The Australian Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 edited by Charles Bean contains exaggerations of the significance of the Australian contribution, the prowess of Australian soldiers and disparagements of soldiers from Britain and its allies. Australian failures and casualties are sometimes blamed on British higher commanders, when high-ranking Australian officers could justly be criticised.
After the First World War, the Royal Air Force (RAF) needed to justify its existence with a function that could not be fulfilled by the army or navy. The parts of The War in the Air (1922–1937) written by H. A. Jones gave undue emphasis to strategic bombing, unbalancing the work. Embarrassing events could be disguised by underwriting and in the French official history , the French Army Mutinies of 1917 were passed over in a few paragraphs, despite occurring in of the French Army. Many of the historians, editors and contributors to the History of the Great War (1915–1949) had been senior officers during the war, which had the advantage of bringing first-hand knowledge of events and experience of military art to the work but risked allowing loyalty and an understandable desire to protect reputations leading to unfair blaming, particularly on outsiders.
The narrative of the Battle of Jutland (1916) is found in Volume III of the Royal Navy history Naval Operations (1923). The draft text was revised at the request of some serving officers present at the battle to remove critical remarks about them. Many of these officers were retired or dead when a revised edition was published in 1940 but the excised passages were not restored. The British Army Military Operations.... volumes have been criticised for dishonesty, in not blaming GHQ for the extent of British casualties. The authors have been accused of exculpating Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from December 1915 to the end of the war, by default. In 2011, Neil Wells wrote that as the history is a description of events, rather than an analytical work with criticism and conclusions, Haig and other commanders escape explicit blame for failures, yet the reader is left free to form conclusions.
British official history
In 1906, official histories were being written by three departments at the War Office and one in the Admiralty. Lord Esher, a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence, suggested that a subcommittee be established as the Historical Section, to centralise the collection of army and navy archives, as a repository of the lessons of war for strategists. Esher thought that the lessons of the South African War (11 October 1899 – 31 May 1902) could not be shown unless the naval, military and political aspects of the war were treated as one. In January 1907, the subcommittee was established with Sir George Clarke as chairman, charged with the completion of an official history of the Boer War. The original account was begun by Colonel George Henderson (1854–1903), before ill health forced him to retire. Before he died, Henderson had completed a narrative up to the beginning of the war but it was not published. A later version, (History of the War in South Africa 1899–1902, four volumes, 1906–1910) by Major-General Frederick Maurice reached publication but Maurice had needed a large number of assistants which increased the price of the book; it was favourably received but did not sell well.
Histories of the Great War In August 1914, the Historical Section was busy on a history of the Russo-Japanese War (8 February 1904 – 5 September 1905) and work was suspended on the outbreak of the First World War. The section began to collect material being returned from France and Lieutenant-Colonel E. Y. Daniel was appointed as full-time Secretary. Experience of writing the history of the South African war showed that delay made the task impossible and that the collection of material for the work should begin at once. In May 1915, Captain Christopher Atkinson was sent to France to collect unit diaries. Atkinson reported that the diaries were inadequate, because of the difficulty of writing them during events like the Great Retreat of 1914, when few were kept and those that were had big gaps. Although the diaries would not show why events occurred, Atkinson recommended that they should be indexed and grouped by unit, subject and chronology for later scrutiny to identify discrepancies caused by the organisation of the material.
A formal decision to write an official history was taken in a Cabinet meeting on 26 August 1915, when Maurice Hankey (1 April 1877 – 26 January 1963) the Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence and of the War Council, advocated a series of histories to provide
Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener (24 June 1850 – 5 June 1916) the Secretary of State for War wanted work begun on a single-volume popular history, to be published soon after the war. This would maintain public interest in the main series and put the case of the government at the same time as accounts by participants and popular authors. The Treasury objected over the cost but Hankey considered that it would be a work of education and reference, not a commercial proposition and that if scientific works were judged only on commercial criteria, research would be abolished.
The Treasury gave way and agreed to finance an official history series and popular single-volume works, written by civilian authors, to ensure public appeal. Sir Julian Corbett (12 November 1854 – 21 September 1922) was appointed to write the navy volume and Sir John Fortescue (28 December 1859 – 22 October 1933) was chosen for the army volume. Work on the military histories was slow and in 1917, Daniel reported that Atkinson and an assistant had examined only diaries and that the Fortescue narrative had only reached as far as November 1914. The war precluded a big increase in manpower and for the Fortescue volume to be adequate, Daniel reported that confidential staff correspondence would be needed. With the huge increase in the size of the British army, it would only be practical to use some unit diaries and care would be needed to avoid skewing their selection. In March 1919, Winston Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) received a draft copy of the Corbett popular history of the navy and objected to certain passages. Churchill wanted official records to be published with the volume so that readers could judge for themselves. Hankey claimed that Churchill's objections made the publication of an official history series questionable, since they would inevitably reflect on leaders, many of whom were still in public life.
Hankey wrote that an official history should not be written, because it would attract parliamentary and public criticism, the length of time taken to publish would mean that each volume would be examined and that the history would be produced at a loss. The experience of producing the navy volume also showed that each publication would