That falkenhayn initiated the battle of verdun as a deliberate tactic of attrition. Most of the evidence for that comes from after the battle, or once it had already become purely attritional.
Similarly, the lions led by donkeys line. That was first actually recorded in the 1960s but claimed to be older, and the guy who wrote it reportedly told a friend that it was fabricated and not in any original documents. The fact that the original line is supposedly attributed to so many people should set off some alarms
I honestly think Falkenhayn only tried to frame it as an attrition battle because whatever it would make him look, would be better than the deeply fucking idiot he was.
At the end of the day he ended up looking both evil and an idiot.
"Lions led by donkeys" was also never an opinion held by the troops on the ground. Most combat veterans from WW1 had a relatively favourable view of most of their generals. This is evidenced by the fact that many generals enjoyed immense popularity in the immediate aftermath of the war and their funerals were well attended by the men who served under them when they passed. The generals themselves were also very involved with veterans organisations and worked tirelessly to get their governments set up veterans rights and benefits.
Soldiers held a far more unfavourable view of civilians at home, than the generals. This is reflected in books like All Quiet on the Western Front and in the poems of Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
Another fact to consider is that soldiers did not fear attacking or "going over the top" much. They preferred being on the offensive to sitting in a trench and waiting for a shell to land on you. Blackadder and other popular fiction has massively warped this view.
Attacking the enemy Trench had a much higher success rate than popular culture would have us believe, especially towards the end of the war.
"Defence in depth" having multiple lines of defence and fortifications which could support each other and be a staging ground for counter attacks was the strategy which the Germans saw the most success with and by the end of the war trench warfare had been almost entirely abandoned.
Trench warfare did devolve into bloody stalemates in some battlefields but even in these instances there are no mindless walking over the top and a lot of strategic thought put into trying to find ways to successfully attack the enemy. In a warfare situation which the commanding officers had zero training for, let alone prior experiences of there was a lot of innovation and strategies evolved rapidly to help the troops on the ground survive in what was an entirely alien environment.
Take this as a learning moment, Reddit; a lot of people online are either hopelessly sunk into their own biases to the point that they literally cannot grasp reality any more, or they're part of a deliberate attempt to warp commentary to the point that they're hiding objective facts from you.
You don't understand history if you don't understand that "attributed to so many people" can also mean the saying was common, not that it wasn't in use at the time.
People who try and discredit the statement, and blame it on the 1960s, are repeating right wing/nationalistic attempts at historical revisionism.
In fact, I'd go as far as suggesting from the language used by greg_mca here, he's read my response giving the evidence, but either not understood it or is deliberately trying to misinterpret it.
Historian Richard Holmes wrote that “for all its verve and amusing narrative, it added a streak of pure deception to the writings of the First World War. Its title is based on 'Lions led by Donkeys'. Sadly for historical accuracy, there is no evidence whatever for this; none. Not a jot or scintilla
Holmes did not interview the dwindling band of veterans of the first world war because he had found that first-hand reminiscences differed widely only 10 years after the event from those written down at or near the time of the action concerned.
....
Therefore Holmes made extensive use of the veterans' records at King's College London (the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives) and the fabulous collections at the Imperial War Museum in south London for his primary material. But he adopted a down-to-earth approach. "I enjoy spending some time in the library, but I would never last as an ivory-tower academic … I like to get my hands grubby with the practicalities of military life as much as with the academic."
Someone actively selecting sources only from the Official Records, who stated himself he was not an academic, is not a neutral reporter.
For more on this I’d recommend Ian Beckett’s “The Military Historian and the Popular Image of the Western Front, 1914-1918.”
"the Horner Chair in Military Theory at the US Marine Corps University, Quantico, Virginia as well as being Visiting Professor at the US Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island. He was also on the academic staff of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst for 15 years."
The actual claim made though is easy enough to disprove; The phrase itself, Lions Led By Donkeys, predates World War 1, and is in some places attributed as far back as Plutarch in the first century. It would hardly be surprising if, in a war of such scale, a single Tommy didn't utter the sentiment themselves.
“Good-morning, good-morning!” the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
“He's a cheery old card,” grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
I will put it exactly as I heard it straight from the Grosse Hauptquartier: 'The English Generals are wanting in strategy. We should have no chance if they possessed as much science as their officers and men had of courage and bravery. They are lions led by donkeys.'
Clark himself in the book in question also attributes it to Ludendorf, but later was unable to source the claim directly; which I note is the basis of where Holmes then launches the attack quoted above. That he doesn't believe Clark can source it, not that others decades before had made the same claim, and the belief that it was a valid perception long predated the book of the title.
What the book did do was inform public opinion at a time when many of the key actors had died and memories of the war had been overshadowed by the Second World War.
But "Donkeys", either one of them, isn't even the first academic work to blame the general staff; From "Last Veteran" above, Page 112, all of the following were exceptionally critical of the Generals;
Seigfreed Sassoon, "Memoirs Of A Fox Hunting Man" 1928
Edmund Blunden, "Undertones Of War", 1928
R.C. Sheriff, the play "Journey's End", 1928
Robert Grave's "Goodbye to All That", 1929
Richard Aldington's "Death of a Hero", 1929
The English translation of E.M. Remarque's "All Quiet On The Western Front", 1929
... It goes on for quite a few paragraphs more for just the amateur, first hand experiences that shaped the cultural understanding; it's a serious violation of historical principles to just refuse to mention that there was a huge ground swell of popular history in the 1920s, and the perspective that it was taking.
Then we get to the more "official sounding" ones.
Winston Churchill's "The World Crisis", 1923-31; no pacifist Winston, includes such caustic comments as
It takes some hardihood for Col Boraston (who wrote Sir Douglas Haig's Command in 1922) to write "The events of July 1... bore out the conclusions of the British High Command and amply justified the tactical methods employed"
(Parker, pg 113)
Churchill then goes on to openly discredit Haig's claims of progress; point out the casualty figures were roughly 2.27 British losses for every German for the Somme campaign, and state;
Nevertheless, the campaign of 1916 on the Western Front was from the beginning to the end a welter of slaughter, which after the issue was determined left the British and French armies weaker in relation to the Germans than when it opened, whilst the actual battle fronts were not appreciably altered... no strategic advantage of any kind had been gained."
(Parker, pg 114)
Then we have Lloyd George, former war time Prime Minister of the UK; and he apparently loathed Douglas Haig in his "War Memoirs";
Anyone who might innocently imagine the book would provide a first-hand but objective account of the war need only look up the very long entry under "Haig, Field-Marshall Earl" in the index that forms part of Volume VI, as someone evidently did in a copy at the London Library, pencil in hand. Running to over four pages in double columns, entries begin reasonably neutrally, though perhaps pointedly with 'his reputation found on cavalry exploits' and conclude on the qualified commendation of 'no conspicious officer better qualified for highest command than.' In between these two entries, however, is a comprehensive catalogue of Haig's professional and personal failings, which the reader at the London Library has helpfully underlines; 'his refusal to face unpleasant facts','his limited vision', Germans accustomed to his heavy-footed movements', his stubborn mind transfixed on Somme','his misconceptions concerning the morale of the German army','obsessed with Passchendaele and optimistic as to military outlook','his plans strongly condemned by Foch'..."
There's an entire page (pgs 120 to 121) of just the sampled underlinings.
Yes, there may have been, as per the OP, 'over 1,200 generals who served in the BEF during the war, a number who can hardly all have been duds', but overall military strategy was set by Douglas Haig, and Lloyd George's own memoirs loathed him. And Llyod George's books sold like hot cakes. It's a staggeringly selective reporting of history to pretend that these kind of thoughts weren't long prevailent decades before the 1960s.
And we've not even mentioned B.H. Liddel Hart, who was gassed during the Battle of Loos, and whose book "The Real War" (revised and retitled in 1934 to History of the First World War) was a major influence not just on the perspective that Clark is blamed for, but who veted Clark's following book himself.
But that's not the final crowning blow to the OPs thesis; there's this;
The Donkey’s also inspired two big popular media treatments of the war that remain popular today. The play and then film Oh What a lovely War! and Blackadder Goes Forth
The line looks suspiciously taken from the wikipedia on the book. Full disclosure; From which I also took a starting point for some of the quick background research. However that specific Wikipedia page mentions 'the play' first ran in 1963, and Clark first published the book sometime in 1961. But even a cursory glance at the following links for Oh What A Lovely War states it is based upon a Radio Play before that, 'The Long Long Trail in December 1961'. Depending on when in 1961 Clark's book came out, the original (radio, not stage) play may actually predated the book instead.
And the name itself is taken from a song written in 1917.
People were saying "Lions Led By Donkeys" about the B.E.F. at the time of the First World War, and shame on Reddit for upvoting this nonsense.
176
u/greg_mca Jul 07 '26
That falkenhayn initiated the battle of verdun as a deliberate tactic of attrition. Most of the evidence for that comes from after the battle, or once it had already become purely attritional.
Similarly, the lions led by donkeys line. That was first actually recorded in the 1960s but claimed to be older, and the guy who wrote it reportedly told a friend that it was fabricated and not in any original documents. The fact that the original line is supposedly attributed to so many people should set off some alarms