British Expeditionary Force

1870 gave birth to the renaissance of French military thought which culminated in Foch.

The disasters of the Boer War produced that highly trained instrument, the British Expeditionary Force of 1914.

Thus it is but natural that more than any other the present German military doctrine embodies this supreme lesson of the bitter years of the World War, that quality attained through intensive and scientific training and expressed in a supreme degree of mobility and the fullest exploitation of maneuver even by the smallest units of infantry will more than compensate for the greater numbers of a short-service army.

It has been well said that the Germans went to Canae for their last model.

You got political dissent at home and just things bubbling up that really nobody is paying attention to.

There's a lot of parallels to the British Empire, specifically, and I've talked about this earlier, the BEF, British Expeditionary Force, pre-1914.

But also, if you roll it back further, like we were talking about earlier today, the rudderless political situation, you know, if we could, how far do you want to walk that back?

I mean, I think it's a, I think there's a lot, there's a good lesson in here.

And the British really didn't have that.

It took them quite a bit of time, actually, in the First World War.

I mean, look, the BEF itself, like the guys there at the beginning who were fighting at Liège and other places up in Belgium, those guys are no freaking joke,

man.

And they attempted to fix this.

And by fixing it, they passed some legislation that established the British Expeditionary Force, adjusted training a bit, and they created a doctrine in an army that for little wars.

Man, this sounds so frickin' familiar.

But mobile columns, punitive expeditions, garrison duty, think of the FOB concept, or the Forward Operating Base concept, all across the Middle East up until recently was pummeled by the Iranians.

They had much deeper manpower reserves, particularly the German army.

And the British got a dose of this in 1914.

So right about 1914, with the strongest navy in the world and a small but professional regular army that was very experienced in colonial operations, had some very good marksmen, and very hardened in low-intensity activity, In August 1914, the British broke with their espoused doctrine, which was to stay out of major land conflicts and use their navy to control the seas, and threw the British expeditionary force into Belgium.

to try and stop the Kaiser's army as it came through with the Schlieffen plan.

So this is the army that's going into southern Belgium, the French army.

The British Expeditionary Force is operating on Fifth Army's left, and that's where the story of the British Army in Belgium is going to begin.

But Lomresac's Fifth Army is due to enter southern Belgium, block the German advance there, and hopefully not only push them back, but then maybe even roll into northern Germany.

in the process.

33rd Infantry sets forth with 5th Army on the 4th of August.

Ten days later, de Gaulle, section commander now for 11th Company on the 33rd Infantry.

he arrives and they're in southern belgium they're in the rollonia section of belgium and they start to meet oncoming elements of german's second army which is part of the schlieffen plan of course trying to wheel south down through belgium as part of this vast invasion of france german first army to the north is going to run into the british expeditionary force and this is going to set the scene for intense fighting and ultimately the great retreat And the encounter is going to be fought around the Belgian village of Dinant, which is still there to this day.

And we were talking just before it came on air, James, about the maps for this action are few and far between.

I have recently finished reading a book about the Battle of France in 1940 and I never cease to be amazed by the speed of the German conquest which is often compared with the attritional slogging match of the Great War.

When you were interviewing Great War veterans in the 1980s and 90s did any of those veterans make any disparaging remarks about about the performance of the BEF or French forces in 1940.

For example, they lost in five weeks what the veterans of the Great War successfully defended, albeit at a horrendous cost, between 1914 and 1918.

Well, when I look back to those interviews that I did with those Great War veterans at that time, you might believe that we only ever spoke about the First World War.

They got to know some of these veterans, and they would go out and make a cup of tea and leave me to talk to the veteran, and then come back in and sit, and the kind of conversation would spread a little bit.

But when it came to talking about the Second World War, particularly that early phase, which a lot of them lived in the south of England where...

the reality of the fact that the Nazis were just around the corner and conveyed at any point, none of them that I can remember made any disparaging remarks about either the BEF or the French.

In fact, many of them were actually veterans of that BEF.