11 - Coalition as a defective mechanism?

Summary

In 1919 the former Director of Military Operations at the War Office and future professor of military history, Sir Frederick Maurice, wrote that victory was the ‘result of combination’. He claimed that:

Germany could not have been beaten in the field, as she was beaten, without the intimate co-operation of all the Allied armies on the Western front directed by a great leader, nor without the co-ordination for a common purpose of all the resources of the Allies, naval, military, industrial and economic. If victory is to be attributed to any one cause, then that cause is not to be found in the wisdom of any one statesman, the valour of any one army, the prowess of any one navy, or the skill of any one general.

This study of the coalition mechanism has touched on the vast and unprecedented problems of fighting a war that required a commitment to alliance overriding all other considerations. Without a willingness, however forced, to forget past enmities, work in cooperative ways, submerge differences – to create an efficient machinery of alliance – the powerful threat represented by the Central Powers, and especially Germany, could not be beaten. France could no more defeat Germany unaided, than could Britain. Neither could have done without the financial and material support, followed by a potentially unbeatable army, of the United States. The victory was indeed the ‘result of combination’.