Lions led by donkeys

The historiography of the United Kingdom during the 20th century frequently described the infantry of the British Army as brave soldiers (lions) being sent to their deaths by incompetent and indifferent commanders (donkeys).

[1] The phrase was implied by English military historian Alan Clark in the title of his 1961 study of the Western Front of World War I, The Donkeys.

[11] In early 2019, the hashtag #LedByDonkeys was coined by an anti-Brexit campaign group that highlights perceived hypocritical statements by British politicians.

[1] A correspondent to The Daily Telegraph, in July 1963, wrote that librarians in London and Stuttgart had not traced the quotation and a letter to Clark was unanswered.

[20] Snow subsequently wrote an article for the BBC in 2014 discussing "10 big myths about World War One debunked", in which he posits the idea that "Much of what we think we know about the 1914–18 conflict is wrong" and that "This saying was supposed to have come from senior German commanders describing brave British soldiers led by incompetent old toffs from their chateaux.

He was part of a small but growing group of soldiers-turned-writers who used their prodigious talents to raise profound questions about the nature and management of World War One.

Bond objected to the way that, in the 1960s, the works of Remarque and the "Trench Poets" slipped into a "nasty caricature" and perpetuated the "myth" of lions led by donkeys, while "the more complicated true history of the war receded ... into the background".

The 1964 seminal and award-winning BBC Television The Great War has been described as taking a moderate approach, with co-scriptwriter John Terraine fighting against what he viewed as an oversimplification, while Hart resigned as an advising historian to the series, in an open letter to The Times, in part over a dispute with Terraine, claiming that he minimised the faults of the High Command on The Somme and other concerns regarding the treatment of Third Ypres.

While recent documentaries such as Channel 4's 2003 The First World War have confronted the popular image of lions led by donkeys, by reflecting current scholarship presenting more nuanced portrayals of British leaders and more balanced appraisals of the difficulties faced by the High Commands of all the combatants, they have been viewed by far fewer members of the public than either 1964's The Great War or comedies such as Blackadder.

[4] Hew Strachan quoted Maurice Genevoix for the proposition "[i]f it is neither desirable nor good that the professional historian prevail over the veteran; it is also not good that the veteran prevail over the historian" and then proceeded to take Hart to task for "suppressing the culminating battles of the war", thus "allow[ing] his portrayal of British generals to assume an easy continuum, from incompetence on the Western Front to conservatism in the 1920s...."[4] While British leadership at the beginning of the war made costly mistakes, by 1915–16 the General Staff were making great efforts to lessen British casualties through better tactics (night attacks, creeping barrages and air power) and weapons technology (poison gas and later the arrival of the tank).

British generals were not the only ones to make mistakes about the nature of modern conflict: the Russian armies too suffered badly during the first years of the war, most notably at the Battle of Tannenberg.

German tactics are routinely criticised for involving the immediate counterattacking of lost ground, leading to lopsided losses in essentially defensive actions.

To many generals who had fought colonial wars during the second half of the 19th century, where the Napoleonic concepts of discipline and pitched battles were still successful, fighting another highly industrialised power with equal and sometimes superior technology required an extreme change in thinking.

One historian wrote that "the idea that they were indifferent to the sufferings of their men is constantly refuted by the facts, and only endures because some commentators wish to perpetuate the myth that these generals, representing the upper classes, did not give a damn what happened to the lower orders".

[27][28] Strachan quotes Gavin Stamp, who bemoans "a new generation of military historians", who seem as "callous and jingoistic" as Haig, while himself referring to the "ill-informed diatribes of Wolff and Clark".