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Laura Boyd, Learning to Fight: Military Innovation and Change in the British Army, 1914–1918. By Aimée Fox, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 31, Issue 1, March 2020, Pages 134–136, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwz017
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Popular history has suggested that the British Military during the First World War was almost incapable of change.1 The consequences of such rigidity were losses and terrible mass-fatalities such as the Battle of the Somme, which continues to reign in British history as the stand-out failure of the conflict. Learning to Fight aims to readdress—and at times redress—this simplistic conclusion; to provide a more nuanced and thoughtful account of the ways in which the British Army learned from mistakes over the course of the Great War. She aims to examine the efficacity of the learning process in the army and asks whether there was a culture of innovation in the organization. Using what she terms a ‘holistic’ approach, Dr Aimée Fox takes the reader through the different approaches to learning that permeated the military structure and shows how learning was integral to the structure and indeed the ideology of the British Army of 1914–8. Using a series of case studies, Learning to Fight demonstrates how the structure of the British Army leant itself to different ways of learning, and how learning developed and was encouraged at all levels of the military hierarchy. This book is a new approach to scholarship relating to Britain’s military during the conflict, offering a more thorough and sophisticated understanding regarding military learning. Rather than focusing on what mistakes were made (though never denying that they were mistakes), Dr Fox takes the reader through the evolutions and changes that were made by the British Army as they fought to tackle a new type of industrialized warfare. Bringing together military history and elements of social and cultural history, this well-researched book shows how learning innovation during the Great War was neither top-down nor bottom-up, but was multifaceted and widespread.
