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7 - The Military Entente with France

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

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Summary

In November 1914 the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence produced a ‘Report on the Opening of the War’. In his notes towards this Report Julian Corbett maintained that ‘our arrangements with the French Naval and Military Staff … fettered our freedom of action’, with the result that ‘our Army … became committed as an integral part of the allied line, and we had to forego all the advantages of operating independently on a line of our own and at our own selected moment, in order to break into the German scheme after it had developed’.

Corbett's position is now widely shared. John Terraine has spoken of ‘the binding force’ of the British Government's commitment to a prearranged plan. Paul Guinn has said that when the crisis of continental war arose in the summer of 1914, ‘no resistance could avail against the long-matured General Staff preparations’; and Samuel Williamson that the continuance of the staff talks assured the primacy of the strategy of continental intervention, that ‘the staff talks … were responsible for British presence on the western front’. Nicholas d'Ombrain, in the course of demonstrating emphatically that the C.I.D. failed to operate as a centre for strategic planning, has held that as a result of this failure, ‘the Government discovered in 1914 that its imagined freedom of choice had been jeopardised’.

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The Policy of the Entente
Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904–1914
, pp. 121 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1985

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