Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Lloyd George at War
- 1 Setting the Stage
- Part I The Home Front
- Part II Strategy and the War
- 5 The First Attempt at a Unified Command
- 6 Facing the Submarine Menace
- 7 Prelude to Catastrophe
- 8 The Horror of Passchendaele
- 9 The Peripheral War
- 10 The Quest for a Negotiated Peace
- 11 The Creation of the Supreme War Council
- 12 The Plans for 1918
- 13 Before the Storm
- 14 Crisis on the Western Front
- 15 The Maurice Affair
- 16 The Origins of Intervention in Russia
- 17 The German Advance Halted
- 18 The Turn of the Tide
- 19 The Road to the Armistice
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
15 - The Maurice Affair
from Part II - Strategy and the War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Maps
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Lloyd George at War
- 1 Setting the Stage
- Part I The Home Front
- Part II Strategy and the War
- 5 The First Attempt at a Unified Command
- 6 Facing the Submarine Menace
- 7 Prelude to Catastrophe
- 8 The Horror of Passchendaele
- 9 The Peripheral War
- 10 The Quest for a Negotiated Peace
- 11 The Creation of the Supreme War Council
- 12 The Plans for 1918
- 13 Before the Storm
- 14 Crisis on the Western Front
- 15 The Maurice Affair
- 16 The Origins of Intervention in Russia
- 17 The German Advance Halted
- 18 The Turn of the Tide
- 19 The Road to the Armistice
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Newspapers favorable to the army, such as the Globe and Morning Post, continued to be a thorn in the government's side, holding it, not the generals, responsible for the German breakthrough. The daily pummeling of Lloyd George by a section of the press had its echo in parliament. On April 9 Lloyd George addressed the House of Commons and in the course of rebutting charges that he had deliberately kept Haig short of reserves, made several incorrect statements. He declared that in spite of heavy casualties in 1917, the British army in France was “considerably stronger” on January 1, 1918 than it had been twelve months earlier. The allegation is misleading. It can be justified only if Lloyd George had included noncombatants such as labor battalions. The prime minister also denied that he had large British forces locked in secondary theaters, forces that would have been more useful fighting the Germans in France. He claimed that there was only one white division in Mesopotamia, and in Egypt and Palestine there were only three white divisions; the rest were either Indians or mixed, with a very small proportion of white troops. Here, what Lloyd George said was clearly untrue. In Palestine alone, Allenby had eleven divisions, consisting of about 100,000 white and only 6,000 Indian soldiers.
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- Information
- Lloyd George at War, 1916–1918 , pp. 261 - 272Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009