Archibald Murray becomes Chief of the Imperial General Staff

On 26 September 1915 Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray became Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the most senior staff officer in the British War Office. He replaced General James Wolfe Murray, who had left the post the day before. The name of the office dated from the reform of 1909, when the British General Staff was meant to become the centre of military planning for the whole Empire.

The new chief of staff was 55 years old and had a difficult start to the war behind him. From August 1914 he had been chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force in France, but in January 1915 Field Marshal John French sent him home. On 10 February 1915 he became Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He was responsible for the training and organisation of the New Armies, the volunteer divisions raised by the Secretary of State for War, Lord Herbert Kitchener. He travelled a great deal around training camps throughout the country. Two of these divisions, the 9th and 15th (Scottish) Divisions, had been attacking at Loos since the previous day.

Murray was taking over an office that had counted for little over the previous year. Kitchener was his own chief of staff, and Wolfe Murray had made no attempt to change that. Archibald Murray had a poor opinion of the minister. After the war he wrote that Kitchener “seldom told the absolute truth and the whole truth”. In October and November 1915, as the government argued over sending troops to Salonika and the future of the Gallipoli campaign, the General Staff again began preparing its own appreciations of the situation for ministers. According to Murray’s account, only when Kitchener left on an inspection of the Dardanelles was he able to put full recruiting figures before the Cabinet. They showed that far fewer volunteers were coming forward than were needed to maintain an army of 70 divisions, which argued for the introduction of conscription. The Cabinet then demanded that military matters be presented to it in the form of proper General Staff papers.

Murray was chief of staff for less than three months. In the autumn the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, was making changes in the highest posts of the army, and chose to replace Murray with General William Robertson, chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force, who made it a condition that the chief of staff would be the government’s sole adviser on strategy. In his last days in office, on 16 December, Murray submitted a memorandum calling for the effort to be concentrated on the Western Front, which Robertson later called “the Bible of the war”. On 23 December 1915 he had to step down. He himself, however, believed that in forty years of service he had never done better work than in his three months at the General Staff, and the secretary of the government’s War Committee, Maurice Hankey, called him Robertson’s “John the Baptist”, who had prepared the ground for his rule.

In January 1916 Murray took command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force with headquarters in Egypt, and in March of all British forces in that country. At their head he repulsed the Turkish attack at Romani, built a railway and a water pipeline across the Sinai desert and led the first advance into Palestine. After two unsuccessful battles for Gaza, in June 1917 he was replaced by General Edmund Allenby.