Dismissal of Gough

At 4.30 p.m. on 28 March 1918 General Hubert Gough handed over command of the British Fifth Army to General Henry Rawlinson. The decision had been taken the day before. At about 5 p.m. on 27 March, when Gough returned to his headquarters from visiting his corps commanders and was preparing a counter-attack near Lamotte, Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s military secretary, General Harold Ruggles-Brise, was waiting for him there. He told him that he and his staff needed a rest, and that Rawlinson would come the next day to replace him. Rawlinson was then the British military representative at the Supreme War Council in Versailles. The change took place in the middle of the battle, with the XIX Corps, all that remained of the army, still falling back towards Amiens.

From 21 March the Fifth Army had borne the main weight of Operation Michael. Its eleven weakened infantry divisions held a front almost 70 km long, much of it newly taken over from the French and poorly fortified. On the first day, in thick fog, two German armies struck it. For a week the Fifth Army fell back, fighting by day and marching by night, but its front, though broken many times, did not disintegrate. In London, however, exaggerated rumours were circulating, based on the tales of stragglers, that the army had run away. The British official history states that the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Henry Wilson, with the government’s approval, held Gough responsible for the retreat and ordered his recall. On 27 March Wilson said at the War Office that Gough “must go, because he has lost the confidence of his troops”. The author of the official history, General James Edmonds, suggests that Wilson also wanted to use the occasion to get the strong-minded Rawlinson out of Versailles. As early as 5 March the Secretary of State for War, Lord Derby, had written to Haig that the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was hearing complaints about Gough from various quarters.

Haig carried out the order, but kept Gough in France. The handover of command in the midst of battle went smoothly, because Gough’s staff officers stayed on to help Rawlinson take over all the business. As late as three in the morning on the night of 27–28 March Gough had General Ferdinand Foch, who had forbidden voluntary withdrawals, woken up, and obtained his consent to pull back the left flank of the XIX Corps. The Germans had crossed the Somme behind that flank and taken Lamotte, and it was in danger of being surrounded. In the evening Rawlinson wrote to Foch that unless fresh troops arrived within two days, the remnants of the corps would not hold east of Villers-Bretonneux. On the same day, near Arras, the Third Army repulsed a great German attack.

That was not the end of the matter. Haig wanted to entrust Gough with building rear defence lines, and on 3 April he defended him before the Prime Minister. Lloyd George replied that Gough had neither held nor destroyed the bridges on the Somme and must not be employed again. The next day Derby ordered that Gough leave his post and return home. The inquiry he demanded was never held. Rawlinson’s army was renamed the Fourth Army on 2 April.

For years Gough fought to clear his name. Many historians now consider that he was a scapegoat for the shortage of men and the over-extended front, although his command in 1916–1917 raises serious reservations. In the 1930s the British official history took up his defence, and according to his biographer Lloyd George admitted in a letter that “no general could have won that battle”. In 1937 Gough received the Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, which was regarded as his official rehabilitation.