James Wolfe Murray dismissed

At the end of September 1915 Lieutenant-General Sir James Wolfe Murray left the post of Chief of the Imperial General Staff, the British government’s senior military adviser. The British chronology of the war records his dismissal under 25 September, and the official announcement in the “London Gazette” states that his successor, Lieutenant-General Sir Archibald Murray, took up the post on 26 September. Wolfe Murray had headed the staff for less than eleven months. He had taken it over at the end of October 1914, after the sudden death of General Charles Douglas, and throughout that time he remained in the shadow of the Secretary of State for War.

Lord Herbert Kitchener ran the war almost single-handed. He drew up plans for operations himself or with a few trusted officers, and the General Staff, whose ablest officers had left for France in August 1914, became, according to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, merely the executor of his instructions. Wolfe Murray, a conscientious administrator and a master of detail, was excessively timid towards Kitchener and the politicians. His deputy, Archibald Murray, wrote years later that he was an able soldier and a courteous gentleman who knew little of the work of a general staff, and whose head Kitchener muddled every day with fantastic ideas and changeable, ill-considered orders.

This was seen most clearly in the Dardanelles operation. Wolfe Murray sat at the table of the War Council when the decisions to attack the Straits were taken at the beginning of 1915, but, like the admirals of the Admiralty, he considered himself there only as an adviser to his minister and did not speak unless asked. Kitchener did not instruct the General Staff to prepare a plan for a land operation at Gallipoli, and its chief did not press for one. Questioned later by the commission investigating the course of the campaign, Wolfe Murray admitted that Kitchener “was very much his own Chief of the Staff”.

By the summer of 1915 this way of running the war was arousing more and more opposition. The May coalition government included politicians who distrusted Kitchener and wanted sound assessments of the situation from the soldiers. The August offensive at Gallipoli had ended in failure, Russia was retreating in the east, and the government had to decide whether to go on supporting the Dardanelles, send troops to the Balkans or concentrate on France. Wolfe Murray, regarded as having no mind of his own, was not suited to this role. His departure coincided with the great Allied offensive in the west, including the Battle of Loos, which began the same day.

Wolfe Murray never returned to the highest posts. He went on a special mission to Russia, whose affairs he knew well, and in May 1916 he took over Eastern Command in England, which he held for about a year. He retired in 1918 and died suddenly on 17 October 1919 at his family estate of Cringletie in Scotland. The Dardanelles Commission, in its report published in 1917, noted that he and the admirals had remained silent at meetings of the War Council because they regarded themselves as advisers to their ministers rather than as members of the council.