Kiggell replaces Robertson

On 22 December 1915 Lieutenant-General Sir William Robertson ceased to be Chief of the General Staff of the British Expeditionary Force, a post he had held since January 1915. He was leaving for London to become Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The British chronology of the war records that on the same day he was succeeded in France by Major-General Launcelot Kiggell, promoted to temporary lieutenant-general while holding the post. From then on Kiggell was the closest collaborator of General Douglas Haig, who had taken command of the British forces in France three days earlier.

The new chief of staff was 53. He was born in 1862 in County Limerick in Ireland into a family of modest means, passed through Sandhurst and in 1882 was commissioned into the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In the Boer War he served on the staff of General Redvers Buller. He was a typical staff officer and instructor. He taught at Sandhurst, in 1904–1907 worked at the Staff College in Camberley, in 1909–1913 headed the Staff Duties directorate at the War Office, taking over the post from Haig, and in 1913 succeeded Robertson as Commandant of the Staff College. From the outbreak of war he worked at the War Office, first as Director of Military Training and later as Director of Home Defence. According to some studies, at the end of 1915 he was also briefly Deputy Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

Kiggell was not Haig’s first choice. The new commander-in-chief wanted as his chief of staff General Richard Butler, who held that post in the First Army. The British official history writes that Butler was considered too junior. According to Kiggell’s biographers, the post went to him on the recommendation of Lord Herbert Kitchener. Butler became his deputy. Haig had known Kiggell for years and wrote that he had great confidence in him as a soldier and a gentleman. A less flattering judgement came from J.F.C. Fuller, who had been a student at the Staff College when Kiggell ran it. He wrote that Kiggell was a highly educated soldier, but a doctrinaire who had knowledge but little imagination.

The change did not concern the chief of staff alone. Robertson took with him to London the heads of his operations and intelligence sections, Brigadier-Generals Frederick Maurice and George Macdonogh, who took over the corresponding directorates at the War Office. In France they were replaced by John Davidson and John Charteris. Some historians believe that Haig’s new staff was weaker than the one Robertson had built, which may have affected the army’s operations over the next two years.

Kiggell was Haig’s chief of staff for more than two years, during the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele. At the beginning of 1918, under pressure from the prime minister, David Lloyd George, who blamed Haig’s staff for the bloody and fruitless attacks of 1917, he was removed together with several other officers of General Headquarters. He then became Lieutenant Governor of the island of Guernsey.