Loos 1915: The Unwanted Battle

In many histories 1915 is the forgotten year of the First World War.

Yet it saw the British and the French make repeated attempts to find methods that would break the stalemate that had existed since the end of First Ypres in the winter of 1914.

These attempts to break through the German lines culminated in what to the British was the Battle of Loos, the largest deployment of the British Army so far in this war.

At this stage the British were, on land, the junior partner in a coalition, and in the greater scheme of things, Loos was but a minor distraction in a much larger strategy, but as part of the development of the British way of waging war it was hugely important.

Loos saw the first use by the British of gas, a weapon banned in future conflicts, so terrible was it (erroneously) thought to be; the first use of the New Armies, Britain’s first truly citizen army, and the realization that it would be some time yet before they could be deployed with any confidence; and it was the final straw that led to the dismissal of Sir John French and his replacement by Sir Douglas Haig as Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force.

Gordon Corrigan uses contemporary accounts, war diaries and his own knowledge of the ground to chart the course of the battle, and assess the competence of commanders and the capabilities of men and equipment in what was, in many ways, the last hurrah of the old regular army.

This is an important addition to the ongoing re-assessment of the First World War, and of the British Army’s part in it.

Praise for Gordon Corrigan:

‘Political, fluent, well-researched and extremely argumentative’ – Andrew Roberts.

'Meticulously researched and well-written' Pennant

Major Gordon Corrigan is a retired Gurkha officer, a member of the British Commission for Military History and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fluent in the Nepali language, he is now a freelance military historian and battlefield lecturer. He is a well known figure on the History channel. He is also the author of ‘Sepoys in the Trenches’ and ‘Wellington: A Military Life’.

Endeavour Press is the UK’s leading independent publisher of digital books.