Book Reviews

Secret Warriors
Key Scientists, Code-breakers and Propagandists of the Great War

by Taylor Downing
London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2014
357 pages, £20 (cloth)
ISBN: 978-1-4087-0421-9

Reviewed by Douglas Agnew

The title of Taylor Downing’s latest book, Secret Warriors, is slightly misleading. It is not about intelligence officers and other scoundrels playing ‘sneaky-peaky.’ Rather, it is about the mostly-British doctors, engineers, soldiers, and the occasional madman, whose research and experimentation had a dramatic effect upon how the war was waged, upon the men who fought it, and upon the Home Front. It is also a history of the politicians and institutions which either made their work possible, or did their best to obstruct it.

Downing sets the historical stage. Pre-War Edwardian England was not the end of the ‘long’ 19th Century, not a time of languid summers and imperial pomp. It was, in fact, a time of great optimism, when people believed the future held exciting new possibilities. But optimism was not enough. Britain was falling behind its industrial rivals, Germany and the United States. The Army and the Royal Navy were loath to embrace technological advances. Senior officers were educated, almost without exception, in the public schools, and shared their social class’s distain for industry and science. They considered themselves professionals, and most saw little reason to change how they did business. Downing also puts wartime research and development in a post-War historical perspective. While industrial-scientific war resulted in slaughter on an unprecedented scale, it also laid the foundations for much of the scientific progress that would be achieved over the next two decades.

Downing covers some familiar territory. He writes of Lord Richard Haldane, Secretary of State for War from 1905 to 1912. A military reformer, Haldane won government support, overcame the skepticism of the military, and brought scientific rigor to the study of aviation. Downing recounts how Royal Flying Corps reconnaissance flights were providing invaluable information by the third week of August 1914, how such flights were initially considered an invasion of the enemy’s privacy by some officers in the Army, and how, much later in the war, they detected the movement of large numbers of troops before the German offensive of March 1918. He also speaks to Winston Churchill’s pre-occupation with total secrecy, and his failure to realize Room 40 intercepts had to be systematically analyzed, and those analyses disseminated. Downing is highly critical of Churchill, but does not allow himself to condemn the man.

He devotes much of his book to doctors and surgeons. After the death of maneuver warfare in September 1914, armies on both sides were able to develop methods of moving wounded men away from the front line for medical attention. In the British Army, Casualty Clearing Stations came to include laboratories, X-ray machines, and operating theaters, and eventually specialized in particular treatments, such as head injuries or abdominal wounds. It was here that a ‘cruel arithmetic’ [triage] was applied and men who were thought to be too far gone received minimal attention. Medical scientists and doctors increasingly understood the need to keep wounds clean, and cases of infections, such as gas gangrene dropped by 90 percent from 1914 to 1918. Australian and Canadian army units began to use transfusions more frequently, and methods to refrigerate blood were slowly improved. Captain Harold Delf Gillies became one of the pioneers of reconstructive surgery, developing techniques to rebuild faces, and to graft bones and skin. These techniques enabled many horribly disfigured soldiers to face the world again.

By the end of 1914, the British Army was noting an increasing number of men with either no physical injuries, or with very minor ones, but they were suffering from paralysis, the shakes, and stupor, among many other symptoms. Enter Charles Samuel Myers, a physician teaching psychology at Cambridge when the war broke out. Myers secured a position at a private hospital in Paris attached to the British Army. It was here that he theorized that ‘shell shock’ was a physical concussion caused by close proximity to exploding shells, challenging the widely-held belief that ‘hysteria’ was an indication of weakness. Myers later came to reject his own theory, concluding that the vast majority of cases of shell shock had psychological causes. He also came to reject the term shell shock as an inadequate descriptor of a wide range of symptoms. Myers established the principle of treating cases as close to the front as possible, which is, to this day, fundamental to all military psychology. The Army ultimately rejected the humane approach to curing shell shock advocated by Myers and his colleagues, preferring instead to see it as a disciplinary issue. Records released in the 1990s showed that men who had broken down under the strain of the most brutal war to date had, in fact, been executed as examples, contrary to repeated assertions by the British government.

Downing also covers the dark art of propaganda, a subject given short shrift if not completely ignored in most histories of conflict. The bureaucracy of propaganda under British Prime Minister Lloyd George was dysfunctional, but British propagandists nevertheless had notable successes, weakening the Austro-Hungarian war effort by fanning the flames of independence among the many nationalities making up the Empire. They also convinced many Germans that the Allies had nothing against the German people, but were determined to defeat their militaristic leadership.

Secret Warriors suffers from a few problems. There are places where Downing goes back and forth in time. It can take a while to grasp whatever point he is making when doing so. As a specific example, Part Four, Doctors and Surgeons, comes to mind. The author also spends a lot of time in Part Five, Propagandists, dealing with wrangling in the propaganda bureaucracy, which is all very interesting, but it would be nice to know more about how the art of propaganda was practiced.

Nonetheless, Taylor Downing is an accomplished historian. Secret Warriors is well-researched, with some interesting and unusual primary sources, the controversial Brigadier General John Charteris’s At G.H.Q. being among them. Secret Warriors is an informative, worthwhile read, covering as it does subjects often overlooked by amateur and professional historians and soldiers alike.

Major (ret’d) Douglas Agnew was an Army Intelligence Officer, most recently as J3-2 Collection Management for the CF Intelligence Group. He is now Managing Director of Insights Incorporated, which provided information and intelligence to companies seeking investment opportunities.