At the outbreak of war, the imperial powers in East Africa were unprepared for a major campaign. Although the colonies possessed little strategic value in themselves, the dynamics of imperial rivalry quickly generated armed conflict. The East African campaign evolved haphazardly from neutralising German wireless communications and naval facilities to a wildly over-ambitious plan to conquer the whole of the colony with scant forces. The British wanted to keep any potential spoils for themselves, but were also strongly influenced by the expansionist policies of South Africa, largely propounded by Louis Botha and Jan Smuts. By September 1916, the British forces, commanded by Smuts, had occupied the bulk of German East Africa with all the railways, towns and ports in their possession. However, he had failed to bring the German Schutztruppe to battle and it remained a powerful and well-motivated force. Furthermore, his reliance to manoeuvre and reluctance to fight battles led his troops ever-deeper into enemy territory and dependent on inadequate lines of communication. Smuts continued his advance until January 1917 when he left for the Imperial War Conference. His forces were in terrible condition and unfit for further offensive operations. He was succeeded by the British General Hoskins for a bare three months, but, who nevertheless instigated badly needed reforms and reorganisation. In May 1917, the South African, General, van Deventer assumed command, an appointment that he would hold until the end of war. Van Deventer continued to build on Hoskin’s work while instigating an aggressive policy of fighting hard battles whenever possible, while concurrently trying to destroy German food supplies. These methods were continued throughout the remainder of 1917 and until November 1918 when the war ended with the Schutztruppe being pursued from Portuguese East Africa into Northern Rhodesia.

Our memory and understanding of women's experiences at the Front during the First World War are overwhelmingly influenced by the autobiographical account of Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth was published in 1933 as part of a wave of antiwar literature produced by men and women. Brittain's chronicle of the war achieved renewed popularity in the 1970s and early 1980s when it was dramatised by the BBC and acclaimed by feminist academics who recognised its value in contesting the predominantly male literary war canon. Brittain wrote about the effects of losing the young men in her life, her fiance and her brother, and the inability she felt as a young woman, to achieve anything constructive during the war. When her fiance enlisted in the army she decided to enrol as an auxiliary nurse with the Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), believing this would give her at least some idea of what it was like to experience war. The loss of the men she loved shaped her war experiences, as did the labour and anguish of volunteer nursing and the eclipse of her youth in a war that she considered neither just nor worthwhile. Her experience of being a young woman from a provincial middle-class background, without medical training, going off to war to nurse as a way of comprehending the experiences of the men closest to her came to personify the experience of women who went to the Front.

This thesis examines the relationships and interactions between British and French soldiers on the Western Front of the First World War. To date the historical approaches to inter-allied relations has been predominantly focused on those interactions taking place at governmental or command levels. Whilst previous studies have touched on the relations between common soldiers, this has often been within specific case studies. I have drawn particularly on the contemporary diaries, letters and written records of British soldiers within the Imperial War Museum and also the postal censorship records of the French army at the Archives de l'armee de terre in order to trace the nature and evolution of these relations across the war. My study covers the time-period of 1914-1918 and focuses on periods of sustained contact in 1914, 1916 and 1918. This focus shows that the arrival of Kitchener's New Armies in 1915-16 was a crucial development in forming strong relations between British and French soldiers. British military command took little interest and made no substantial plans for ensuring friendly relations between soldiers of the two armies and, as a result, these early interactions were largely self-directed by the soldiers. They were also driven by the apparent insecurities of the British volunteer soldiers who viewed themselves as being less accomplished than their French fellows, who were largely well-disposed to welcoming and teaching the new British arrivals in order to achieve swift victory. I argue that, although serendipitous in nature, this uneven starting point allowed relations between British and French armies to evolve positively whilst allowing both sides to maintain a sense of their own national identity without having to overly sacrifice their own ideals. However, the French desire for a decisive victory and a professional response in the trenches led to a rupture in Tommy-Poilu relations following the British failures in 1918. This changed the dynamic between the two nations in the build up to, and aftermath of, the armistice and provided a prelude to the difficult inter-war relationships at governmental levels.

This thesis analyses the significance of oil to British strategy during 1914-1923. It shows that by 1923 Britain had a coherent oil policy, which affected naval strategy, diplomatic relations, policy towards the oil industry and post-war aims in the Middle East. Previous works have looked at only part of the picture and have not appreciated the extent to which oil affected all these areas. This work brings all these different facets together into a single study. The most important British user of oil was the Royal Navy, which was replacing coal with oil as its principal fuel even before the First World War, which saw great growth in the use of oil. Aircraft and land vehicles powered by oil fuelled internal combustion engines transformed both warfare and civilian life, but their overall usage of oil was much less than that of the RN. British industry was slower than the RN to adopt oil because coal was cheaper; the RN put the technical advantages of oil ahead of cost. Britain's power and prestige was based on its naval supremacy; British dominance of naval fuel bunkering was a key factor in this. Britain had substantial reserves of coal, including Welsh steam coal, the best in the world for naval use, but little oil. Britain's oil strategy in 1914 was to build up reserves cheaply in peacetime and to buy on the market in wartime. An oil crisis in 1917 showed that this was flawed and that secure, British controlled supplies were needed. The war created an opportunity for Britain to secure substantial oil reserves in the Middle East. Attempts to obtain control of these affected the peace treaties and Britain's post-war relations with its Allies. The USA was then the world's largest producer and was the main supplier to the Allies during the war. It believed, wrongly, that its output would decline in the 1920s and feared that Britain was trying to exclude it from the rest of the world. France also realised that it needed access to safe and reliable supplies of oil. The largest available potential oilfield was in the Mosul vilayet, part of the Ottoman Empire in 1914, and now part of Iraq. The 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement allocated about half of Mosul to France, which in 1918 agreed to include all of it in the British mandate territory of Iraq in return for a share of the oil and British support elsewhere. Other disagreements delayed an Anglo-French oil agreement, but one was finally signed at San Remo in 1920. It was followed by the Treaty of Sèvres with the Ottoman Empire, which appeared to give Britain all that it wanted in the Middle East. The resurgence of Turkey under Mustafa Kemal meant that it had to be re-negotiated at Lausanne in 1923. Sèvres angered the USA, since it appeared to exclude US oil companies from Iraq. For a period Britain focused on the need to have a large, British controlled oil company, but it was eventually realised that control of oil bearing territory was more important than the nationality of companies. This allowed US oil companies to be given a stake in Iraqi oil, improving Anglo-American relations. Britain's need for oil meant that it had to ensure that the Treaty of Lausanne left Mosul as part of the British mandate territory of Iraq. Turkey objected, but the League of Nations ruled in Britain's favour. Britain had other interests in the region, but most of them did not require control over Mosul. Mosul's oil gave Britain secure supplies and revenue that made Iraq viable without British subsidies. By 1923 Britain had devised a coherent strategy of ensuring secure supplies of oil by controlling oil bearing territory.

During the First World War, thousands of Welsh women became involved in the production of munitions and food for the war effort. This thesis examines attitudes towards and experiences of women workers employed in munitions and agricultural production in Wales during the war. It explores the organisation and recruitment of women in these areas, the employment of women in both fields, the organisation of welfare and leisure within and outside the workplace, and women’s experiences of demobilisation. Throughout, it considers women’s motivations for undertaking war work, as well as their experiences, including their involvement in strike action and in sporting activities, and how these were affected by class, age, and locality. The thesis argues that while the war lasted, women gained greater self-confidence and started to forge a collective identity as workers, but their contribution to the labour market was always viewed as temporary and valued less than men’s work. After the Armistice, women were forced back to the home or to traditional ‘feminine’ occupations. This thesis therefore contributes to long-standing historiographical arguments about the extent to which the war brought about lasting social change for women. It makes a significant contribution to the under-researched field of Welsh women’s experiences in the First World War.

This thesis explores the economic, social and political changes in society of the largely rural Welsh county of Pembrokeshire during the First World War to establish to what extent war conditions were a major agency of change and whether that change was of short duration or long lasting. Regional and local studies of particular counties and towns provide for a micro-historical test of national hypotheses. The methodology of this thesis has been to extensively engage with all existing primary sources, for evidence of social change. The potency of a conservative reaction seeing custom, tradition and hankering after pre-war certainties has been identified as a factor successful in limiting the scope of social change. The introduction places the thesis in its historiographical frame and presents the national debate of continuity verses war-generated change. Chapter one investigates state expansion and regulation of everyday life through the Defence of the Realm Act. Chapter two discusses changes to the Pembrokeshire economy and the implications of wartime price rises. Chapter three discusses voluntary military enlistment, the operation of conscription at the local level through Military Service Tribunals, conscientious objection and female paramilitary military service and the gender implications which it raised. Chapter four considers the changing identities of individuals and the rich diversity of expression of patriotic wartime forms. Religious and cultural changes are analysed in chapter five with the effects of carefully choreographed propaganda expressed in public events. The vicarious experiences of war on a distant rural population, including spy and war scares, expressions of the psychology of wartime, are reviewed in chapter six in the v context of Pembrokeshire being a coastal county. The thesis concludes with an assessment which detects limited social change and greater long-term continuity than war exceptionalism as the Pembrokeshire experience.

119 Brigade, 40th Division, had an unusual origin as a 'left-over' brigade of the Welsh Army Corps and was the only completely bantam formation outside 35th Division. This study investigates the formation's national identity and demonstrates that it was indeed strongly 'Welsh' in more than name until 1918. New data on discipline and the social background of men and officers is added to that generated by earlier studies. The examination of the brigade's actions on the Westem Front challenges the widely held belief that there was an inherent problem with this and other bantam formations. The original make-up of the brigade is compared with its later forms when new and less efficient units were introduced. Training is identified as key to success in battle. The controversial Frank Percy Crozier commanded the unit for most of its active service and the study examines the often-quoted books by Crozier putting them into context and concluding that they must be used warily as source material. The study advances the view that Crozier, while not an easy man to like, was an efficient and effective commander during the Great War and not the 'callous and overbearing martinet' often portrayed.

The evolution of infantry battalion commanders in the First World War progressed from a pre-war system based mainly on promotion by seniority to one largely based on merit. It remained a weighted process, however, favouring the professional officer, particularly during the first two years, and biased against the Territorial. The quality of the pre-war officer appears higher than has been estimated. Average command lasted 8.5 months. Eleven per cent of COs were killed, ten per cent promoted, and 18 per cent invalided. The army practised quality control, removing 38 per cent from command, although reduction in removals as the war progressed indicates a refinement of quality. The army committed itself to professional development, teaching technical aspects of the CO role, as well as command and leadership. Citizens of 1914 with no previous military experience rose to command, this progress taking on average three years. Despite the social opening-up of the officer corps, these men tended to be from the professional class. By The Hundred Days, infantry battalion commanders were a mix of professional soldiers, pre-war auxiliaries and citizens - younger, fitter and richly experienced; many being quick thinkers, self-assured, and endowed with great personal courage and well-developed tactical ability.

This thesis examines the conceptual origins of the control of the air in Britain between 1911 and 1918. It concludes that military and naval aviators possessed an innate understanding of the concept, informed by the wider operational and organisational context of their respective parent services. For the Royal Flying Corps, the control of the air was understood in terms of providing auxiliary support to the British Army in the field. For the Royal Naval Air Service, the concept possessed an inherently strategic slant. Pre-war theorising, developed during the First World War, has been the subject of some controversy in the literature. The overtly tactical focus of the Royal Flying Corps and its concept of the control of the air, praised in the first instance, is now widely criticised. In contrast, naval aviators, highlighted as lacking focus and direction, are now hailed as progressive innovators. By examining various facets affecting the conceptual origins of the control of the air, including doctrine, education, and relations with allies, this thesis attempts to reinvigorate the traditional interpretation of military and naval air power in Britain during this period.

Infantry brigades have been described as the ‘building blocks’ of the British army. Despite this, their role and that of their commanding brigadier-generals have been labelled as being concerned primarily with the provision of ‘training and administration’. The conventional criteria used to evaluate the performance of brigades and their commanders, however, has been their battlefield performance. This study challenges these orthodoxies. The Battle of Arras 1917 was the first offensive action which provided the British army with an opportunity to implement the lessons derived from its experience drawn from the Battle of the Somme. A cohort of one hundred and sixteen brigadier-generals commanded cavalry and infantry brigades involved in the battle. Collectively they are the subject of analysis. Five of these brigadier-generals, their battalion commanders and principal staff officers, are the subject of case studies over the period mid-October 1916 until mid-May 1917. These studies reveal a number of threads, in addition to battlefield performance, that are argued to be essential elements in understanding the role and functions of brigadier-generals. Their most significant contribution was to ensure, despite the unglamorous treadmill of building and rebuilding their brigades, that they retained the capacity and capability of their brigades for battle.