ABSTRACT
In particular, this study looks at the development of British operational thought during the war, a subject that has been comparatively neglected. The concept of the operational level of war is employed here in the sense of the ‘area between strategy and tactics which denoted the fighting of battles in a given theatre of operations in pursuit of the political objective of the war’,2 and as the ‘grey zone once called Grand Tactics, the tactics of large formations’, such as army groups, armies and corps.3 One area of especially heated debate during the war was whether to employ breakthrough or siege operations to penetrate the formidable German defences.
