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Sir Frank Fox

First World War and WW2 Author, author of Breaker Morant

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The RUSI Journal review essay including G.H.Q.

October 12, 2017 by Ed Goodson


Excerpt from THE SOMME A CONTEST OF ENDURANCE, Review Essay by Jack Spence:

So much for context. Two of the authors under review — Frank Fox and Taylor Downing — provide specialised treatment of two subjects: the work of General Headquarters (GHQ) based at Montreuil-sur-Mer and the impact of shell shock on those who suffered and those in authority who had to deal with it.

Frank Fox, whose G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer) was first published in 1920, was severely wounded on the Somme, but after a year’s convalescence returned to France as a staff officer at Montreuil.
The work was reissued in 2015 by Charles Goodson-Wickes, the author’s great-grandson and literary executor.
The reader is offered a meticulous and well—researched account of the vast bureaucratic structure and process required by Britain to prosecute the war successfully. This was, in many ways, a miracle of improvisation that governments of the past had never had to deal with on this scale, given the logistic requirements of modern war. In effect, the war, at one level of analysis, was a bureaucratic contest between states, all of which were seeking to mobilise and destroy the enemy’s ability to wage war most effectively. The author considers this in superb detail: for example, how munitions were supplied and despatched to the front; how medical facilities were organised; how horses and mules were cared for; and how a rudimentary educational system was devised. Fox is also illuminating on Secretary of State for War Horatio Kitchener’s New Army, providing an altogether fascinating account of the supporting role of the Dominions and the US. This argument is supported by a wealth of statistical information, photographs and a helpful chart detailing the various directorates and inspectorates controlled by the quartermaster general. Finally, there is a delicately phrased account of GHQ at play: ’monkish in its denial of some pleasures, rigid in discipline, exacting in work, but neither austere nor anxious’.7

This is an important text full of insight into how the British organised themselves for war.

7Frank Fox, G.H.Q. (Montreuil—sur-Mer)
(Beaumont Fox, 2015), p. 1.

(The RUSI Journal Dec 2016, Vol.161)

Filed Under: G.H.Q. Montreuil-sur-Mer

Review “The King’s Pilgrimage” The Times, Tuesday, Jul 04, 1922

October 12, 2017 by Ed Goodson

The Times, Tuesday, Jul 04, 1922; pg. 16; Issue 43074; col C
Our War Graves In France. “The King’s Pilgrimage.”, A Fitting Record.

Review Times

Filed Under: The King's Pilgrimage

Rupert Edis on GHQ for “History Today”

October 12, 2017 by Ed Goodson

History Today book review
Sir Frank Fox is a largely forgotten figure whose life reads like a character from a John Buchan novel. A “strikingly handsome” Australian émigré to England, who became a doyen of Fleet Street, as a war correspondent he witnessed German atrocities against Belgian civilians in 1914 which so appalled him that he signed up – lying about his age – at 41.

Grievously injured at the Somme, he worked for a time at MI7, focused on bringing the USA into the war, before charming his way to a staff officer post at General Headquarters (GHQ) in Montreuil-sur-Mer, northern France.

GHQ was the ‘brain’ of the huge British expeditionary effort in France and Belgium, responsible for strategy, coordination with Allied governments, and administration.

This contemporary account, re-published to coincide with the centenary of GHQ’s move to Montreuil under Haig, is a fascinating reminder of the unsung but vital role of logistics in military success or failure – “for every rifleman in the trenches there are at least three people working to keep him supplied with food, clothing, ammunition, and on communication.”

The red-tabbed staff officers of GHQ, whose prior experience at best stretched to small colonial wars, suddenly found themselves as the “Board of Directors” of a vast wartime supermarket, transport (in charge of half a million horses, and a spider’s web of railways), laundry and health service which had to match the BEF’s tenfold growth 1914-16.

Fox compares the challenge to peacetime civilian administration: “Tell the manager of the London to Brighton line that next week he must carry 15 times the normal traffic for a number of days, and that it is extremely important that people observing his termini and his lines should not notice anything unusual”. During intense fighting, 1,934 tons of materiel had to be supplied to each mile of front, per day, to feed the war machine.

GHQ personnel led lives of monkish hard work, sealed tight inside Montreuil’s medieval ramparts against the dangers of espionage. Fox, who had experienced both, downplays the dangers of trench life, “not nearly so dangerous as one might judge from the lurid accounts of imaginative writers”, as set against the “fantastic” but punishing work at GHQ.

Work might continue through consecutive days and nights, and some men, tortured by their sometimes momentous effect on human lives, became unfit to work there. Hardly the image of cosy “chateau generalship” encouraged by some historians and “Blackadder”.

There are moments of high tension at GHQ when the Ludendorff Offensive of March 1918 smashed through British lines, threatening the Channel Ports, the conquest of which the author estimated could have extended the war by another ten years. GHQ worked then with the French on defensive preparations to destroy Calais, Boulogne and Dunkirk and flood the Pas de Calais from the sea, which would have made “this great province a desert for two generations”.

From March 1918 until the Armistice, GHQ was subsumed under the overall command of the French Généralissime Marshal Foch, but continued to play its crucial role in the complex strategic and logistic planning for the ultimate defeat of the German Army.

This charming account, sometimes disjointed and written in the manner and language of its time, which will not please all modern readers, gives rare perspective on GHQ’s wartime operations. Its example 1916-18 (the author also reminds us that Montreuil was a jump off point for the Roman invasion of Britain, and “lay almost in sight” of Agincourt and Crecy) demonstrates the need for a flexible, bilateral approach to meet changing circumstances – at least in military and security affairs – rather than the over-idealistic “ever closer union” required by some of Britain’s current allies.

Filed Under: G.H.Q. Montreuil-sur-Mer

Excerpt from The Agony of Belgium

February 12, 2017 by Ed Goodson

The King among his soldiers

Excerpt from Chapter II of The Agony of Belgium by Sir Frank Fox page 19 with the speech from King Albert I to the Belgium parliament on August 4th, 1914.

On July 31st, 1914, the mobilization of the Belgian Army was ordered, and the Belgian King at the same time called publicly Europe’s attention to the fact that Germany, Great Britain and France were solemnly bound to respect and to defend the neutrality of his country. On August 2nd, Great Britain and France having replied that they would faithfully observe their treaty obligations, Germany intimated to Belgium that she intended to march troops through her territory to attack France, and if Belgium would acquiesce in this, then Belgium would not be annexed after the war and no damage would be done.
On August 3rd Belgium replied that to assent to that would be to sacrifice her national honour and to betray her duty to Europe, and on August 4th the Belgian King, addressing his Parliament, said:

“Never since 1830 has a graver hour sounded for Belgium. The strength of our right and the need of Europe for our autonomous existence make us still hope that the dreaded events will not occur. If it is necessary for us to resist an invasion of our soil, however, that duty will find us armed and ready to make the greatest sacrifices. If a stranger should violate our territory, he will find all the Belgians gathered round their Sovereign, who will never betray his Constitutional Oath. I have faith in our destinies. A country which defends itself wins the respect of everyone and cannot perish. God will be with us.”

The same day the German Army violated Belgian territory, crossing the frontier at dawn. On August 4th Liége was attacked and on August 7th fell.*

Filed Under: The Agony of Belgium Tagged With: august - december 1914, belgium 1914, start of WW1, ww1

The Guards Magazine book reviews of The Agony of Belgium and GHQ

July 13, 2016 by Ed Goodson

In June the Guards Magazine, Journal of the Household Division, reviewed two Frank Fox books: The Agony of Belgium The Invasion of Belgium; August-December 1914 and G.H.Q. (Montreuil-sur-Mer) . We have copied the text from the reviews below and here is the link to see them on their website World War I books review The Guards Magazine.

THE AGONY OF BELGIUM
THE INVASION OF BELGIUM; AUGUST-DECEMBER 1914
by Major Frank Fox

Frank Fox was an Australian born in 1874. A journalist from the age of 18, he came to London in 1909, where he was soon warning of a European war. He covered the Balkan War as a war correspondent on the staff of the Morning Post, and in August 1914 was sent to Belgium to cover the German invasion. This remarkable little book, published in 1915, was the product: a contemporary account of the bravery and suffering of the Belgian population and the Belgian Army, and the stoicism of King Albert.

Although the newspapers at the time made much of the ghastliness and brutality of the Germans, to the extent that this was later regarded as shameless propaganda, there can be no doubt that the Germans were responsible for some terrible atrocities in Belgium. It is one of the tragic features of war that invading armies, however rapid and successful their advances are, tend to attack populations with unnecessary ferociousness. The Germans, with all their sense of discipline and order behaved this way in 1914, and did the same in 1940. Twice in the same century, Belgium suffered greatly before this small country was quietly forgotten as the battle moved on.

The Agony of Belgium is good reportage and written by one who was there. So much of the First World War was about the trenches, no man’s land, and the big offensives, so it is perhaps not surprising that later generations assume that this is how it was. This short book, written just over a century ago, proves that this was not the case. Dr Charles Goodson-Wickes, formerly The Life Guards and Frank Fox’s great grandson, has done today’s readers a great service by re-publishing this excellent account of an aspect of the First World War that could so easily be forgotten.

G.H.Q.
(Montreuil-sur-Mer)
by Sir Frank Fox

Following Frank Fox’s time in Belgium, witnessing the German invasion and writing The Agony of Belgium, he was keen to get into uniform with a combatant role. In those opening months of the war he had seen the German Army through a very different prism, and what he saw must have had a profound effect on him. Commissioned into the British Army at the age of 41, he was back in France by December 1914. He suffered severe injuries during the Battle of the Somme, and spent a year recovering in hospital back in England. Yet still, he wanted to be back to the front, and succeeded in getting himself a job at Haig’s HQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. As Dr Goodson-Wickes describes in his foreword ‘he must have cut a curious figure on crutches having lost part of his right foot, and having a withered left arm. His profound deafness cannot have added to the overall impression’.

Montreuil-sur-Mer is a charming walled town that is not exactly ‘on the sea’ because its estuary silted up many years ago. GHQ moved to Montreuil in March 1916, and given its strategic role and important link to the War Office in London, there can be little doubt that its location made perfect sense, despite the occasional swipe delivered by polemic historians of another era. GHQ’s web of communications stretched out and along the Western Front, and the scope of its responsibilities were truly vast. Frank Fox’s account of GHQ provides a vivid picture of what it must have been like here, and it was certainly not an easy life. Staff officers routinely worked late into the night, weekends really did not exist, leave was intermittent, and those who worked here would have suffered from that additional sense of guilt about being away from the real action.

There are many stereotypes about Headquarters in the First World War, not helped by Oh What a Lovely War and Blackadder. For a considerably more balanced insight into GHQ and its workings, Frank Fox’s book has filled another important gap.

The Editor

Filed Under: WW1 books review

Sir Frank Fox marries Helena Clint

May 30, 2016 by Ed Goodson

 

Sir Frank Fox married Helena Clint,  grand daughter of the English landscape painter Alfred Clint and great granddaughter of George Clint the theatrical and portrait painter.

Alfred Clint (1807-1883) "Margate"
Alfred Clint (1807-1883) “Margate”
George Clint (1770-1854)
George Clint (1770-1854)

Filed Under: Sir Frank Fox

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