Sir James Edward Edmonds was a British First World Warofficer of the Royal Engineers. Edmonds became the Director of the Historical Section of the Committee of Imperial Defence on 1 April 1919 and was responsible for the post-war compilation of the 28-volume History of the Great War. Edmonds wrote nearly half the volumes, including eleven of the 14 volumes dealing with the Western Front. His task was not completed until the final volume was published in 1949.
Edmonds passed the two-year staff course at the top of his class. He was understandably marked for work inmilitary intelligence and was posted to the War Office Intelligence Department in 1899. Edmonds served as an Intelligence Officer in South Africa from 1901 to 1904, then the Far Eastern desk of the War Office Intelligence Department, following the removal of an officer found to have made basic mistakes in the role. He performed well, rising to be the head of the renamed Military Operations Directorate 5 in 1907, by which time he was a highly experienced intelligence officer. In 1905, with W. Birkbeck Wood, Edmonds authored The Civil War in the United States with Special Reference to the Campaigns of 1864 and 1865, a two-volume history of the American Civil War. The book, "subsequently abbreviated and constantly republished, remains to this day the best English history of the war". Edmonds was arguably the leading army intellectual of his day; as a child living in France he had witnessed the Franco-Prussian War and had studied the German Army ever since. He developed many German links and was important in convincing government ministers of a German spy threat before World War I. He is widely credited as being a pioneer of intelligence in the departments that developed into MI5, the British Security Service. Edmonds was a supporter of the appointment of Captain Vernon Kell to the Secret Service Bureau, the predecessor of MI5 of which Kell became the first head.
First World War
At the outbreak of the war in 1914, Edmonds was chief-of-staff of the 4th Division of the Expeditionary Force but the strain of the Great Retreat following the Battle of Mons, led to his replacement in September, within a month of the opening of hostilities. He spent the remainder of the war as a staff officer at the BEF GHQ, during which time he gathered documents to be used in the Official History. Edmonds needed to demonstrate great diplomacy to obtain information. He told his Australian counterpart, Charles Bean,
Later career
The History of the Great War produced by Edmonds has been criticised as propaganda, for being too lenient on the British generals. It has been suggested that Edmonds' favourable portrayal of Haig was a counterpoint to the scathing criticism delivered by the former British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George in his memoirs. In 1991, Denis Winter, a critic of Haig, acknowledged Edmonds' comprehensive understanding of British operations during the war but said, Andrew Green in Writing the Great War: Sir James Edmonds and the Official Histories 1915–1948 considered the volumes of the Official History for Gallipoli, the Somme, 3rd Ypres and the German March offensive of 1918 and concluded that Edmonds had been far more objective than others had given him credit for and that Edmonds was knighted in the 1928 Birthday Honours. In 1939, he became Secretary of the Cabinet Office Historical Section, following the resignation of Colonel E. Y. Daniel and on 15 November 1939, the section moved to Lytham St Annes, Lancashire where it stayed until April 1942, then moved to the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth. Edmonds died at Brecon House, Sherborne, Dorset, after a brief illness.
