GREAT WAR Battles Nomenclature Committee Report

Thirty years ago, N&MP published a reprint of E. A. James’s Record of the Battles and Engagements of the British Armies in France and Flanders 1914-1918, an invaluable little work of reference. Then some years later an even more significant contribution to the study of the Great War – the first reprint of the Committee report, on which James’s booklet was based. (‘Battles and Engagements’ has remained in print through several editions since first publication.)
The ‘Battles Nomenclature Committee Report’ has long since disappeared from general view and yet it remains an essential source. It is unique in that it is the sole authority for what action has official recognition, under what name it is known and what are its geographical and chronological limits. It covers every theatre of war from the Western Front to China, and provides the framework on which the history of the conflict has been and continues to be written. It was also the basis on which the regiments laid claim to their battle honours. 
Although the tables are the essence of the report, the first part makes absorbing reading. Here is the reasoning behind the Committee’s decision; here are explained the principles it followed in devising the system of classification. Firepower and numbers engaged alone could not always be the predominant factors in deciding the relative importance of engagements; moral and political effects had also to be considered. An action that in terms of the Western Front might have been regarded as a local affair might, in some minor theatre, have had an effect out of all proportion due to the number engaged and due weight had to be given to that outcome. 
This is a valuable and essential document, and its reissue is an important step in the process of making out-of-print, official material widely available to the ever-increasing number of students of the history of the Great War.