Michael Gove recently made the above comments about so called "Blackadder myths" that misrepresent the quality of the British elite during the war. To what extent are his criticisms justified?
The "Blackadder Myth" is both true and false. Certainly, what you see on a television comedy is inaccurate, but criticism of Britain's officer class has increasingly grown popular since the end of the Second World War. Much of this is rooted in class politics -- officers traditionally came from the United Kingdom's oft lofted public schools -- and, in my opinion, to the detriment of the British Army's history.
The roots of such criticism date back to the Crimean War. The famous charge of the Light Brigade was (initially) an absolute scandal in London and commentators of the period attempted to spin the disaster as a demonstration of British bravery in the face of the enemy. No one officer was held singularly accountable for the blunder, and a code of secrecy and loyalty amongst the brigade's officers ultimately prevented anyone from being held responsible. The Charge was therefore swept under the rug by the War Office, and reliance upon tradition and seniority would continue to be held in high regard through the First World War.
In 1871 such criticisms eventually resulted in the Cardwell Reforms. For decades officers had been promoted by seniority (that is to say, by the date they received their commission) rather than by merit. The reforms drastically changed the way junior officers were promoted, but senior commanders were still somewhat teased about their ability to hold command in good fashion. You can see an early example of public criticism of the officer corps in the Major-General's Song from The Pirates of Penzance, where Gilbert and Sullivan cast a general as being well educated in absolutely everything but the art of war.
At the dawn of the First World War, the British Army was firmly rooted in its long-term traditions. However, absolutely no one could have predicted the sheer carnage that modern warfare brought to the battlefield. To criticize the officer corps and the Imperial General Staff during previous conflicts is logical, but preceding reforms and the Boer War had sharpened the War Office's organization of the army into a extremely potent force.
For example, the doctrine of cavalry superiority was common practice in Europe amongst every single major army. It was not until 1915 that trench warfare made their existence moot and even then some successful cavalry charges did carry the day. Airplanes, tanks and extremely powerful heavy artillery shook were all new inventions spawned by a desire for victory and all of these inventions inflicted immense casualties. The First World War shattered any previous doctrine and quickly devolved into a war of attrition.
Perhaps one of the most criticized battlefield commanders was the Earl Haig, who was nicknamed the "Butcher of the Somme" for his insistence upon brute force charges against German lines. Retired politicians were the first to level criticism upon the by-then dead Haig, although many quietly confided that the Allies had made no substantial progress until the Hundred Days campaign that gutted the German Army in 1918. However, Haig was keen on what critics perceived as gentleman staff officers, although arguably any officer would have been a member of the gentry. He has been, in my opinion, unfairly maligned as has the entire Blackadder portrayal of the British Army. What first perhaps began as a gentle nudging in The Pirates of Penzance has evolved into a scapegoat by politicians and a prejudicial view of the British Army in general by mid-20th century historians.
For a better view on the officer class immediately preceding the First World War, I'd recommend the following:
As others have said, this is both true and false. WWI was not inevitable, but nor was it futile, nor useless, nor any other synonym meant to evoke in the reader the feeling that millions of men were fed to some kind of giant meat grinder just over the horizon. The leadership was not, on the whole, inept; although many did make mistakes, this goes for all wars. Haig has been unfairly maligned, you can read 1918: A Very British victory, by Peter Hart, for the rarely-expressed view that he might actually have been quite a competent commander.
The myth of the officer sitting safely well behind the lines having a great time while men died is just that. The British lost more senior officers to small arms and shell fire in WWI than WWII, for instance.
There is something of a danger that the more popularised view of the war, a tragic waste of beautiful young men, has come to poison or at least colour the actual common experience of the war (As I heard one person pithily remark "Perhaps if Wilfred Owen had been a bit more bang bang, and a bit less scribble scribble, he might have survived the war."). Their personal view of the war has come to override other views from the same time, even from those other officer class poets who were pro-war.
Mindsets and worldviews back then were very different to ours, and Gove's vague statements about 'freedom', a 'just war' etc do not necessarily relate to what those same statements would mean back in 1914. Please remember that Britain was an Empire, and Germany wanted a competing empire, and colonialism was still very much alive. If British soldiers were fighting to defend freedom, then the question must be asked "Whose freedom?" The freedom of Belgium, France, Russia? None of Germany's post-war goals would really have impinged upon Britain's freedom.
Gove's statements are vague, to leave room for political manoeuvre. He has an axe to grind, as he is currently part of an out-of-touch right-wing elite with strong interests in portraying Britain as having an antagonistic relationship with Europe. If he was ever stupid enough to get down to particulars, any competent historian would tear him a new arsehole.
I think there are two fronts to address your question on.
I think the main "Blackadder myth" that he is referring to is the sheer incompetence of the military leadership during the war. This is largely true. Millions of allied (and German, for that matter) soldiers were killed in assaults that retrospectively we can say were utterly futile. This is, however, largely a result of genuine lack of knowledge rather than any malicious intent on the part of the military leadership. It's been said that military leadership always fights the last war, and this was true of World War 1, they just had the misfortune of doing so at a time when technology had increased incredibly rapidly since the last major European conflict. Napoleon had gone almost undefeated for nearly 15 years based on shock tactics, rapid advances, and encirclement. Not having seen another major continental conflict since then the Military Establishment of ALL nations believed that one must always attack, when in fact it turned out that the defensive forces had an immense advantage.
Truthfully there were several opportunities for them all to realize this, notably the Russo-Japanese War and to a lesser extent the American Civil War, but they did not. So, while General's were incompetent it wasn't just because they were assholes. For the most part they were sincere, just out of touch.
The second part I do think he is right about. I think that many people, when they first learn about the connections between the First World War and the rise of Naziism the Soviet Union etc. believes that the world was better off before or would have been better if the Germans won and that the whole thing was pointless. Then, the more you learn about, the more realize that it really was the Germans' fault in many respects and that they really were fighting "for democracy."
The more you read about pre-war German society the more genuinely scary that threat seems. The British may have been classist and arrogant and the French insane and obsessed with revenge (the Russians were genuinely horrific autocrats, so I'm going to leave them out of the "the good guys") but the point is they were FAR better than the Germans. Germany didn't just want security, they wanted everything. Even in late 1916 Germany's peace conditions involved them annexing 2/3rds of Belgium (whose neutrality they had violated) and much of Normandy, along with heavy restrictions on both British and French military capabilities. In pre-war Germany the Kaiser was almost in control as the Czar was in Russia, and it was largely his bungling of foreign affairs that led to the war in the first place. The Germans didn't execute Belgian civilians just because, they did it because they genuinely didn't understand the concept of resistance to authority. To their mind they should have just walked through Belgium and the Belgians should have loved it.
A childhood obsession with the military had left the Kaiser a slave to his general staff, who basically talked him into supporting a lot of the more overtly aggressive decisions made during the war. The "Kultur' that Germany thought it was their duty to bring to the world was not it's brilliant music, science, or philosophy (all of which flourished in Imperial Germany) but rather a culture of obedience to a hyper-militarist, more than likely racist, and almost comically arrogant ruling class that wanted to, eventually, rule the world.
tl;dr: Blackadder was sort of right, the Generals were dumb but it wasn't just out of spite. The war was for a good cause, the Germans really were assholes, and the reason things went south afterwards was because of bungled peace and inter-war occurrences rather than the futility of the War itself.
Sources: The Guns of August and The Proud Tower (both by Barbara Tuchman and excellent books on the beginning of and pre-war atmospheres respectively) and Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War by Max Hastings.
Fiction but also interesting, The General by C.S. Forester is sort of like an All Quiet on the Western Front from the perspective of a British Aristocrat who does all within his feeble capabilities to win the war with minimal casualties and fails miserably.