"I keep pointing out that AJP Taylor, in his fairly definitive account of WW2 points out repeatedly that senior officers had learned the lessons the hard way when as junior officers in WW1 they witnessed and to their shame were involved with the awful decisions and methods. They had no intention of repeating them."

A.J.P.Taylor - that the one born to wealthy left-wing parents, whose mother in the 1920 was a member of the Comintern and who had an Uncle who was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Great Britain? Member of the Communist Party himself, the ardent Labour supporter the whole of his life from the age of twenty onwards - can't see any reason at all why his view on things might be slightly biased, can you?

Leaving the Second World War aside for a minute here is what A.J.P.Taylor said about the First World War:

"The Second World War, however, changed historians views of the First World War.   Faced by the phenomenon of an Adolf Hitler, the 'Anti-revisionists' tended to return to the idea of German responsibility.   In Britain, the historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote a book called The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, in which he claimed that German ambitions caused the conflict:

[The German] bid for continental supremacy was certainly decisive in bringing on the European War ...
A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (1954)

About the same time, a book by the Italian journalist Luigi Albertini - The origins of the War of 1914 - became available in English.   Albertini's ideas supported AJP Taylor's in as much as he believed that the primary responsibility for the war lay with Germany's plan of mobilisation.   Unlike other countries' mobilisation plans, the Schlieffen Plan was OFFENSIVE, and meant that, when Germany mobilised, Germany went to war.

Most of all, Taylor was supported by the German historian Fritz Fischer, who in his books Griff nach der Weltmacht ('Grasp for World Power', 1961) and War of Illusions (1969) argued that:
1.   there was a 'will to war' amongst the leaders of Germany,
2.   the German government wanted events to slide into war in 1914,
3.   the German government had a plan of expansion very similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s,
4.   this was as a result of social and economic factors inside Germany - the ATTITUDE of Germans - as much as it was the result of any fears about foreign policy or the international scene."

Now this next bit is a statement of the obvious if ever there was one and can be applied to every war and every subsequent war that followed it within a generation:

"senior officers had learned the lessons the hard way when as junior officers in XXXXXXX they witnessed and to their shame were involved with the awful decisions and methods."

Well History and recorded fact showed the opposite with the BEF in France in 1939 and 1940 and with the TA Expeditionary Force sent to Narvik in Norway in 1940 - British Senior Officers the ones A.J.P.Taylor and Musket are referring to showed that they had not learned anything at all. Sir John French with his 80,000 men in France in 1914 and 1915 at least managed to keep his army as a force in being and successfully engaged and delayed the German advance. All these senior British officers in the Second World War, all the ones who had learned all those lessons succeeded in overseeing the total destruction of their Army and that army would have been captured lock, stock and barrel had Admiral Ramsay and the Royal Navy not organised and protected their evacuation from Dunkirk.

Now had they been junior officers in WWI then they cannot have had anything to do with "decisions" or with "methods", so what was there for them to be ashamed about?

There is of course one other reason that A.J.P.Taylor might have mentioned while heaping praise on all those former WWI British Junior Officers who through shame, etc, learned their lessons and went on to became Senior British Officers in WWII, as to why WWII was not allowed to get bogged down into the same stalemate as WWI - a chap who had lived through it all very much at the sharp end - one Adolf Hitler who expressly forbid the use by German troops of chemical weapons - Churchill had no such qualms, but then Churchill had never been gassed, Hitler on the other hand had. Hitler also appreciated the use of tactical air power and the application of integrated all arms forces as pioneered by the British in WWI. By reading and following through on Fuller's ideas the German Army developed their Blitzkrieg, which demonstrated that even if outnumbered and with inferior weapons, if your command and control is superior you will win.

I would also venture to guess that the junior officers serving with the British Army from 1917 on were pretty proud of their efforts, the efforts of their men and the success of the tactics that had been developed.

As far as WWII goes the former WWI Junior officers who really learned from the mistakes of their commanders in WWI and who applied that knowledge in WWII were all GERMAN and it took OUR senior officers in WWII almost FOUR YEARS to catch up (In WWI it only took them TWO and that included building an army from scratch to do it - just as well they did because they left behind the template for those Senior WWII Officers to follow when after Dunkirk they found themselves having to the same thing all over again).