The Making Of The British Army (88 page)

¹⁴⁰
There had been various OTC schemes before the Boer War, none very satisfactory.

¹⁴¹
The terms ‘arms’ and ‘services’ were always a little loosely employed: ‘arms’ were the infantry, cavalry and artillery, while ‘services’ embraced the engineers, medical, supply and administrative corps. Today the terms used are combat arms (infantry, armour, army aviation), combat support (artillery, engineers, signals, intelligence) and combat service support (supply, maintenance, medical and administrative).

¹⁴²
The SMLE, along with the Vickers machine gun of both world wars, the Royal Ordnance 25-pounder field gun of the Second World War and the Centurion tank, is one of the four ‘twentieth-century greats’ of British armament. All but the Vickers remain in service in some part of the world still.

¹⁴³
The first Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1886; it was defeated in the Commons and never introduced in the Lords. A second bill was introduced in 1893, to be passed in the Commons but defeated in the Lords.

¹⁴⁴
‘Brass hats’ referred to the gold wire embellishments on the peaks of general officers’ hats, while ‘frocks’ referred to the frock-coats worn by politicians.

¹⁴⁵
The Bill was passed in the Commons at the end of May, and after the expected defeat in the Lords it was sent under the provisions of the new Parliament Act for royal assent. In July, however, the Ulster Unionists forced an amendment for the exclusion of Northern Ireland from the workings of the Act, with the precise details (the number of counties -four, six or nine – and whether exclusion was to be temporary or permanent), to be further negotiated. The haggling continued until the Kaiser, in effect, put an end to it.

¹⁴⁶
The all-out offensive. The new French service regulations of 1913 had tried to do away with the defensive-mindedness that had become the prevailing doctrine after the Franco-Prussian War: ‘The French army, returning to its traditions, henceforth knows no law but the offensive.’

¹⁴⁷
Charles Garforth was in fact recommended on three separate occasions for the award of the VC. Remarkably, he survived the war, dying in 1973.

¹⁴⁸
Bloem,
The Advance from Mons
, Eng. edn (1930).

¹⁴⁹
Their bodies were buried some days later in a mass grave, the exact position of which is unknown but, according to the regimental history, can be accurately surmised.

¹⁵⁰
Six weeks later, near Ypres, Montgomery was shot through one of his lungs, and a grave was dug for him. Recovering, however, he was awarded a DSO for inspiring leadership and posted as brigade major to one of Kitchener’s new divisions.

¹⁵¹
The root cause of the dislike almost certainly included jealousy (although French was Smith-Dorrien’s senior, the latter had greater experience of action), but ostensibly it was professional – a profound disagreement over the role of cavalry, Smith-Dorrien (an infantryman) being a proponent of the ‘mounted infantry’ school. Lieutenant-General Sir James Grierson had been commanding II Corps when the BEF sailed for France but had died of a heart attack in his train to Amiens. French had wanted Sir Herbert Plumer to replace him; Kitchener sent him Smith-Dorrien instead.

¹⁵²
The casualty figures for Le Cateau are notoriously difficult to pin down.

¹⁵³
Examples such as Colin Campbell, Hector Macdonald and ‘Wully’ Robertson, though perhaps few, give the lie to the notion of strict exclusivity in the Victorian and Edwardian army. Men such as these would not have gained advancement so easily in the Prussian, Austrian, Russian or even French armies of the period. Only the US army showed an equal disregard for social background, although in many ways it could be even more rigid in its reverence of West Pointers than ever the British Army was of Sandhurst alumni.

¹⁵⁴
The day before, papers had been found on a dead German staff officer indicating that von Kluck was so alarmed by the gap opening up between his army and von Bülow’s that he saw no option but to close with him and give up the Schlieffen idea of a western envelopment of Paris.

¹⁵⁵
One of the best and most successful (perhaps against the odds) examples was the earl of Derby’s brother, the Honourable Charles Stanley, at 43 a decorated captain in the Reserve of Officers with service in the Sudan and South Africa. With Derby’s intervention he was made temporary brigadier-general and took command of the four Liverpool Pals battalions comprising the 89th Brigade.

¹⁵⁶
Four out of the nine VCs awarded on the first day of the Somme were won by the 36th (Ulster) Division.

¹⁵⁷
with many volunteers from West Belfast.

¹⁵⁸
Australian casualties were 28,000 (7,600 dead); New Zealand’s 7,250 (2,700 dead); French (estimated) 27,000 (10,000 dead); and Indian Army (including Gurkhas) 5,000 (1,400 dead).

¹⁵⁹
Churchill commanded 6th Battalion Royal Scots Fusiliers until May the following year, when the battalion was amalgamated with the 7th. He saw service in the trenches and was recommended for brigade command.

¹⁶⁰
There was a long tradition of ‘spare’ seamen serving ashore as infantrymen or gunners. Occasionally they took to it rather well and decided to make a career of it – like Midshipman Evelyn Wood, who served with the Naval Brigade in the Crimea, transferred to the 13th Light Dragoons and rose to the rank of field marshal.

¹⁶¹
This is a contentious assertion, but ever since the Somme the army has been casualty conscious in a way that it never quite was before 1916. The losses in 1914 and 1915 were generally seen as the price to be paid for fighting in the big league, and largely unavoidable. The Gallipoli débâcle sounded a warning bell, but did not adversely affect operations on the Western Front. The casualties on the Somme changed everything, however. And they haunted politicians and soldiers alike in the inter-war years and during the Second World War.

¹⁶²
In the end, the shell count was nearer 1.7 million, since the French added their weight on the right.

¹⁶³
In
Gallipoli
Masefield wrote, for example: ‘On the body of a dead Turk officer was a letter written the night before to his wife, a tender letter, filled mostly with personal matters. In it was the phrase, “These British are the finest fighters in the world. We have chosen the wrong friends.”’

¹⁶⁴
Fussell,
The Great War and Modern Memory
(1975).

¹⁶⁵
Isaac Rosenberg was killed while serving with the 11th King’s Own on 1 April 1918.

¹⁶⁶
‘The Redeemer’ (from
The Old Huntsman
).

¹⁶⁷
The story is told in full in an article by (Surgeon) Brigadier Timothy Finnegan in
The British Army Review
, Spring 2008.

¹⁶⁸
The battle of Amiens which began the offensive in earnest on 8 August with a surprise tank attack by 4th Army (Rawlinson) broke through the German lines, destroyed six divisions and forced the line back 9 miles in one day. Ludendorff called 8 August the ‘Black Day of the German Army’.

¹⁶⁹
For detail on how the composition of the army had changed, see ‘Notes and Further Reading’.

¹⁷⁰
Robert Graves,
Goodbye To All That.

¹⁷¹
The museum today is a vast, newly built complex housing the largest collection of armoured vehicles in the world.

¹⁷²
John Frederick Charles Fuller had been a regular officer before the war, transferring from the infantry to the new Tank Corps at its inception. Liddell Hart had joined the infantry in 1914, and although he saw little active service, being dogged by a poor constitution and gas wounds, he applied his mind to warfare in a theoretical way. He remains controversial, with a reputation for a certain ‘military shamanism’ or even charlatanism. But such accusations are not uncommon when it comes to revolutionary military doctrine.

¹⁷³
At the same time, several yeomanry regiments were equipped with armoured cars under the auspices of the TA RTC.

¹⁷⁴
In 1939 the Royal Armoured Corps was formed, an umbrella organization for the RTC and the mechanized cavalry. Two regiments remained horsed, the 1st Dragoons (Royals) and the Scots Greys, as well as the two regiments of Household Cavalry (and much of the yeomanry). The Royals and the Greys were the senior of the line, which indicated the instinct that remaining horsed was a privilege. In fact the Greys’ commanding officer had written to all Scottish MPs to lobby for the retention of horses, which act earned him ‘an expression of the Army Board’s severe displeasure’. Ironically, one of the MPs who raised the Greys’ case in Parliament was William Anstruther-Gray, member for North Lanarkshire (at a time when there still were Tory MPs in Scotland), who would go on to win an MC with his (armoured) yeomanry regiment, the Lothians and Border Horse. In hindsight he cannot have regarded his October 1938 question to the secretary of state for war as his finest moment.

¹⁷⁵
There were three other developments in the First World War that would have a profound bearing on the way the army would fight in the Second World War – and have done ever since. First was the systematization of operational analysis, doctrine, training and rehearsal. Second was the recognition of the ‘moral’ (non-materiel) element of combat, and therefore the need for the spiritual sustenance of the soldier – from which the Chaplains’ Department emerged as a significant element of the ‘moral component’ of fighting power. And third was the realization that there was a role for women in khaki. See ‘Notes and Further Reading’.

¹⁷⁶
Germany, Italy and Japan were to sign the Tripartite Pact in September 1940 – and become known as the Axis powers – although Japan did not begin active military operations against Britain until late the following year.

¹⁷⁷
Sir Arthur Bryant,
The Turn of the Tide
(1957). This was, in effect, the first volume of Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke’s memoirs; the second,
Triumph in the West
, was published in 1959.

¹⁷⁸
A ‘bar’ to a medal – indicated by a rosette on the medal ribbon – means that the decoration has been awarded a second time; two bars means that it has been awarded three times.

¹⁷⁹
After one of the Luftwaffe’s strafings Major John Cordy-Simpson had his squadron form line and pick up litter: the ‘Dunkirk area-cleaning fatigue’ passed into regimental legend.

¹⁸⁰
It is curious, to say the least, that one of the lessons of the First World War in the higher organization of command was ignored: in 1940, GHQ BEF was the campaign headquarters – looking back to London and to left and right to allies – as well as having executive command of the fighting. By 1915 the original BEF had subordinate army HQs; the BEF of 1940 needed that level of command too – a point made clearly in the report of the Bartholomew Committee of Inquiry which took evidence from senior commanders and selected commanding officers after the evacuation.

¹⁸¹
Speech to House of Commons, 4 June 1940.

¹⁸²
Italy had declared war – ‘jackal-like’ – after the Fall of France. Mussolini must have secretly rued his decision soon afterwards, for besides the humiliation in Libya, a month before at Tarranto the Fleet Air Arm had badly mauled the Italian fleet; and in May 1941, after a two-pronged offensive from Kenya and the Sudan by British, Indian and South African troops, all Italian forces in East Africa surrendered.

¹⁸³
He had actually retired in 1948, but the prime minister Clement Attlee rejected Montgomery’s proposal of General Sir John Crocker (a former RTR officer, and one of Monty’s corps commanders in Normandy) as his successor, and brought Slim back to the Active List in the rank of field marshal.

¹⁸⁴
During those ‘inactive’ years Montgomery had, however, studied the problem of fighting the Germans more than any other commander had been willing or able to.

¹⁸⁵
In ‘positional defence’ the defending troops occupy positions which dominate the ground in between, ‘fortifying’ them as strongly as possible, and fighting
in situ
rather than the ‘hit and then move’ of mobile defence.