The Making Of The British Army (50 page)

But although the Pals battalions were of their own time and place, and although their experience was frequently tragic, the sense of unit identity which came from recruiting from a single locality gave them instantly both high morale and a self-regulation which the army has
sought to emulate ever since. The alacrity with which recruits came forward was confirmation that the Cardwell–Childers regimental system, based on geographical identification, had been the right model for the infantry, even if in a way they had never imagined. But how were these Commercials, Railwaymen, Miners, Accrington Pals, Grimsby Chums and Wool Textile Pioneers to be made into soldiers capable of fighting the German or the Turk?

The answer, in truth, was improvisation. It was one thing to form a command structure – there were retired officers and NCOs ready to step forward,
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and the Pals battalions found it easy enough to ‘elect’ their company officers and NCOs – but quite another to find the cadre of regular or even Territorial officers and NCOs to instruct them. For while Kitchener might reasonably have expected the regular army to be a ready source of training staff when he issued his call for volunteers, the mounting losses in the BEF soon put paid to this idea. And so reservist NCOs with the most recent service were diverted to the new battalions, as were officers on home leave from India, usually with the ‘sweetener’ of promotion – anything, indeed, that the authorities could think of to attract them.

So successful was the call to arms that there was not only a shortage of trainers but also a chronic shortage of uniforms, rifles, ammunition and accommodation. Men drilled with broom handles in the clothes in which they had enlisted; they slept under canvas, or in seaside lodging houses. Only boundless good spirits and forbearance seemed in plentiful supply. There were New Army battalions that formed with only one regular officer – in the case of the 8th (Service) Battalion East Surrey Regiment a captain, who drew up his new command and asked those who felt they could control six to eight other men to step forward (a bold step which clearly worked well, since several of these self-selected NCOs went on to win commissions, and the battalion’s war record proved second to none).

The battalions were conceived of not as reinforcements for existing brigades and divisions but as parts of entirely new Kitchener formations (brigades, divisions, corps), each successive 100,000 men
forming a replica BEF, termed unofficially K1, K2 etc. Some Kitchener formations were already thoroughly militarized. In Northern Ireland the Ulster Volunteer Force, which earlier in the year had threatened armed resistance to the implementation of the home rule Bill, in effect turned itself into the 36th (Ulster) Division, with an unsurpassed fighting record on the Western Front.
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In the south of Ireland, too, the traditional source of manpower for virtually every regiment of the army at one time or another, the spirit of volunteering was no less strong, if somewhat more complicated. The ‘Irish Volunteers’ had been formed as a counter to the UVF, and their leaders – not so extreme as those who would take up arms in 1916 – now decided that the cause of home rule would be best advanced by a show of loyalty to the King, exactly as the UVF’s leaders believed that volunteering safeguarded Unionism. Two divisions were formed – the 10th and 16th – predominantly but by no means wholly Catholic (as the 36th Division was by no means exclusively Protestant). The 5th (Service) Battalion of the Connaught Rangers was raised in Dublin in August – unusually, for Dublin is in Leinster, not Connaught – and a second service battalion the following month in Cork (Munster)
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. The 5th were fortunate enough to have the excellent Serjeant McIlwain posted to them as a serjeant-major after Ypres, when his much depleted 2nd battalion of the Connaughts was amalgamated with the 1st.

Before the war it was reckoned that it took about eleven months to make a soldier – and this with the full resources of the regular army. The first of Kitchener’s divisions, the 18th, was judged ready to deploy to France in May 1915, even though it was a K2 formation (i.e. raised as part of the second 100,000). Its early readiness was in part due to the imagination and energy of its commander, Major-General Ivor Maxse, who had made his name in the Sudan campaign and South Africa and had commanded the 1st (Guards) Brigade from Mons to the Aisne. Maxse’s ideas about training were innovative – ‘drilling for initiative’, as he called it, insisting that all tactical movements must be planned and rehearsed with nothing foreseeable left to chance (what would later be known as ‘battle drill’), so that the commander’s mind was then free to apply the drill to the particular situation. He was impressed by the
quality of the recruits, and his training concept had obvious resonance with men used to making decisions for themselves. Not all Kitchener divisions were so fortunate, and some, though in theory fully trained, would be plunged into action before they were able to get used to conditions in the field.

On 2 January 1915 Sir John French received a letter from Kitchener that could have been penned by Pitt a century or so before: ‘The feeling here is gaining ground that, although it is essential to defend the line we now hold, troops over and above what is necessary for that service could better be employed elsewhere. The question
where
anything effective could be accomplished opens a large field and requires a good deal of study. What are the views of your staff?’

The letter revealed the usual symptoms of the chronic British strategic disease: seeking easier victory somewhere other than where victory might achieve the strategic ends – through what would later be derided as ‘stratagems of evasion’. Kitchener’s question was reasonable enough in that it recognized that battering the army’s head against the brick wall of the German defences on the Western Front was going to be both costly and unproductive; but the idea that the Germans could be defeated other than by defeating the German army did not recognize the reality of the German state. ‘Finding the flank’ was one thing at the tactical level, but quite another at the strategic.

But the opportunity seemed to present itself after Turkey entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria in November 1914. The war cabinet’s thoughts – in particular those of the first lord of the admiralty, Winston Churchill – turned to the eastern Mediterranean and the twin prospect of opening up warm-water lines of communication to Russia and defeating Germany by ‘knocking away the props’. If Turkey were defeated, he argued, Italy, Greece and Bulgaria, who were still sitting on the fence, would come in on the allied side. This could be achieved at little cost, he further argued, believing that the Dardanelles could be forced by a handful of obsolescent warships. Kitchener had misgivings but the war cabinet gave way, and in February a naval bombardment of Turkish forts commanding the Dardanelles Straits began. By the middle of March the efforts to force the straits had come to grief, with both French and British warships destroyed by Turkish shore batteries and mines.

At this point the stratagem’s ‘economy of effort’ was abandoned
and Kitchener agreed to commit ground troops. The Mediterranean Expeditionary Force (MEF) was formed under command of General Sir Ian Hamilton, consisting of the 29th Division – the country’s only strategic reserve – and the Australian and New Zealand Corps (Anzac), which was assembling in the Suez Canal zone.

Hamilton’s record is as controversial as French’s. The campaign would be a costly failure, but the margin between failure and brilliant success at Gallipoli was narrower than is sometimes supposed. The peninsula was by no means impregnable, although the Turkish army was experienced and its discipline formidable. The problem lay in the quality of some of the MEF’s subordinate commanders and the lack of training in many of its battalions, those of the New Armies especially. Indeed, Hamilton himself had only thirty-five days to prepare for what was to be the first machine-gun-opposed amphibious assault in the history of warfare.

His plan for multiple landings on 25 April, given that the months of naval bombardment had forfeited strategic surprise, was feasible enough. He intended the 29th Division to land at Helles on the tip of the peninsula and then advance on the forts at Kilitbahir; the Anzacs were to land some 15 miles up the coast on the Aegean side and advance across the peninsula to cut off any Turkish retreat and prevent reinforcement of Kilitbahir; the French (for this was an allied operation) would make a diversionary landing on the Asian shore, and the Royal Naval Division would make a demonstration in the Gulf of Xeros to confuse the Turkish high command as to where the main effort lay.

The execution of the plan was not up to its conception, however. The Anzacs, under the exceptional 49-year-old British officer Major-General William Birdwood, a Bengal Lancer, gained tactical surprise by landing before dawn without a preliminary bombardment. Thereafter, in crude terms, he simply ran out of luck. The 29th Division, under the far less exceptional Aylmer Hunter-Weston, simply impaled themselves on the cliffs and machine-guns at the southern tip of the peninsula in broad daylight after a preliminary naval bombardment that would have left the dullest Turk in no doubt as to what was about to happen.

The Gallipoli peninsula thereby became a salient every bit as lethal as Ypres, and with the added complications of supply across open beaches, water shortage, intense heat and insanitary conditions. Despite suicidal gallantry on the part of British, Anzac and Indian
(including Gurkha) troops, none could get any further than 3 miles from the beaches. As on the Western Front, barbed wire, machine guns and artillery put paid to any thoughts of tactical manœuvre: the only alternatives were head-on attack or evacuation. The excellent Serjeant-Major McIlwain whose battalion of Connaught Rangers was part of the 10th (Irish) Division in ‘K1’ recounts one such assault:

Hamilton was relieved of command in the middle of October and replaced by Sir Charles Monro. In this, at last, the troops were lucky: Monro was fresh from command of the 3rd Army on the Western Front, and as commandant of the Hythe School of Musketry after the Boer War he had been the architect of the infantry’s education in marksmanship and the new tactics of fire and movement. He was independent-minded and his reputation stood high, and he lost no time in assessing the situation and reporting to the war council that there was no future in the campaign – which advice they accepted, if grudgingly, for it had also been Hamilton’s opinion.

By 8 January 1916 the peninsula had been evacuated. And, just as at Corunna and later at Dunkirk, the evacuation was a sort of brilliant parting shot in an otherwise dismal campaign: remarkably, 134,000 men were taken off without a single loss, and with the Turks oblivious of what was happening almost literally under their noses – a masterpiece of deception, organization and command that would be studied at the Staff College for years afterwards. If only the same degree of ingenuity had been there from the outset. If only the same guileful tactical methods could have been used six months later on the Somme, indeed: for if surprise could be achieved in the withdrawal, there was no reason in principle why it could not be achieved in the offensive.

The cost of the Gallipoli campaign had been massive. British casualties were at least 75,000, including 21,255 dead, a great many from dysentery and enteric fever.
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The New Army battalions suffered particularly high losses, especially of officers – none more than the 6th (Service) Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards), where only the quartermaster survived unscathed. And these losses were all the more calamitous for their cost to operations on the Western Front: the lack of reserves at the battle of Loos in late September and early October 1915, for example, was a critical factor in the failure of the British autumn offensive in Picardy. Nor did the casualty lists do anything for recruiting, which took a dip towards the end of 1915 – rather as yellow fever in the West Indies had hampered recruiting during the Napoleonic Wars. Confidence in British generalship among the Anzac troops (and, just as important, their governments) fell dangerously, although regard for Birdwood remained high; and a general sense of failure hung upon the nation. On the positive side, the failure at Gallipoli put the Western Front back at centre stage as the decisive theatre of war, although it would take another year at least for the politicians to accept the full consequences of this.