The Making Of The British Army (83 page)

The Guards have never formed Territorial battalions, nor did they raise Kitchener battalions. The few additional battalions raised in both world wars therefore had the benefit of a strong core of professional Guards NCOs and officers from the outset.

I wrote too that there were three particularly interesting developments – innovations – of the First World War as far as the making of the army is concerned. One was ‘mission-specific’ training and rehearsal. All individual reinforcements on the Western Front had to pass through the base training depot at Etaples to be put through a course in trench-craft, the first time there had been a training regime for a particular theatre of operations. ‘The bull ring’, as the training ground was known, was detested by all, the bayonet drill especially, but the instruction in grenade handling, sentry work and field hygiene was grudgingly acknowledged as useful. Training also took place before attacks, with briefings using large models constructed by the sappers, and over ground chosen for its similarity to the sector in which the attack was to take place. All this became standard procedure in the Second World War, and has continued ever since – with added impetus gained during the long Northern Ireland campaign. Indeed, mission-specific training based on thorough operational analysis is one of the things that gives the British army its current edge.

Another development was military chaplains. The Army Chaplains’ Department had been formed in 1796 (hitherto chaplains had been a regimental responsibility), but it was not until the Great War, through the circumstances of static warfare and the huge expansion of the army, that chaplains became a prominent and significant factor in the maintenance of morale (and therefore in fighting power). They were not always well regarded, however. Robert Graves rails against them, except the Roman Catholic padres. But he probably never came across, for example, the Reverend Theodore Bayley Hardy, who won the DSO, MC and VC before dying of his wounds a few weeks before the end of the war, two days before his 55th birthday; or the Reverend Noel Mellish, VC, MC; or the Reverend W. R. F. Addison VC. The trouble was that many Anglican chaplains – who of course ministered to everyone except those who declared themselves RC, non-conformist, Jewish, etc. – went to the front on a year’s contract full of missionary zeal and, finding the captive congregations unresponsive to evangelization, became disillusioned. But as the war went on, padres found their feet – aided by a certain sense that ‘there are no atheists in an artillery bombardment’.
And by 1939 the department
²⁹⁶
(‘royalled’ in 1919) had a very clear idea of how to prepare its chaplains, and how to deploy them. Interestingly, when the Berlin Wall came down and the former Eastern Bloc armies began ‘democratizing’, the RAChD’s advice was much in demand by their new chaplains’ departments. Every major unit (infantry battalion, artillery regiment, etc.) deploying on operations today takes a chaplain with it. The traditionally Catholic ones – the Irish Guards, for example – take an RC padre; but cover for every denomination is assiduously arranged. Every soldier likes to feel there is someone official to ‘do the honours’ if he or his comrades are killed in action.

The First World War, if it did not quite break the taboo on women in the army, dented it considerably. Besides the Imperial Nursing Service and various auxiliary nursing organizations, in February 1917 the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps was established, eventually employing 57,000 volunteers on lines-of-communication work (at home and in France): cooking, storekeeping, clerical work, telephony and administration, printing, vehicle maintenance. The earliest to wear khaki, however (albeit unofficially), were grooms attached to the Army remount depots in Britain. They wore (khaki) breeches and rode astride – to the dismay of the respectable side-saddle riders – but tied their hair up with gaily coloured scarves to emphasize their independence. There is a fine painting by Lucy Kemp-Welch of these ‘gals’ exercising remounts on permanent display at the Imperial War Museum. The WAAC was disbanded after the war, but was re-formed as the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1938, after which women in khaki became commonplace except in the ‘combat zone’. The Queen is the ATS’s most illustrious former officer. Today, to a degree, women are making up the shortfall in the support arms, but the army’s policy is firmly that women should not take part in
direct
combat: the consensus is that were they to do so this would be to ‘cross a line’ (as well as opening a can of practical worms for no appreciable gain). Not that this refers to the notion of
front
line, for in modern war and ‘operations other than war’ (or ‘hybrid war’, a mixture of the two) the term ‘front line’ is imprecise; rather, it refers to the idea that women and men are different. So far there are few equal-rights voices arguing that war and women have changed
that
much.

Conscription ended immediately with the Armistice. The problem of demobilization was enormous, as was the reshaping of the army that was to remain. Most new infantry battalions had been raised within existing regiments, the Northumberland Fusiliers being the most prolific, fielding fifty-one battalions. However, some new regiments had been formed, such as a fifth regiment of Foot Guards, the Welsh Guards, created in 1915 to honour the distinguished actions of the Welsh regiments in the opening battles of the war (the Royal Welch Fusiliers – the regiment of Sassoon, Graves and several other men of letters – were reportedly sounded out for conversion, but to their credit preferred to stick to their place in the line). The composition of the army had changed considerably, however. The cavalry of the BEF represented 9.28 per cent of the army, but by July 1918 was only 1.65 per cent. Infantry would also change from 64.64 per cent in 1914 to 51.25 per cent in 1918, while the Royal Engineers would increase from 5.91 per cent to 11.24 per cent in 1918.

Finally, the ‘contemptible little army’. There is no documentary proof that the Kaiser ever said it. After the war he is said to have denied it, and that he would only have thought of saying ‘contemptibly little’.

Chapters 24–6: The Second World War

The following statistics give an impression of the vast undertaking that D-Day was, and the vast repository of organizational experience the army possessed – possesses – as a result. On 6 June the allies landed around 156,000 troops in Normandy: the Americans 73,000, the British and Canadians 83,115 (61,715 of them British) including 7,900 airborne troops. The landings were supported by 11,590 aircraft, flying 14,674 sorties; 127 of them were lost. In the airborne landings (on both flanks of the beaches), 2,395 aircraft and 867 gliders of the RAF and USAAF were used. The naval forces comprised 6,939 vessels: 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing ships and landing craft, 736 ancillary craft and 864 merchant vessels. By D+5 (11 June), 326,547 troops, 54,186 vehicles and 104,428 tons of supplies had been landed over the beaches. Total allied casualties on D-Day itself are estimated at 10,000, including 2,500 dead; British casualties were approximately 2,700. In addition, 100 glider pilots became casualties – either during landing or in subsequent fighting as infantrymen. Only one VC was awarded – ‘for uncommon gallantry was commonplace’ – to Company Serjeant-Major Stanley Hollis of the Green Howards.

British losses would undoubtedly have been greater without Hobart’s ‘funnies’. And his story is interesting as well as instructive. Percy Hobart, whose sister had been married to Montgomery (she died in 1937), had been commissioned into the Royal Engineers just after the Boer War, transferring to the Royal Tank Corps after the Great War. In 1934 he commanded the first permanent armoured brigade in Britain and was made Inspector Royal Tank Corps, and then in 1937 was made Deputy Director of Staff Duties (Armoured Fighting Vehicles) and later Director of Military Training as a major-general. Sent back from Egypt where in 1938 he had formed the ‘Mobile Force (Egypt)’, from which chrysalis 7th Armoured had emerged, he joined the Home Guard, in
Dad’s Army
fashion taking the rank of lancecorporal and charge of the defences of his home village, Chipping Camden (Gloucestershire, not even a front-line county in the Home Guard). But at Churchill’s instigation, after the success of the German
Blitzkrieg
had seemed to justify his unconventional ideas, he was reinstated to the Active List and ultimately to command of the experimental 79th Armoured Division and development of the ‘funnies’ (by the end of the war, 79th Armoured had 7,000 vehicles farmed out to the fighting formations).

Of the many books about the several theatres of the war, some are classics; and there are more being written each year – of which Antony Beevor’s
D Day: the Battle for Normandy
(2009) is the most recent of the ‘big guns’. (General) David Fraser’s
And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War
(1983) is truly essential reading. So is (Field Marshal) Lord Slim’s
Defeat into Victory
(1956).
Quartered Safe Out Here
(1992) by Flashman’s creator, George Macdonald Fraser, tells the same story from the infantry corporal’s perspective. Correlli Barnett’s
The Desert Generals
(1960) is infuriating but cannot be ignored. Jon Latimer’s
Alamein
(2002) is excellent, as too is
Alamein: War Without Hate
(2002) by John Bierman and Colin Smith. (Field Marshal) Lord Carver’s
The War in Italy, 1943–1945
(2002), John Keegan’s and Max Hastings’s books on June 1944 –
Six Armies in Normandy
(1982) and
Overlord: D Day and the Battle for Normandy
(1984) – are musts. Cornelius Ryan’s
A Bridge Too Far
(1959) remains the most dramatic account of Arnhem, but that of the commander of 1st Airborne Division, Major-General Roy Urquhart, called simply
Arnhem
(1958), is also of course illuminating. So, too, is that of another who was there –
Men at Arnhem
(1986), a beautifully written study
by (Colonel) Geoffrey Powell. And for a more recent and different perspective there is (Colonel) Robert Kershaw’s
It Never Snows in September: The German View of Market Garden and the Battle of Arnhem
(1996). (Lieutenant-General Sir) Brian Horrocks was not to everyone’s taste (a master publicist, he – played to a T in the film
A Bridge Too Far
by Edward Fox) but his
Corps Commander
(1977) is a spirited account of much of the fighting from Normandy to the Baltic. And Max Hastings’s
Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944–45
(2004) from the failure to make a bridgehead on the Rhine at Arnhem to the final German capitulation is monumental.

Chapters 27–32: Post-war

An innovation which might have helped the Glosters at Imjin was the self-loading rifle (SLR) which entered service in the late 1950s. Sergeant-Instructor Snoxall’s (1914) record of thirty-eight rounds in a 12-inch target at 300 yards in one minute with the bolt-action Lee – Enfield (see chapter 20) was dazzlingly greater than the national serviceman’s average at the time of the Korean War. The Royal Ordnance Factory (Enfield) variant of the Belgian
Fabrique Nationale
semi-automatic rifle, known to soldiers simply as the ‘SLR’ (as the old rifle was known simply as the ‘303’), used the principle of the machine gun to gas-feed rounds into the chamber from a magazine of twenty: each time the trigger was squeezed a round was fired, the empty case was ejected and a new round was fed automatically into the chamber. The rifleman’s aim was scarcely broken. The 7.62mm calibre round was very powerful, and although both weapon and ammunition were heavy the SLR was a superb ‘defensive’ rifle. In 1987 it was replaced by the SA80, a much lighter – both weapon and ammunition (5.56mm) – ‘assault rifle’, whose shorter length, reduced weight and thirty-round magazine makes it much handier in fire and movement. It is this weapon that is the infantry’s mainstay in Afghanistan today.