Let's keep our eyes on the prize. It's not a car. It's the Luv Bandit. And by that I mean that if a war of choice is fought, not by the army you want, but the army you have, then a war of total social mobilisation is fought, not by the army you want, but the army that society will give you. It is an army that, however imperfectly, sees the future: and that future is cruising with your buddies in the Luv Bandit.
(Or your children. Your son, anyway.)
This is a prose dump, of course, from a manuscript that at the rate I clipped it out earlier in the decade would have easily hit 2000 pages had I finished it. The point, of course, is that the British Army that went into Operation Goodwood pretty much had to look the way that it did. Next up is the manpower crisis, then the munitions crisis, and then I should be ready to talk about tanks.
Given that I've mapped this out as seven days of writing, with, ideally, some library time on a day off, I hope you will accept the "dump the windy prose" strategy. At least it preserves the footnotes. Though why the Word and Open Office default is to lower-case Roman numerals I do not know. Some of the tables here repeat. If you're interested in the Supplementary Reserve, I am sure that you will not care. If you aren't, you will have suffered terminal eyeglazing long before you get that far, so it's all good.
Finance, Organisation, Troop Strengths, and
Design
In 1937, the land armed
forces of the United Kingdom were under the War Office, a Ministry of State of the British
government that handled weapon and supply procurement,
construction, maintenance, and administration of the nation’s fortifications,
including naval. With the creation of the Ministry of Supply just before the
outbreak of war procurement and weapon design were removed from War Office
purview, although it eventually won back a significant share of design
responsibility. The Indian Army answered to the India Office, some like formations to the Colonial Office. The Indian Army was largely
officered by British-borne and trained officers, who were not members of
the British armed forces under the War Office, although integrated with it
insofar as command and discipline were concerned. A large number of
British troops in garrison in India were under the War Office, but
administratively subject to the India Office. The distinction is important
because they were financed from the government of India’s budget and thus do
not appear at the head of the Army Estimates in the Vote A heading, where
misled common sense has led some to expect to find a statement of the global
number of British subjects in the service of the Crown, the upshot being
occasional misstatements of the land forces strength. The Indian Army normally bought its
weapons and procurred its military engineers and technicians from Britain,
which made it a consumer rather than a producer of military design and
engineering, but there were exceptions to this rulen. The Government of India’s
budget, which changed little from year to year, fell well short of providing the
necessary onetime costs of mechanisation, and ultimately an extraordinary
British subsidy was required, payed in 1938 before the Indian cavalry could
be (partially) mechanised.[i]
Year
|
Estimate
|
Pay
|
Reserves Pay
|
Vote A Strength
|
Reserve
|
Suppl Reserve
|
Territorial Army
|
British Forces in India
|
1914
|
22
|
8.7
|
3.7
|
186.4
|
147
|
80
|
251
|
78
|
1920
|
165
|
88.5
|
5.03
|
525
|
|
---
|
---
|
--
|
1921
|
86
|
55.8
|
6.47
|
641[iii]
|
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
1922
|
50.2
|
29.9
|
7.02
|
210
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
1923
|
52
|
28.1
|
7.2
|
170
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
---
|
1924
|
45.9
|
24.5
|
7.04
|
161
|
84
|
---
|
182
|
71
|
1925
|
54.3
|
28
|
7.07
|
160
|
92
|
23[iv]
|
187
|
62
|
1926
|
54.4
|
14.3
|
5.42
|
159
|
99
|
23
|
186
|
62
|
1927
|
51
|
13.9
|
5.36
|
166[v]
|
96
|
23
|
186
|
62
|
1928
|
49.3
|
13.0
|
5.43
|
153
|
97
|
23
|
184
|
60
|
1929
|
49
|
12.7
|
5.47
|
150
|
109[vi]
|
22
|
184
|
60
|
1930
|
47.5
|
12.4
|
5.53
|
148
|
124
|
23
|
180
|
60
|
1931
|
46.6
|
12.1
|
5.58
|
148
|
132
|
23
|
171
|
60
|
1932
|
42.8
|
11.7
|
4.04
|
148
|
129
|
24
|
169
|
60
|
1933
|
43.9
|
11.8
|
4.78
|
148
|
126
|
25
|
172
|
58
|
1934
|
45.4
|
11.9
|
4.76
|
149
|
125
|
25
|
172
|
58
|
1935
|
49.7
|
12.3
|
5.03
|
152
|
120
|
25
|
171
|
58
|
1936
|
55
|
12.7
|
6.03
|
158
|
113
|
25
|
177
|
58
|
1937
|
89
|
13
|
7.9
|
168
|
121
|
25
|
184
|
58
|
1938
|
114
|
13.8
|
9.83
|
170
|
132
|
51
|
203
|
57
|
1939
|
161
|
16.4
|
14.1
|
185
|
143
|
56
|
203
|
57
|
The estimates
show that the interwar financial history of the army was shaped by the
aftershocks of WWI. The enormous size of the army in 1919 reflects above all
the difficulties the army was experiencing with rapid demobilisation.
Meanwhile, the budget was inflated with residual liabilities and incomplete
production contracts. These fell off rapidly, even precipitously over the next
two years, but other legacies of the war were less easy to buy out. The army
would carry the pension debt of the officers and men whose normal careers were
extended for the duration in 1914–18, though not, fortunately, for wartime
recruits, whose pensions (largely disability payments) were shifted to another
ministry..[vii]
The army suffered
under other exigencies that had to be reconciled with finances. India shaped it
at a fundamental level, but it was sometimes difficult to see this, because of
the evolutionary character of the army’s structure. For it should be borne in
mind that armies are all about manpower, and large employers simply cannot
change policy on a whim without considering individual careers, and in an
institution where men who fought at Balaclava and El Alamein could (barely)
overlap, it was difficult to manage within a politician’s notoriously short
timeframe. As a result, the Secretary of State of 1914 found himself saddled
with an army that was an “immediate” result of the panic inspired by the
Franco-Prussian War forty years before, and mechanisation in the 30s was
overshadowed by arrangements fixed after the Indian Mutiny. Two brilliant
Secretaries of State for War triumphed over this reign of expediency to place
permanent imprints on the army: Viscount Cardwell from 1868 to
1874; and Lord Haldane, in 1905–11. In its final working form,
which was certainly not the result of Cardwell and Haldane’s reforms only, the
British army, excluding the Guards, was a short service force in which men
served from 5 to 7 years with the colours, and subsequently for the balance of
12 years in the Regular Army Reserve. The large reserve was intended
specifically to fill out the army for operations in Europe, but as in all other
armies the horse cavalry was not subject to “filling out” on call up because
cavalry reservists were not considered suited for immediate action. Unlike on
the continent, where the tendency was to redirect cavalry reservists to
infantry formations, the War Office kept
its options open so as potentially to increase very greatly the British ratio
of foot to horse above that required for European warfare. The Indian garrison
was fixed, as was the proportion of British units to Indian Army formations,
and also the periods of rotation. This ultimately fixed British regular
infantry and cavalry strength although the nominal Cardwell calculation that
there would be one battalion at home in Britain for every one overseas,
excluding the Guards, was rarely achieved. Infantry units at home at home were
maintained at reduced peace strength precisely so that they could receive
reservists upon mobilisation into a Field Force. Under Lord Haldane, there was
actually only 1 British unit in India for every 3 elsewhere. This still left sufficient troops at home for prewar Foreign Secretaries to wield 6
infantry divisions and 1 cavalry division in diplomacy, and actually deploy 4
and 1 1/3 when diplomacy failed. (The Territorial army was to supply 14
infantry divisions and 14 cavalry brigades on the same basis as Continental
lower readiness reserves.)The British
army is sometimes described as a long service force, under both Cardwell and
Haldane, enlistment was deliberately kept shorter than many soldiers
preferred. This saved money on pensions while filling out the reserves. It
helped address the fact that the army was persistently understrength, and was
well suited to the ever-increasing scale of operations on the Northwest
Frontier, where mountain warfare put a premium on youthful fitness in the ranks
and junior officer corps. It was also wise and deliberate use of manpower in
some respects. It would have been foolish beyond imagining to keep the Royal
Army Medical Corps, or even the bakers of the service corps at wartime
strength, for example, but underrecruitment was also an issue. Understrength
was a continuing and serious problem. The Haldane system, so fixed and logical
in its conception, for example, contained the critically illogical assumption
that the army would be able to recruit no less than 35,000 men a year, a number
that it never reached.
The British
regular army consisted in 1939 of 19 regiments of cavalry, 143 batteries of
artillery, 135 battalions of infantry, 8 tank battalions, and 8 independent
artillery companies. Indian troops included 96 infantry battalions, 18 regiments
of cavalry, 18 batteries of Mountain Artillery, 4 pioneer corps, and the Indian
Signals, Service, Ordnance, and Railway Corps under an officer corps of 3031
British and 697 Indian officers. By the outbreak of war, British and Indian
military payroll had reached 640,000 Britons 200,000 Indians, and 8,000
colonials. British army enlistment reached 2.71 million men on 6 June 1944, and
peaked at 2.9 million a few months later. The Indian army reached 2 million, a
number that does not reflect the Indian population base in part because of
racist policy, but also shortages of the necessary skills, notably language.
This was particularly serious for the officer corps. Largely British through
1945,“Indianisation” began all-too tentatively in the 1930s, leaving the Indian
army with 33,000 “white” officers and 14,000 Indian in 1945, by which time the
“Africanisation” of the 3 African divisions attached to the Indian Army had
scarcely begun. Tactically, the British Empire ultimately fielded 56 division
equivalents, 44.5 British, 8.5 Indian, and 3 African, 12 of them armoured. It
had been intended that expansion of the armoured arm be consistent throughout
Empire forces, but the mechanisation of the British cavalry ran well ahead of
that of the Indian.[x]
As the ultimate
expansion of the army depended heavily upon its prewar cohort, it is well to
note that the ideal establishment figures cited above hide a less favourable
picture so far as actual recruiting goes. While Army recruiters sometimes
interviewed as many as 84,000 men a year (out of around 270,000 Britons
reaching 18 each year) final intake rarely exceeded 30,000, and was usually
much less, and always falling well short of the Haldane goals. In the depths of
the depression the army was 5400 men understrength (and this was considered a
crisis), while in 1937–8 the figures showed a shortfall of 1200 officers and
22,000 men. Although sometimes blamed on the inroads of ideological pacifism
recruiting shortfalls had in fact been a permanent fixture of the British army
since before the Cardwell reforms, and a comparison of British with European
cavalry strengths shows that supposedly more warlike Europeans were not any
more likely to volunteer than Britons before 1914. An intake even approaching 35,000 out of 270,000 candidates strikes me as an index of a highly militant society, not the reverse, and the RAF’s steady and rapid rise from 30,000 men in 1933 to over
100,000 in 1939 shows this as much as anything. The fact is that the RAF was drawing in a new
demographic that would never have volunteered for the army, something that was
particularly noticeable in the cavalry, which had special recruiting
difficulties by the interwar years, while Tank Corps recruiting was much more successful. British youth chose "modern" services. The question was whether the infantry could ever be packaged as
“modern.” It was frankly noted
that the lower two-thirds of interwar officer candidates for the RASC, infantry
and armour were of poor quality –although this was to some extent implicit in
the army’s “up or out” policy. The problem did not extend to signals,
engineering, or the artillery, fortunately.[xi]
The peacetime
“Second Line” of the British land forces consisted of, besides the Regular Army
Reserve, a Special or Supplementary Reserve, and the Territorial Army. After an
ad hoc employment in 1914–18 gave plenty of room for experimental trial, the
War Office fixed on a postwar plan whereby the Territorials would field 12
infantry divisions and two cavalry brigades in wartime, as well as the bulk of
home defence AA troops. There were standing provisions (or perhaps notions)
that the Territorial Army would expand by twinning or tripling existing units
along the lines of continental conscript armies, but this only became relevant
in the spring of 1939 when Territorial Army recruiting finally reached and
exceeded targets. The twinning of 29 March 1939 was evidently a political
gesture, and not very successful in terms of fielding sufficient trained troops
in May 1940, but it did establish the foundations of the British wartime army,
which largely consisted of Territorial divisions formed by the spring of 1940.
India’s Territorial army of 18 infantry
battalions received the output of 11 University Training Courses,
probably making its most important contribution to the expansion of the Indian
Army through officer training. The British and Indian regular reserves
contained enlistees were relegated
post-separation, the British one being much larger because of the shorter
service time in the British army. Both reserves were intended to fill out
existing units to their war establishment, but additional shortfalls in the
British organisation were covered by a Supplementary Reserve raised directly
without reference to the Territorials. This hardly exhausts the subject of the
Supplementary Reserve in Britain, which will be further considered below. There
was also an Indian Supplementary Reserve that consisted exclusively of
part-time soldiers of the Anglo-Indian community, but it existed largely to assuage Anglo-Indian
racial paranoia, even if it became an
important source of technical skills for the expansion of the Indian army.[xii]
Among
Chamberlain’s many objectives in making Leslie Hore-Belisha his Secretary of
State for War, the new minister’s easy grasp of public relations, so well
demonstrated in the Transport Ministry, was far from the least. Recruiting, so
long as it depended on volunteers, was very much a matter of publicity, an area
where the army had long been seen to lag behind the navy and now the air force.
Fortunately, Hore-Belisha recognised that publicity without at least the
appearance of constructive improvements was doomed to failure. The new minister
quickly identified problems, such as pensions and accommodation that were
within his power to improve. Chamberlain, in spite of his commitment to contain the growth of the Army Estimates in
the present, allowed Belisha to greatly expand the number of soldiers allowed
to serve out the full 12 years of their enlistment in active duty and re-enlist
for another 9 –in other words, to qualify for the generous pensions that
long-past governments had been forced to rein in after the Crimean War. He also
extended this privilege to men already in the reserve. On the one hand, as the
minister was quick to note, this encouraged 3000 men to rejoin the colours in
the first three months of the programme, on the other, as Winston Churchill
observed, this was a partial mobilisation, and not a recruiting gain. The
minister also relaxed physical standards for recruits, facilitated officer
promotions, permitted older and married recruits, particularly in the technical
arms, and dramatically increased pay. It was, overall, an astonishing pension
giveaway.[xiii]
Nevertheless, there was one common-sense way
of inflating voluntary recruiting –the threat of imminent conscription, as
introduced in April 1939. The earlier volunteering initiative having already
borne fruit to a remarkable extent, as can be seen from the rapid expansion of
the Territorial Army in 1938–9, the introduction of conscription sufficed to
fill the ranks of both the Territorial and Regular Army (although not yet the
Supplementary Reserve) to a very satisfactory degree at the outbreak of war.
Training was still weak, but there was considerable enthusiasm and a strong
institutional framework in the army. Avoiding Kitchener’s error in ignoring the
Territorial Army in 1914–15, Belisha directed the flow of new soldiers,
volunteer up to September and conscripts beginning in July, into the
established army. By the end of July 1940 the army had received 734,000
conscripts. It is not clear what kind of wastage was experienced in the process
of turning the Territorials over to active status, but by the end of the year
there were 1.128 million men in the army, compared with 2.5 million in the
armed forces in total. This was enough to provide 30 divisions, compared with
the 10 fully equipped divisions in France, plus 1 armoured, 2 British infantry,
and 1 Canadian infantry division sent into France during the fighting, 4
divisions in the Middle East, and troops in India, but as we have seen, besides
training shortfalls there were real problems with the Lines of Communications
in France that kept the new recruits at home.[xiv]
The cabinet was
responsible for meeting industry’s needs as well as the War Office’s. For the
first 8 months of the war it attempted to balance the requirements of both
expediently. The blockage in France limited the outflow of army manpower, which
was the main drain. The armed forces as a whole stated a target of 4.4 million men, while the War Office was
aiming for 59.3 divisions by the end of 1941, including Indian and African but
not Commonwealth troops. This goal was evidently modelled on the peak Imperial
effort in WWI and must have seemed reasonable (as well as being diplomatically
well-received in Paris), but serious consideration of the WWI situation would
have revealed its lack of realism to anyone save Hore-Belisha, who was at one
point aiming for a 100 division army. Winston Churchill, who had been
associated with Field-Marshal Wilson’s plan to cut the Commonwealth
Expeditionary Forces to 35 divisions for the 1919 campaign, referred to below,
must have been aware of this, for he moved quickly after reaching office to
rein the War Office in, capping army strength at 2.2 million men. Unfortunately,
the early months of his premiership coincided with the summer 1940 crisis. The
War Office, whose training situation had been transformed by the return of the
BEF with all its potential instructors, was permitted to call up the remaining
available men in draft-eligible age brackets. From this point on, the army
would be confined to manpower already raised and its share of 270,000 man
cohort –plus one-time gains when the draft age was cut from 18 1/2 to 18, and
raised from 41 to 46, but these gains could not compensate the Home Army for
the ever-increasing demands of the Middle East. The army breached its cap and reached a new
ceiling of 2.374 million in May 1942 and then was switched to a moving cap that
reached 2.5 million in the course of
1943, then 2.7 million in June 1944, and finally 2.9 million in the spring of
1945 as the army prepared enormous lines of communication for a war against
Japan –and the government confronted rising unemployment at home as the coastal
shipping shortage bit into British industrial output.[xv]
Despite the ideal goal of improving on the
performance of WWI, military mobilisation again collided with industrial and
scientific needs. The TUC fought for skilled tradesmen, while the universities
fought to broaden the base of educational deferments. The services might have a
jaundiced eye on the course of study of every one of the 3% of British youth
who enrolled in university, but the authorities at Cambridge and Oxford were
convinced that there was not a man in their colleges who was not of more value
sitting lectures than fighting at the front. Compromise was difficult, but
achieved. On the trade union side, in April 1941 the Manpower Committee drew up
“manpower budgets” every six months to allocate the 130,000 men of the
semiannual cohort. The first of these received a report from the Technical
Requirements Subcommittee of the Labour Ministry. The TRS estimated that the
country could mobilise 235,000 tradespeople aged 20–5 (out of a total of
650,000) and 120,000 aged 26–40. It is amazing that 650,000 of the roughly 2.2
million Britons in this age group qualified as tradesmen, and these figures do
not include the serving technicians that the armed forces trained themselves.
The April 1941 labour budget was later seen to reflect a certain degree of
optimism. By the fall of 1941 industry perceived a shortage of skilled men. Firms proved unwilling to part
with their apprentices as they reached drafting age. Certain industrial
apprentices received deferrments as generous as any Oxbridge physicist, and the
Beveridge Committee endorsed a widespread feeling that the army was hoarding
skilled men. Cabinet denied the army further
tradesmen and engineers until August 1942 when the Army Council finally managed
to rebut the charge by laying out the human resources implications of the
invasion. At the other end of the social scale, the Ministry of Labour and
National Service denied university students blanket deferrments at all. Some
5500 engineer and scientist undergraduates and resident graduate students were
considered in October 1939–January 1940. Five thousand were allowed to continue
their studies, but only 111 relieved of future service obligation as proven
researchers. The remainder were simply reserved for military service in their
specialities –although in some cases this would mean research as well. The
universities were also encouraged to reduce the length of courses, excepting
engineers, physics, radio, and metallurgy students. In the first years of the
war call-ups for university students could be deferred to age 20–1 as under the
militia provisions, and this meant that even the arts students of 1939–40
graduated normally. By October 1942 this had ended, but students could still
appeal to advisory committees at their universities. [xvi]
The Beveridge Committee’s recommendation that
the army end its technical call ups and the subsequent reversal of this policy
in August 1942 deserves some special consideration. The problem of continental
lines of communication has come up before, and will come up again, but it is
worth looking at one of the primary corps concerned, the Royal Engineer
(Transport). By August 1942 the branch was looking to the problem of invading
Europe and pursuing the defeated Germans with specific reference to its WWI
experience of advancing across the devastated landscapes of 1917–18. The worst
case scenario had the Germans destroying all logistic facilities behind them. The Allies would have to rebuild the ports they entered
through, the rail and road net they advanced along, and provide their own
transport capabilities. All this would require men, and the RE (T) put forward
tentative orders of battle for the work. Port construction, dredging, and
repair alone would require 154 engineer-officers and 2100 tradesmen from British
forces. These men would be recruited directly from the labour force, but still
had to be called up in advance to be given basic infantry and in some cases
diving training. Fortunately Britain had perhaps the largest population of port
construction specialists in the world. Even more dramatically, as in the last
war the navy’s decision to retain its personnel and the modest RN wartime
expansion (most new personnel coming from Britain’s seafaring and technical
labour force via the RNR and RNVR) meant that its training pipeline was soon
delivering surplus manpower. This ultimately found use in the amphibious force, where
the navy came to compete directly with the army. Overall, the introduction of a universal compulsory national
service obligation made the most efficient possible use of British human
resources, but could not stay ahead of competing manpower demands of war even
before its main forces were heavily engaged. This paradoxical fact was to have
great strategic and diplomatic consequences.
II. Organisation and Training of the
Technical and Tactical Arms
The British army
has traditionally distinguished between the “combat” and “service” arms. The
former consisted of the infantry, cavalry, and artillery that fought the
battles, while the latter carried up the water. Yet it would be hard to argue
that the combat arms had more prestige than theone “service” corps, the Royal
Engineers, usually acknowledged as the intellectual elite of the army. Officers
of the infantry, cavalry, artillery, and the RE could qualify for Staff College
and rise to become generals and commanders-in-chief. Through the 19th
century the engineers and artillerists tended to dominate the very highest
ranks, but during and after the South African War the cavalry leaped into the
lead. In the nineteenth century, the other two service corps, the Royal Army
Ordnance Corps and the Army Service Corps (Royal Army Service Corps after 1923)
were much less important within the army. The RAOC handled munitions and
weapons maintenance and repair, and being more closely associated with the
armouries than with the field army, could probably have cared less what the
regular army thought of it, but the ASC, officered largely by commissioned
warrant officers rising from the ranks, was definitely not the right sort of
people. Even the higher ranks of logistical administration were more often
occupied by RE officers than by RASC men.
The postwar era complicated matters
enormously. The cavalry became the RAC, while the artillery and RE became
intensely technical services. From the RE sprang the signals personnel of the Royal Corps of
Signals (RCS), who also qualified as “combatant,” while the RAOC and ASC (or
RASC as it became in 1923) developed vehicle maintenance branches that merged
in 1942 to become another “noncombatant” corps, the Royal Electrical and
Mechanical Engineers (REME). Meanwhile, Britain had entered WWI with a small
Railway Operating Department and two Railway Operating Companies intended to
support the BEF as it operated a single corps on perhaps only a single railway
line such as the Sinai Railway or the Karachi-Lahore spur lines. Subsequent
massive expansion formed the RE (Transportation), virtually a separate corps with
its own internal divisions.Taken together, the RAOC, RCS, RE, and RASC employed
large numbers of engineers and tradesmen during WWI and played a critical role
in ensuring that the tactical branches were actually able to fight, a lesson
well learned by 1939, while the third of the classical combat branches, the RA,
remained as profoundly technical as ever. Meanwhile, the infantry and RAC
specialist specialist niches within their own ranks as their weapons became
more complex over the years. By 1939 the technical arms were actually more
numerous than the tactical arms, and several infantry regiments, having been
converted to machine gun or motorised battalions formed their own small
technical corps in all but name. The largest, and by implication most important
branch of the army in Normandy was the Royal Artillery, with 22% of
Commonwealth troops in theatre compared with only 12% infantry The Commonwealth
armies actually suffered from a shortage of infantry thanks to the technical
arms’ demand for human resources, while the difficulties experienced by the
Indian army in finding adequate numbers of technical troops, and to a lesser
extent the Dominion armies, reduced the overall Commonwealth combat strength,
as British personnel had to make up the shortfall, further reducing the number
available for infantry duties.[xviii]
Table: Corps Breakdown (British Regular
Army)
Corps
|
1938
|
1939
|
Corps
|
1938
|
1939
|
RAC[xx]
|
4777
|
12,541
|
RASC
|
7 510
|
9090
|
Cavalry
|
8077
|
1844
|
RAMC
|
4468
|
5356
|
RA
|
26,186
|
30,711
|
RAOC
|
4,653
|
5843
|
RE
|
10,143
|
6,457
|
RAPC
|
964
|
1158
|
RCS
|
6,286
|
6,722
|
Infantry
|
79,722
|
81,372
|
Recruiting and Skills: The Engineering
Industry, The Decline of Wheat and the Supplementary Reserve
Unlike the other
armed forces, armies exist by mobilising society’s existing resources. Pastoral
tribes count their fighting power in terms of the number of adult males,
because they make no distinction between the tools and arms of manhood. Ancient
city states and medieval kingdoms required more sophisticated harness and
counted their armies by the number of men of wealth enough to buy their own
weapons. Early modern states had the wealth to arm every man they could call
up, and eventually developed the coercive power necessary to mobilise every
available horse and wagon. By Napoleonic times the modern state matched the
nomad tribe in its ability to mobilise to the limits of social resources. The
nation’s war strength was the measure of its population –but only because it
was wealthy enough that it now ran out of draftable men before it ran out of
draftable horse and wagon. Industrialisation restored the balance of man and
horse and forced the European powers into horse subsidies. In spite of
maintaining its manpower by volunteerism, in the larger scheme of things the
British army was no different. For all that it took a smaller share of the
annual cohort, it had a large second-line part-time army (through 1904 the
Special Reserve, Militia, and Yeomanry; 1904–14, Special Reserve and
Territorial Army; 1919–23, Territorials; 1923–39 Supplementary Reserve and
Territorials) that when taken together at establishment strength doubled
theoretical mobilised British manpower. These part-time citizen armies were, by
their nature, inefficient and smaller than their conscript counterparts of the
continent, but the lot of the horses of England was much closer to that of
their continental counterparts. Every summer, on both continent and in Britain,
reservists and subsidised horses alike were called to training camp, and men
played at war while doing the very real work of driver and groom. Horse skills,
whether those of the cavalry or the supply column, presented continuing
problems –and opportunities. The total mobiliseable British reserve cavalry
approached that of the European powers much more closely than did the nation’s
infantry because one could not conscript cavalrymen. On the other hand, it
lacked reserves of trained manpower. But the great truth of mass mobilisation in
the pre-petroleum era: trains, rifle ranges, and conscription laws figured as
one crucial dimension in strategic calculation, but in order to get the new
model rifles and quick-firing guns to the front, men in their hundreds of
thousands had to be marshalled into marching columns complete with a
horse-drawn wagon for every 20 men, and every one of those horses had to be
inspected, harnessed or saddled first. To a large extent this was simply taken
for granted, but the South African War revealed that Britain’s resources were
sifting away. The War Office soon ran out of British horses and ended by buying
them around the world. In the years before 1914, Britain was subtly losing the
basic requirements of a mass mobilisation infantry army.
To understand how this change came about, it
is necessary to understand the character of the army. Britain never gave up its
right to conscript men, but it was understood that India could not be
garrisoned by conscripts in peacetime. It followed that the British army required
35,000 volunteers each year not counting the navy, and this was thought
incompatible with conscription. As already noted, these numbers were not
reached, and through the long years between Cardwell and 1914 the War Office
had to resort to expedients. Units, especially those under training in Britain,
were often understrength. This lead to inappropriate overtraining, for the
horses had to be taken care of, and the War Office supplied enough horses to
move a battalion or an artillery battery whether it was at authorised strength
or not. Yet in a subtle sense, this was an advantage. Tactical training
suffered, but Britain still won its wars. And meanwhile, a far larger
proportion of recruits were getting the opportunity to fill in as grooms,
drivers, and for that matter as bricklayers and personal secretaries. In itself
this made the army more attractive to young men –and increased its value to the
large economy as a trainer of men.[xxi]
Meeting the gap
between the army’s very high enlistment and its even higher requirements was a
serious problem, and we might even ask why it British rates of military
participation were so high. Urban legend to the contrary, the boys who signed
up did so with their parents’ informed consent and had to pass physical and
written examinations. Far from being reluctant scum, British boys signed up
eagerly, and with the promise of 7 years
with the colours and 5 with the reserve, could look forward to separating from
the army at 25 with six months’ separation pay , if not a pension, officers at
35 with a small pension. Although pay was good enough that a frugal soldier
could save enough money to buy a business, this was not the common outcome. So
from one perspective, the army’s terms were not promising. The young soldier
lost 7, or 17 years, on the job market compared to his contemporaries and could
easily end up with dependents and the entire burden of retirement saving ahead.
It is clear that many men enlisted in the hope that they would be among the
minority who were invited to extend service with the colours to 12 years,
followed by an automatic option to extend for 9 years and a pension. Every time
the War Office reduced service time required towards pensions or increased the
number of men retained, recruiting spiked. Officers showed the same good sense,
being far less likely to enter Sandhurst, the aristocratic military academy
that served the infantry and cavalry than the technical school, Woolwich.[xxii]
Arguably, soldiers also wanted higher pay than the army was offering, but pay
adjustments had less effect on recruiting than pension adjustments. This leaves
a rather important question. Why did so many men enlist specifically in
infantry and cavalry regiments before 1914, despite knowing that they were
unlikely to reach pension, and why did they cease to be so enthusiastic about
the infantry and cavalry after 1918 while volunteering eagerly for the RN, RTC
and the RAF?[xxiii]
The key point, modern studies of recruiting
suggest, has to lie in the other “goods” that military service offer. Among
these, the lure of adventure and the social cachet of uniform and branch of
service cannot be doubted, any more than the opportunity to learn a skill, but
this is complicated. Men entered the pre-1945 peacetime British army in two
streams, and the same may be said of officers. The first recruit stream
consisted of 16 year-old boy entrants, who entered the army through the Boy’s
Technical Schools and passed on after two years, mainly to the RA, RE, RCS,
RAOC, and RASC. The second stream entered at 18 1/2. They largely volunteered
through specific depots, going to specific cavalry and infantry units, and the
RTC. Meanwhile, boys aspiring to be officers took a standard entrance exam on
graduation, and were placed in either the Royal Military College Sandhurst or
the Royal Military Academy Woolwich according to their grades. Woolwich had
much much higher scores than Sandhurst
–higher, in fact, than Oxford or Cambridge. Tradesmen were at the top of the
list for retention to pension, and their army experience (and seniority) was
directly transferable to peace employment. They, and for that matter their
Woolwich-trained officers could realistically expect to retire from the army at
the peak of their working life with a pension already paying and a combination
of training and work experience that
Woolwich-trained officers were in a similar position. Conversely, the
men who entered later, or via Sandhurst were locked into infantry and cavalry
careers in the British or Indian armies, with no convenient access to technical
training. There were exceptions. The army recruited men in their early 20s
precisely for their technical skills, or in the case of officer entrants via
the older universities, even their liberal arts training. All garrisons were
supposed to offer adult education, and the larger garrisons sometimes presented
opportunities to extend this to technical training. Some men were able to
transfer from the combat arms to the technical.[xxiv]
These aside the large mass of men entered the army were excluded from technical
training, and the same was true of the Territorials and the old Special
Reserve. Unfair as all of this was, it reflected society at large. The army
took its apprentices at 16 because British industry did the same, and the RN
already circumvented the process by taking its prospective technicians at 15
1/2. Yet neither it nor any other army could recruit infantry and cavalry at 16. Sixteen year olds
could not meet the army’s physical standards, nor, given the late age of
maturation in this period, was their any guarantee that they ever would. All
this said, fighting soldiers did not have to be taken at 18, nor apprentices at
16. This was simply the most convenient and economical method of arranging
matters, and one that neither Cardwell nor Haldane though necessary to modify.
The reason it worked, in the end, was that service in an infantry or cavalry
regiment could still serve in lieu of more active career training in 1914, and
its developing failure during the 30s reflects the changing relationship
between the prewar infantry and cavalry regiment and the world of work.[xxv]
A European army
of the 1880s called conscripts into their regular service formations and left
their training to their officers. The whole process of perfecting their military
abilities could not take more than 2 years, but in practice due to generous
furlough policies often took even less time. In that time their trainers had to
bring them to peak physical condition, teach them weaponcraft, tactics, and a
fairly complicated drill. This may seem reasonable, but in fact is not. Besides
being fit and soldierly, it was taken for granted in 1914 that an infantry
battalion could be turned out to forage, that it could receive its ration in
the form of live animals if necessary, that it could field the men needed to
drive its wagons and battalion guns. Now, men are not born with scythes or
butcher’s knives in their hands, but the typical new 19th century
conscript might as well have been. He was an agricultural labourer who could,
at least under supervision, butcher a calf, pitch a 10 man tent, drive a wagon,
change its wagon wheel, harness a horse, fell a tree, build a road, and harvest
a field. This was why nineteenth-century conscription worked, and for that
matter the analagous Commonwealth Territorials and militias could function:
many of the skills needed were brought to the army as a matter of course.
Lord Cardwell’s
army took all this so much for granted because it was of this world. The fact
that most recruits were agricultural labourers was not so much observed as
taken for granted on the grounds that most 18 year old men were either
agricultural labourers, or “urban” labourers who did a significant amount of
agricultural labour. More than 2 million people were registered as agricultural
labourers in Britain in 1870, that is, persons, largely adult males, making their living from wages paid by
farmers. And although England was the most urbanised European power, not more
than fifty percent of Englishmen lived in towns by the 1870s, many of them
economic migrants from the countryside who returned their happily when there
was work. The landlord went to supervise the harvest, the poor to gather it,
while the engineer went to survey, and the artisan to build sluices, pumps, and
operate steam tractors. Within town, there were the“industrial workers who
tended the draft horses that were the basis of the transport and construction
industries. True urbanites went to the RA and the navy. The reason for this is
apparent in the nature of the agricultural economy in which they lived. All of
this, and most particularly those 2 million registered agricultural labourers,
was possible and necessary because advanced capitalist agriculture succeeds
by capture fleeting efficiencies –by
ploughing, sowing, reaping and harvesting at short notice when weather
dictates. To achieve this, it must have a pool of unemployed labour at hand,
but this unemployment is no kinder than any other form. Although buttressed by
parish relief, it fell, as it always does, most heavily on the young and
inexperienced, who from this perspective are caught in the classic experience
trap, one made all the more severe by the fact that the work was arduously
physical, so that one’s “experience” was often manifested in a broad shoulder
and well-turned calf. An institution
that could offer escape from the experience trap was therefore likely to have
considerable success, and not surprisingly the typical European army tended to
that shape. In most countries, and even England, the best way of escaping the
dead end life of the agricultural labourer was offered by the artillery and
cavalry, which offered much more access to horses, which is why these
volunteer-manned arms were able to keep pace, more-or-less, with the expanding
conscript infantry branches on the continent, but the infantry, and
particularly the British infantry, also offered these opportunities, at least
in the form of the muscle built by 5 years of army food and army training. This
was the nineteenth century agricultural “push and pull” logic of recruiting. It
died during the English interwar.
In 1914 there
were 3 million registered agricultural labourers in the United Kingdom, a
robust recovery from a low of 2.3 million in 1900 thanks to the long-delayed end
of the agricultural depression, but nevertheless only about 15% of the English
workforce was on the land compared with 20% in Germany in 1939. The shortage of
horses that emerged during the South African war might have served as a
warning, however, that war was to reveal, or cause, a catastrophic and
irreversible decline in labour-intensive British agriculture. Whereas the
German equine population recovered from the WWI hecatomb and expanded so that
it could mobilise 2.7 million horses in 1940, compared to 1.4 million horses in
1914, the number of horses in the United Kingdom, after rising modestly in
1875–1905 from 1.8 to 2.1 million, fell to only 200,000 in 1938. English
farmers could no longer afford to plough even with internal combustion, much
less horse and man. More and more arable land was going into pasture for
fatstock and dairy, and without ploughing to absorb the labour, there were only
300,000 registered agricultural labourers in 1939.[xxvi]
One way in which
the army had traditionally dipped into the pool of agricultural labourers was
with its Special Reserve. Special Reservists received six months of training
–and room and board. Thereafter they only were obliged to attend a two week summer camp, but could be
called up for much more time consuming duties, up to and including tours in
India. The Special Reserve was indispensable when the BEF ws called up to
strength in 1914, providing slightly more than 1 infantryman for every 2.5
regulars in the United Kingdom. Yet it disappeared after the war, to be
replaced by the Supplementary Reserve,
with a very different composition.
Table:
Comparison of the Special Reserve (1914) with the Supplementary Reserve (1939)
(Figures given Officers/Men)
Branch
|
1914
|
Attached to
Territorials for Training
|
Attached to
Regulars for Training
|
Not Required to Train in Peace
|
Total, 1939
|
Cavalry
|
1919
|
|
32/0
|
|
32/0
|
Armour
|
|
|
310/343
|
|
310/343
|
Artillery
|
957
|
132/4149
|
230/0
|
1000
|
362/5149
|
Engineers
|
1788
|
130/4299
|
173/35
|
69/2067
|
372/6401
|
Signals
|
|
122/3039
|
154/540
|
43/1207
|
319/4786
|
Foot Guards
|
|
104/0
|
|
|
104/0
|
Infantry
|
66,713
|
|
599/17,000
|
|
599/17,000
|
Military Police
|
430
|
|
0/800
|
|
0/800
|
Medical
|
1000
|
|
290/370
|
68/1862
|
358/2232
|
Services
|
9930
|
5/123
|
453/0
|
7/11,067
|
465/11,200
|
Ordnance
|
120
|
2/110
|
0/50
|
70/8,692
|
72/8852
|
Royal Engineer Transport Service
|
|
|
19/0
|
0/2554
|
281/7,129[xxvii]
|
Authorised Est.
|
80,120
|
|
|
|
67,945
|
Actual Est.
|
63,069
|
|
|
|
32,259
|
Aside from
oddities such as the authorised 136 Supplementary Reserve officers of the Foot
Guard and cavalry, these figures, which it must be emphasised, are only
authorised recruiting figures, are practically a history of the changing
British economy. The Special Reserve of 1914 was a cheap infantry reserve feeding on agricultural
unemployment. By contrast more than half the 1939 Supplementary Reserve
consisted of potential drivers and mechanics enrolled in the RAOC and RASC,
miscellaneous technicians in the RCS and RE, and potential railway troops in
the RE(T), who were not even required to
train in peace. These were the men that a mechanised army would need, and which
the government had to be prepared to offer any concession needful to bring them
into the ranks. Needless to say, whether or not they volunteered for the
Supplementary Reserve before the outbreak of war, had it not been for the thousands of skilled mechanics that the War
Office was able to extract from the economy, there could have been no question
of mechanising the BEF.
The RE(T) was a
different matter. It existed because of its training obligations.
Railroad troops emerged in European armies during the second half of the
nineteenth century in order to meet the logistical needs of mobilised armies.
Railroad troops were needed in wartime, but also during the summer training
period, when the national rail system had to handle the many reservists who
were recalled to their units for refresher training, along with the horses and
equipment required to mobilise them. The obvious approach was to form a
reservist corps of railroad troops, largely out of employees in nationalised
railroad companies. The British armies had been one of the first to move large
numbers of troops by rail, but its domestic needs were small, even during the
summer mobilisation of the Territorials, and the British railroads were private
companies. The War Office did not ignore the problem. At the outbreak of war in
1914 there were 3 Railroad Operating Companies at a small training centre at
Catterick. India, with real and pressing problems, had railroad troops under
the Indian Army, with British officers seconded from the Royal Engineers.
Commonwealth mobilisation during World War I went far beyond anything
envisioned before the war, but in the end the British army carried its weight
in France, raising an enormous railroad corps on the back of British volunteers
from the rail industry. Looking forward to a second such war, the War Office
recognised that the army would need a new reservist branch to provide the
nucleus for a similar expansion. (Ironically, at the same time the efficient
German and Austro-Hungarian railroad corps were disbanded because the peace
treaties prohibited these countries, although not Czechoslovakia and other
counties ethnic German populations, from maintaining reserves). However, there
remained the difficulties of the private–public partnership to overcome. The
solution was simple. The Crown would invite volunteer engineers and artisans to
a six month course at the Railway Training Centre, with its six-mile railway
attached to the LMS system, followed by two week refreshers every year. They
would then be free to use their Crown training in private life, in turn for
being liable for war service. Yet other artisans would qualify for reservist
status without having to train in peacetime at all. The Supplementary
Reservists of the 1939 RE(T) were recruited by precisely the same kind of
incentive as the infantry reservists of 1914: the prospect of learning job
skills at the Crown’s expense. Very little had changed in British demographics
between 1914 and 1939. Every recruit obtained as a potential railway trooper
was one lost the army as an infantryman. If we ignore the fact that neither the
Special nor the Supplementary Reserve were recruited to strength, the major difference between the BEF of 1914 and
that of 1939 at this level was the loss of 2 rifle divisions of infantry in
favour of railway workers, mechanics, and drivers. This change lies, quite
simply, at the crux of the change in British society and, of necessity, of
British strategy.
The War Office
actually took a much broader perspective on skills training and education.
Parliament had long since determined that it was not going to be vulnerable
when veterans begged in the streets. Unemployed discharged soldiers
represented, as far as it was concerned, a serious failure on the part of the
War Office, and the War Office took the point. It ran a comprehensive adult
education programme, recruited apprentices for the Indian Army’s railway shops
from the ranks of the British garrison, and from 1923 on, guaranteed every
soldier who had not already received vocational training a seat at a Vocational
Training Centre during their last six months of service upon volunteering. The
VTC system was in slight flux during the early years of its mandate, when there
was a dedicated agricultural training school beside the industrial school, but
from 1929 they catered almost exclusively to the building trades, and their
graduates were performing at much the same level as graduates of two year
apprentice colleges serving the industry in the London area. was dedicated to training men for
agricultural work, but by 1930 there were two skills, both catering to the
construction trades. Unfortunately, there were only 2400 seats a year for
25,000-odd separatees, but by all accounts the VTCs were too large rather than
too small for the number of volunteers, who rarely exceeded 1000 a year In
theory men were rotated back to the U.K. for their last year of service, but in
practice overseas crises had their effect. More importantly, a large number of
separating soldiers did not want to attend the VTCs. Some of them did not need
their help, while others found the programme of 44 hours at the benches and a 2
hour voluntary night class too demanding, and yet others resented the fee of
5s/week. Some sad cases did not have the money to attend due to the needs of
their dependents. It was even suggested that thanks to the continuing
maintenance problems of some Indian stations that many men had already learned
as much as the VTCs were likely to teach them. Within their limits the VTCs
made a creditable contribution to the lives of veterans and the national
skilled labour supply, but almost incidentally, the War Office was spending
money to ensure that not less than 10% of available reservists were skilled
construction workers. While there was no VTC for officers (the ultimate solution,
requiring a university degree in all officer entrants, collided with
other priorities). Here, as in many other respects, policy was working against
the health of the nation’s pool of infantry.[xxviii]
Training
TRaining covers
two separate outcomes, that for soldiers, and that for officers. Commissioned
officers represented about 2.5% of the personnel of the British armies for a
total officer body of roughly 11,000, including over 1600 Indians. Officer
turnover was heavy according to the needs of the “up or out by 40” policy. Roughly
500-600 officers joined each year, 120 Cadets via Woolwich, 320 through
Sandhurst, and 100 through university degrees and the Officers Training
Courses, or through the Supplementary Reserve. Many in the latter category
would have been doctors and other professionals, while other rank candidates
for promotion were normally sent to the academies. By 1938, the Indian Military
College at Dhera Dum graduated 35 Indian officers each year, the remainder of
Indian officers being “Viceroy’s Commission Officers” promoted from the ranks
of more limited command privilege. The cadet colleges set entrance examinations
and the British schools charged tuition of up to £200/annum. Sandhurst and Woolwich courses
lasted 18 month, Dhera Dum a more sensible 3 years. Sandhurst in particular had
a well found reputation as a less than academically challenging environment,
but it must be realised that it was intended to produce large numbers of small
unit leaders whose physical fitness was of more immediate importance than their
academic talents. Sandhurst’s cult of sport and horsemanship alienated some
cadets, but was probably inescapable given just how difficult it apparently was
to produce and maintain cavalrymen. The fact that so many Sandhurst graduates
would have to compete for so few seats at the Staff Colleges against better
prepared Woolwich and university graduates could be held against Sandhurst to
the extent it is considered as an educational institution, but there were
quotas for Sandhurst graduates, and there seems to have been a hard-hearted
assumption that those Sandhurst enrollees who were there because of their
limits rather than their lack of academic inclination had only themselves to
blame for being stupid or lazy. Besides, the sons of the aristocracy went to Sandhurst
as well, and here the assumption was that children of wealth should be
encouraged to serve their country without placing unreasonable academic
barriers in their way that could be better reserved to the Staff Colleges. Many
men did rise out of Sandhurst to distinguished careers, generally vindicating
the implicit policy of leaving it toe the individual to make up his lost
ground.[xxix]
To say that
Woolwich was the more academic institution is not even to come close to
describing this London landmark, for it was a military technical universe.
Gentlemen cadets found themselves in the midst of a vital, brawling institution
that found room within it for explosives plants, model research laboratories,
advanced production facilities in the world, and an enormous apprentice school.
The gentlemen attended lectures given by accredited university teachers, and
while these were perhaps not always taken seriously, top graduates went on to
the Tripos at Cambridge via the School of Military Engineering ( 19 RE officers
who wrote the Tripos in 1930, 4 took Firsts, 5 Seconds, and 9 Thirds). Lower
ranked Woolwich graduates went to the Royal Artillery after 5 months at the
army’s Royal Military College of Science at Woolwich, although the Military
College also offered many other programmes, with a 2 year full time programme that included
strength of materials, thermodynamics, optics, illumination and acoustics,
electrical engineering; drafting and design, manufacturing methods, hydraulics
and heat engines; chemistry and metallurgy; ballistics, gunnery and gun
construction, and special courses. Taken by a smaller number of selected RA and
RN officers, it was in effect, a standard engineering curriculum directed at
producing an ordnance designer, if a little short of mathematics courses by
modern standards. The introductory 18 month course at Woolwich was more
general, but this was because it was thought
more attractive to potential recruits, for “the student is better
equipped, should he return to civilian life.” College training was also
extended to other ranks. Some Woolwich apprentices, but not all, came in as Boy
Entrants and received a technical high school-standard training before passing
on to the Royal Artillery Training Battalion, a trades school, or full training
at the RCS. These last, who would go to Woolwich or Sandhurst after
receiving the equivalent of an undergraduate engineering degree, would have
been able to contest the honour of top army technocrat with the RE’s Cambridge
graduates. The RCS then ran a similar programme at the Signals School at
Catterich for 18 months, sending its graduates on to university for parallel
training to that received by the RE in electrical engineering.[xxx]
Table 3: Branch of Service Opted for by
Sandhurst/Woolwich Graduates and Total Officer Strength[xxxi]
Branch
|
1935
|
1936
|
1938
|
RA
|
35/1738
|
54
|
52
|
RE
|
10/1125
|
17
|
18
|
RCS
|
8/399
|
7
|
8
|
Cavalry
|
15/209
|
12
|
8
|
Foot Guards
|
7
|
9
|
4
|
Infantry
|
89/2991
|
103
|
114
|
Indian Army
|
48
|
47
|
57/c. 3000
|
RTC
|
5/294
|
8
|
12 (2+10)
|
Along
with the Military College of Science and the School of Military Engineering
there were a number of other schools, such as the School of Electric Lighting
near Plymouth, ostensibly a specialised programme for AA forces, that actually
took much of the electrical engineering burden. Security and cipher concerns
kept the School of Signals an institute apart, while the Tank Schools, although
not considered part of the army’s technical training infrastructure, were
obviously critically important to mechanisation. The RASC College filled a wide
range of functions including a driving and mechanics school, but also including
what might now be called business administration. Finally, organised corps
instructional courses aside, there were a range of special-purpose courses
offered by institutions such as the
RAF’s School of Army Air Cooperation, the Army School of Hygiene, and
the Cookery School.
Table: Enrollment
in Army Schools, 1939
School
|
Officers
|
Men and Boys
|
School
|
Officers
|
Men and Boys
|
RMA Woolwich
|
255
|
|
Sch. of Elec. Lighting
|
12
|
315
|
RMC Sandhurst
|
540
|
|
AA Defence Sch.
|
60
|
125
|
Imp. Defence College
|
5
|
|
Sch. of Signals
|
60
|
170
|
Staff College
|
135+85
|
|
Small Arms Sch.
|
114
|
194
|
Senior Officer’s Sch
|
57
|
|
Army Gas Sch.
|
60
|
94
|
Sch. of Equitation
|
22
|
|
Mechanics
Sch.
|
|
200
|
Sch. of Artillery
|
135
|
|
RASC Tr. Centre
|
66
|
25
|
Sch. of Coast
Art.
|
63
|
|
RAOC Tr. Centre
|
20
|
650
|
M. Coll. of Science
|
160
|
600+400
|
Phys. Train. Sch.
|
60
|
270
|
Sch.of Mil
Eng.
|
125
|
(450)
|
Music
|
c. 180
|
|
Railway Tr Cen
|
50
|
50
|
Instructor’s Centre
|
12
|
130
|
The
second hurdle for a candidate technical officer came after completion of
specialist school. He could serve well and faithfully on the basis of his
education, but the army wanted good technicians, and was willing to encourage
them by paying specialist bonusses to qualified technical officers, but .
Surprisingly, did not attempt to judge their qualifications, leaving it instead
to the various Institutes of Civil Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, and
Electrical Engineers. Officers who wished to draw specalist bonuses had to
qualify as members of these institutions, and it was hoped that this
relationship would go beyond qualifying exams. At various times army engineers
described the institutions as the
friends, brains, and second and professional homes of the Royal
Engineers and the REME. Numerous papers given to the Institutes by serving and
reservist officers show that some officers took this very seriously.[xxxii]
Once set on the
ladder of promotion an officer’s career would take him through a series of
further training centres. Captains who hoped to attend Staff College requested
a more challenging version of the qualifying exam for major’s rank that also
served as a qualifying exam for the Staff Colleges. Far more eligible officers
sat the entrance examinations each year than the schools could take, 450 in
1930 for example. Successful candidates would probably attend a staff college
for two years. The British army operated a staff college at Camberly, the
Indian Army one at Quetta in Pakistan. The navy’s school at Greenwich and Cranwell also took some army officers. Total
output was between 50 and 60 army officers each year along with RAF, RN, and
Dominion students enrolled in the army colleges. Camberly was preferred to
Quetta among those who placed well enough to have a choice. All the standardised administrative training, but
since much Staff College instruction had a service-oriented tactical and
strategic component, the obvious implication was that the cross-trained
officers would be preferred for future liaison and combined arms appointments.
Certainly from the perspective of RAF or RN officers attending army staff
schools, the subject of combined (that is, amphibious) operations seemed
omnipresent.[xxxiii]
Plain army students at Staff College courses got generous lashings of
geography, military history, and directed studies in “military science,” but
the sand table Tactical Exercise Without Troops (which also included staff
rides of the locales reproduced in the sand tables) were the glory of the
school, with RAF squadrons and tactics
via sand table exercises. Less glamourous but perhaps as important was the
college’s administrative instruction, as staff college graduates made up the
larger part of service administrative staffs. After Staff College graduation,
majors passed an additional 10 week higher preparatory course at the Senior
Officer’s School at Sheerness. Senior Officer’s School was intended to prepare
them for command of a large unit of all arms. It, too, had cross-appointed
officers from the other services, a typical course in early 1931 had 34 army
majors, 2 Royal Marine officers, 2 RAF officers, and 2 RN captains. Set
lectures included “Discipline,” “Messing,” and “Double-Entry Book-Keeping,” as
well as “Combined Operations.” Tactical instruction was by the staff method of
assigning field tactical problems to syndicates of officers thrown together
from various units. In this 1931 course the set problem was a mobile meeting
engagement followed by a fighting retreat fought out in the country around
Sheerness, and after a staff ride, set exercises included writing “orders by
the Officer Commanding Divisional Royal Engineers as regards delaying the enemy
pursuit by destruction of bridges, etc,” among others. Students were also set
seminars to develop their ability to lead by instruction, and of the 40
seminars heard, the 1931 class found “Finding Water in the Syrian Desert,” “The
Chinese Language,” “How a Regimental Depot is Run,” “Tank Tactics,” and
“Soldiering in Burma,” particularly memorable. On promotion to field grade
select officers, 7 per term, went on to the Imperial Defence College, where
they studied strategy alongside their RAF and RN peers under the direct supervision
of the Committee for Imperial Defence. Senior officers might also enroll in
specialist courses at the corps schools, so that engineers such as Martel and
the former RCS officer Major General E. A. Osborne, GOC commanded divisions in
1940, while infantry officers could learn the complexities of signals and
logistics.[xxxiv]
Because the War
Office was an industrial as well as a purely operational institution, there
were many uses for the skills it developed in its officers at such expense. The
army in Britain had over 400 staff officers in the War Office, the Regional
commands and Territorial Army another 2000 staff personnel. The army schools
absorbed about 800 personnel as instructors and administrative and physical
plant staff, above and beyond civilian employees. The industrial and technical
inspection establishments required almost 900 personnel, and lesser
institutions such as field bakeries and grass farms, although to all
appearances impossibly boring, were vital and demanded much specialist administrative
skill. Most administrative officers belonged to the RASC, although the
uniformed personnel in the research and production facilities were members of
the RAOC, and after 1942 the REME. The RAOC, RASC, and REME (and the accounting
and medical branches) were considered noncombatant branches. Their officers
could not command combat formations and did not attend the Staff Colleges. This
might give the impression that these arms were staffed by second-rate personnel
compared to infantry and cavalry officers, but members of the RASC could and
did become Lieutenant-Generals if not Field-Marshals. Unlike their infantry and
cavalry counterparts who (in the post agricultural age, anyway) added little to
their value as potential businessmen as they progressed through the ranks,
noncombatant officers picked up genuinely useful skills and experience, and
since they were expected to leave the army by their 55th birthday, a final
stint as Managing Director of some relevant firm was a more or less normal end
to their career. Arguably the technocrats of the RE, RA, and RCS, who could
hold field commands while monopolising technical appointments peculiar to their
branches had the best of both worlds, and it is hard to escape the impression
that this was intentional. The Army Council had been dominated by sappers and
gunners like Kitchener and Gordon before WWI, and this tradition was
re-established after a generation of cavalry dominance by the appointment of an
artillerist as CIGS in 1926, Sir George Milne (CIGS 1926–33). subsequently, Sir
A. A. Montgomery-Massingberd (1934–37) and Lord Alanbrooke (1942–45) extended
the artillery dominance, although the infantryman Ironside came between
Montgomery-Massingberd and Dill.
Table 4: Strength by Corps, 1939–1944
Corps
|
India, 1939
|
U.K., 1939
|
1944
|
RAC and Cavalry
|
5.6%
|
9.5%
|
6%
|
RA
|
16.4%
|
20%
|
18%
|
RE
|
0.1%
|
4.2%
|
13%
|
Infantry
|
70%
|
54%
|
14%
|
RAOC[xxxv]
|
0.4%
|
3.4%
|
much less than 10%
|
RASC
|
—
|
8%
|
15%
|
RCS
|
4.7%
|
4.4%
|
5%
|
REME
|
—
|
—
|
5%
|
Technical
training for other ranks was largely directed at boy entrants. Eighteen-year
olds were understood to have their issues with the workforce, and it was
expected that talent that had somehow missed its place at 16 would be captured
by the rudimentary methods of recommendation for Men’s Training Courses or as
Ranker Cadets, or by accelerated promotion to NCO. Woolwich was the traditional
destination of the boy entrant for either Army or Arsenal work, an admirable
arrangement that ensured close informal ties between gunners and the men who
built the guns, but after 1918 the new technical corps were increasingly
dissatisfied with depending on Woolwich, feeling that the best boys somehow
tended to end up artillerists, and new Boy’s schools were opened to meet their
needs. Woolwich was the original model for Halton and had the same relative
success, but despite the army’s aspiration to be as much an engineering service
as the RAF, it was never a trainer on the same scale. By 1939 the army had 2000 BTS seats and produced only 700
technicians a year, including such old-fashioned trades as masonry.
Fortunately, for all its informality, men’s training was carried out on a large
scale, notably at the RASC Corps School that trained 18 year old entrants as
both truck drivers and mechanics. The residual problem of overlooked
(technical) talent lay in the infantry.
[i].This is calculated by working out the
individual portion of the vote for the maintenance of the standing army and
multiplying by the number of troops on the Indian establishment; more sophisticated
analyses are possible; for mechanisation efforts in India in response to the
subsidies recommended by the Chatfield Committee, see for instance P. N. Khera,
the Indian Armed Forces in World War Two: The Technical Services: Ordnance
and IEME ([New Delhi]: [n.p.], [1962]), 5.
[ii].The first figure is the Gross estimate,
that is, the army budget inclusive of appropriations-in-aid from other
ministries spent on army services including the costs of operations in the
Middle East as projected in the annual army estimates released in spring for
the upcoming fiscal year running 1 April–30 March. “Pay” is actually the
“maintenance of the standing army” vote and includes warlike stores until
1923–4. Warlike stores is the total spent on weapons and munitions and
explicitly excludes fuel, clothing, and victuals. Vote A is the total
authorised army strength exclusive of British troops on the Indian
establishment, but inclusive of Indian troops on the British establishment.
British troops on the Indian establishment includes troops in Burma and (until
1932) Aden. Colonial and Indian forces included under Vote A reached a high of
4,287 in 1927–8 and another high of 5,249 in 1939. See United Kingdom, House of
Commons, Sessional Papers, “Army Estimates,” 1924–5, 17:1ff; Ibid,
1925–6, 18:1ff; Ibid, 1926–7, 14:1ff; Ibid, 1927–8, 11ff; Ibid, 1929–30,
11:19ff; Ibid, 19:1ff; Ibid, 1930–1, 15:1ff; Ibid, 1933–4, 17:1ff; Ibid,
1934–5, 17:1ff; Ibid, 1935–6, 13:1ff; Ibid, 1936–7, 17:1ff; Ibid, 1937–8,
17:1ff; 1938–9, 17:1ff; Ibid, 1939–40, 17:1ff.
[iii].This figure covers mobilisation of
reserves to work as replacements during a dockers’ strike.
[iv].The Supplementary Reserve was
re-established during this fiscal year.
[v].This figure covers mobilisation of 10,000
reservists to cover the needs of an expeditionary force sent to China.
[vi].This increase reflects the resumption of
normal recruitment with reserve obligation after 7 years in 1920.
[vii].For one WWI-era pensioned officer’s story,
see Charles Carrington, A Soldier at Bomber Command
(London: L. Cooper, 1985), vii, xi, 3ff.
[viii].For the defences of Portsmouth-Southampton
in WWII, see for example Colin Dobinson, AA Command: Britain’s Anti-Aircraft
Defences of World War II (London: Methuen, 2001), 512–23; see also Military
Engineering. Volume II, Defences (London: HMSO, 1925); for the
development of the Inland Water Branch under Brigadier White, see C. W. White
and S. G. Stark, “Nos. 1 and 2 Military Ports,” CEW 2: 6ff.
[ix].Postan, Jay, and Scott, 237–39, 305ff;
George Macleod Ross, The Business of Tanks, 137, 155–67; Martel and
Davidson in the BEF, see Blaxland, Destination Dunkirk (NB incomplete
reference, one work not bibliographically reference –Ross); Hart, 370–8.
[x].A. P. Halton, “Recruiting Problems for the
Future,” Army Quarterly 22, 1 (April 1931): 155–8; R. L. Sherbrooke,
“Recruiting for the Regular Army, Army Quarterly, 22, 2 (July, 1931):
321 [NB these sources not in bibliography]; F. W. Perry, The Commonwealth
Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1988), 98–119; Philip Mason, A Matter of Honour: An
Account of the Indian Army: Its Officers and Men (London: J. Cape), 465–6,
467, 512.
[xi].Editor’s comments on the Secretary of
State’s Reports on the Army and RAF in Army Quarterly 26, 1 (April
1933): 156–7; Army Quarterly 34, 1 (April 1937): 9–10; and Army
Quarterly 36, 1 (April 1938): 9–10; recruiting differential between armour
and cavalry, see Lord Carver, Britain’s Army in the Twentieth Century
(London: Macmillan in Association with the Imperial War Museum, 1998), 159.
[xii].Minney,
87; Various estimates, plus G. M. Orr, “The Military Forces in India,” Army
Quarterly 18, 2 (July 1929): 384–95. NB not in bibliography.
[xiii].Perry, 59–60; Minney, 70–110.
[xiv].Flynn, 90.
[xv].Flynn, 50–1.
[xvi].Perry, [NB –also Beveridge committee];
Flynn, 122–4.
[xvii].Perry, 115, 138–41, 144, 146–7, 169,
171–2; Blaxland, Alexander’s Generals, 25, 246–7.
[xviii].On the origins of the RE (Transportation),
see, for now, W. J. K. Davies, Light Railways of the First World War: A
History of Tactical Rail Communications on the British Fronts, 1914–18
(Newton Abbot, Surrey, U.K..: David and Charles, 1967), 15–20; and Ian Brown, British
Logistics on the Western Front, 1914–1919 (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998).
[xix].OB information, Forty, 345–9; even within
the infantry battalion about 5% of personnel were attached from the RCS, REME,
RASC, and RAOC, or Indian equivalents; the downside of the Indian Army’s
“martial race” policy is more forcefully put by an opponent of Indian self
determination, Audrey O’Brien, “A Democratic Army for India’s Democracy,” Army
Quarterly, 19, 1 (October 1929): 132–3.
[xx].The Royal Armoured Corps replaced the
Royal Tank Corps (RTC) in April 1939, by which time a large proportion of the
cavalry had already been absorbed .
[xxi].The 1938–39 Army Appropriation Accounts
show that the army was understrength by 29,500 on 1 April 1937 during the
height of the manufacturing boon, it had fallen to 26,600 by September, 23,300
by 1 December 1938, and 19,696 in February 1938, the final prewar figure
released. As the economy began to recover later in the year, and recruiting
targets rose, the shortfall probably rose; for training problems see for
example M. Beckwith-Smith, “Battalion Organisation in Time of Peace,” Army
Quarterly 8 (1924): 372; O. T. Frith, “Reacting to Mechanization,” Army
Quarterly 23, 2 (January 1932): 351–7; Lord Robertson, born in 1860,
entered 16th Lancers as a trooper in 1877. In 1888 he received his Queen’s
Commission in the 3rd Dragoon Guards, and embarking on a career “on the
intellectual side of war,” was seconded to the Intelligence Branch, Simla. In
1896 he passed the staff college course at Camberly, and was in South Africa as
Staff Captain, Intelligence in 1900 before returning to Whitehall in 1901 to
work in the Intelligence Branch. Staff appointments in a cavalry brigade, a
posting as Commandant, Camberly, as Director of Military Training, and
Quartermaster General of the BEF preceded his 1915 appointment as CIGS, from
which he resigned on point of principle in 1918, after which he was employed
until retirement as General Officer Commanding Eastern Command (see Army
Quarterly 26, 1 (April, 19330: 12–15, and appreciation by Brigadier-General
Sir James Edmond, Ibid, 16–21).
[xxii].One officer claimed that after stoppages
private soldiers earned 15–24 shillings/week “pocket money,” and that an
unmarried private soldier could expect to save £350 by the end of his 6 years
of service (£750 if he made sergeant), “enough to start a business and marry
his girl,” not bad for a 25 year old who was guaranteed access to free
vocational training and 5–6 further years of part-time employment in the
Reserve in the bargain (“Battalion Commander,” “An Experiment in Thrift in the
Army,” Army Quarterly 4 (April 1922): 339.
[xxiii].Minney, 131.
[xxiv].An anonymous writer in the Army
Quarterly actually recommended university entry over the service schools,
and the resulting controversy in the correspondence pages did not challenge
this aspect of the article (“The Mother of Four Officers,” “How to Succeed in
the Army,” Army Quarterly 29, 2 (July 1932): 359. “Mother” excepts
candidates for the RE, who in any case would do a year of university training
at army expense, and notes that the 18 month antedate in seniority more than
made up for the time apparently wasted.
[xxv].See James R. Hosek and Christine E.
Paterson, “Enlistment Decisions of Young Men,” in Army Manpower Economics
ed. Curttis L. Gilroy (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1986): 7–9, 26–30; Lawrence
Goldberg and Peter Granston, “Economic Analysis of Army Enlistments: Policy
Implications,” in Gilroy, ed., 70, 79; and Thomas V. Deula and D. Alton Smith,
“Recruiting Goals, Enlistment Supply, and Enlistments in the U. S. Army,” in
Gilroy, ed., 112.
[xxvi].Mason, Matter of Honour, 469;
Richard Perren , Agriculture in Depression, 1870-1940, a volume in the
New Studies in Economic and Social History series (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995), 48–50; Richard Moore-Colyer, Aspects of Horse Breeding
and the Supply of Horses in Victorian Britain,”
Journal of British Studies 43, Part 1 (1995), 58.
[xxvii].The Royal Engineer Transport Service
Supplementary Reserve included an establishment of 262 officers and 4605 men in
a unique mobilisation category additional to the totals on this table.
[xxviii].”The Army Vocational Training Centre,” The
Engineer, 5 January 1937, 72. The quotations are from the article, but have
the feeling of being lifted from an official source.
[xxix].For entry statistiscs and a surprisingly
frank assessment of Sandhurst’s intellectual limitations, see C. Bonham-Carter,
“Recent Developments in Education in the Army,” Army Quarterly, 21, 2
(January 1931): 264. (NB: not in bibliography); for details of Dhera Dum, see
Mason, Matter of Honour, 465–6. Major-General Bonham-Carter was then
Director of Staff Duties at the War Office.
[xxx].On Woolwich life between the wars, see
Bidwell and Graham, 152, 156–60; statistics see Bonham-Carter, 267–8; Military
College of Science, see “The
Military College of Science, Woolwich,” Engineering, 22 April, 1938, 459-60, citation see 460.
[xxxi].Figures from The London Gazette and
the 1926 Estimates. “Foot Guard” and “Infantry” total officers category is
inclusive. In addition there were 582 officers in the RASC, 1019 in the RAMC
and ADC, 258 in the RAOC, 137 in the RAVC, 169 in the Royal Army Pay Corps, 105
in the Corps of Military Accountants, and 148 in the Army Educational Corps.
[xxxii].Sayer, 3–4.
[xxxiii].See “A Naval Visit to Quetta,” Naval
Review 23 (1935): 71–4; and ”Some Impressions of the S. O. S.,” Naval
Review 20 (1932): 698–704.
[xxxiv].”Some Impressions of the S. O. S.,” Naval
Review 20 (1932): 698–704; Gregory Blaxland, Dunkirk: The Story of
Gort’s Army ( London: W. Kimber, 1973), 57.
[xxxv].In 1939 the RAOC included the army
electrical maintenance units, the RAOC(E). In 1942 the RAOC(E) was split off
from its parent corps and combined with the mechanical maintenance units of the
RASC to form the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME).
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