Tommies: The British Army in the Trenches Read online

  TOMMIES

  Casemate Short History

  TOMMIES

  THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE TRENCHES

  Rosie Serdiville & John Sadler

  This one is for all of them who have no known grave

  Published in Great Britain and

  the United States of America in 2017 by

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS

  The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE, UK and

  1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083, USA

  © Casemate Publishers 2017

  Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-484-6

  Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-485-3

  Mobi Edition: ISBN 978-1-61200-485-3

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  Maps by Chloe Rodham

  For a complete list of Casemate titles, please contact:

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (UK)

  Telephone (01865) 241249

  Email: [email protected]

  www.casematepublishers.co.uk

  CASEMATE PUBLISHERS (US)

  Telephone (610) 853-9131

  Fax (610) 853-9146

  Email: [email protected]

  www.casematepublishers.com

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: When the Drums Begin to Roll…

  Timeline

  Abbreviations

  Uniforms and kit

  Chapter 1: Deadlock (1914)

  Chapter 2: Stalemate (1915)

  Chapter 3: Attrition (1916)

  Chapter 4: Mud (1917)

  Chapter 5: Breakthrough (1918)

  Chapter 6: Remembrance

  Sources

  Acknowledgements

  Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap. An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit. Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?’ But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll, O it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes,’ when the drums begin to roll.

  Rudyard Kipling, Tommy Atkins

  INTRODUCTION

  WHEN THE DRUMS BEGIN TO ROLL…

  As sure as God’s in his heaven,

  As sure as he stands for right,

  As sure as the Hun this wrong hath done,

  So surely we win this fight!

  John Oxenham, Victory Day – Anticipation

  ON THE SULTRY AFTERNOON OF 28 JUNE 1914, an eighteen-year-old tubercular terrorist shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife outside a pavement cafe in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. Few in Britain at that time had heard of the Duke, the city or the province and, for the most part, cared rather less; just another ‘Balkan do’. It wasn’t. This was the spark that lit the world; that blew the fuse that consumed the great empires and dynasties of Europe. Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia and Turkey would be blown clear away. Britain was swept up in a tidal wave of righteous sentiment. The beastly Hun had to be stopped and gallant little Belgium restored. No other nation sustained its initial war effort entirely with volunteers. The posters let every man know what path duty demanded he take.

  A call to arms

  In that final, glorious summer of peace when it seemed the Empire was at its height and the King Emperor firmly on the throne, Britain stood tall as the world’s only global superpower. Her navy had ruled the waves for over a century since Trafalgar. Atlases of the day showed significant tracts of the globe shaded in red. As an instrument of imperial policy, beside the Navy, stood Tommy Atkins, the private soldier. Generally he was not well liked though, as the Kipling poem suggests, he would be lauded and cheered as he went off to die for king and country. When and if he came back he was became invisible. This contemptuous view of redcoats didn’t begin to change until the Crimean War (1854–56). Technology, in the form of the wireless telegraph, early battlefield photography and what would now be termed ‘embedded’ journalists meant Victorians in their comfortable parlours could fully witness all the horrors troops were suffering in the bleak Russian winter. Their privations were caused far more by supply and procurement failures than enemy action. Tommy won all his battles but froze thanks to the failures of the commissariat. Change was demanded; soldiers needed better care, decent accommodation and education. Change was, however, slow.

  One of Marlborough’s footsloggers toiling on the road to Blenheim in 1704 might have had little or no difficulty in recognising his great-grandson marching in the rain towards the ridge of Mont St. Jean under Wellington over a century later. Both wore the famous red coat. They marched or rode as armies had through distant centuries. They wheeled and drilled, delivered their platoon volleys in a very similar manner. Both carried a smoothbore flintlock musket that might just kill their man at fifty yards. Wellington’s infantryman might have had far greater difficulty in recognising his own great-grandson, trudging along the hot pavé towards Mons in 1914. ‘Tommy’ was clad in stiff khaki. He carried the SMLE bolt action repeating rifle, deadly at a dozen times the distance of its predecessor. Much of his travel was undertaken by rail and the ubiquitous tin meant he could fight all year round and still be fed. None of this promised an easier life. Indeed his would very likely be harder, more terrifying and very much shorter.

  The war had been a long time brewing. Seeds of conflict had been sown over forty years before when Prussia, burgeoning into a united Germany, trampled France, humiliatingly, unexpectedly and comprehensively, relieved her of both Alsace and Lorraine. Desire for revenge, La Revanche, burned fiercely in the breast of every Frenchman. In the course of those four decades, Imperial Germany – which had come late to the idea of nationalism and the scramble for empire – blossomed and boomed. Her industry came to rival that of Britain. Once the canny touch of the ageing Bismarck had been prised free, Kaiser Wilhelm II and his generation of gilded hawks, flushed with power and might, steamed headlong into fresh confrontation and hostility with Austria was forgotten as France and Russia drew together. This was ominous; a war on two fronts, east and west, was not to Germany’s advantage.

  The Short Magazine Lee Enfield (SMLE) was the standard British service rifle of the era: called ‘short’ because the barrel length was less than the earlier ‘Long’ Lee-Enfield which did service in the Boer War and still armed many territorial units in 1914. The SMLE was intended both for cavalry and infantry, firing 10 rounds of .303 ball cartridge. The weapon reached its final pre-war variant, the Mark III, in 1907 and confounded its critics, doing good service throughout the conflict and, depending on circumstances, for decades afterwards.

  If Germany had to fight on both flanks, she must deal swiftly with one opponent to then concentrate upon the other. Russia was the larger demon, with potential armies of millions. Count von Schlieffen gave his name to a strategic plan which proposed an immediate knockout blow in the west to deal swiftly with France before concentrating upon Russia, perceived as far slower to mobilise. Russia was industrialising fast. The German General Staff feared that, by 1917, her capacity would have expanded so prodigiously as to remove any prospect of victory. The whole European polity, by summer 1914 was a tinderbox, requiring only a single spark.

  The killing of Franz Ferdinan
d inspired little mourning at home. Indeed conspiracy theorists might suggest his death was precisely what had been hoped for to provide a cast iron casus belli. There comes a point when the slide into war cannot be halted. A departed troop train, having departed, cannot be recalled. He who mobilises fastest can land the first, very probably decisive, blow. High command cannot simply wait upon events and hope for a diplomatic outcome. If one side begins to mobilise, the other must do likewise or else be left hopelessly exposed. Vast conscript armies cannot be summoned and marshalled overnight.

  The opening battles in which the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was pitched against enormous odds were fought at Mons and Le Cateau in a fast-moving war of manoeuvre. Wrong-footed and exposed, the BEF fought some masterly, if costly, actions and played its part in General Joffre’s counterstroke on the Marne. From there they advanced into Belgium in what would become known as ‘the Race for the Sea’ which ended in the ferocity of First Ypres in October. This battle and those of 1915 drastically reduced the ranks of regular formations and handed the baton, in part, to Kitchener’s ‘New Service’ Battalions.

  The Quick-Firer was an artillery innovation from the 1890s, distinguished from earlier ordnance in that they were fitted with buffers to limit recoil; the breech was adapted to allow rapid re-loading with shell and propellant combined in cartridge form. Consequently, in the early 20th century, the killing power or artillery increased exponentially.

  After stalemate in 1915, came the colossal slaughter at Verdun and then the Somme, a battle that cost Britain and the Empire more dead than the entire course of World War II. In 1917 the British learnt how to crack the linear German defences and scored some great successes before German resilience and new defensive systems drowned all hopes in Flanders mud. For spring 1918, the Kaiser’s generals unleashed a series of blistering offensives which came close to breaking the Allied line. Close but not close enough: the tide inexorably turned, victory won at enormous cost.

  New small arms, accurate and deadly, were not the only lethal hazards on the battlefield. Field guns were quick firers, throwing high explosive shells over long distances with fearful accuracy. Hiram Maxim had heeded a colleague’s exhortation that, if he wanted to make money, he should enable European armies to slaughter each other with greater ease. He obliged and the machine gun, with a range of 2,000 yards (1,829 metres), firing some 600 rounds per minute, would change the nature of the battlefield forever.

  Mr Atkins

  On 16 August 1819, British cavalry turned their sabres against protestors and put numerous of them ruthlessly to the sword. The Peterloo Massacre outraged public opinion. Yet it left men of property fearful that revolutionary trends were undermining the fabric of society, threatening to shake the established, God-given order of things. Something had to be done.

  Raising local mounted forces, drawn from the tenantry and affinities of local magnates, landed and industrial, was considered the best means whereby those of substance might ‘render effectual aid to the civil power in case of disturbance’. The Duke of Northumberland, a man of very great estate, called a meeting of county magistrates in October 1819. Within two months, the Northumberland and Newcastle Volunteer Corps of Cavalry was raised. For the most part, it comprised ‘gentlemen of great respectability, such as merchants, brokers and tradesmen, together with officials of the collieries, and tenantry and retainers of the landed proprietors.’

  For obvious reasons the Yeomanry were regarded as tools of oppression and these well-groomed class-warriors were soon dubbed ‘the Noodles’. Oddly, in mining areas of Northumberland, everyday colliers volunteered, if they could afford it. The lure of working with horses outweighed disaffection. Indeed, the Ashington troop was soon amongst the smartest. There was stiff competition, gentlemen need to dress up. With their smart, tailored uniforms, they took on a very dandified air. Besides, if this was training for war, it smacked of romance and derring-do, of stiff parades ‘of jewelled hilts/for daggers in plaid socks; of smart salutes/And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears/Esprit de corps; and hints for young recruits’. Reviews were glittering affairs and the highlight of the social calendar was an annual grand ball in Newcastle’s Assembly rooms, held every year through the 19th century from 1828: ‘In all, 343 ladies and gentlemen, who included nearly the whole of the gentry of the neighbourhood’, interrupted only once by an outbreak of cholera.

  Service in the militia had traditionally been far less glamorous, decidedly unpopular. Limited forms of conscription in the 18th century, during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) had led to riots. One, at Hexham in 1761, ended in bloodshed with forty-odd deaths as panicky North Yorkshire militia opened fire on a hostile crowd. Fears over possible French aggression in the late 1850s had led to the raising of Rifle Volunteers – altogether more fashionable than unwilling and workaday militia but, unlike their mounted contemporaries in the Yeomanry, unwaged.

  Haldane’s reforms of 1908 abolished old distinctions between Rifle Volunteers and Yeomanry. The Noodles were now the Northumberland Hussar Yeomanry. These measures, though long overdue, were not entirely popular. Rates of pay came down and county gentlemen, who had been used to doing things very much their own way, suddenly found themselves altogether more accountable to the War Office. All the new Territorial units from Northumberland, Durham and North Yorkshire formed part of the newly created Northumbrian Division, commanded by General R. S. S. Baden-Powell, hero of Mafeking and founder of the Scouting Movement. Territorial divisions were intended for homeland defence though many in the ranks chose to volunteer for overseas service.

  It was during this epoch, when the Queen Empress ruled nearly a quarter of the earth’s inhabitants, that the Royal Military Tournament got underway, a chivalric tribute to the Spartan fighting qualities of British soldiers and sailors. Officers duelled with sabres and hacked imaginary foes, represented by melons, from horseback in a ritual dubbed ‘cleaving the Turk’s head’. Manly displays or martial prowess were to be lauded: ‘without encouraging the display of those brutal and degrading passions, which induce a couple of vagabonds, with a dislike for work, to batter each other with their fists for a wager, till one or the other can no longer stand upright.’ Tommy would be fighting a very different type of war; industrial warfare on a scale and intensity never experienced before or even imagined.

  It has been said, and not without truth, that Britain fielded four armies in World War I. Firstly, the original regular army and reserves that formed the BEF in 1914 – immortalised as ‘the Old Contemptibles’. Next, the Territorial battalions, followed by Kitchener’s New Army Battalions and, finally, the conscript army of 1917–18. The core tactical unit throughout was the battalion (typically 750–1,000 men). This was commanded by a colonel, essentially an honorary position. Actual day-to-day command was vested in the lieutenant-colonel. As a rough rule, some 10 per cent of battalion strength was kept in reserve, left out of the battle (‘LOOB’), as a core around which to rebuild if the unit was badly cut up. All too often this pragmatic prophecy came to pass.

  Below lieutenant-colonel, the major was the next most senior officer. He normally commanded the 150-strong HQ Company. Then ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’ companies were each commanded by captains, all at similar notional strength. The company was then divided into four sub-units or platoons; an HQ platoon, commanded by a lieutenant with an NCO and four privates (or ‘rifleman’ in a rifle unit); then four other platoons, numbered 1–4, usually led by a second lieutenant (subaltern), with four NCOs and 32 privates. The platoon itself was broken down into sections, the smallest tactical unit, each of eight men and an NCO.

  Crucially, the infantry battalion in 1914 possessed only two Vickers medium machine guns. From 1915 firepower was significantly enhanced by the introduction of lighter automatic weapons, such as the Lewis gun. Latterly, the medium machine gunners were transferred to the Machine Gun Corps and the number of Lewis guns available was increased from four per battalion to four times that number an
d double that again after the Somme.

  The Vickers, manufactured by Vickers-Armstrong on Tyneside, was a .303 calibre, belt-fed, water-cooled machine gun with a cyclic rate of around 500 rounds per minute. It was famed for its reliability and robustness. It required a crew of eight, a full section with one firer and one loader: the rest carried weapons, tools and ammunition.

  The Lewis Automatic machine gun remained in service from 1914 to 1953. It was a .303 calibre, drum-fed light MG which used a 47-round box with a cyclic rate of 500 rounds per minute. At 28 lb, it was far more portable than the Vickers and had a marked effect on British infantry tactics.

  Initially, in 1914, four battalions, under a brigadier-general, formed a brigade and three brigades a division. This larger unit was commanded by a major-general and possessed its own signallers, medical staff, engineers and gunners. Three, perhaps four, divisions would be formed into an army corps, led by a lieutenant-general. A number of corps (between four and six) would constitute an army. By 1918 Britain had five armies deployed on the Western Front with a total ration strength of over a million.

  Haldane’s plan had been that county Territorial associations would be responsible for any large expansion in army numbers. True to their task, these immediately began to recruit when war was declared. They were, at the outset, so successful that by November 1914 not only had all shortfalls been made good but recruiting was some 25 per cent over capacity.

  Kitchener had other ideas. Partly he was unconvinced by the part-time soldiers. He realised, perhaps uniquely, that the war would be both long and hard. He proposed to raise 70 new divisions to bolster the six regular and 14 Territorial. He held that the existing county system could not hope to build armed forces to compete with the Kaiser’s conscripted hordes. Raising a ‘New Army’ from the general populace was a mammoth undertaking. The first call for six divisions went out on 7 August. He wanted 100,000 men. This call (K1) was soon followed by K2 and K3 on 11 and 13 September respectively, aimed at raising a further dozen divisions.