British Army during World War I

The History of the British army during World War I, witnessed a great change to the army in a very short time. From being a small army policing an Empire to a European continental army able to match the German Army.

Organisation

At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the British Army was a small, professional force of 247,000 soldiers, over half of which were posted overseas in garrisons throughout the British Empire. The regular Army was supported by 224,000 reservists and 269,000 soldiers of the Territorial Force. The size of the Army was in stark contrast to the Royal Navy which was the largest navy in the world, while many of the Army's continental counterparts, such as the French and German Armies (both of whom employed conscription) numbered nearly 1 million troops and were part of highly militarised societies.

Under the Entente Cordiale, the British Army's role in a European war was to embark soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), arranged in four infantry and five brigades of cavalry. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.211 para 2] The British Indian Army was called upon to assist the numbers, and of the 9610 British officers in France 20 percent were from the Indian army. The 76,450 of the other ranks 16 percent were from the Indian army. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.211 para 2]

Kaiser Wilhelm was famously dismissive of the BEF, on 19 August issuing his order to "exterminate... the treacherous English and walk over General French's contemptible little army." — in later years the survivors of the regular army dubbed themselves "The Old Contemptibles". By the end of 1914, after the battles of Mons, Le Cateau, the Aisne and Ypres, the old regular British Army had been effectively wiped out, but was extremely effective at stopping the German advance.

As the regular Army's strength declined, the numbers were made up, first by the Territorials, followed by the volunteers of Lord Kitchener's New Army, known as Kitchener's Army. By the end of August 1914, he had raised six new divisions, rising to 29 divisions by March 1915. The Territorial Force also expanded, raising second- and third-line battalions and forming eight additional divisions in addition to its peacetime strength of 14 divisions. By January 1916 when conscription was introduced, 2.6 million men had volunteered for service and a further 2.3 million were conscripted before the end of the war.

A prominent feature of the early months of volunteering was the formation of Pals battalions, whole units recruited from the same town or workplace, such as the Grimsby Chums. Many of these pals who had lived and worked together, now joined up and trained together, only to die together on the first day on the Somme, leaving entire communities shattered.

During the war, most new infantry battalions were raised within existing regiments; the Northumberland Fusiliers were most prolific, fielding 51 battalions. However, some new regiments were created, such as the fifth regiment of the Foot Guards, the Welsh Guards, created in 1915 to honour the distinguished actions of the Welsh regiments in the war.

The army would change drastically over the course of the war, reacting to the various changes, from a mobile war to the static trench warfare up to 1917. The Cavalry of the Expeditionary force would represent 9.28 percent of the army, but by July 1918 would only represent 1.65 percent. Infantry would also change from 64.64 percent in 1914 to 51.25 percent in 1918, while the Royal Engineers would increase from 5.91 percent to 11.24 percent in 1918. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.212 para 1] The British army before 1914 was poorly prepared and the Crimea War was the last major war the army had been called to fight. In the interim years the army had been prepared and primarily called upon for Imperial matters and the ensuing colonial wars. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.212 para 3] This lead the high command of the army not to develop new tactics for a conflict with a major power, and a very much offensive doctrine under any circumstances, was adapted. The inter-rivalry of the various branches of the army cavalry, infantry and artillery further made a universal doctrine remote. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.213 para 2]

The war also saw the British having an increasing reliance upon the Dominion and Empire troops, many of whom volunteered to serve in the British Army out of a perception that Britain was the 'Motherland'. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment and British West Indies Regiment were both formed in 1915, the latter of which was made up of volunteers from the Caribbean who had arrived in Britain. Both regiments were disbanded in 1919. There were also existing regiments like the West India Regiment and West Africa Regiment (both disbanded by the end of the 1920s). At various times on the Western Front, Australia, Canada and India provided corps, New Zealand a division and South Africa a brigade, all of which were attached to British armies.

In August 1914, the Army's Royal Flying Corps dispatched 63 aircraft to France in support of the BEF. The aggressive doctrine of RFC commander, General Hugh Trenchard, and periods of technical inferiority such as the Fokker Scourge of 1916 and Bloody April in 1917 resulted in high casualty rates amongst aircrews. At the start of 1918, the RFC numbered nearly 4,000 aircraft, including capable fighters such as the Sopwith Camel and S.E.5a. On 1 April 1918, the RFC merged with the Royal Naval Air Service, forming the independent Royal Air Force.

Equipment

The British Army were pioneers in many aspects of military technology, having adopted the first machine gun, the Maxim, in 1889 and by 1912 it possessed the Vickers machine gun. Both infantry and cavalry were equipped with the Lee-Enfield rifle (first introduced in 1895) with which the professionals of the regular Army could fire 15 aimed rounds per minute. The British Army that started the war in 1914 was not the same type of army that ended the war. The mix of arms the army possessed in 1914 was more suited to the mobile conditions of the early war, but was not suitable for the environment of trench warfare of 1915 to 1917 or to the set piece tactics of 1918. [cite book| first =David|last =G.Chandler |title=The Oxford History of the British Army|year=2003|pages=p.211 para 3] Artillery suffered from a shortage of shells and initially supply only improved at the expense of quality. The Army adopted chemical weapons, usually in response to German innovations, and often lagged markedly, taking over a year to deploy their own mustard gas agent.

The British Army reacted to these shortcomings, introducing the Mills bomb as the standard grenade, producing over 70 million in the final three years of the war, and the versatile Stokes mortar, the predecessor the modern mortar. The role of the machine gun expanded throughout the war, dramatically increasing the firepower to the infantry. Platoons were equipped with the light Lewis gun while the independent machine gun companies of the Machine Gun Corps, established on 22 October 1915, operated the heavy Vickers. As the war progressed, the artillery grew in sophistication, employing the creeping barrage for protection of advancing infantry, developing sound-ranging and flash-detection techniques for counter-battery fire, and learning how to predict the fall of shells without needing to register the guns on their target.

The Army pioneered the use of the tank; operated by the Heavy Branch of the Machine Gun Corps, the Mark I tank first saw service on the Somme in September 1916. In July 1917, the Tank Corps was formed from the Heavy Branch and was the only corps created in the war to survive past the 1920s, becoming the Royal Tank Corps in 1922, then Royal Tank Regiment in 1939.

Operations

The most important theatre was the Western Front but the British Army fought in almost every theatre of the First World War. In the four years of the war, the British Army had suffered nearly 2.5 million casualties; 662,000 men killed, 140,000 missing and 1,650,000 wounded.

Western Front

Under the command of Field Marshal Sir John French, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) began to deploy to France within days of the declaration of war. The first encounter with the Germans came at Mons on 23 August 1914 after which the Allies began the Great Retreat, not stopping until at the outskirts of Paris. The BEF had small role in halting the German advance at the Marne before participating in the Aisne counter-offensive which was followed by a period known as the "Race to the Sea" during which the BEF redeployed to Flanders. For the BEF, 1914 ended with "First Ypres" which marked the beginning of a long struggle for the Ypres salient. In four months, the BEF had suffered nearly 90,000 casualties and of the 64 original 1,000-strong battalions that had travelled to France in August, on average only one officer and 30 other ranks remained. On Christmas Day, the steadily expanding BEF was reorganised into two armies; the First Army under General Sir Douglas Haig and the Second Army under General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien.

Trench warfare prevailed in 1915 and the BEF, as the junior partner on the Western Front, fought a series of small battles, at times coordinated with the larger French offensives; at Neuve Chapelle in March, Aubers Ridge and Festubert in May and at Givenchy in June. On 22 April 1915, the Germans launched the Second Battle of Ypres, employing poison gas for the first time on the Western Front and capturing much of the high ground that ringed the salient. By September 1915 the British Army had grown in strength, with the first New Army divisions entering the line, and as part of the Third Battle of Artois, the Army launched a major attack at Loos utilising their own newly developed chemical weapons for the first time. The result was another costly and disappointing failure and marked the end for Field Marshal French; on 19 December 1915, General Sir Douglas Haig became Commander-in-Chief of the BEF.

For the British Army, 1916 was dominated by the Battle of the Somme which started disastrously on 1 July. The first day on the Somme remains the bloodiest day in the history of the British Army when over 19,000 soldiers were killed and a nearly 40,000 were wounded, all for little or no gain. There followed nearly five months of attrition during which the Fourth Army of General Henry Rawlinson and the Fifth Army of General Hubert Gough advanced about five miles (8 km) for a cost of 420,000 casualties. Despite the losses, the British Army under Haig had grown in size and experience such that it was now an equal partner with the French Army on the Western Front.

In February 1917 the German Army began to withdraw to the Hindenburg Line and it was these formidable defences that elements of the British Army assaulted in the Battle of Arras in April. For this battle, the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had placed Haig and the BEF under the orders of new French Commander-in-Chief, Robert Nivelle who planned a major French Army offensive in Champagne. Arras failed to deliver a breakthrough and Haig, freed from the restraints of the French command, now embarked on his favoured plan to launch an offensive in Flanders. In a successful preliminary operation, General Herbert Plumer's Second Army seized the Messines Ridge south of Ypres. The Third Battle of Ypres, which began on 31 July 1917, was one of the worst ordeals endured by British and Dominion forces during the war, with the battlefield reduced to a quagmire. It was not until 6 November that the Passchendaele ridge was captured, by which time the British Army had sustained 310,000 casualties.

For the British Army, 1917 ended with faint promise in the Battle of Cambrai which demonstrated the potential of tanks operating "en masse". Third Army commander, General Julian Byng, planned an ambitious breakthrough and achieved an unprecedented advanced of six kilometres on the first day but lacked the reserves to either continue or consolidate. A German counter-offensive succeeded in recapturing most of the lost ground.

The year 1918 started with disaster and ended in triumph for the British Army. On 21 March 1918, German commander, General Erich Ludendorff, launched the Spring Offensive and the main weight of the first blow, Operation "Michael", fell on the British Fifth Army of General Gough which was forced into retreat, finally halting the German advance east of Amiens. The next German attack came south of Ypres along the Lys river and here too the British Army fell back. Haig issued his famous Order of the Day, "With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight on to the end." In response to the crisis facing the Allies, French general Ferdinand Foch was made Supreme Commander for Allied forces on the Western Front, placing the BEF under his strategic direction.

On 8 August 1918, General Rawlinson's Fourth Army launched the Battle of Amiens which marked the start of the Hundred Days Offensive, the final Allied offensive on the Western Front. Over the following weeks, all five armies of the BEF went on the offensive from the Somme to Flanders. A few American divisions remained attached to British armies and participated in the British operations. Fighting continued right up until the Armistice with Germany came into effect at 11.00 am on 11 November 1918.

Other theatres

The British Army was involved in some comparatively obscure theatres of the war such as the symbolic contribution of the South Wales Borderers in support of Japanese forces in the capture of the German port of Tsingtao in China in 1914. A few British Army battalions also participated in the East African Campaign against von Lettow-Vorbeck's elusive German and African askari forces, however most British operations in Africa were carried out by African askari units such as the King's African Rifles, or South African or Indian Army units under British Imperial command.

The British Army was heavily engaged in the Mediterranean, Middle East and Mesopotamia throughout the war, mainly against the Ottoman Empire. In April 1915, following the failure of the Royal Navy's attempt capture the Dardanelles, the Army landed at Cape Helles on the Gallipoli peninsula. In August another landing was made at Suvla Bay but the deadlock remained and by January 1916, the British, Anzac and French forces had withdrawn. A new front was opened in Salonika at the request of the Greek government, intending to support Serbian forces and oppose Bulgaria, but this too remained static, tying up troops who suffered severely from malaria and other illnesses; it gained a reputation as "Germany's biggest internment camp."

In the Sinai and Palestine, the British Army, along with Australian and New Zealand light cavalry, made steady progress against Ottoman opposition until the First Battle of Gaza in March 1917. The appointment of General Edmund Allenby reinvigorated the campaign, leading to the capture of Jerusalem in December 1917 and the decisive Meggido Offensive in September 1918 which precipitated an armistice with the Ottoman Empire. In Mesopotamia, the Army was highly dependent upon Indian Army forces and initially experienced success until defeat at Kut-al-Amara in April 1916 halted progress. The British eventually regained momentum upon General Frederick Stanley Maude becoming commander and Baghdad was captured in 1917.

References and notes

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