Soldiers

by Richard Holmes

  The regimental system that existed in 2004 was no system at all. There were large regiments, like the Royal Anglians and the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, now down to two battalions apiece; amalgamated single-battalion regiments like the Devon and Dorsets; and those last four unadulterated line regiments. Links between regiments and their recruiting areas had been progressively weakened, though by dint of hard work and good local contacts a regiment could still tap profitably into traditional strengths, as the Worcestershire and Sherwood Forester Regiment demonstrated in the late 1990s.11 Sometimes a distinguished regiment found itself with a recruiting base that could no longer sustain it. In 2004 the Black Watch affirmed that it welcomed applicants ‘from the UK and across the world. We currently have soldiers from Texas, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, England, Wales, Gibraltar, and Fiji.’12 It was not just the Black Watch that welcomed Fijians. These big, good-natured men were widely represented across most of the infantry. In 2004 the Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment drew about 75 per cent of its strength from within the regimental area of south-east England. Around 10 per cent of its soldiers were ‘Foreign and Commonwealth,’ including Fijians, Africans, South Africans and men from the Caribbean, like the Grenadian Private Johnson Beharry, who was to win the Victoria Cross on the 1st Battalion’s Iraq deployment that year.

  It was rare for a battalion to be so well up to strength that it could go on operations without being reinforced by men of another regiment, and sometimes there were crippling shortfalls. An under-recruited unit often became worse recruited by the minute, for any battalion in barracks had to find the manpower for certain ‘fixed costs’ in terms of guards and other duties. The smaller its numbers the more often such tasks came round, and the more frustrated soldiers became. When Richard Dannatt was commanding the Green Howards in 1989, on the eve of the ‘Options for Change’ or ‘cull’, he was

  asked to supply thirty soldiers to reinforce the King’s Regiment in Northern Ireland and was happy to do so, but was less happy when I was ordered to send another ninety to reinforce 3rd Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment back in Londonderry. Chancing my arm a little, I refused to send ninety soldiers but offered to send a fully-formed rifle company instead, complete with its own officers, sergeants and corporals. There was some tooth-sucking at Headquarters Infantry before my offer was accepted … I knew I would lose some Royal Anglian friends, but it was a case of survival of the fittest. As it happened we supplied three companies for six months each over an eighteen-month period.

  The fact that the Green Howards were so comfortably up to strength told heavily in their favour, and when the decision was announced,

  Sadly, and inevitably, 3rd Royal Anglian who we were reinforcing in Londonderry, were to be disbanded, together with the other two infantry battalions with us in 24th Airmobile Brigade – The Glosters and the Duke of Edinburgh’s – who were to be amalgamated with each other.13

  The ‘Options for Change’ amalgamations did not solve the problem of undermanning in the infantry, and the need to top up battalions with officers and soldiers from other units, or with mobilised reservists – a process that became common after the passing of the Reserve Forces Act 1996 – damaged one of the traditional arguments in favour of the regimental system. There were other issues too. Infantry battalions, like regiments of the Royal Armoured Corps, were posted wholesale from garrison to garrison in a process called ‘arms plotting’. This meant that, at any given time, part of the infantry was ‘in baulk’ because it was preparing for, or recovering from, a move. Since changing garrisons usually involved a change of role – there is armoured, mechanised, light, and air assault infantry – some skills were lost and others had to be built. It was argued that the process ensured freshness and provided a constant challenge, but it was expensive: about £1 million to convert a light-role battalion to armoured infantry. Furthermore, when a battalion changed garrisons it dragged behind it a comet’s tail of unhappiness as wives sought new jobs and children were put into new schools. This instability tended to worsen as one became more senior. An officer, who would be likely to alternate staff or instructional postings with regimental duty, could find himself an eternal bird of passage. When Richard Dannatt left the army as CGS in 2009 he and his wife had lived in twenty-three houses since 1977. In contrast, the Royal Artillery, the Royal Engineers, and the logistic corps practised ‘trickle posting’, rotating individuals between their more static regiments, and although some seasoned infantrymen maintained that this process diminished cohesion, there was little real evidence for this.

  When the gravelly-voiced Mike Jackson became commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps in 1997, he and his wife had moved seven times in twelve years of marriage, so he was well aware of the instability of army life. Although he had transferred to the Parachute Regiment as a captain in 1970, he had been commissioned into the Intelligence Corps and was a Russian linguist – and a member of MENSA. He felt that his predecessors had been reluctant to grasp the nettle of infantry structure on their watch; indeed, one of his most single-minded predecessors, General Sir Nigel Bagnall, had been ‘seen off’ by the Director of Infantry of the day when he had proposed a similar reform in the mid-1980s. So no sooner had Jackson become CGS in early 2003 than he made it clear that he would address it. He produced a list of criteria that should be embodied in any future structure, and it could be seen, early on, that he tended towards the ‘large regiment’ solution. It was to be tempting for those who would be infuriated by his eventual recommendations to maintain that he came to the issue parti pris, had done too little regimental duty to understand the real strength of the regiment, and lacked the combat experience that might have shown him the error of his ways. But there was a strong swell of opinion, certainly amongst junior and middle-piece officers, in his favour. In July 2004 a large group of infantry officers attending the Joint Service Command and Staff College wrote to tell him of their wish to

  see a system that fits the demand of the present day and future so that we deliver the most effective possible level of fighting capability. We anticipate that the initiative proposed achieves this, and trust that the implementation will be sensitive to all, swift in execution and bold in scope. We respect the legacy of our forebears which will always be enshrined in any Regimental System, but hope that they will support us in making these changes that we believe are crucial to the infantry’s ability to fight and win in the conflicts of today and tomorrow.14

  The decision was complicated by the belief that the infantry could manage with four fewer battalions, largely because the situation in Northern Ireland had improved. This was certainly a contentious view, and Richard Dannatt thought that it reflected Whitehall’s failure to ‘appreciate the value of well-trained infantry, especially in the type of warfare with which we had been engaged since the end of the Cold War’.15 The Treasury, with its unerring knack of gauging the price of everything and the value of nothing, had initially demanded a reduction of at least ten battalions. In the spring of 2004 General Jackson tasked the adjutant general, Lieutenant General Sir Alistair Irwin, with writing a paper on the strengths and weaknesses of the regimental system. General Irwin had read history at St Andrews before going to Sandhurst. He was the third generation of his family to join the Black Watch in modern times – ‘more like a religion than a regiment,’ wrote Bernard Fergusson – taking command of its 1st Battalion in 1985.16 The Irwin paper was wholly honest and objective. On the credit side, it affirmed that ‘the best of the current regimental system is a sense of belonging to an entity which has an existence, a past, present, and future of its own … all our officers and soldiers acquire a sense of belonging when they join.’ It provided continuity, ensuring ‘the ability of individuals to keep returning to the regiment or corps in which they began, to their individual benefit and the benefit of their units’. General Irwin argued that regional connections helped provide a focus for recruiting and, though the evidence was equivocal, ‘those examples of where regional co
nnections are strong represent part of what is best in the current regimental system.’ He emphasised the importance of names and traditions, and of esprit de corps.

  He also acknowledged that there was a debit side too. There was a risk of inflexibility: ‘The talents and the skills of the best officers and NCOs are often ignored and their ambitions thwarted,’ he wrote, ‘by keeping them with their own regiments, regardless of where those regiments might be stationed.’ He admitted that ‘the main, perhaps the only reason that we continue to arms plot is to ensure that the current … system is preserved.’ Furthermore, ‘by tying individuals to particular units … we ensure that when the unit moves they move too, regardless of whether it is convenient or desired.’ And he feared that units would find it hard to generate ‘critical mass, because authorised strengths were already too low,’ and simply recruiting up to that strength ‘gives no room for manoeuvre; it has excluded the human dimension from the numbers equation’. In consequence, ‘today’s single-unit regiments struggle on a daily basis to make ends meet in manpower terms, regardless of their role or readiness state.’17

  The Army Board decided to recommend the adoption of a system based wholly on large regiments. Arms plotting would disappear, and instead battalions would be based in one location for the long term, and individuals could expect to be posted between their regiment’s battalions as required. While the changes were warmly welcomed by some, they were catastrophic for others. ‘It had a devastating impact on my own regiment,’ said Richard Dannatt,

  as it meant the end of the Green Howards after 318 years of loyal service to the Crown. The Green Howards became part of the much larger Yorkshire regiment. To be specific, 1st Battalion, The Green Howards (Alexandra Princess of Wales’s Yorkshire Regiment) became 2nd Battalion The Yorkshire Regiment (Green Howards).18

  On the day in 2004 that the crucial decision was taken, General Dannatt was commander of NATO’s Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, and not a member of the Executive Committee of the Army Board (ECAB). Once the board had finished the day’s work he joined its members as they reconfigured into No 1 Board, the group that decides senior officers’ promotions and appointments.

  As I went into the meeting room I saw … Alistair Irwin … with his head in his hands. ‘What’s up?’ I asked, knowing Alistair pretty well. ‘This is the worst day of my life,’ he replied, explaining how the ECAB discussion and decisions had gone. I felt for him. At the time he was the only born and bred infantryman on ECAB, and as a fellow infantryman I could understand his anguish. The logic of the situation was clear, but logic and emotion and history do not always go hand in glove … Of course on the day of the decisive meeting Alistair could have resigned in protest, but to what point? The decisions would still have been taken in the army’s wider interests, and his resignation would not have changed the outcome. Instead, he nobly continued, working to secure the best outcome for his Regiment, Scotland and the Army.19

  In its original form the new structure left The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, the Royal Anglian Regiment, the Light Infantry, and the Royal Green Jackets as they were, with two regular battalions apiece. In the Scottish Division, the Royal Scots and King’s Own Scottish Borderers became The Royal Scots Borderers (1st Battalion, the Royal Regiment of Scotland). The Royal Highland Fusiliers, the Black Watch, the Highlanders, and the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders took seniority thereafter, as 2nd to 5th battalions, the Royal Regiment of Scotland. The King’s Division now comprised two battalions of the Duke of Lancaster’s Regiment (King’s, Lancashire, and Border) and the three-battalion Yorkshire Regiment (14th/15th, 19th, and 33rd/76th Foot). The Prince of Wales’s Division also comprised two new regiments, the three-battalion Mercian regiment – 1st Battalion (Cheshires), 2nd Battalion (Worcesters and Foresters), and 3rd Battalion (Staffords) – the two-battalion Royal Welsh Regiment. The Parachute Regiment retained three battalions, but one of these was to form the core of the new Special Forces Support Group and was removed from the infantry order of battle. Territorial units were wisely aligned with the new structure, so that each regiment had at least one Territorial battalion.

  After the main decisions had received ministerial approval, The Light Infantry and The Royal Green Jackets announced their intention of amalgamating as The Rifles in 2007. In the process, and after some hard-headed negotiations with both regimental councils, they caught up both the Devon and Dorsets and the Royal Regiment of Gloucestershire, Berkshire, and Wiltshire, who were originally to have been amalgamated into a battalion of Light Infantry. There was particular grief about the disappearance of the title Light Infantry; the move was indeed both swift and bold. It left The Rifles with five regular battalions, including one in 3 Commando Brigade, and thus unrivalled opportunities for service in various roles. Within three years of its formation, three battalions of the new regiment had served with distinction in Afghanistan, and the regiment had become the most sought-after amongst Sandhurst cadets.

  In sharp contrast, changes within Scots regiments caused very serious dissatisfaction. Alistair Irwin initially threw his full weight behind them, arguing that the new regiment would

  Preserve those things that we all hold most dear in Scotland, while at the same time providing for our people a very attractive combination of increased personal and family stability and a much wider career choice for all our officers and men within the same regiment … I regard the preservation of real and meaningful links with the past as being particularly important.

  These ‘overt and strong’ links would be fostered by the policy of naming battalions, with the battalion name followed by its regimental bracketed title. He was also happy that links with the past would be maintained by battalions continuing to wear specific items of uniform: ‘So the Black Watch battalion will continue to wear that famous red hackle, and The Highlanders their blue hackle.’ We have already seen that there was a close relationship between successful recruiting and regimental survival, and General Irwin pointed out that

  The reason that we have been required to lose a battalion from Scotland is that for many years now we have been the worst recruited division in the whole of the infantry … In fact our figures are so bad, with four of our six battalions in the top 10 worst recruited battalions in the whole army, that we very nearly lost two battalions.

  He was concerned that opposition to the changes would ‘dispirit the serving community’, and called for support for young men who wished to join.20

  The discussion swiftly slipped beyond logic. A vociferous ‘Save the Scottish Regiments’ campaign assailed the government’s decision, with well-attended public meetings in Scotland containing be-medalled veterans, and in one case a youngster bearing a placard announcing that he wanted to join his grandfather’s regiment. A fiercely critical website listed the Scottish regimental colonels, noting that all but one had voted in favour of what it called ‘disbandment and amalgamation’, although it did not speculate how they might have been lured into acting against their consciences. 1st Battalion the Black Watch, serving in Iraq for the second time in two years, had been deployed, at American request, for a difficult tour of duty to Camp Dogwood, near Baghdad. Scots Nationalist MP Annabelle Ewing called Secretary of State Geoff Hoon ‘nothing but a back stabbing coward’ for agreeing to the regiment’s merger after it had performed with such distinction. In Edinburgh, Scots Nationalist leader Alex Salmond blamed the Scots Labour MPs who had supported the government: they were Scotland’s ‘parcel o’ rogues’.

  Things went from bad to worse when it became clear in 2005 that the regiment would wear a new cap-badge on the fore-and-aft Glengarry in its most formal uniform, with the insignia of the separate regiments worn on other occasions. General Irwin had by then retired to Scotland, where the Herald quipped that the name of his new house, Dunmore, might have been prefaced by ‘Should’ve’.21 He told The Times that he had learnt of the decision ‘with the utmost dismay’, and had written to General Jackson, urg
ing him to reverse it, for

  This will make the task of building up the new regiment more difficult … Up until now we have been doing quite well, bringing everyone along with the plans. We had a kilted regiment, the red hackle, and we retained our local links which are so important to us … The decision has overturned all the good work that had led to supportive hinterlands and serving battalions keen to get on with the change and make the best of it. Of course, we shall press ahead, and the serving men will do their duty, but this decision makes it all the harder. The sense of gloom that has fallen on us is palpable. People feel let down.22

  Jeff Duncan, of the ‘Save Our Scottish Regiments’ campaign, was fiercely critical of General Irwin. ‘Alistair Irwin, who is universally accepted as having written a paper which was the blueprint advocating the creation of a single super regiment, has for the past 16 months stressed that the golden threads that bind the regiments together would be retained by the individual Scottish regiments … Alistair Irwin’s final chance to do the right thing has arrived.’23 This was published after Alistair Irwin had ‘most passionately’ urged General Jackson to adhere to what he saw as the original cap-badge agreement, and we might wonder what options were now available to him. Few who read the Irwin paper would deduce that it was a blueprint for the creation of anything – still less of a large Scottish regiment. The discussion had now become so rancorous that the Royal Regiment of Scotland’s cap-badge, a thoughtfully designed lion rampant, surmounted by a Scots crown, on a St Andrew’s saltire, was described by some of the scheme’s opponents as ‘a crucified pussy’. Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Crawford thought that ‘a better and more appropriate badge might be a dagger in the back, superimposed on a white flag.’24