by Tim Lynch
Immediate steps are to be taken to provide equipment and accommodation for the 210,000 additional members of the Territorial Army involved in the decision, announced by Mr. Chamberlain in the House of Commons yesterday, to double the strength of the Territorial Field Army … Mr. Chamberlain made his statement in reply to Mr. Greenwood, Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who asked what were the intentions of the Government regarding the Territorial Army. The Prime Minister said: ‘The House will remember that in a recent statement I announced that every aspect of our national life, including the national defence programmes, would be examined anew. In the course of this review His Majesty’s Government have been impressed with the need for availing themselves still further of the spirit of voluntary service which is manifest throughout the country. (Cheers) In particular they feel that they cannot allow would-be recruits for the Territorial Army to be refused because the units in which they apply are clearly over strength. Accordingly they have been giving consideration to the position and have come to the following conclusion:
‘The Territorial Field Army which is now on a peace establishment of 130,000 men, will be raised forthwith to war establishment, which will involve an addition of about 40,000 men to this figure.
‘The Territorial Field Army so brought up to war establishment will be doubled and will therefore be allotted an establishment of 340,000 men.
‘The House will appreciate that these important decisions will involve a number of consequential decisions to provide for the necessary increases in accommodation, in the number of competent instructors, in equipment and reserves and in the war potential necessary to maintain the increased forces. Plans for all these matters are being worked out and further information about them will from time to time be given to the House. It will be realised that a further and much augmented effort will be required to bring home to the nation the need for obtaining the numbers aimed at in the shortest possible time, and I trust that all members of the House will be willing in one form or another to give their aid to such an effort.’
He also pointed out … that his announcement showed that double the number of divisions would in time be available for overseas service.
The report went on to claim that:
By the time training is over, full war equipment will be ready. The decision to train the Territorial Army for war in a European centre means the provision of full-scale equipment similar to that of the Regular Army. That equipment is being ordered at once. A notable innovation is that the officers will be recruited as far as possible from the rank. This principle, though followed throughout the anti-aircraft units, has not formerly been put into general practice in the Territorial Army and artillery.22
As the Telegraph’s special correspondent noted in the following day’s edition; ‘I understand that the Army Council did not reach its decision to double the strength of the Territorial Army until shortly before the Prime Minister made his statement in the House of Commons. Consequently all the Territorial Associations responsible for administration were taken by surprise.’23 Despite the promise that ‘there is already a plentiful supply of rifles. There will be one for all who join, however swift the rush’, it was clear that the ‘cost of the new Territorial Army developments alone will be more than the total cost of the whole Army three or four years ago’ and that the army’s infrastructure was in no state to accept a flood of new recruits. Frantic efforts began to find suitable accommodation in drill halls, church halls and private billets and for staff to help train and administer the new units by calling on retired officers, NCOs and soldiers – and even members of the British Legion – to offer their services. Special arrangements were to be made for night workers who could not attend evening training. In an echo of the spirit of Kitchener’s New Army, it was even suggested that chauffeurs and male domestic workers could be formed into special units and that large employers should form their own units.
TA recruitment poster, 1938. After the Munich Crisis, recruitment to the TA was stepped up in an intensive drive.
To many, the seemingly snap decision was yet further evidence of Hore-Belisha’s cavalier attitude to the military. Politically, though, it was an astute move. With the announcement of the unpopular introduction of peacetime conscription only a matter of weeks away, the increase of the TA offered the chance to escape liability for full time service whilst committing to military training in a regiment or corps of one’s choice. At the same time, it also pre-empted any attempt by his enemies at the War Office to undermine him by a repeat of Kitchener’s creation of the New Army.
As volunteers came forward, the TA quickly grew. The 5th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, for example, grew from 27 officers and 528 other ranks in March to 47 officers and 1,032 other ranks by June, 346 over wartime establishment. Under Lieutenant-Colonel Pulleyn, these 346 were to form the nucleus of a duplicate battalion and recruitment began in May to bring this up to full strength. Training schedules and equipment though, had been prepared on the peacetime strength and linked to plans by the parent regiments. Many of those recruited had not, by September 1939, had chance to even attend the annual training camp.
Impressive though the figures for recruitment were, they hid some painful truths. As Parliament prepared to agree to allow limited conscription in a debate long into the night of 27 April, Hore-Belisha explained:
May I ask the House to consider our military resources? The Regular Army has an establishment of 224,000 men. The right hon. Gentleman the Leader of the Opposition was good enough to say that we have instituted many reforms to make the Regular Army more attractive, and that the recruiting had thereby considerably improved. That is true. The establishment is 224,000, but the strength is 204,000. I shall at a later stage be asking the House to increase that establishment. The Territorial Field Army has an establishment of approximately 325,000 men. Its strength is 167,000 men. The Anti-Aircraft Army, if I may so describe it, has an establishment of 96,000 men and a strength of 80,000. Let us take each of these forces in turn. In the Regular Army the difference between the figures of establishment and strength shows that we are short of trained men. Those who will be at the disposal of the Regular Army under the new scheme, for which we are asking approval in principle to-night, will, in the event of war, make the shortage less inconvenient. I would point out that, although doubt has been thrown upon the value of the numbers of men we shall engage each year, a number approximating to the whole strength of the Regular Army will be trained each year.
In regard to the Territorial Field Army, the new divisions will be composed in time of the best material that we have, of volunteers who have sacrificed their leisure and their holidays to fit themselves to defend our cause. We shall fill the ranks in time. We shall train the men in time. Yet time is a factor in international events which we cannot control. The response to our appeal for recruits to double the Territorial Army is most encouraging and the Government hope that no effort will be relaxed. The number of recruits enlisted since 1st April has been no fewer than 2,000 a day, a figure which far exceeds any record previously attained. The plan announced by my right hon. Friend yesterday, under which six months’ intensive training will be given to all men between the ages of 20 and 21, will fill the gap while the slower process of assembling and preparing the new Territorial formations is taking place.24
The plan Hore-Belisha referred to was the new Military Training Act, intended to create a reserve of fully trained troops who could be recalled to the service if necessary but who would not be as costly as maintaining a fulltime conscript army. The relatively short period of service would also cushion the blow. Twenty-year-old Rex Flowers, working in a Yorkshire Co-Op store, welcomed the idea:
Then we got the news that there was going to be a militia, six months service, nice blue uniforms, and then back home. I was looking forward to it very much. Just think of it, Six months playing soldiers, firing guns. The nice blue uniforms would turn the girls’ heads – they might have done too, we all tho
ught it was a great idea. We got the news. First militia was to go up in June or July, I can’t remember which. My friend Harry Pattison was in the First lot. How I envied him.25
In May, Peter Walker and John Marsland, working together at a Halifax mill, decided that ‘rather than wait until the balloon went up and probably lose all chances of making up our own minds as to where and in what we served’ they would join the TA. After a medical conducted in an empty shop premises in Cow Green, Halifax, they were duly signed on as members of the 2/7th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Training would take place in a gym in Great Albion Street every Tuesday and Thursday night where, between 7 and 9pm, the recruits were taught basic weapons skills and foot drill and earned a day’s pay for every eight hours they attended. Despite his lack of experience and military knowledge, Peter soon found himself promoted to Corporal even before he was issued with his first pieces of kit or fired a rifle. It would not be until August that the unit attended a live firing training weekend and he was issued with some surplus First World War pattern webbing to take home. On Friday 1 September, a call from John Marsland had him leave work and report to the gym immediately with his webbing and washing kit. On the way he recalled hearing radio announcements telling reservists where to report. ‘It filled me with excitement; tinged with apprehension and, I suppose, fear.’26
By the time Walker reported for duty, the establishment of a total of 645,000 troops described by Hore-Belisha in April had been increased by the inclusion of the 34,000 men of the Militia and 150,000 of the Army Reserve – bringing the army up to a nominal establishment of around 865,000 men with the possibility, it was claimed, of raising this to a million by November 1939.27 Crucially, these forces were not to be regarded as different armies but as one whole. In the First World War TF men completing their four-year term of enlistment had been discharged and sent home from units in the front lines. This time the TA would not be a separate force with its own rules.
‘During the last war, at the end of 1914’, wrote one observer in 1940, ‘Britain had three separate armies in existence and in preparation, all with competing interests … In less than a week from the outbreak of war in 1939 Britain had a single army, well equipped, well trained, and well led.’28 The truth, though, was rather different.
NOTES
1 Burdock, C. & Jacobsen, H-A. Halder War Diary 1939–42 Novato, California: Presidio Press 1988 p67
2 Frieser, K-H. The Blitzkrieg Legend Anapolis: Naval Institute Press 2005 p20
3 Ibid p21
4 Karslake, B. 1940: The Last Act London: Leo Cooper 1979 p27
5 National Army Museum ‘Against All Odds’ The British Army of 1939–40 London: National Army Museum. Limited Edition p23
6 Hamilton, N. Monty: The Making of a General 1887–12 London: Hamish Hamilton 1981 p325
7 See Hatherill, G. A detective’s story: George Hatherill of Scotland Yard New York: McGraw-Hill 1972. Hatherill later went on to investigate the serial killers John Reginald Christie and John George Haigh and the Great Train Robbery
8 www.royalpioneercorps.co.uk/rpc/history
9 Glover, M. The Fight for the Channel Ports London: Leo Cooper 1985 p77
10 Against all Odds Op cit p47
11 Ça Ira Journal of the West Yorkshire Regiment Vol 9. No 4 March 1940 p372
12 ‘It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to exterminate first the treacherous English and walk over General French’s contemptible little army.’ Army Order Issued by Emperor William II, 19 August 1914 Headquarters, Aix-la- Chapelle. Source Records of the Great War, Vol. II, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923
13 Corrigan, G. Mud, Blood and Poppycock London: Cassell 2003 p48
14 Corrigan p63
15 Jackson, J. The Fall of France Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003 p66. See also McDonald, L. 1914 London: Penguin 1989 p243
16 From the Latin meaning ‘The power of the county.’ The Posse Comitatus Act of June 16, 1878 passed the principle into US Federal Law and gave birth to the Sherriff’s posse of western fame.
17 Nicholson, WN. Behind the Lines: an Account of Administrative Staff Work in the British Army Cape Publishing 1939 p19–20 quoted in Messenger, C. Call to Arms: The British Army 1914–18 London: Cassell 2005 p70
18 Messenger Op cit p71
19 The many stories of underage troops in the trenches are true, but the key factor is that they were boys who had lied about their age to enlist. Only in the last stages of the First World War was the minimum age for overseas service reduced to eighteen and a half. It is only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that the British Army has knowingly sent soldiers still legally classified as children into combat. For example, Neil Grose, Jason Burt and Ian Scrivens of 3rd Battalion of the Parachute Regiment were all aged just seventeen when they were killed in the battle for Mount Longdon during the 1982 Falklands war.
20 The role of conscripts in the First World War remains an apparent source of embarrassment with many books devoted to the famous ‘Pals’ battalions but very little attention given to the larger numbers of men who chose not to enlist yet who became part of the war-winning army of 1918. As Ilana R. Bet-El points out in her study of conscripts in 1916–18, when the BBC began researching its groundbreaking ‘Great War’ documentary series in the 1960s it deliberately limited its requests for participants to those who served before the end of 1915 to exclude former conscripts. (Bet-El, IR. Conscripts Stroud: Sutton Publishing 2003 p201–204)
21 Don Clark. Personal account (Imperial War Museum Documents 99/16/1)
22 Daily Telegraph 30 March 1939
23 NATION ANSWERS THE CALL: RECRUITMENT BEGUN. From A Special Correspondent Daily Telegraph 31 March 1939
24 Hansard House of Commons Debates 27 April 1939 vol 346 cc1343–464
25 Rex Flowers. Personal account.
26 Peter Walker, Personal account. See http://www.dwr.org.uk/dwr.php?id=119&pa=121
27 Hammerton, Sir John (Ed). The Second Great War, Vol One, London: Waverley Book Company (Not dated c 1941) p134
28 Hammerton p134–5
Chapter Three
‘You are no longer Saturday
night soldiers’
Training for the TA took on a new impetus over the summer of 1939 but for Don Clark, by now a private in the 4th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, the big event of their two weeks of camp on the Isle of Man was not weapons or tactical training but four days of rehearsal for a parade of the whole 49th Infantry Division to which they were attached. The parade went well and Clark recalled a tremendous sense of achievement in his ability to remain in formation for the light infantry’s 140 paces per minute march past. It was, no doubt, a stirring sight but had cost almost a third of the available time for more active training – and time lost that would soon be regretted. As they prepared for the parade, men read of the deepening international crisis and it was clear to all that war was coming.
When the battalion returned from camp in August, Clark was among those ordered to remain on active duty and for the next few weeks spent his days doing various jobs around the drill hall and awaiting developments. In other areas, guards were ordered to be posted at Vulnerable Points in readiness for a possible pre-emptive sabotage attack as early as 24 August. On the 29th the Durham Light Infantry suffered their first casualty when Private G.R. Milburn was killed by a train as he guarded the Croxdale Viaduct in Northumberland.1 On Sunday 3 September, men gathered around radios set up in drill halls across Britain to hear Chamberlain’s speech. As the news sank in, Clark heard the Regimental Sergeant-Major’s voice suddenly boom out: ‘Attention you men, you are no longer Saturday night soldiers, you are in the bloody Regular Army now, or you will be when the state of war has been promulgated this afternoon, and then we’ll see what you’re made of.’2
Militia recruits arrive a
t their training depot.
Guard mounting at a railway tunnel. A posed publicity shot; few of the newly enlisted TA had full uniform at this stage.
With the declaration of war the Territorial Army effectively ceased to exist and became part of the Regular Army, its ranks now swelled by a steady stream of volunteers, militiamen, recalled reservists and in due course, conscripts. Filling the ranks was one thing, filling them with the right kind of soldier in the right kind of role was a different matter entirely. Soldiering remained, as it always had been, the least attractive of the services and men with skills and education looked first to the more glamorous Air Force and Royal Navy when volunteering – a major problem for a mechanised and increasingly technical army. Even those willing enough to serve in the army quickly became resentful when its system for handling recruits broke down under the sudden pressure. After enviously watching his friend go off for Militia training during the summer, Rex Flowers recalls:
After a while I received an official letter. I had to report to Somme barracks Sheffield. The very name filled me with awe. I had read so many books about the Great War, including the terrible battle of the Somme in 1916. At the barracks I had my medical, cough and all that, a completely new experience for me. I passed on and found wonder of wonders, that I had passed, A1. The next step was to face a board of Officers etc. My Father had said to me, ‘Whatever you do son, keep out of the infantry.’ Very good advice. So when the officer said ‘What arm of the army do you want to serve in?’ I said ‘The artillery please sir.’ Dad had told me how to recognise an officer and to answer with ‘sir.’ He replied ‘No problem, We will put you down for the artillery’ and that was that. I returned home well satisfied and told my Dad proudly ‘I am going into the artillery’, the officer had said so. I was to get to know the army a lot better before all that long. I was just an innocent well out of my depth! Time went on. It was now August 1939. I was eagerly awaiting the letter telling me when I was being called up, I was all agog, I couldn’t wait. Such is the age of innocence.