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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2000

Copyright © Dr Peter Liddle, Dr John Bourne and Dr Ian Whitehead 2000

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Source ISBN: 9780007116171

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007598182

Version: 2014–10–09

Dedication

To the generations who experienced the lightning strikes 1914–1945

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Editors’ Introduction

PART I THE FRONT LINE EXPERIENCE

Chapter 1 A personal reflection on the two World Wars

J. M. Bourne

Chapter 2 Preparing for war: the experience of the Cameronians

John Baynes and Cliff Pettit

Chapter 3 Waging the undersea war: a British perspective

Jeff Tall

Chapter 4 The merchant seaman at war

Tony Lane

Chapter 5 War in the air: the fighter pilot

David Jordan

Chapter 6 War in the air: the bomber crew

Christina Goulter

Chapter 7 The Desert War experience

Niall Barr

Chapter 8 War in the Pacific

Eric Bergerud

Chapter 9 War in the Tropics: East Africa and Burma

Phillip Parotti

Chapter 10 Hitting the beach: the amphibious experience

Geoffrey Till

Chapter 11 British Special Forces operations behind enemy lines

Julian Thompson

Chapter 12 Partisans and guerrillas

Malcolm Mackintosh

Chapter 13 The experience of being abroad: doughboys and GIs in Europe

James J. Cooke

Chapter 14 German soldiers in victory, 1914 and 1940

Benjamin Ziemann and Klaus Latzel

Chapter 15 The experience of defeat: Kut (1916) and Singapore (1942)

Robin Neillands

Chapter 16 The experience of killing

Joanna Bourke

Chapter 17 The experience of captivity: British and Commonwealth prisoners in Germany

Peter H. Liddle and S. P. McKenzie

Chapter 18 Casualties and British medical services

Nick Bosanquet and Ian Whitehead

Chapter 19 Spies, codebreakers and secret agents

M. R. D. Foot

PART II THE EXPERIENCE OF LEADERSHIP

Chapter 20 Monarchy in wartime: King George V and King George VI

Hugo Vickers

Chapter 21 Political leaders in wartime: Lloyd George and Churchill

George H. Cassar

Chapter 22 Erich Ludendorff and Tôjô Hideki: some comparisons

Peter Wetzler

Chapter 23 Foch and Eisenhower: Supreme Commanders

Frank E. Vandiver

Chapter 24 General Brusilov and Marshal Zhukov, June 1916 and June 1944

John Erickson

Chapter 25 Reflections on the experience of British generalship

G. D. Sheffield

Chapter 26 Coalition war: the Anglo-American experience

Dennis E. Showalter

Chapter 27 Coalition war: Britain and France

William Philpott

Chapter 28 Coalition war: Germany and her Allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy

Gary W. Shanafelt and G. T. Waddington

PART III THE EXPERIENCE OF OCCUPATION

Chapter 29 The experience of occupation: Belgium

Mark Derez

Chapter 30 The experience of occupation: Northern France

Margaret Atack

Chapter 31 The experience of occupation: Poland

Anita J. Prazmowska

Chapter 32 The experience of displacement: refugees and war

Guy S. Goodwin-Gill

Chapter 33 The experience of genocide: Armenia 1915–16 and Romania 1941–42

Mark Levene

Keep Reading

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Editors’ Introduction

A part from debates about the international ramifications of the Treaty of Versailles, historians have tended to study the two world wars in isolation. This has been justified by the assumption that the two conflicts were qualitatively and quantitatively different. The First World War has more often than not been regarded as a ‘bad’ war resulting from failures in diplomacy, and a war characterised by the ‘futile’ sacrifices of trench warfare on the Western Front; standing in stark contrast to the justifiable and necessary struggle, between 1939 and 1945, against Nazi tyranny and aggressive Japanese militarism. In the First World War the civilian populations of the belligerent powers played an increasingly vital part in the war effort. But it is the Second World War, with its indiscriminate bombing of cities placing civilians in the front line, and technology taking man’s destructive powers to new heights, that is more usually seen as the first truly ‘total’ war. To treat the wars separately in this fashion, however, is to ignore a significant historical reality – all those who were over forty years of age in 1940 would have had their adult lives in some sense defined by their participation, or non-participation, in these two global conflicts. It is this continuum of human experience that firmly unites the world wars, and which is the focus both of this book and its successor volume.

The aim throughout is to demonstrate the diversity of personal experience in the two world wars. This volume examines uniformed service and such aspects of civilian experience as occupation, displacement and genocide. It discusses the exercise of political and military leadership and details the difficulties of prosecuting coalition warfare. The later volume deals with the national experiences of both belligerent and neutral states and considers the role of civilians in war. There are also sections dealing with moral and cultural issues.

The comparative approach that underpins the book reveals striking parallels between the two global conflicts of the twentieth century. It is clear that in many respects lightning did indeed strike twice – when considering the development of modern warfare, its challenges and its impact, there is much that unites the two conflicts. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that, in relation to human experience, there was nothing fundamentally new in the Second World War. There were, however, important differences, none more significant than the ideological basis of the struggle between Nazi Germany and her opponents. The First World War was, in part at least, the product of ancient Balkan savageries and the fate of the Armenians gave warning of the human capacity for organised atrocity on the scale of genocide, a word not yet then coined. But a new register is required to measure the consequences of ideological warfare in the Second World War. German and Japanese conduct of the Second World War was driven by racism and political dogma. This and the response it provoked from the Soviets on the Eastern Front, the Americans in the Pacific and the British and Americans in the skies above Germany and occupied Europe ensured that the Second World War extended the frontiers of human degradation and misery well beyond the boundaries ‘achieved’ in the earlier struggle.

PART I

THE FRONT LINE EXPERIENCE

Chapter 1
A personal reflection on the two World Wars

J. M. Bourne

Dates resonate in history, and in life. Few dates in 20th-century history resonate more than ’14-’18 and ’39-’45. They are not only instantly evocative and significant in themselves, but they also give meaning to other dates.

‘Would you mind telling me when you were born?’ I asked an elderly Lancastrian while taking part in an oral history project 25 years ago.

‘1903,’ he replied. This was followed by an infinitesimal but palpable pause, a silence that has followed me down the years. ‘A grand year, 1903,’ he added.

‘Why is that?’ I enquired.

‘Too young for the first war and too old for the second,’ he explained with a chuckle.

I was born in 1949, too young for both wars; too young even for conscription. Old enough for the welfare state, antibiotics, mass working-class prosperity, the coming of television and the expansion of higher education. Like the vast majority of professional historians of my generation, my experience of war is entirely second-hand. It is, nevertheless, real.

No British child born in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War could possibly escape its influence. Samuel Hynes’s felicitous description of the Second World War as ‘Everybody’s War’ is certainly true in my experience.¹ Everybody appeared to have taken part in it. Not only fathers and uncles, but also mothers and aunts. I was taught by veterans of the war. My eccentric and charismatic English teacher, J. E. ‘Boris’ Simnett, landed in Normandy on D+3, carrying a wireless set that he promptly (and accidentally) broke, for which hamfistedness he was threatened with court-martial. My equally eccentric physics teacher, E. W. ‘Daddy’ Knight, enlivened lessons with tales of his time in bomb disposal.

As an undergraduate I sat at the feet of the Rev J. McManners, who fought in the Western Desert as adjutant of the 1st Battalion Royal Northumberland Fusiliers and later with the Greek resistance, and R. H. Evans, who spent much of the war with 7th Armoured Division and actually witnessed the German surrender to Field-Marshal Montgomery on Luneburg Heath. When I entered the world of work, as a civil servant, most of the middle managers were veterans. ‘I slept next to my tank all the way from Normandy to the liberation of Belsen and never got a cold,’ one wistfully recalled. ‘Now if I go out without a hat, I risk pneumonia.’² The undoubted nostalgia that many seemed to feel for the war is apparent in the last remark. ‘No one in this country comes alive until you mention the war,’ observed a young American on his first visit to Britain in the early 1960s.³

Nostalgia was not confined to those who fought the war. Many in my generation grew up believing that they had missed something that was not only really important but also really exciting. This was due not only to the influence of adults but also to the new, powerful medium of television, especially perhaps to the long-running series All Our Yesterdays, which showed – almost nightly, it seemed – extracts from British newsreels from the same week 25 years earlier. In this way it was possible to live through the descent into war and the war years vicariously. And I did. Few major figures of the war adapted better to the new medium than Field-Marshal Montgomery. More even than Churchill, he was, for me, the great British hero of the Second World War. I cried the day he died. Churchill was a remote figure who appeared in newsreels and waved at the cameras from the steps of aircraft or the decks of Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Montgomery gave interviews. And what interviews. ‘Now, I’ll call you Cliff and you call me Monty,’ he declared to the television journalist Cliff Michelmore, himself a veteran of the war. It was captivating stuff.

What television failed to achieve was completed by the cinema. War films were a staple of the British film industry throughout the 1950s and 1960s: They Were Not Divided (1950); Albert RN (1953); The Cruel Sea (1953); The Colditz Story (1954); The Dam Busters (1954); Cockleshell Heroes (1955); Reach for the Sky (1956); Ill Met by Moonlight (1956); Battle of the River Plate (1956); The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957); Dunkirk (1958); Sink the Bismarck (1960); The Battle of Britain (1969); and many more. Television repeated films made during the war itself: The Foreman Went to France (1941); In Which We Serve (1942); Went the Day Well? (1942); The Bells Go Down (1943); San Demetrio London (1943); Desert Victory (1943); Western Approaches (1944); and Olivier’s Henry V (1944). Feature films tended to portray what were, to the British, key moments of the war. By the time I was ten I could recite the litany: the Graf Spee; Dunkirk; the Home Guard; ‘the Few’; the Blitz; Coventry; the Bismarck; Tobruk; El Alamein; Singapore; the Prince of Wales and the Repulse; the death railway; Burma and the ‘Forgotten Fourteenth’; Anzio; the Dambusters; D-Day; Arnhem; Doodlebugs and the V2; Belsen.

Samuel Hynes and Gary Sheffield have shown that young men who grew up in the 1930s and went to war in the 1940s did so with a war already in their heads.⁴ That war was, of course, the First World War, or at least the First World War depicted in the ‘anti-war’ memoirs of a small number of middle-class veterans. By the time I reached my teens the war I had in my head was the Second World War. David Lodge’s novel Small World has a hero who is writing a PhD thesis about the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare. There is an important sense in which it is possible to talk about the influence of the Second World War on the First. When, eventually, I came to read and think about the First World War, it was difficult to rid my mind of images of the Second. Doubtless, these distorted my view but they also illuminated it.

The Second World War in my head had several distinguishing features. First and foremost, it was clearly glorious. This is now a deeply unfashionable thing to say. Many would regard the statement as wicked. It would be meaningless to my mother-in-law, a Pole, to whom the war brought nothing but suffering, loss and displacement. But most people in my childhood seemed to feel it. ‘No English soldier who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade,’ wrote A. J. P. Taylor in the elegiac final paragraph of his volume in the Oxford History of England.⁵

Second, the noble crusade had been a quintessentially British victory. ‘We’ had won the war. This was the source of much national pride. Although the Second World War was a global conflict, fought by armies numbered in millions across four continents, the British always seemed to be at the heart of it and to be playing the key role. Persons who questioned this often got short shrift. The British were very proprietorial about their victory. During the 1960s an American television series about a US unit operating behind enemy lines in the Desert War had to be taken off by the BBC after a couple of episodes following howls of outrage from British Eighth Army veterans. Early attempts at revising the heroic ‘myth’ of 1940, by Len Deighton in Fighter (1977), also brought odium upon its author. Foreigners had only walk-on parts in this drama. Germans were efficient and brave in a bad cause. Italians were useless soldiers, worthy only of contempt. ‘I’ve got no time for Italians,’ one British veteran recalled. ‘When we put them into the POW cages in Algeria they just sat around in their own shit. Not like Jerry.’⁶ ‘Japs’ were cruel and unfathomable. One decent, humane, well-read, liberal-minded provincial Englishman recently observed to me that he still found it almost impossible to be civil to Japanese, whom he characterised as ‘vicious little bastards’.⁷

Allies, except perhaps for the brave and exotic Poles, fared no better. The French (and the Belgians) had ‘let us down’. The Yanks prevailed because they had lots of ‘kit’, not because they could fight. Eisenhower was no more than a glorified clerk, whose failure to submit to the military genius of Montgomery had handed half of Europe over to Communism; Patton was a madman who slapped shell-shocked soldiers. The war on the Eastern Front was vaguely recognised as bloody and important, but the war there had been won by a country that was now our mortal enemy, whose nuclear missiles were pointed at our shores. Wartime admiration for the achievements of the Red Army soon evaporated. Now, in middle age, I recoil with horror at the parochialism, narrow-mindedness and bigotry of these views, but they were commonplace in my childhood and many still share them.⁸

Third, the war was well-managed. After initial setbacks, mostly attributed to the malign influence of the ‘Men of Munich’, the British eventually got their act together. Churchill provided not only effective but also inspirational leadership at the political level. Montgomery and Slim emerged as ‘great commanders’, with an almost unbroken record of success. Both had learned from the mistakes of the First World War. They were prudent with men’s lives. They left nothing to chance. They understood technology. They had the common touch. If, in Montgomery’s case, it was that of a shameless vulgarian, no one seemed to care. But Slim was what would now be called ‘cool’. He exemplified the ironic mode of late-20th Century heroism. Most of all, however, they had, in the words of Slim’s own account, turned defeat into victory at a price that seemed worth the paying.⁹ Casualties lie at the heart of British perceptions of the two World Wars. British casualties in the First World War were unprecedented in the national experience. British military casualties in the Second World War were hardly small (c305,000) but they were considerably less than half of those of the First. The superior nature of British military leadership and technology in the Second World War is still generally given credit for this by popular opinion.

Fourth, the Second World War was not only a war of national heroism but also a war of individual heroism. There was something almost bijou about Britain’s war, a war of commando raids and operations behind enemy lines, small scale, human scale, dramatic, filmable and easy to follow. It was a war in which individuals and small groups seemed to make a difference: Douglas Bader; Guy Gibson; Orde Wingate; Vian of the Cossack¹⁰; ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten and the Kelly, the ‘little ships’ and their crews at Dunkirk; the Chindits; the Long Range Desert Group. When, in later years, I learned in the pages of Professor Fussell that the First World War had changed for ever the nature of heroism, it was the cause of some consternation.¹¹ The heroes of the Second World War seemed then, and seem now, to sit easily with those of the past: Grenville, Drake, Wolfe, Nelson.

Finally, the Second World War represented the triumph of brains. It was a war of the ‘boffin’ and the ‘gadget’. Few books are better designed to lift the spirits of the Briton than R. V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939–1945¹², in which a motley collection of mathematicians, linguists, classicists, engineers, chemists and physicists, even the odd historian, often eccentric and unwarlike individualists in horn-rimmed spectacles and decaying sports jackets, conspired to destroy the Nazi war machine. The centrepiece of this was, of course, the development of radar. Though the name of its originator, Robert Watson Watt, was well known, his personality was not. The iconic figure of the boffins’ war became, instead, Dr Barnes Wallis, inventor of the ‘bouncing bomb’, a concept so bizarre that it must have been the work of a genius. Only later, however, did history offer up the pièce de resistance of the British war effort, Enigma. Revelations about the code-breakers’ war at Bletchley Park, which appeared in the early 1970s¹³, merely confirmed the importance of British brain power and discovered a new hero, the mathematician, cryptanalyst and computer pioneer, Alan Turing, who was not only a genius but also a tortured gay, very much a hero for the late 20th century.

During my childhood, the First World War struggled for visibility in the glare of attention paid to the Second. There was no one to reminisce with me about the Great War. Both my grandfathers died before I was born, one as the result of war service. My maternal grandmother died when I was three. My paternal grandmother was not a woman who invited questions. My first, dim, awareness of the First World War came through the powerful injunction never to wear a poppy. This stemmed from my maternal grandmother, Louisa Sheldon, a formidable personality who never forgave the war for killing her husband and leaving her in poverty to bring up a family of five, including four girls. She regarded poppies as a means of extorting money out of gullible people who could ill afford it for the enrichment of those who had done well out of the war.

Beyond the family, the First World War seemed to exist only as a guilty secret. My loud, childish enquiries about why some men had only one arm or one leg was met with a whispered, ‘He lost it in the first war.’ My native North Staffordshire was no stranger to respiratory disease: white lung for potters, black lung for colliers. During the early 1960s I began to notice coroners’ reports in the Staffordshire Evening Sentinel in which the cause of death was given as ‘pneumoconiosis, with gassing in the First World War as a contributory factor’. Gassing. The Second World War had gas masks, but no gas. The First World War evoked no nostalgia. Politicians did not summon the nation to show the ‘spirit of the Somme’ as they routinely did the ‘spirit of Dunkirk’ or the ‘spirit of the Blitz’. It seemed to be a war of victims, not of heroes. It was, in short, a very different kind of war.

How different became apparent as soon as I began to read about it. My introduction was Alan Clark’s The Donkeys¹⁴. It was not necessary to read far in this book to get the message. The caption of the first photograph, adjacent to the title page, read ‘Donkey decorates lion’. Between pages 80 and 81 there were photographs of No-Man’s Land showing ‘human remains and detritus’ and of an advanced dressing station (something that rarely seemed to adorn the pages of books on the Second World War) in a ruined farmhouse. These contrasted strikingly with the photograph of General Rawlinson, captioned ‘Rawly’, standing in the sun on the steps of a chateaux, immaculate in dazzling boots and leather gloves.¹⁵

When television finally turned its attention to the First World War, it did so with extraordinary effect. Tony Essex’s epic documentary The Great War (1964) proved so compelling that it was repeated on BBC1 even before the 26 episodes had concluded on BBC2. Much of the modern British fascination with the First World War stems from the impact made by this series. The impact was not that intended by some of those who made the programme. The series’s haunting, mournful music (written by Wilfred Josephs), its contemporary film (some of it now known to be fake) showing men ‘going over the top’ and dying ‘on the old barbed wire’, its still photographs of trenches deep in water and stretcher-bearers carrying wounded men through thigh-deep mud, its interviews with veterans, its extracts from contemporary memoirs, conspired to reinforce an image of the war that was completely at odds with the script of Correlli Barnett and John Terraine. The stage production of Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) (followed by Richard Attenborough’s film version in 1969), and A. J. P. Taylor’s wonderfully readable, witty and damning The First World War: An Illustrated History (1963)¹⁶ further discouraged the revisionist cause.

By the time I went to university, in 1967, there was a clear public consensus. The First World War was avoidable; the Second was not. The First World War was not really about anything, or not about anything important; the Second World War was about national survival at home and the defeat of a vile tyranny abroad. The First World War was hopelessly mismanaged by incompetent generals whose aristocratic, rural backgrounds ill fitted them to come to terms with industrialised war; the Second World War was well run by generals who understood technology, allowing them to fight a war of manoeuvre that avoided costly battles of attrition. The outcome of the First World War was futile, merely creating circumstances in which political extremism would fester, making another war inevitable; the outcome of the Second World War, sanctified by discovery of the Nazi death camps, was not only a military but also a moral triumph.

The differences embraced not only the origins, purposes, conduct and outcomes of the wars but also the ways in which they were experienced by ordinary soldiers. Trench warfare on the Western Front in the First World War has come to be regarded as the epitome of human suffering and degradation, a sort of hell on earth. Two of the books on the First World War recommended as further reading at the foot of this chapter contain the word ‘hell’ in their titles. This is rarely the case with books on the Second World War. The implication is that the business of soldiering in the Second World War was easier. Only after many conversations with veterans of both wars did I discover the extent to which they themselves often felt trapped by these stereotypes. People only wanted to learn from First World War veterans how ‘terrible’ it was, and from Second World War veterans how ‘grand’.

How different was the experience of ordinary British soldiers at ‘the sharp end’ in the two World Wars? Some parameters need to be set. The First World War is unique in British history. It is the only war in which the British Army was engaged with the main forces of the main enemy virtually from the first day of the war until the last. The British Army mobilised on 5 August 1914. The first soldier to be killed, Private John Parr (4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment), died on 21 August. Two days later the British Expeditionary Force blundered into the German Army at the battle of Mons. The two armies remained in contact for the rest of the war. This is very different from the Second World War. Arguably, the British Army only faced the main forces of the main enemy once – and briefly – in 1940. British civilian casualties were higher than military ones until after the invasion of Europe on 6 June 1944. The campaigns fought by the British in Eritrea, in the Western Desert, in Crete, even – to some extent – in Italy, were what Gary Sheffield describes later in this book as ‘big small wars’. From a German perspective, they were all essentially sideshows. The real big war was on the Eastern Front and, from 1944, in north-west Europe. The casualties on the Eastern Front, and the savagery of the fighting there, were far more severe than those of the Western Front in the First World War. British casualty rates in north-west Europe in 1944 and 1945 were comparable with those suffered in the infamous ‘attrition’ battles on the Somme and at Third Ypres that haunt the British national memory. They appear to have been even higher for officers.¹⁷

There is a persistent, and simplistic, popular view that trench warfare caused high casualties and that the absence of trench warfare in the Second World War, the result of superior technology, accounts for lower (British) casualties. This view needs to be ‘unpacked’.

First, trench warfare developed in order to reduce casualties. The early battles of the First World War were closer to those of Napoleonic times than they were to the battles of 1916 onwards. Vast numbers of men, sometimes gaudily dressed (especially in the French Army), deployed into the open, rolling fields of northern France, where they met the withering fire of smokeless, breech-loading rifles, machine-guns and quick-firing rifled cannon (mostly firing shrapnel, deadly against troops in the open). Casualties were enormous. The decision to ‘dig in’, from which trench warfare evolved, was made through necessity by soldiers themselves. If they had not done this, it is difficult to see how the war could have been sustained for very long. The trench system, which began to be apparent from as early as September 1914, was routinised with remarkable speed. It was recognised that troops should spend only a limited amount of time there and that only a limited number should be located in the very front line. Regular systems of relief and rotation were organised, both into and out of and within the trench system. Although trench conditions were often extremely unpleasant, troops of all sides did not submit to them passively. They did their best to make themselves comfortable. Part of the experience of war, in both World Wars (perhaps in all wars), is learning how to achieve reasonable comfort in adversity. Official and semi-official campaigns were launched at home to provide ‘comforts’ for the troops. Vast masses of material were brought in to make the trenches more habitable. A single square mile of trenches contained 900 miles of barbed wire, 6 million sandbags, 1 million cubic feet of timber and 360,000 square feet of corrugated iron.¹⁸ The logistical infrastructure to support this was huge and increasingly sophisticated.¹⁹ Defending the trench system was never cheap. The experience of the 46th (North Midland) Division, the first Territorial division to be deployed to France (in March 1915), is instructive. 46th Division was involved in only three major attacks during the war, at the Hohenzollern Redoubt (13 October 1915), at Gommecourt (1 July 1916) and at Bellenglise (29 September 1918); 13 October 1915 was its worst day in the war. Casualties suffered on those three days account for a significant proportion of the unit total, but by far the majority of its casualties were incurred in the routine of trench-holding, from snipers, shelling, mortars and harassing machine-gun fire. The British Army during the Second World War was rarely subjected to this constant, expensive, piecemeal attrition.

Second, open, mobile or semi-mobile war is not less expensive than trench warfare. Fighting on the Eastern Front in the First World War was predominantly semi-mobile. The distances were greater than on the Western Front and the densities of men and equipment, especially artillery, were less. Casualties, however, were higher than on the Western Front. The British Expeditionary Force’s worst calendar month for casualties during the Great War was, unsurprisingly, July 1916. The second worst was April 1917 (Arras). The third worst was October 1917. The fighting in all these months could be characterised as ‘trench warfare’. But the fifth, sixth and seventh worst months were April, August and October 1918, all periods of semi-mobile war, the last two during a period when it is generally recognised that the BEF was well led, well resourced and operationally proficient. During the ‘Advance to Victory’ in the final hundred days of the war, from 8 August 1918, the British Tank Corps, the epitome of mobility and technology, lost a third of all its officers and men. Tanks crews were so vulnerable to disfiguring facial wounds, caused by ‘metal splash’, that they took to wearing chain-mail visors, reminiscent of medieval knights.

Nor is it true that the Second World War was won by ‘manoeuvre’ and the First by ‘attrition’. The mobile war of the Blitzkrieg or the Western Desert or the breakout from Normandy was no more typical of the Second World War than slogging matches like Stalingrad, Cassino, Kohima and Imphal, Caen and the Falaise gap, or the Reichswald. The US Navy’s freedom to ‘hop’ from island to island in the Pacific War was achieved only at the cost of epic attritional naval battles, such as Midway and the Coral Sea, fought principally by aircraft at long range. And once ground forces were landed, they faced an equally grim attritional struggle against ferocious resistance from Japanese soldiers, often dug into hillside bunkers and trenches, reminiscent (in a very different landscape) of the fighting at ‘Passchendaele’. This process is usually known as ‘winkling out’, a typical cant phrase for what was a desperate business, contracted at close quarters, often with flame-throwers and grenades.

Third, trench warfare was not peculiar to the First World War. Trenches (saps) had always been part of siege warfare, the dominant mode of war for much of military history. They played a leading part in the final campaigns of the American Civil War in northern Virginia and in the Russo-Japanese war. They were also a constant feature of the Second World War, though they were generally less permanent and are, perhaps, better characterised by the American term ‘foxhole’, a rapidly dug slit trench for one or two men, exhausting to dig, often under enemy fire. Life in them, particularly for a prolonged period, was certainly worse than life in a First World War trench system. The key word here is ‘system’. First World War trenches were organised places, with facilities – primitive maybe – but still real, and comradeship. (Rob Thompson has characterised the Western Front as ‘trench city’.²⁰) US troops in the Belgian Ardennes, in the harsh winter of 1944–45, found themselves occupying foxholes 4 or 5 feet deep, 2 or 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, for 10, 20, even 30 nights in succession. Trench foot, that spectre from the early days of trench warfare, made a reappearance, causing 45,000 men to be evacuated from the front line, more than were put out of action by the enemy.²¹

Fourth, technology does not save lives in war. The conceit that it does is often used to explain lower British casualties in the Second World War. It was repeated recently during the British television series Great Military Blunders²². The role of technology in war is to take lives, not to save them. First World War soldiers were killed by technology, high explosive, gas, aircraft, tanks, as were those in the Second. Many of the technologies used in the Second World War were deployed in the First. The ‘all-arms, deep battle’, utilising sophisticated artillery techniques, armour and ground attack aircraft, employed during the autumn of 1918 by Allied armies on the Western Front, was the true precursor of modern war. The contribution of ‘boffins’ was also apparent. The development of artillery in the British Army, on which its success in 1918 principally rested, owed much to the contribution of the scientist Lawrence Bragg, the engineer Harold Hemming, the cartographer Evan Jack and the brilliant meteorologist Ernest Gold. The Second World War had more sophisticated signals systems than the First (especially radar and the man-portable radio), its aircraft flew higher and faster and carried more ordnance, its tanks were better armoured, more potent and quicker, but there was comparatively little fundamental change in field artillery, small arms, mortars and grenades. A British soldier of the First World War would have felt quite at home with the Lee Enfield Rifle Mark IV, the Vickers machine-gun and the Mills No 36 grenade. The excellent Bren replaced the Lewis gun, but it would have held no mysteries for a First World War Lewis-gunner. Indeed, the generation of small arms used in the First World War survived in many armies until the 1960s.

Also, in both World Wars the reality of war at the sharp end was ‘low tech’. First World War trench raiders favoured knives, knuckledusters and bludgeons. In the vicious, prolonged, hand-to-hand, street-to-street, building-to-building combat that characterised the battle for Stalingrad, one of the most prized possessions was a sharpened spade. Great claims are sometimes made for the ‘war-winning weapon’. The tank has been portrayed in this way in the First World War; the Soviet T-34 tank and the P-51 Mustang (or its drop tanks) in the Second. There is no doubt that a technological lead, such as Fokker’s development of the interrupter gear in 1915, allowing German aircraft to fire machine-guns through their propeller blades, gave them a decided (if temporary) operational advantage. But, in many cases, complaints about the enemy’s superiority in technology merely disguise tactical inferiority. This was sometimes the case in the Desert War, where skilful German use of tanks in combination with the excellent 88mm field gun, rather then the inherent inferiority of British armour, was the decisive factor. The focus on quality disguises the importance of quantity. The T-34 was an excellent tank, but so was the German Tiger. The Soviets, however, produced far more T-34s than the Germans did Tigers, sufficient for the Red Army to survive a 75 per cent loss rate in armour.

This book is a study of comparative experience. What results it produces depends on what is compared. The true comparison is not between the experience of soldiers on the Western Front and in the Western Desert, but between soldiers at Verdun and Stalingrad, between the fighting of 1916–18 in France and Flanders and the fighting of 1944–45 in north-west Europe. Such comparisons show no dramatic lessening in the grim toll of casualties; indeed, quite the contrary. When like is compared with like, modern war is shown for the truly brutal and expensive business that it invariably is. Lower British casualties in the Second World War overall are explained not by better technology or by better generalship but by the smaller scale and lesser intensity of the ground fighting in which it was involved before D-Day. In the Royal Navy (and the merchant fleet), where seamen were involved from day one of the war with the main forces of the main enemy, casualties were higher than during the First World War.²³ High casualties were also central to the experience of Bomber Command, which spearheaded the British war effort against the main forces of the main enemy from 1942 onwards.

From these perspectives, the experience of the two World Wars seems much more similar than is often supposed, a view that is strengthened by consideration of some of the ‘actualities of war’.

The first of these is ‘the army’. The two World Wars were fought principally, though not exclusively, by organised military forces. The men (and women) who served in them, however, were not principally ‘soldiers’. When war crept back on to British university syllabuses in the 1960s, it did so as a partner (a junior partner) in the relationship between war and society. War was considered worthy of academic consideration in proportion to the extent that it had social consequences. These were felt through the need of modern, ‘total’ war, in particular, to mobilise ‘civilian’ workers, including women, and the vulnerability of those civilians to enemy action through ‘strategic bombing’. This ignores the fact that wars were fought, as well as supported on the home front, by civilians. The mass armies of the two World Wars are united by their essentially civilian natures. Sir William Orpen described the British soldier of the First World War as ‘the British workman in disguise’²⁴. Michel Corday depicted the French soldier, in similar terms, as ‘merely a peasant in a steel helmet’²⁵. The First World War had a higher proportion of volunteer soldiers than the Second did. The British Army was recruited wholly by voluntary means until the spring of 1916. The Australian Imperial Force was recruited by voluntary means throughout the war, as was the (British) Indian Army in both World Wars. But this was not the norm. Most soldiers, in most armies, in both World Wars, were conscripts, chosen because of their youth, their physical fitness and the degree to which their skills could be dispensed with by the war economy. In the British and American armies, with their traditional peacetime reliance on small, Regular forces, this meant that only a small number of wartime soldiers had any significant degree of peacetime training, something the conscript armies of Europe and Japan avoided. In both World Wars the British and American armies undoubtedly suffered from having to improvise large armies from small Regular cadres. This was, perhaps, particularly true of the British Army in the First World War, when it was allowed little ‘preparation time’ before being committed to combat. The civilian nature of armies also had consequences for their discipline and morale. In the German and Japanese armies potential problems were resolved by ‘indoctrination’ of an extreme kind.²⁶ ‘Indoctrination’ jars on Western liberal ears, but it produces formidable soldiers. It can also produce the most cruel and barbaric. On the whole, the British and American armies in the Second World War learned the lessons of the First. They recognised from early on that if the conscript soldiers of ‘democracies’ were to be asked to die, they had a right to understand the cause for which they were dying. Towards this end they mobilised an impressive array of talented writers, film-makers and artists. In the British case, Second World War practice built on that established towards the end of the First, and many exaggerated claims have been made for the political effects of the Second World War Army Bureau of Current Affairs.²⁷

The process of converting civilians into soldiers and their ‘blooding’ has been a staple of feature films on both sides of the Atlantic. The dramatic effects achieved by following a group from civilian life through to combat, however, often required a stability of ‘cast’ that was often not achieved in real life. For many soldiers, as Sir John Baynes and Cliff Pettit point out later in this book²⁸, the reality was to be thrown into units, where they knew no one, after only the most exiguous training. War is a notoriously difficult thing to prepare anyone for. Far from coping with it as ‘soldiers’, many brought the resourcefulness, resilience and comradeship, rooted essentially in civilian values, to the business of mutual survival in extreme danger.²⁹ Although both World Wars were ‘global’, ‘mass’ affairs, at the sharp end they were fought by small groups, the infantry section, the machine-gun team, the tank crew. Combat effectiveness depended on the morale and cohesion of these groups. ‘Comradeship’ is a constant theme of wartime memoirs from both World Wars. It was undoubtedly a reality, deeply felt and never forgotten. But this somewhat cosy concept ought not to disguise the often brutal reality of military discipline, not least – perhaps – in the Italian army in the First World War and the Red Army in the Second. The Italian Army’s attempts to bolster morale by a series of random executions would have done justice to a barbarian horde; the Soviet NKVD executed 15,000 Red Army deserters at Stalingrad alone.

The second ‘actuality of war’ that united soldiers of the two World Wars was the elements. The ‘high tech’ image of the Second World War, all speeding armour and diving aircraft, disguises the fact that war is a labour-intensive, physical, outdoor activity, which takes place at all hours and in all weathers. The front-line infantryman was a ‘beast of burden’. Towards the end of the First World War, and during the Second, he may have obtained a lift into battle, but once he got there he had to carry everything he needed. Everything he needed seems to have weighed the same for centuries, certainly since Roman times, about 601b. American slang for an infantryman, a ‘grunt’, is clearly well observed. In both World Wars, front-line infantrymen of all armies carried heavy burdens, worked long hours, and often got little sleep. They froze in the Iraqi desert at night during the First World War and on the Don steppe during the bitter winter of 1941–42 in the Second (the Wehrmacht boot, with its steel toecap and heels, might have been designed specially to induce frostbite). They were soaked to the skin in Flanders in the First World War and in Flanders in the Second World War. They burned under desert suns in the Sinai during the First World War and in Libya during the Second. They sweated through the African bush in the First World War and the jungles of Burma in the Second.

Both World Wars offered almost every kind of terrain. Some of it was familiar. Soldiers often commented in letters home on the similarity of the country through which they passed or on which they fought. But much was deeply foreign. German soldiers on the Russian steppe were sometimes demoralised by the infinite space and huge skies. This produced a desperate nostalgia (literally ‘home-pain’), which, as James Cooke shows later in this book, often led to the idealisation of ‘home’.³⁰ Wherever they went, on whatever terrain, soldiers would eventually make the acquaintance of mud. Mud is inseparable from war. British Army uniforms were dyed ‘khaki’, the Hindustani word for ‘dust’ (dried mud). American ‘doughboys’ acquired their name from the adobe dust of the Mexican border war of 1916–17 that covered their uniforms. German slang for an infantryman is dreckfresser (‘mud-eater’). Learning to keep clean and to keep equipment on which your life might depend clean was part of the universal experience of soldiering in both World Wars. Few have better captured the image of soldiers adapting to these conditions than the painter Eric Kennington in The Kensingtons at Laventie, where functional efficiency has entirely replaced ‘smartness’ as a military virtue.³¹ Apart from details of uniform and equipment, photographs of combat soldiers from the two World Wars are barely distinguishable. Dirty, unkempt, haggard, exhausted, prematurely aged, they look straight past us with the tell-tale ‘thousand-yard stare’ that transcends time and reveals a universal experience.

The final ‘actuality of war’ that bridged the experience of front-line soldiers in both World Wars to be considered here is ‘artillery’. Both conflicts were wars of the ‘guns’. Stalin called artillery the ‘god of war’, and in both World Wars, like the Gods of Ancient Greece, it dealt out death with a chilling impartiality. Artillery was the major cause of death and wounds on the battlefield in both wars. It was also the major cause of psychiatric casualties. ‘Shell shock’ is often regarded as a phenomenon of the Great War.³² I was never aware that it existed at all in the Second World War until I came across General Patton’s famous assault on a ‘shell-shocked’ GI. The experience of being under prolonged artillery bombardment was among the most terrifying that anyone has invented. The German veteran of the Western Front, Ernst Jünger, likened it to having a giant continually aim blows at your head with a huge hammer and just missing. The chances of being killed by a high-explosive shell, fired from ten miles away, were far greater than being killed in single or small group combat, in which personal skill, training, equipment and determination might be a factor. This reality contributed to the fatalism of soldiers, remarked upon by many commentators. High explosive did not distinguish between the callow recruit and the old hand, between the brave man and the coward, between the willing soldier and the man who just wanted to go home. Knowing when to take cover, being able to see that tiny but significant fold in the ground that another might miss, helped to keep one man alive while another would perish. But, ultimately, it was a matter of luck (front-line soldiers on all sides in both World Wars were deeply superstitious). To be a front-line soldier in the two World Wars was eventually to recognise your mortality, that one day, not this day or even the next day, given long enough exposure to the ‘God of war’, he would deal death or wounds to you and that your fate was to ‘lie on the litter or in the grave’.³³

Notes on contributors

Dr J.M. Bourne, The University of Birmingham, UK

John Bourne has taught History at the University of Birmingham since 1979. He thought that the publication of Britain and the Great War (London: Edward Arnold, 1989, 1991) would be his first and last on that conflict, but he was mistaken. During the last ten years his work has become increasingly focused on the British Army during the First World War and he is currently completing a revisionist study of the British Western Front generals.

Recommended reading

Addison, Paul &. Calder, Angus (eds) Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of the War in the West 1939–1945 (London: Pimlico, 1997)

Donovan, Tom (comp), The Hazy Red Hell: Fighting Experiences on the Western Front 1914–1918 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1999)

Ellis, John, Eye-Deep in Hell: The Western Front 1914–18 (London: Croom Helm, 1976) The Sharp End of War: The Fighting Man in World War II (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980)

Holmes, Richard, Firing Line (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985)

Hynes, Samuel, The Soldiers’ War: Bearing Witness to Modern War (London: Pimlico, 1998)

Chapter 2
Preparing for war: the experience of the Cameronians

John Baynes and Cliff Pettit

The aim in this chapter is to look sequentially at the experiences of men drawn into the preparations for war in 1914 and 1939, emphasising in the second half of the chapter the similarities and differences between these two threshholds to British active service soldiering in the two World Wars of the 20th century. The study is mainly based on the recollections of those who served in The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles), a regiment no longer shown in the Army List, but one of which both authors were proud to be members in their day.

1914–15

Although a few people in Britain foresaw the tragic consequences of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the speed of events that led to the outbreak of hostilities on Tuesday 4 August took most of the nation by surprise. Once the die was cast, however, virtually the entire population enthusiastically endorsed the decision to declare war against Germany. Mobilisation of the Regular Army, the Reserves and the Territorial Force was ordered on 5 August. Within days Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, also called for volunteers to join a new army, since he realised that troops would be required in far greater numbers than could be provided by existing organisations. By 25 August the first hundred thousand men, referred to as ‘K1’, had been enlisted, so he called for a further hundred thousand. Nearly double that number came forward.

To see how these events affected the various components of a particular regiment we shall look at the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) at their home bases in Glasgow and the county of Lanarkshire, commencing with Captain R. M. S. Baynes, a Regular officer at that time at home on leave from a tour of colonial duty with the West African Frontier Force in Sierra Leone¹:

‘When war was declared I was at home in Kent and either that day or the day after I had a telegram telling me to rejoin the 1st Battalion at Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow. When I got there I found intense activity: reservists coming in and all sorts of preparations being made. Also arriving were a lot of officers – veterans of the Boer War – many of whom had just dug out their uniforms, and looked as though they had just arrived from South Africa without having time to wash or change since arrival. I can’t remember how long it was but it was two or three days after I got there, and we were really getting things going, when Kitchener made the announcement that he required a hundred thousand men, which were to be raised immediately. Robertson was commanding the battalion – always known as “Blobs” – and he sent for me and told me that he was very sorry, but as I’d been away from the battalion for some time, I must be one of the three officers who had to be sent off immediately to help with this business of raising a new army. It was a bitter disappointment, but there was nothing to be done about it. Off I went to the depot.

At the depot in Hamilton, instead of the intense activity of Maryhill we found utter confusion. Reservists had been coming in and were fitted out, and the staff were getting on with things fairly well, although the depot was extremely full. But immediately the announcement of the first hundred thousand was made, volunteers started pouring in: their tents were pitched in a sort of playing field in the middle of the barracks, and every available space was taken up by men sleeping. There was not enough preparation in the way of food and rations, and we had to send out into Hamilton and collect everything possible in the way of food. The first night things got so bad and the depot was so full that we had to close the gates and at intervals open them and then charge the people outside, thus keeping them from breaking in. All this first kind were a pretty rough lot, many of whom were unemployed, and they were only too anxious to join up and get some food and pay. After a few days I was sent off with a 2nd Lieutenant, 200 men and half a dozen or so NCOs from the depot. We were put on a train but we’d no idea where we were going.

We eventually found ourselves at Bordon in Hampshire. Nobody at Bordon knew anything about us either, but I met the garrison adjutant, whom I’d known before, and he told me that I’d better go and choose some barracks to live in. I chose Martinique barracks, which were nearest the station, and went in there with my 200 men.

Some days later another 200 men arrived and these were put into other barrack rooms, which we took over. Later came another 200, and then some officers of various sorts and kinds. I think the first officers were probably old volunteers dating back to the previous century. There were certainly two ancient majors, and then more odd people turned up. There were those who’d been on jobs in various strange places, odd Indian army people who’d been on leave, and so on. What was interesting was the sort of men who arrived with each party. The first lot that I had taken down were a pretty rough crowd who, as I said, had more or less broken into Hamilton and joined up for food and jobs. The next lot were rather better. They’d had jobs and had given them up and joined the army. Then later a superior class came down. These were all very well dressed, with a couple of them carrying suitcases, and later on came an even smarter variety. Also a lot of ex-NCOs who were most useful. One thing about it was that with all these men to select from there was no difficulty in finding somebody for any kind of job such as cooks, clerks and people who did all kind of mending such as bootmakers. I also found as mess president a man who was one of the directors of the Savoy Hotel in London.

To start with, as I said, we were more or less camping. We had absolutely nothing in the way of uniform or equipment or anything else. In spite of that we started marching quite soon, as one of the first things to do was to get the men as fit as possible. I think that broomsticks, instead of rifles, were the first equipment that we learned to drill with. Then a certain amount of uniform started to arrive. This was all old full dress uniform from every kind of unit, and you’d get a most extraordinary selection on parade. You’d see a man for instance in a rifle tunic and tartan trews, wearing a straw hat, next to somebody else in a red coat and some civilian trousers. At all events the men were clothed – in a way. The next stage was khaki, and everybody got fitted out not so very long after. There were no khaki overcoats available, and so a supply of civilian coats were sent down. This distribution was most amusing as in those days people wore very heavy overcoats, and senior NCOs, sergeant-majors and so on all took the large heavy double-breasted kind with belts. Other junior NCOs had double-breasted ones without belts, whilst the rank and file had to make do with the single-breasted ones which were not so handsome.

I can’t remember how many hours training we put in per day, but the training syllabus came down from the War Office. We had to fit in so many hours on each subject for every company every week, and I had to make out a chart of the times and places of various kinds of training to ensure that we distributed it properly, as well as the training facilities such as ranges, assault courses, parade grounds and so on. These charts were always known by the company commanders as “my Chinese puzzles”. The first great occasion was when we got a complete battalion on parade, though strangely dressed, and took them out for a route-march as a battalion. [After some confusion about its correct title the battalion was by now officially designated 9th Scottish Rifles.]

We then moved to Bramshott, and it was a very proud day when we got the whole battalion on parade, fully armed and with a certain amount of transport, and we were able to march out of the barracks at Bordon as a real unit, led by our pipers. I’d started getting pipers very early in the proceedings and one of the first was boy Gibson from Dunblane, who was 14 years old and afterwards became sergeant-major in the regiment. He was a tough lad who insisted on playing a full set of pipes, although I’d offered to buy him a smaller set, and went out on all marches. He never fell out, but very nearly burst from the amount of food and buns that were given to him at every halt by the local inhabitants. He was a most popular person and an enormous help to the battalion. I think eventually we had six pipers and they really were quite good.

It must have been either January or February 1915, certainly when there’d been a lot of snow, that the division was inspected by Kitchener. We were all drawn up along miles of road at Frensham Ponds on a bitterly cold day. Kitchener was late for some reason, so we were standing about in the snow for over an hour. A good many men were falling out or down.

All this time we were training pretty hard, and there was not much time for amusement, but we were now and again able to get up to London at weekends, where we had some very cheerful parties indeed. Of course we were all very keen to get to France. I shall never forget the shock we’d had earlier after the news of the Battle of the Marne, and then the advance from the Marne to the Aisne. We were all terrified the war would be over before we could get into it.’

Leaving the 9th, the regiment’s first-formed K1 battalion, shortly before it crossed over to France, let us return to the first days of the war and look at one of the four Territorial battalions.

On 7 August there arrived at 261 West Princes Street, Glasgow, Headquarters of the 5th Scottish Rifles (created in 1908 out of the 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers), a very tall, rather irate subaltern who some years later was to become famous as the first Director-General of the BBC. Lieutenant J. C. Reith had been working for the firm of Pearson in London as an engineer on a big dock-building project, but there had been confusion over his mobilisation orders, which had been incorrectly telegraphed to him. The muddle was eventually sorted out, and he joined his company as described in his book Wearing Spurs² published in 1966, although he had actually written the account many years earlier:

‘A Territorial battalion mobilised – On Active Service – a curious and interesting spectacle. We who had been amateurs had become professionals; what we had done in odd moments, voluntarily and in a sense unofficially, was now full-time, compulsory and very official. The authority of officer and NCO, in general the run of military law, had been observed almost on sufferance and on occasion; now they were mandatory and permanent. From being rather farcical, an officer’s job had suddenly become very serious; the play-hour had merged into life itself and turned solemn reality – all rather bewildering. Camp each year was mobilisation of a sort, but the period was limited to a fortnight, and we were not On Active Service. It was these words which made the circumstances and conditions and atmosphere radically different. Trivial faults became crimes; minor crimes became major ones. Officers commanding companies were instructed to impress upon their men the awful import of the term; to warn them of the penalties of disobedience or neglect of duty. My OC company was thoroughly in form to do so. The death sentence was frequently to be found in the rubric. “And you’re On Active Service now,” he would with portentous solemnity interpolate, and glare along the ranks. We had no doubt about it.

We were shortly “to proceed to the war station” which sounded interesting; and we were given identity discs: “Lieut J. C. W. Reith Pres 5th SR”. This, or rather what was implied, was something of a shock – the reference to one’s religious persuasion in particular; so early and so far from actual warfare to be presented with the credentials for burial and record. Moreover, but quite incidentally, Territorials were available for home defence only, and no one had said anything about foreign service, though I for one had no doubt we would go abroad. The company OC told me to wear the identity disc day and night, but that struck me as being premature. As a matter of fact it was not worn until May 1915 – and then only par cause de pous.

Where was this war station and whither had two or three of the officers and about a hundred of the men disappeared? I sought enlightenment of my OC, thinking we might be going to some vulnerable spot on the east coast; Falkirk, he told me. “Falkirk – what on earth for?” As to the others, it was secret; but he had no doubt they were “in the trenches”. I could not imagine what trenches there were in Scotland, nor why anyone should be living in them. His imagination was running away with him.

On Sunday morning, 9th, the Battalion paraded with its bands and marched down Great Western Road to church. It was an impressive performance. Every Friday night in pre-war drill seasons we had emerged from the seclusion of our training-ground and marched along the two miles of this spacious boulevard to a formal dismissal at Charing Cross. I never cared for this operation for, as senior subaltern of No 1, I had to walk beside the little company OC. The Territorials were always an object of amusement to a section of the community, and ribald youth along the route made the most of the sight of a very tall man in uniform marching by the side of a very little man. But it was different now. We had been playing at soldiers before; now we were soldiers. Status and potentialities recognised.’

Reith spent ten days at Falkirk before being detached with 60 men to guard two vulnerable points on the railway line south from Perth in the region of Larbert. For four happy weeks he ran his detachment in his own way with no interference from any senior officer. Then came the time to rejoin the battalion, when, soon after 20 September, the main body moved to Larbert as well:

‘Next morning, with a heavy heart, I set out to attend an ordinary battalion parade which was to be followed by a route march. A route march! I was met by an orderly room messenger. He handed me a note from the Adjutant instructing me to take over command of Transport. Gosh, what a joy this was; the sun shone in an unclouded sky.

The Transport Officer was a somebody; an object of mystification, envy and even respect among his brother officers. He was not, as they, subject to parades and orderly duties. He was a power in the land; one with whom it was expedient to be on friendly terms; he could perform or withhold all sorts of services… Transport Officer. Magnificent – like the gold star.

The major issues of war are in the hands of God, politicians and the general staff. The regimental officer, realising his helplessness, is not greatly concerned about them. Apart from discharging to the best of his ability the particular little task allotted to him he is not exercised with schemes for the rout of the enemy. Beyond satisfying himself that there is an appropriate depth of sand or earth on his dugout roof, and choosing when available a cellar instead of an attic (or at any rate a room before reaching which a shell would have to pass through at least one other) the chances of his own survival and the general progress of the campaign do not figure much in his mind. He has too much else to do, and in the doing of them the Transport Officer is often of determining importance. A horse and cart at the right moment, or a few cubic feet of space in a cart, may make all the difference to his outlook on life. They may make war tolerable and perhaps, for the time being, enjoyable. A mighty and beneficent power to wield. Transport Officer 5th SR.’

For nearly all the men in the various units of the regiment, the first months of the war involved making many adjustments to military life. This applied to the Regular 1st Battalion, (always known as the Cameronians while the others were called the Scottish Rifles) because it was made up largely of reservists. With the 2nd being always kept up to strength at its overseas station in Malta, the 1st was usually short of men, especially during the summer trooping season when it sent out drafts of newly trained soldiers to its linked battalion. Thus in August 1914 it was ready to absorb all the reservists that came back to the colours, some of whom had been firmly settled in civilian life for many years. Although the men in the TF had a little military experience, their training, in Reith’s words, had been ‘done in odd moments and in a sense unofficially’. Naturally the New Army volunteers had the most adjusting to do, but the Regular reservists and TF men had their share of adapting, or readapting, themselves to military routine as well.

The problem of adjustment can be discussed under two general headings: physical demands and discipline. Under the first come general fitness, especially condition of feet; hygiene and medical matters; and food and drink. Under the second, obedience to orders and military law; the acceptance of a strict hierarchy of ranks; and loss of freedom.

Apart from the occasional long journey by train, and the rare trip in a bus or lorry, the infantryman of 1914 travelled everywhere on his feet, the condition of which was more than a matter of purely individual concern. During the retreat from Mons, which came so soon after the start of the war, the Regular reservists of the Cameronians and the other battalions of the British Expeditionary Force became fully aware of their boots not having been well worn in and their unhardened feet, as well as shoulders unused to carrying heavy packs and other accoutrements. However unpopular, long periods of foot drill, physical exercises and route marching were a major part of preparations for joining the army in France.

As described by R. M. S. Baynes, the volunteers who rushed to join the New Army were a cross-section of the population, ranging from well-educated potential officers to the unemployed only ‘too anxious to join up and get some food and pay’. While members of the former group were normally healthy and kept themselves clean, many of the unfortunate ones at the other end of the scale were underdeveloped and had only rudimentary ideas about hygiene. Medical inspections, foot and skin inspections, inoculations, compulsory showers and other measures were applied to all, being resented by the various groups for different reasons, but accepted as an inevitable part of army life. As reaction to these basic health matters varied according to background, so did the views on army rations. Whether considered dull and inadequate by the better-off, or almost luxurious in comparison to the meagre diet of many of the poor, the basic ration scale was adequate to maintain stamina and fitness among men living unusually strenuous lives, and was more generous than most of the British population was used to.

Turning to the subject of military discipline, the first point to make is that it came as much less of a shock to most of the 1914 volunteers than it might to their few descendants in the Army almost 90 years later. Not only was British society more rigidly stratified than it is today, but at every level people holding any form of authority were expected to impose it on those below them with rigour, and in general were respected for doing so. It should be remembered that domestic servants, farm labourers and shop-workers constituted between them the major part of the working population of Britain; ‘…her farms employed more labourers than either business or her textile factories; and more men and women were engaged in paid domestic service than in all the metallurgical industries – from pin-making to ship-building – put together.’³ In such employments hours were long and work hard, with graded levels from owner down to youngest farm-boy or kitchen-maid similar to the military hierarchy.

There were, however, places where hierarchy was not so readily understood. In those areas where the mines and heavy industry were the main employers, attitudes were different. In Glasgow and the surrounding smoke-grimed towns there were hard-faced mine and shipyard owners, with rough foremen to control the workforce, but their power was not so easily accepted. Scottish egalitarianism, supported by increasingly active trades unions, did not produce a type of man to take readily to being chased round a barrack-square. In The First Hundred Thousand ‘K1’, a novel that was a best-seller in the war and long after, the author Ian Hay describes the reactions to military life of a Jock in the fictitious Bruce & Wallace Highlanders. Hay was in fact a captain in the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders in 1914, commanding New Army men largely recruited from Glasgow and industrial Clydeside, and very similar to Scottish Riflemen.

‘There are other rifts within the military lute. At home we are persons of some consequence, with very definite notions about the dignity of labour. We have employers who tremble at our frown; we have Trades Union officials who are at constant pains to impress upon us our own omnipotence in the industrial world in which we live. We have at our beck and call a Radical MP who, in return for our vote and suffrage, informs us that we are the backbone of the nation, and that we must on no account permit ourselves to be trampled upon by effete and tyrannical upper classes. Finally, we are Scotsmen, with all a Scotsman’s curious reserve and contempt for social airs and graces.

But in the Army we appear to be nobody. We are expected to stand stiffly at attention when addressed by an officer; even to call him “sir” – an honour to which our previous employer has been a stranger. At home, if we happened to meet the head of the firm in the street, and none of our colleagues was looking, we touched a cap, furtively. Now, we have no option in the matter. We are expected to degrade ourselves by meaningless and humiliating gestures. The NCOs are almost as bad. If you answer a sergeant as you would a foreman, you are impertinent; if you argue with him, as all good Scotsmen must, you are insubordinate; if you endeavour to drive a collective bargain with him, you are mutinous; and you are reminded that upon active service mutiny is punishable by death. It is all very unusual and upsetting.

You may not spit; neither may you smoke a cigarette in the ranks, nor keep the residue thereof behind your ear. You may not take beer to bed with you. You may not postpone your shave till Saturday: you must shave every day. You must keep your buttons, accoutrements, and rifle speckless, and have your hair cut in a style which is not becoming to your particular type of beauty. Even your feet are not your own. Every Sunday morning a young officer, whose leave has been specially stopped for the purpose, comes round the barrack-rooms after church and inspects your extremities, revelling in blackened nails and gloating over hammer-toes. For all practical purposes, decides Private Mucklewame, “you might as well be in Siberia”.’⁴

1939–40

Any comparison of the respective attitudes of those joining the forces at the outbreak of the Second World War with the rush to enlist that occurred in 1914 must be considered in conjunction with the distinctive 1939 circumstance. Unlike 1914, where an isolated, unexpected event triggered the outbreak of hostilities, there had been an air of inevitability about war with the Axis powers. It profoundly influenced the population. For the many who could recall the grim reality of the earlier conflict, there could only be apprehension. This was confirmed by the introduction of conscription in May 1939 for what was intended to be six months’ service of men aged 20, and the doubling in size of the Territorial Army. Thus when a declaration of war was made in September 1939, most felt that only force would defeat Hitler’s tyranny and that this was essential for personal and national survival. There was no headlong dash to join up, although there were many volunteers. Recruiting was much more orderly than in 1914. This was only in relative terms, as the Depots struggled to cope with the recall of reservists, the conscripts already being trained, the established and newly formed Territorial units, in addition to the volunteers.

In many ways the recruit of the 1939–40 era faced less of a culture shock initiation into the disciplines of service life. Most who were conscripts, either of the May 1939 group or immediately after the outbreak of hostilities, had a much better preparation than their 1914 predecessors. Virtually all had parents or relatives who had served in that conflict. While many of this generation refused to recount tales of their time in the trenches – the memory often painful to recall – talk about service life in general was less difficult. The cinema, radio and improvement in literacy had given a much clearer picture of what to expect, as well as an indication of the true nature of Nazism and the consequences for those who failed to stand against it. Of his first impressions, an anonymous reservist wrote:

‘On 13th July, 30 men aged 20 years and of various trades and creeds, were formed into the Ramillies Platoon of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). Most of these men had done very little physical training or swimming, and knew nothing of guns. Formerly they lived in quiet homes, each with a room to himself or shared with a brother. Now all this is altered. “The old order changeth yielding place to new.” A fine spirit of camaraderie prevails, and we eat and sleep together, each man willing to help and share with his neighbour.

In our physical training class and at the swimming bath our bodies are being developed. When we entered this life we were given a full kit, and some time was spent in cleaning our equipment, which was inspected on 29th July. If the cauldron of war should boil over, our country wants us to be able to protect ourselves against the atrocities of modern warfare, and so we have gas lectures in order to teach us to recognise the various gases, persistent and non-persistent, and how to treat our respirators properly. However, war may never come, and what then? Are the men of Ramillies Platoon just wasting six months of their lives? Certainly not, for habits of neatness and tidiness are being sown in the minds of these 30 men of this platoon, and what gives greater happiness than a disciplined life? So ends the first fortnight in the life of the first Militiamen of Ramillies Platoon.’

This quotation is part of an article that was printed in the Regimental Journal⁵, and reasonably could be suspected of special pleading. However, it is unlikely that the writer would have sounded so euphoric, knowing the probability of his piece being read by his comrades, if it did not give a fair reflection of their general attitude. There were many similarities in the experiences of recruits joining the army at the beginning of both conflicts. The induction courses still operated along the same lines. Indeed, it is difficult to see where there could be much difference, as it is a basic necessity of any military arm to establish its own principles grounded on tradition, and the requirement of the acceptance and carrying out of orders.

While the expansion of the armed forces was carried out in a much more structured manner – the chaos created by the too rapid formation of Kitchener’s Army in 1914 being avoided – the absence of conscription until just before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 resulted in a similar effect. Large groups of recruits had to be taught from scratch the rudiments of living collectively, on a long-term basis, and the peculiar disciplines of a military existence. It was acknowledged that this could not be accomplished overnight. Sensibly, it was achieved by the establishment of Infantry Training Units at Regimental Depots. These, in effect, were an extension of the Training Companies in being in 1919.

This situation was endemic to all arms of the service. Frederick Hindmarsh⁶, a civil servant and Royal Artillery trainee in 1940, said that his fellow recruits had a sober approach to the whole thing, although the lack of modern equipment produced an attitude of cynicism among his fellow conscripts. The standard of instruction was at times abysmal:

‘Regular rankers were promoted and flung in at the deep end. Many had had no proper education. They knew nothing of teaching methods, and often couldn’t understand the training manuals. So they learned everything by heart and repeated the words verbatim to the trainees – a question would throw them completely, and they simply repeated the last part of the lesson – relevant or not! Most conscripts were more intelligent than the instructors, and simply scoffed at the whole thing. I recall being given a talk on the Indian Mutiny in the wind and driving rain at the entrance to a shed which the noise of artificers at work made it almost impossible to hear, even if we had been interested. It was only two years into the war that things really began to improve.’

A comparison of the Infantry Training Manual issued on 10 August 1914 (‘IT 1914’) with that issued on 31 August 1937 shows some interesting variations that indicate that there was a clear acknowledgement of the need for a complete rewrite of IT 1914. The latter concluded its preface with a draconian warning on the authority of the War Office, that ‘…any enunciation by officers responsible for training of principles other than those contained in this manual, or any practice of methods not based on those principles is forbidden…’

By 1937 the approach had changed, with most rhetoric and exhortation removed. The preface to IT 1937 recognised that as a result of reorganisation, the manual reflected a period of transition:

‘The new weapons and vehicles with which the infantry is to be armed and equipped, have either not yet been issued to the troops, or have been provided on a limited scale. There has therefore been little opportunity for studying the methods of training in peace, and leading in war, that may be necessitated by reorganisation, mechanisation and re-armament…’

The object of training is baldly stated:

‘Above all he must be highly disciplined, for by discipline alone can morale be maintained; it is the bedrock of all training. It is the ingrained habit of cheerful and unquestioning obedience that controls and directs the fighting spirit and is the back-bone of a unit in a moment of crisis.’

IT 1914 provided for a course of 26 weeks, with about one-third devoted to squad and ceremonial drill, and the same for physical training. In IT 1937 there is a similar division in a more intense course of 18 weeks, about one-fifth of which, significantly, is to be devoted to educational training, a subject not part of IT 1914.

The state of training of the Territorials needed urgent attention. Charles Michie⁷, a junior bank official, had joined the London Scottish, a Territorial unit, as a private soldier just after his 20th birthday in 1936:

‘Training took place in the drill hall at Buckingham Gate, or at Easter and Whitsun Camps with a Highland battalion at Aldershot or at Dover Castle, or at annual camp. The weekend training taught me nothing except possibly to be a smarter soldier. Annual camp was better but our automatic weapons were mock-ups. In 1937 we did our annual march in Scotland: Tain, Dingwall, Inverness. This did help for later active service as we learned to march all day with sore feet! With the increase in size of the Territorials, I suddenly shot from private to Lance-Sergeant in a matter of months.’

At the antiquated Depot at Hamilton in Lanarkshire, it seemed that little had changed since 1914. While all entrants were kitted out with uniform and a rifle (the SMLE, but with no ammunition), there was a desperate shortage of equipment and accommodation. However, there were additional considerations to be taken into account. Bernard Kilpatrick⁸, a railway clerk of Motherwell, was conscripted and joined the Regiment at Hamilton Barracks in March 1940:

‘Strict blackout restrictions were in force. Once in the middle of the night there was an air-raid alarm. The drill was for us to parade on the nearby square. It was forbidden to turn on the room lights in case they shone out when we opened the door to double to the muster point. Once mustered, we then had to move, again at the double. To the racecourse, to stand about until the all clear. The result was a mad scramble in the darkness of the hut for clothing as we dashed for the door. I remember one rather disorganised Jock ending up at muster point clad in nothing but his underpants.’

Kilpatrick is clear about the lack of any proper equipment other than the rifle for training purposes:

‘A mortar platoon was formed, but there were no Universal Carriers, the prescribed basic transport for the men, weapons and ammunition. All that the platoon got to make it mobile was an issue of sit-up-and-beg bikes when the men paraded one morning. When the Platoon Sergeant gave the order “Prepare to mount”, everyone had to put his left foot on the pedal. On the command “Mount”, the Jocks did so. Some had forgotten to push their bikes forward at the same time, and promptly fell off the other side into the path of those who had. The result was a chaotic tangle of bodies and bikes all over the square. Our basic training, the NCOs and officers, I thought, were good. We all were keen enough to learn the principles of soldiering. After Dunkirk a “Duty Platoon” had to be available on constant standby in case of invasion. It had to remain fully dressed, with equipment to hand at all times. Having to sleep wearing our battledress and boots gave the feeling of being really involved in the great events taking place further south. We made route marches of up to ten miles, often being offered food by the locals – a great boost to making us feel that we were appreciated and serving a useful purpose.’

The pressure on accommodation in the barracks was such that every available space was utilised. Bob Baxter⁹, a clerk, reported to Hamilton in January 1940 as a conscript, having had no previous experience of army life:

‘We were billeted in the stables, and we all slept on the concrete floor on palliasses, hessian bags stuffed with straw. While the horses had been moved, the rats which often are their bedfellows remained. We had to accept at night they would crawl over our bedding, and sometimes over our faces. I had been an office clerk before call-up, and the primitive conditions were quite a shock for many of us whose life previously had been comparatively sheltered, even though we knew what to expect. We were taught the use of the Bren Gun on a wooden model. Being new to military life, we tended to accept everything we were told by the regulars as “gospel”. It was only after a few weeks service that we began to realise that some of the very junior NCOs, old sweats who had received instant promotion after the rapid expansion of the forces, perhaps were not the ideal instructors. Even the over-officious Acting Unpaid Lance-Corporal was obeyed without question, as we soon learned that rank was all-important. I joined the Motor Transport Section. This consisted of a variety of military vehicles supplemented by an assortment of commandeered civilian cars, vans and lorries. Nevertheless, the usual moans of the private soldier apart, it was a sound introduction to military discipline and army life but nothing else.’

Rifleman W. W. Gallacher¹⁰, a 1940 conscript, was astounded at the crudeness of some of the Regulars and reservists: ‘…they even used to spit in their tea to make sure no one would drink it while they queued for the next course, probably a legacy of service abroad in stations where water was in short supply.’

Thomas Laing¹¹ was a shop assistant in Edinburgh when conscripted in 1939. When asked on enlistment if he had any preference for a particular arm of the service, he explained that he was a musician and interested in organising entertainments. The response was immediate: ‘…it’s the infantry for you!’ He was posted to a training unit of the Cameronians in a hutted camp at East Kilbride, having had no previous military experience:

‘We were all conscripts, and not allowed out of camp for the first three weeks, until we had acquired a semblance of soldierly appearance. Apart from the few malcontents which could be found in any branch of the forces, all of us realised we were there “for the duration”, so there was nothing for it but to make the best of it. Having had to wait some time between enlistment and call-up gave us some time to prepare mentally for the abrupt change in our circumstances. I was able to escape the dreaded Church Parade by being detailed as an organist, and also to organise entertainments for the unit. I cannot recall that there were any complaints about the standard of catering, but some of our billets were pretty primitive to say the least, but we all mucked in and an excellent team spirit developed. While we were prepared to accept orders from our own officers, there was always objection taken to anyone not of our Regiment trying to tell us what to do. We had a strong sense of being part of the Scottish military tradition – I think even the Englishmen who joined us felt this, and adopted the same unwillingness to be messed about, especially by anyone we didn’t respect.’

This was not always the case. The policy adopted in 1916 during the First World War of restricting the number of conscript postings to local regiments was continued – in order to avoid a particular area being severely affected in the event of that unit suffering heavy casualties. It was not a universal success. A Rifleman¹², who wishes to remain anonymous, joined at Hamilton in early 1940 to be squadded with several thoroughly disaffected East Londoners bemused by their alien surroundings, and intent only on returning to London and their former way of life in the criminal society of the city’s East End:

‘On our first leave, the Barracks shut down all training, and a special train was laid on to Glasgow to catch onward connections. The train had barely left the station when the Londoners changed into civilian clothes, threw their uniforms out of the window and produced false identification cards. I never saw them again…’

Unlike 1914 there was no immediate award of commissioned rank to men thought to be of the right social standing and background. Initially officers were selected mainly from the ranks of the existing Territorial battalions of the Army. However, in the Officer Cadet Training Corps a requirement of membership was the giving of an undertaking in the event of war to join HM Forces and go forward to commissioned rank. The potentiality of immediate commissioning occurred in September 1939 to David Liddell¹³, a private in the only infantry battalion of The Honourable Artillery Company, a prestigious London Territorial regiment. He was a junior broker with Lloyd’s, joining his battalion when it was mobilised. The HAC, in effect, was an Officer Cadet Unit, and membership then virtually guaranteed an offer of a commission after mobilisation, the timing of the offer being dependent on length of service as a Territorial.

After a two-month crash course at Bulford in December 1939, I was awarded a commission. I was required to express a preference for a regimental posting. A friend of the family, Major Storey, MC, a Cameronian of many years standing whom I greatly respected, had urged me to apply to his regiment, and although I had no previous connection with it, I was delighted when accepted – so much so, that I was able to persuade three other friends, newly commissioned from HAC, to do so, and we all arrived at Hamilton Barracks at the turn of the year.’

The need to produce cadres of competent junior NCOs was quickly grasped.

‘Training of new recruits was a priority. Soon after my arrival, still as a 2nd Lieutenant, I was given command of a platoon created to train potential NCOs. At the conclusion of each course, my duty was to submit a report to Battalion HQ on the potential of each man. The quality of the Riflemen selected was uniformly high, and many of them joined the 12th Battalion, which was in the course of being made up to strength. I was privileged to be posted to that unit later in 1940, and was pleased to find that those men who had undergone this training were making their mark already as junior NCOs.’

Malcolm McNeil¹⁴, formerly a member of Glasgow University OTC, who joined the Cameronians as a rifleman direct from taking a law degree, said of the four-month course that was to become the norm for Infantry OCTUs throughout the war:

‘The standard of education set and the efficiency of instruction were pretty so-so. I don’t think I learned anything more than I had done at OTC, but the difference was the 24-hour seven-day-a-week exercise and practice, and making soldiering a way of life… The proper training of the Home Forces only began seriously in 1942, when the influence of Alexander, Montgomery, and the GOC Home Forces began to apply to intelligent training – the setting up of Battle Schools, and the concentration on technical skills. Until then we were at sixes and sevens, and from what I saw of it, the 51st (Highland) Division was as poorly trained as we of the 52nd (Lowland) Division when they were sent out to Africa – where they had to learn pretty PDQ…’

Edward Scott¹⁵, a Cheshire man with no Cameronian connections, had this to record:

‘On the outbreak of war in September 1939 I volunteered for service in the army and was formally enlisted. I had undertaken to enlist as a member of the Officer Cadet Reserve, which I had joined on leaving the School OTC with Certificate “A”. I was aware on enlistment that I would have to serve some six months in the ranks before being considered for a commission…’

While awaiting joining instructions he continued his legal studies. On the formation of the Local Defence Volunteers (afterwards the Home Guard) as a private, he joined the local unit. His opinion of its possible effectiveness, despite the undoubted enthusiasm of its members, most of whom were between 45 and 60 years or in reserved occupations, was somewhat circumspect:

‘We were issued with a .303 rifle and ten rounds of ammunition with which to repel the German paratroops… Eventually to my surprise I received orders to report to the Infantry Training Centre of the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) at Hamilton Barracks. I duly reported there on 14 November 1940, and found myself as a rifleman, in hutted accommodation in the company of some 30 young men from Lanarkshire and Glasgow, little of whose conversation I would at first understand. My comrades in arms were good-hearted and loyal to the group. They seemed to have readily, if resignedly, accepted the need to serve, accepted the firm but fair discipline, and showed keenness to learn. Regimental traditions and standards were soon imposed. The training, particularly in weapons, was of a high standard.

My Company Commander was Capt G. R. S. Drought. He was killed in action in Sicily in 1943. He had been an Army Boxing Champion, and it became clear to me that if I wanted a commission I had better enter the boxing ring. I did so one bitterly cold November night, suffering from a head cold and confronted by one Corporal Telfer, who seemed much bigger than me. He struck me on the nose in the first round, and I was covered in blood, but survived to be beaten on points over the three rounds…’

This exploit had evidently impressed the Company Commander, who put Scott forward for an interview with the Commanding Officer, as a result of which he was recommended for a commission. Scott attended 168 OCTU at Droitwich, then at Morecambe.

‘At the conclusion of the four-months OCTU course, which did not impress me, cadets had the opportunity to choose three Regiments in order of preference. The time spent at Hamilton had been an excellent introduction to basic full-time soldiering, and I had no hesitation in selecting the Cameronians as my first choice, being thankful to gain acceptance.’

There was then no pre-OCTU course lasting six weeks, during which those unlikely to make the grade, for whatever reason, were weeded out. This did not become part of officer training until later in the war. Both in training and quality of instruction, in the early stages of OCTUs’ existence it seems that they left a lot to be desired. Most who had been members of their university or school Officer Training Corps or Army Cadet Force felt that they had learned little new from the course. Standards did improve later as instructor cadres began to be filled with battle-experienced officers and NCOs.

Michie, by this time commissioned (in March 1940) and, like McNeil, a subaltern in the 6th Battalion The Cameronians, was very much of the same opinion:

‘Early in 1940 I was sent on a short Junior Leader’s Course at Esdaile, Kilgraston Road, Edinburgh, where an instructor read us a book called Infantry Section Leading. This excellent publication was issued to London Scottish NCOs in the summer of 1939, and I used to study it in the London Tube on my way to work – all the instructor did was to read from it… I could have taught him!’

Both Michie and McNeil served with the Battalion during its short stay in France in 1940. Of this period, Michie recalled:

‘The platoon anti-tank weapon was the Boyes Anti-Tank Rifle, which could hardly open a tin of sardines. The rifleman in charge had more than likely come with me a week earlier as one of the 275 other ranks who joined the 6th. He had to confess that he had never fired the weapon, and in fact didn’t know how to handle it.’

MacNeil remembered:

‘I’d had very good instruction on rifle, pistol, Bren Gun, 2-inch Mortar. Tommy Guns were issued in France in June 1940 – without even an instruction book. We relied on memories of US gangster films to get it working, per Edward G. Robinson.’

While the experience of recruits in 1939 was broadly similar to that of their predecessors in 1914, their instruction was different. They were more cynical about the nation’s leaders, and less inspired by calls on their patriotism to rally them to the colours. The war was seen as a necessary evil to combat Nazi Germany’s arrogance and drive for domination, but less of a crusade than it had appeared to many of those who rushed to enlist in 1914. Once part of an army unit, they settled down in much the same way as their fathers had 25 years earlier, accepting the trials and tribulations of wartime with as good a grace as possible.

Notes on contributors

Lieutenant-Colonel Sir John Baynes Bt., Independent Military Historian, Llanfyllin, UK.

Sir John Baynes served in the British Regular Army with the Cameronians (Scottish) Rifles and the Queen’s Own Highlanders. He has written numerous military biographies and related books and is best known for his outstanding work, Morale: A Study of Men and Courage. The Second Scottish Rifles at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (1967).

Cliff Pettit, Independent Historian and Author, Alnwick UK.

Cliff Pettit is a retired solicitor who served as an infantry platoon commander in North West Europe in the later stages of the Second World War. He has an extensive knowledge of the First and Second World War battlefields of Western Europe. He has presented, advised and assisted in television documentaries on Gallipoli, the Somme and Third Ypres.

Recommended reading

Milligan, Spike, Hitler: My Part in His Downfall (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1971). A humorous but nevertheless realistic account of barrack room life and the attitudes of conscript recruits.

Whiting, Charles, Poor Bloody Infantry, Chapters 1 and 2 (London: Guild Publishing, 1987)

Chapter 3
Waging the undersea war: a British perspective

Jeff Tall

‘It is essential to keep the standard high – nothing can be neglected – it is not a kindness to overlook slackness or mistakes, it is really great cruelty to do so – cruelty to wives and relatives of the man you let off and his shipmates and to yourself. There is no margin for mistakes in submarines; you are either alive or dead’¹ These words, spoken by Admiral Sir Max Horton when Flag Officer Submarines in 1941 to all submarine officers and men in Malta, carry a universal truth for all mariners, not just submariners. To cover the whole breadth of wartime maritime experience in the context of Horton’s exhortation would fill several volumes; however, even the most gnarled sea-dog would probably concede that examination of the British submariner’s story during the World Wars encapsulates his experience sufficiently well to justify this chapter’s narrow focus on the craft and its inhabitants.

Of all the British fighting arms of the two World Wars, the greatest similarities are to be found in the Royal Navy Submarine Service. The platform itself had developed little in the inter-war years and, whatever improvements had been made, the tradition in the Royal Navy of putting the requirements for equipment above the comfort of the crew, prevailed. True, the submarine had become larger, which meant that it now had more torpedo tubes and greater reload capacity; the gun had a longer range and a bigger arsenal; its endurance had been enhanced through more powerful engines and higher fuel storage capacity; communications were now an integral part of submarine warfare; and a ranging form of ASDIC for mine detection had been added to its tactical capability. But all these enhancements called for a higher manning requirement, so there was no relief on the demands for internal space.

Thus, for the men, little had changed. Living conditions were cramped and sanitary arrangements were crude. Minor compensations were the fact that everyone smelled the same, and the daily tot of rum for the sailors (issued on surfacing) was served neat rather than watered down as ‘grog’. Even though by the start of the Second World War the majority of submarines were fitted with Escape Towers and the Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus (DSEA), ‘the war orders were that all escape and other hatches, except the conning-tower hatch, were not only to be clipped internally but also secured by a steel bar externally to prevent a hatch jumping its clips due to depth-charging.’² Thus the chances of escape once sunk were remote in the extreme.

The two areas of specialist operator growth witnessed between the two wars lay in communications and underwater listening. In the First World War, because of the lack of experience in Wireless Telegraphy (W/T) in the Submarine Service, it was necessary to call for volunteers from the ranks of Boy Telegraphists as they left training in HMS Vernon. There were 16 recruited throughout the war, the youngest of whom was 16½, and of these nine perished. There was a single Hydrophone Listener in the later submarines of the era. In the Second World War the W/T staff had grown to four in number, and the Higher Detection (HD) rating occasionally had an assistant, although a Radio Operator was often to be found on the ASDIC set.

In addition the submarines’ modus operandi had changed little. Although they could travel further and stay on patrol longer, they were still weapons of position in that they relied on their targets to come to them, unless the playing field was levelled by mutual physical constraints of restricted waters; they were required in large numbers to be effective; they still relied on the cover of darkness to allow them to charge their batteries, the life blood of the submarine, and conduct their transits; the sextant and astro-navigation still told them where they were (some of the time); the torpedo was still essentially a straight-runner, whose reliability was sometimes in doubt; and the commanding officers still attacked by eye. In the First World War, in addition to being a torpedo boat, the submarine was used as a minelayer, anti-submarine patroller, shore bombardier and, on one famous occasion, a platform from which to launch a ‘special forces’ operation (HMS E11 and a Turkish viaduct). In the Second World War they were used as gun-boats, minelayers, troop-carriers, store-carriers, tankers, navigation beacons to guide surface vessels, rescue stations to pick up downed pilots, reconnaissance units, survey ships, convoy escorts, anti-submarine vessels, power stations to supply electricity ashore, and for landing and taking off agents on enemy soil.

But above all else their primary role was to disrupt enemy supplies by sinking their shipping; they were weapons of attrition. However, unlike the Germans in the two World Wars and the Americans in the Second, who did most of their attacking on the surface at night in the open sea, preying on large convoys and relying upon their low profiles to avoid early detection, in both wars the British had to seek out their targets in heavily defended waters, much of it shallow and richly populated by mines. As a result they conducted most of their attacks submerged by day, or, if circumstances were favourable, by a brief visit to the surface to use the gun. It was constantly dangerous, and the virtually guaranteed outcome of an attack was a ‘bollocking’ either from escorting anti-submarine (A/S) vessels or aircraft. Commander Ben Bryant, who commanded HMS Sealion and Safari between 1939 and 1943, described the submarine as ‘expendable’³, and perhaps the final telling factor of similarity lies in comparison of loss rates for the World Wars. In human terms, the number of men lost was roughly equivalent to the number serving at the start of the conflict (First World War 1,200/1,418, Second World War 3,200/3,383), and in hull terms, losses were approximately 35 per cent of the total that saw active service (First 57, Second 74).

So lightning did indeed strike twice on a myriad of occasions in British submarines, but how and why, and what could possibly induce a young man to join a life redolent of sardines in a can and with a high chance of ending up just as dead?

Rudyard Kipling attempted to define the submariner in 1916 when he sought to find the origin of the sobriquet that had become attached to the service, still only in its 15th year of existence:

‘No one knows how the title “The Trade” came to be applied to the Submarine Service. Some say the cruisers invented it because they pretend that submarine officers look like unwashed chauffeurs… others think it sprang forth by itself, which means that it was coined by the lower deck, where they always have a proper name for things. Whatever the truth, the submarine service is now “the trade”; and if you ask them why, they will answer, “What else can you call it? The Trade’s “the Trade” of course!’⁴

A very similar sentiment was expressed by another observer many years later. Following his analysis of the circumstance of every British submarine loss, A. S. Evans concluded that ‘the small dank and foul-smelling interior [of a submarine] crammed with noisy and temperamental machinery, was no place for the faint-hearted; it took first-class men to withstand the unsavoury conditions and to perform skilled work with efficiency and with at least a modicum of cheerfulness.’⁵ So, from the very beginning submariners had to be submarine ‘types’.

In short, there was a submarine ‘type’ who wanted to belong to a ‘trade’, but this is still far too nebulous to lead to an understanding of why men sought to sign up. Perhaps a ready source of recruitment, consistent with the prevailing view that submariners were ‘pirates’, would have been the gaols, as suggested by Lieutenant Commander Williams-Freeman of HMS H9 in 1915 when he wrote, ‘I cannot conceive why they hang a man, when the foulest crime to be seen would be punished two-fold if they gave him life, and put him in submarines!’⁶

A better clue is provided by Captain W. R. Fell, a veteran of the Great War submarine operations and mentor of Charioteers (human torpedomen) and X-craft (miniature submarines) during the Second World War, when he stated:

‘To serve in submarines is to become a member of the strongest, most loyal union of men that exists. During the First War and the 21 years of peace that followed, the Submarine Branch was an integral part of the Royal Navy, subject to its discipline and obeying its laws. But it was still a “private navy”, inordinately proud of its tradition, jealous of its privileges, and, if slightly inclined to be piratical, the most enthusiastic, loyal and happy branch of the Service.

Scores of people ask, “Why did men join submarines and how could they stick in them?” There are many answers to that question. For adventure and fun at the outset; then because of the intense interest, and because of the variety of tasks that must be at one’s fingertips. The submariner must be a navigator, an electrician, a torpedoman, a gunnery type, and even a bit of a plumber. He must know men and get on with them, he must use initiative and tact and learn to enjoy hard living. He must accept responsibility when young, and not misuse it. There is every reason why he should join and delight in joining submarines, but the greatest joy of all is the companionship, unity and feeling that he is one of a team.’⁷

It was not only the officers who felt the strength of the team. Telegraphist William Halter of HMS D4 recounts his experience in 1914:

‘It was an exclusive service because nobody but a submarine rating was allowed in a submarine. We got more pay and a very stiff medical examination. Your character had to be perfect to get in and we were regarded as something a bit special. We went to [HMS] Dolphin for training, messed in the hulk and slept in the Fort [Blockhouse]. Discipline was quite comfortable and after instruction you could lie in the sun on the ramparts; a very different navy altogether. When we got in the boats we were so near the officers… every one was close to each other. No red tape, no falling in and out.’⁸

Certainly the experience of Lieutenant Leslie Ashmore bears out Fell’s words concerning adventure. He relates: ‘I had ambitions to get into some branch of the service that would give more scope to a junior officer. Watchkeeping and coaling were eating into my soul.’ He found himself visiting the shipbuilding firm of Vickers Ltd in Barrow, Britain’s principal builders of submarines and:

‘…the sight of so many of these sleek little craft in various stages of construction seemed to suggest a solution to my yearnings. It was therefore not entirely by chance that I struck an acquaintance ashore with two officers, considerably my seniors, whom I knew from their conversation were submariners standing by HMS E18, which was nearing completion. The attraction of their mysterious trade for me must have been very obvious and I was soon being questioned by the senior of the two, Lieutenant Commander Halahan, captain designate of E18, as to what I was doing and whether I would like to transfer to submarines.

Evidently Halahan thought me likely material, for next time he visited the Admiralty, he pulled various strings with the result that I received orders to join the Submarine Depot ship HMS Bonaventure at Newcastle. In those days, entry into the submarine service was as simple as that. There were no organised training classes and the young enthusiast learnt the rudiments of his trade by going to sea as a “makee-learn” in an active service boat.’⁹

Although training became more formal as time progressed, nevertheless learning on one’s feet continued as a basic principle. The 1940 experience of Lieutenant Phil Durham, though not typical, nevertheless underlines the principle. As a midshipman Durham had seen active service in a battleship, an anti-submarine trawler (of which he was second-in-command), a ‘County’ Class cruiser, a destroyer and a battlecruiser, and had earned a Mention in Dispatches, yet his goal remained service in submarines. While awaiting training class, he filled his time by joining the training submarine HMS L26, and spending a fortnight of ‘daily seagoing, diving, gunnery and torpedo practice’, after which he ‘had made drawings of air and electrical systems and was able to trim and handle L26 dived’. His enthusiasm made sense of the ‘bewildering mass of pipes, gauges, dials, levers, switches, hand wheels, air bottles, electrical control boxes for rudder, fore and after planes, and centrally, the aluminium ladder leading to the conning tower and the outside world.’ Like Ashmore his talent was also spotted by a senior officer, in this case the revered Commander Jackie Slaughter, who sent him off to join the recently captured German U570 (HMS Graph) with a warning to the Commanding Officer of Durham’s lack of experience, but suggesting that since he had no knowledge of how a modern British submarine was handled, he had ‘nothing to unlearn in finding out how a U-boat worked.’¹⁰

It was not until the trainee submariner got to sea that the real test of character began. Ashmore described conditions in the ‘C’ Class in 1915 as:

‘…primitive in the extreme. There was one bunk for the Captain, but all the others had to sleep on the deck, there being no room to sling hammocks. When diving, the atmosphere quickly became foul, fumes from the petrol engine adding their quota to the normally fetid air… Sanitary arrangements consisted simply of a bucket passed up through the conning tower on surfacing. The periscope was raised and lowered by hand winch. By the time we had been dived for some 15 or 16 hours it was as much as one could do to operate it.’¹¹

He also declared that ‘during these early patrols I got to know the characters and temperaments of my fellow officers and of the ship’s company in a way and a speed only possible in the cramped space, enforced intimacy, and shared responsibility of a submarine.’¹²

His sentiments concerning the atmosphere were echoed by ‘Stoutfellow’ in the ship’s magazine of HMS Oxley of Second World War vintage:

‘One soon gets used to the smell of feet

Of the bath drain blown on the bathroom wall

Of mildewed socks and of putrid meat

One gets to know and like them all

We get so we hardly notice

The smell of fuel and oil

And from ham and halitosis

No longer disgusted recoil

But there’s just one smell like an angry skunk

That, wafted aft by the breeze

Keeps me tossing in my bunk

The smell of that blasted cheese!’¹³

Add to the smells the daily grind of watchkeeping and the hardships involved in conducting even the simplest functions, and one must begin to wonder if the enthusiasm of Ashmore and Durham (and thousands like them) was not totally misplaced. A letter home from Signalman Gus Britton of HMS Uproar in 1944 summed up the sailor’s life and routine:

‘We have lockers about the size of coffins… and a small table in the fore-ends. Hanging from the ceiling there are about 15 hammocks, so if you want to move around you have to do so in a crouched position… Potatoes and cabbages are piled in one corner and, as it is as damp as Eastney beach, after six days there is the horrible smell of rotting vegetables, and refuse is only ditched at night; and on top of that there is the smell of unwashed bodies… At the moment we are doing about 18 hours dived every day so you can guess that it is pretty thick at night.

What a blessed relief when, at night, comes the order “diving stations” and about 10 minutes later “blow one and six”. The boat shudders as the air goes into the ballast tanks and then up she goes! I am at the bottom of the ladder… and then the captain opens the hatch and up rushes all the foul air just like a fog, and if I did not hang on I would go up with it as well. Beautiful, marvellous air… we are provided with top-notch waterproof gear but the water always seems to find a weak spot to trickle into. Up on the swaying bridge, with a pair of binoculars which you try to keep dry to have a look around between deluges of water, soaked and frozen, you say to yourself, “Why the **** did I join?” Then when you are relieved, you clamber down the ladder, discard all the wet gear and go into the fore-ends, have a cup of cocoa, turn in and, as you fall asleep, you think, “Well it’s not such a bad life after all.”’¹⁴

Halfway through this catalogue of complaint Britton hastily points out to his parents (his father himself a submariner): ‘Before I go any further don’t think that I am complaining because I really love submarines and this sort of life, and I wouldn’t swop it for anything.’

Not that surfacing at night, with the promise of the hot meal, a smoke, and the opportunity to ‘ditch gash’ was guaranteed utopia. It could be blowing a gale, and submarines, whatever the era, are wretchedly uncomfortable when on the surface in a storm. The misery was eloquently penned by Lieutenant Geoffrey Larkin RNVR, a human-torpedoman in 1942:

‘I can feel, see and hear for a space

The blindness and the deafness both have gone.

Again I feel a love towards my race

Who recently I hated loud and long.

I feel an urge again to smell and eat

The faintest of a half felt urge to sing.

Strange, since my recent thoughts have been delete

And minus, strike out – leave not anything.

I know this saneness probably will last

And flourish just as long as we remain

At rest. Though still I hope this daily dying’s past,

I feel tomorrow’s dawn will see again

The same insensate blankness – nothingness.

A life of one dimension – of complete

And utter soul destroying hopelessness,

Longing for death and spared that final treat

Now for a while, tho’ ’tis but short and sweet,

I smell and taste, and can appreciate

The beauties of this life, and can create.

When she begins to roll – I terminate.’¹⁵

Those who were sea-sick missed out on the delights of the submarine menu. During the First World War submarines did not carry trained cooks, and kitchen facilities were limited to one hot plate and a ‘fanny’ (water boiler). Submarine comforts (during both wars submariners got the best of provisions that were available) consisted mainly of tinned fare – soup, sausages, bacon, ‘tickler’ jam (even in the 1980s this was always plum-flavoured!), and bottled confections such as fruit. Ironically, fresh vegetables like onions and cabbage, sources of much-needed ‘roughage’, were invariably banned by Commanding Officers because of their residual smell! Bread and potatoes lasted only a few days, but by 1939 most submarines had trained cooks, and they would bake bread overnight for next morning’s breakfast. The range of processed foods available to them had also improved. Tinned sponges – perennially referred to as ‘Mrs B’s’ – became a firm favourite, and ‘pot-mess’, a conglomeration of left-overs, would make a regular appearance on the menu. As patrols became longer, food, like the receipt of mail, played a larger part in the ‘morale factor’ and chef’s creations gave rise to many hours of debate.

Since the most basic of human needs is to relieve one’s bowels, it is unsurprising that the ‘heads’ (or often the lack of them) are a common unifying bond for submariners of all generations. Constipation was a constant companion, but because of the limited diet, lack of exercise and, to begin with at least, sheer embarrassment at having to ‘perform’ in front of an audience, often only a ‘pill’ would sort out the problem. The most famous pills in RN submarine history were those taken onboard HMS E9 in 1914.

Max Horton was engaged on a week’s scouting duty in the Heligoland Bight early in the war, cruising with periscope awash by day and lying ‘doggo’ on the bottom at night.

‘Five or six days of this cramped existence, living mainly on tinned foods, had affected very seriously the digestive apparatus of one of his officers. The latter, seriously perturbed, decided on drastic remedies, and before turning in one night demolished about ‘half a guinea’s worth’ of a certain well-known brand of proprietary medicine. By the early hours of the morning the result of the experiment had passed his most sanguine hopes, but conditions in the confined and stagnant atmosphere lying on the ocean bed are not ideal ones for such shattering effect. That, at any rate, was the view taken by Horton and the rest of the crew. The latter sacrificed their morning beauty sleep without a murmur of protest when their commanding officer decided to rise to the surface an hour before the usual time. All on board were unanimous in expressing an earnest desire to fill the lungs with fresh morning air with as little delay as possible.

The boat rose slowly, Horton’s eye to the periscope. The pleasing sight of the German cruiser Hela was reflected to his delighted gaze as she steamed slowly by, and within two minutes she was sinking, a torpedo in her vitals. It was that box of pills, undervalued at a guinea, that brought Horton to the surface at that propitious moment.’¹⁶

Horton, probably the greatest submariner in our history, strode the two World Wars like a colossus. His renowned attacking and leadership qualities during the First War carved out for him a glittering career and reputation, while his performance as Flag Officer Submarines in 1940–42, then as Commander in Chief Western Approaches 1942–45, earned him a place in the annals of outstanding national military leaders. He was also the first submariner to raise the Service’s battle ensign – The Jolly Roger (JR). After his successful patrol he remembered Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson’s words that ‘all submariners captured in war should be hanged as pirates’¹⁷, and raised the flag on entering harbour to denote his achievement. The practice of flying the JR on returning to home base, now adorned with symbols to depict a variety of activities, became standard practice during the Second World War.

However, back to basics; there are numerous stories from both World Wars about some submariners’ total aversion to using the heads, but few took it to the extremes of Lieutenant Commander Robert Halahan, Commanding Officer of HMS E18. Leslie Ashmore tells the story:

‘For Halahan I had great respect and affection. He inspired considerable devotion amongst his juniors and repaid it by resolute and fearless leadership. He had one idiosyncrasy, I remember, which used to cause us some anxiety. He could never bring himself to submit to the uncomfortable complications involved in the use of the submarine’s rather intricate sanitary arrangements. He therefore insisted, no matter where we were, in taking the boat to the surface every morning so that he might exercise his natural functions in a simpler way over the side.’¹⁸

One day the inevitable happened and they were ‘bounced’ by a German airship. The Captain scrambled down the ladder ‘pantalone en bas’ and the boat escaped with a minor pounding.

However, the inability to handle ‘intricate sanitary arrangements’ that resulted in exploding heads discharge bottles did take their toll on the unsuspecting or the untrained, either at best by providing the operator ‘with his own back’, or, as on two sad occasions, death. This poem, from HMS Torbay’s ‘Periscope Standard’ in 1944, warns of the worst case:

‘This is the tale of Joe McGee

Who couldn’t work our WC.

He didn’t realise when to vent

Nor did he know just what flush meant.

And so, with pressure ninety pounds

(Accompanied by explosive sounds)

He pushed on the lever “Hard a’ blow”

With hull valve shut (cor stone a crow!)

A second later Joe was seen

Impaled upon the Fruit Machine

Where, there unto this day he sticks…

Grim warning to those men whose tricks

With submerged heads, with hands unskilled

Come close each day to being killed.

All because they do not know

When to flush and when to blow.’¹⁹

Living was hard enough, but to this must be added the strain of being under attack. Ben Bryant again:

‘The swish, swish of the propellers of the hunter passing overhead, the waiting for the explosion of the charges as they sank slowly down. Had they been dropped at the right moment? Were they set to the right depth? The knowledge that there is no escape, that you must just wait for it. Then the shattering roar, the lights going out, the controls going slack as the power is cut, and the paint raining down. Then silence and the faint sounds of running water where a gland has started to trickle. It seems magnified one hundredfold – a serious leak is what you dread. For a few there is something to do, to make good the damage, provide alternative methods of control; others just have to wait for the next attack… For the CO being under attack was an absorbing business, you had far too much to think about to have time to be frightened. I always imagined it was very much worse for the crew, though most of them were kept pretty busy in controlling the boat as you twisted and turned, speeding up and slowing down. However, they never seemed to mind though critical interest was taken in the performance of the chaps up top – all of whom, judging by the remarks, had not only been born out of wedlock, but, blessed with amazing stamina, were credited with an almost continuous indulgence in the sexual act.’²⁰

A typical attack of the Second War was survived by HMS Sahib, although dozens were not. By now A/S escorts of all nations were fitted with the sound-ranging device known as ASDIC, the pulses of which, according to Commander Edward Young, ‘were as though someone was gently tapping on the outside of the pressure hull. I thought of Blind Pew’s stick in Treasure Island.’²¹ The Captain, Lieutenant John Bromage²², starts the narrative after he had successfully attacked an escorted Italian convoy:

‘Sahib was at 300 feet. The Climene took up position on the starboard quarter and maintained contact without difficulty in the perfect conditions… quite suddenly hydrophone effect [propeller cavitation], which was clearly audible to the naked ear in the control room, started up directly overhead. Very shortly afterwards the ASDIC office reported the unmistakable sound of depth-charges hitting the water.’

The helmsman, Leading Seaman Bobby Briard, takes up the story:

‘As was usual in these circumstances, I just gripped the wheel a little tighter and stared unblinking at the lubbers line in the compass in front of me. The pattern of depth-charges was right on target and it felt as if some giant hand had taken hold of the submarine and was continually slamming it down. The shock waves inside the boat seemed to burst inside my head and dim my sight. The stunned silence that followed the attack was punctured by a sort of hissing roar coming from the engine room. “All compartments report damage to the Control Room.” The Captain’s voice contained a note of urgency. The gyro in front of me was spinning wildly. When I attempted to put correction on the helm, the wheel spun loosely in my hands, I listened to reports coming in.’

Bromage continues:

‘I had ordered “full ahead group up” [high speed] when the very loud HE was directly overhead, and as a consequence by the time the depth-charges exploded the salvo must have been astern of the submarine. Nevertheless the result inside the boat was dramatic. A valve had been blown clean off the ship’s side leaving a one and a half inch diameter hole through which water entered like a steel bar. No little Dutch boy could have put a stop to that! The pressure hull itself was leaking in the fore-ends, and under the after ends bilge.’

Briard concludes:

‘The Captain’s face was still expressionless but his words, when they came, seemed to hold infinite regret. “I’m sorry lads… stand by to abandon ship.’²³

Lieutenant Thomas Parkinson, First Lieutenant of HMS J2, in a report to Commodore (S), entitled ominously ‘A submarine has no friends’, provides a slightly different perspective:

‘J2 was depth-charged on the first Monday in August 1917 at about 8am by British Light Forces returning home. The submarine was on the surface proceeding at 15 knots to the patrol area; the weather was perfect and the sea glassy calm. On sighting the ships the boat was dived; had an excellent trim and the Captain commenced an attack. Discovering the ships were British we went to the bottom, 125 feet on the gauge. Between 80 and 90 feet the steering gear jammed, and I was ordered to go aft to investigate. While examining the gear a depth-charge exploded quite near. The crew space filled with a white haze and the hands present, the tables and stools, were lifted clear of the deck. On arriving in the Control Room to make a report on the helm a second charge exploded shaking the boat from stem to stern; she was still sinking slowly. As she grounded a third and last explosion, this being nearer than the preceding two, and the lighting switches were thrown off the board. They were put to the on position… All valves were examined and tightened by wheel spanner. WC and [garbage] ejector locked, Sperry [compass] stopped and every necessary precaution taken against betraying our position. The boat was perfectly tight and nothing was broken. Books, magazines, papers etc were issued to the crew, and many of the older ratings turned in. Hydrophones were used and the listener ordered to make his reports in secret to the Captain so as not to disconcert the younger members of the crew though for a long time the ships could be heard quite plainly through the hull as they passed to and fro. How long they stayed I do not know as I turned in and slept until we went to the surface at 3.30pm. My reason for turning in was to try and convince the crew that all was well. We were up and proceeding to the patrol area at 4.00pm. I cannot praise too highly the conduct of the crew but am of the opinion it was due to the cool quiet manner of the old submarine ratings. The reaction was worse than the actual experience for whilst it was taking place the mind was fully occupied in carrying out the necessary duties knowing that a mistake might lead to destruction… To be depth-charged once is good experience; it adds to the keenness and efficiency of the boat’s crew and shortens the time of a crash dive but it is something that no one could ever get used to. Familiarity would never breed contempt… I consider J2 was not lost for [one of] two reasons (a) The Light Forces were sure we were destroyed or (b) they lost our position.’²⁴

To be sunk by the enemy is one thing, but to be sunk by one’s own forces is the ultimate waste. But J2’s ‘blue on blue’ experience was, regrettably, far from unique in the two World Wars, and such occurrences were generated by a variety of factors. In her case it was poor staff work by either the Light Forces Controllers/Submarine Controllers not operating the submarine in a ‘weapons-tight haven’, or one or other of the forces being out of position. Lack of knowledge of a friendly submarine’s patrol area led to the loss of HMS H5 through ramming by the merchant vessel SS Rutherglen in the Irish Sea in 1918. Because the Admiralty was keen not to dissuade our merchant marine Masters from using one of the few counters to a U-boat attack available to them, the M/V was never informed of the mistaken identity, the usual bounty was paid, and the Master was awarded the DSO. A combination of one submarine being out of its patrol area (remember that accurate navigation was far from guaranteed) and failing to respond quickly enough to the daily recognition signal caused HMS Triton to sink HMS Oxley in 1939. Indeed, even firing the correct signal was no guarantee of immunity from attack, for in 1918 HMS D3’s correct and speedily released recognition flare was taken as flak by a French airship, which responded to the ‘attack’ by sinking the submarine!

The ‘fog of war’ also left submarines particularly vulnerable to attack from friendly aircraft, and a combination of trigger-happiness by the pilot, poor navigation by the air-navigator and inadequate briefing before departure caused a number of incidents that often resulted in, at worst, the submarine’s loss or, at best, its removal from the operational scene in order to conduct emergency repairs. Lieutenant Rufus Mackenzie, the Commanding Officer of HMS Thrasher in 1941, came under attack by a Royal Navy Swordfish aircraft as he left Alexandria Harbour. His boat suffered significant damage, including the loss of 90 per cent of his battery, and barely made it back to base. Rufus’s punishment to the young airmen was simply to walk them through the submarine – they apparently refused the offer of a drink in the Wardroom after their tour!²⁵

Despite everything they had to suffer, the health of submariners during both wars was, to the onlooker, surprisingly good.²⁶ The-present day submariner would not be surprised, because it is now known that after 24 hours or so, individuals’ germs become immune to each other! It is only on return to harbour and being exposed to others’ ‘foreign bodies’ that submariners must rebuild their bacterial resistance with, in traditional fashion, alcohol proving a first-class catalyst. Indeed, letting off steam was a necessary relief to the pressures of patrol, and the role of the Depot Ship in this context was brought sharply into focus during the First War. The concept of the ‘Mother’ had been introduced from the earliest days of submarining (the first was HMS Hazard in 1902), but by tradition they tended to be hulks, with priority once again being given to workshop facilities rather than the comforts of attached crews. During the early conflict it was recognised that ‘rest and relaxation’, in as ‘hassle-free’ a scenario as possible, was the most beneficial recuperative tonic to get crews ready to go back to sea. It was concluded that a ten-day patrol needed four days rest to restore the balance (this compared with a ratio of 21:7 in the Second War in equivalent waters). Even those men who were showing the signs of neurasthenia were noted to recover rapidly after these few days in stress-free conditions.

In addition to comfortable bunks and good laundry facilities, there was a general call for the adjacency of a soccer pitch so that the crews could take exercise, although one cynical CO remarked that ‘those that took exercise the most, missed it the most’ and he was probably right. Four designated Depot Ships were built between the wars with, in addition to their routine comforts, rest-camps being established at every opportunity, although, hurriedly one should add, without the extremes of pleasure that were provided for German U-boat crews! These rest camps were much more appreciated than soccer pitches, and Leading Telegraphist Arthur Dickison of HMS Safari waxed lyrical about their recuperative qualities.²⁷

Malta under siege and the base of the famous ‘Fighting Tenth’, however, offered few comforts, and in a renowned exchange between Captain Shrimp Simpson and Flag Officer Submarines (Horton), after the former had been taken to task for inviting HMS Turbulent, in the same signal that provided vital routing instructions, ‘to bring plenty of booze’, retorted to his senior:

‘Sir, I would have you know that in all the time I have commanded the Tenth Submarine Flotilla, never have I known anything like the disastrous series of misses that have occurred during the last month. This has coincided with Lazaretto’s supply of refreshment being completely exhausted. The two matters are not disconnected. I consider that anything to relieve the staleness of my overstrained COs is a matter of the most vital importance.’²⁸

Ben Bryant commented: ‘Malta at the end of the siege was dreary; men who are subjected to considerable strain do not readily relax and regain their resilience when all is dull and depressing; they go stale. A stale CO would be that second or two slower, the second or so that makes the difference between success and failure.’²⁹

Bromage’s action in Sahib in speeding up at the crucial moment was an example of the second between life and death. After one aircraft bomb (dropped on the area of torpedo discharge disturbance) and 56 depth-charges, Sahib managed to stagger to the surface, and the crew abandoned ship to be subsequently picked up and made prisoners of war by the Italians.

During each of the World Wars a number of British submariners became prisoners of war: 152 during the First, and 359 during the Second. To read the accounts of the manner in which they survived attack and remained alive to go into captivity is to appreciate the significance of the expression ‘a hair’s breadth’ in war. To put this into context, every 2 feet of depth for a submarine equates to an extra pound per square inch of pressure on the hull, so at the 500-foot depth at which HMS Splendid (Lieutenant Ian McGeoch DSO DSC) began her recovery from a depth-charge attack by the German frigate Hermes that felt as ‘if a gigantic sea-terrier had grabbed the submarine by the scruff of the neck with intent to kill’³⁰, she would have been subjected to 2501b per square inch. For her to reach the surface before flooding water under this tremendous pressure overcame the reserve of buoyancy required to maintain upward momentum, was a miracle, and testimony to McGeoch’s speed of reaction. He and two-thirds of his crew became Italian POWs.

Others who survived from submarines attacked on the surface rather than dived were spared the gut-wrenching minutes of wondering whether the pressure hull would remain sufficiently intact to avoid its becoming their tomb, but their shortened experiences were nevertheless just as terrifying.

One of the unluckiest submarines to suffer such a fate was HMS E20 in the Sea of Marmara in November 1915. She had been working with HMS H1 as ‘chummy boat’³¹ and although they had both been surprised by the presence of FS Turquoise, they became a threesome. Part of the process of working together, in addition to conducting local water-space management and co-ordinating tasking, was to arrange a rendezvous to agree future tasking. HMS E20 was waiting for Turquoise in the agreed position when, at about 5pm in glassy conditions with a slight haze, the party on the upper deck, enjoying a leisurely smoke, suddenly spotted a periscope soon followed by the wake of a torpedo. The subsequent explosion blew the British submarine in half. Lieutenant AN Tebbs RN, the First Lieutenant, describes how ‘the wire for the heel of the foremast caught my foot and carried me down with the boat to a considerable depth. A rather curious fact was that the air which must have been forced out of the fore-hatch enabled me to take a breath before I actually got to the surface, and before I had got clear of the boat itself.’ Eight other men survived and were picked up by their attacker, U-14, an Austrian-built boat manned mainly by Germans. ‘We were treated with the utmost kindness and courtesy. Everything that could be done for our comfort was done.’ Tebbs was to learn the circumstances of HMS E20’s loss from U-14’s CO:

“‘You have the Frenchman to thank. We knew where you would be this evening from the Turquoise’s chart.” Some ten days previous to our being sunk we had arranged the rendezvous for the 4th/5th, and in the meantime, without informing us, she had attempted to go down the Straits once more, owing I believe, to lack of fuel. His periscope was shot away, and he surrendered his boat… On his chart was found, in writing, the time and place of the intended meeting with us.’³²

Tebbs and his colleagues became Turkish POWs.

The experience of being well-treated once picked up was universal, but until that moment of recovery there was little respite from attack even though the submarine was evidently ‘hors de combat’. McGeoch in Splendid lost 18 men out of his crew of 48 through the continued shelling of the Hermes, and Bromage in Sahib reported that although it was obvious that his submarine was being abandoned, she still came under heavy attack from two escorts and a Ju88 aircraft. After he had been rescued Bromage thanked the CO of Climene for not firing to hit his stricken submarine, but the latter said he had been! What this demonstrates, despite the gracious charm shown by his enemy when Bromage had been rescued, was the determination to sink the hated submarine without regard for the survival of the crew. A similar plight befell HMS E13 when she ran aground in 1914 when attempting to enter the Baltic. Although in the neutral waters of Denmark she was repeatedly attacked by two German destroyers, and her crew fired upon by machine-gun when they attempted to swim to safety. It was only through the intervention of a Danish destroyer that the other half of the crew was not massacred.

In a similar vein, no comparison between the two wars would be complete without a brief mention of two actions that have been branded by some commentators as ‘war crimes’. Each involves British submarine commanding officers. They were those of Herbert in Baralong³³ in 1915 and Miers in Torbay³⁴ in 1942. Both ordered the shooting of apparently unarmed survivors following attacks conducted by them (albeit Herbert was in command of a Q-ship). Their thought processes were very similar to those who pressed home attacks with men in the water – while they remained a perceived threat, and until their contribution could be guaranteed to be at an end, they were subject to the ultimate penalty simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ben Bryant reinforces this message: ‘Submarining is often painted as a brutal game, but submariners are no more brutal than anyone else. Nobody should criticise the submariner unless he himself has been hunted, for it is when harassed that an animal becomes vicious.’³⁵ Both Herbert and Miers had been hunted, and were in the classic mould of submarine commanding officers.

In both wars there could have been few greater responsibilities given to a young man than to command a submarine. Onboard he was a ‘Dictator’ simply because it was his judgement and actions alone that could bring success, failure or death. As Captain Fell, a ‘Captain Teacher’ on two occasions, put it, ‘He has no one to hold his hand, to advise or correct a fatal move. His eye alone can see, and his instinct sense, the correct and only tactic to pursue; on him rests all responsibility.’³⁶ Dictator, yes, full of determination, yes, but as Ben Bryant points out, ‘no man relies more completely upon each and every member of his crew. A good submarine crew is far more than a team; they are as near as possible during attack, a single composite body using the CO as their eye and their director.’³⁷

So perhaps there is after all an explanation of ‘The Trade’, but let a United States Air Force Officer have the last word on the subject. Colonel Bradley Gaylord was on board HMS Seraph for ‘Operation Kingpin’ in 1942 (the pick-up of General Giraud from Vichy France) when he noted in his diary:

‘How could you have claustrophobia among these smiling boys whose easy informality was so apparently a thin cover for the rigid discipline on which every man knows his life depends upon the other fellow. It is so completely infectious. You suddenly realise that here is one of the essential points about war: there is no substitute for good company. The boys in the Submarine Service convey a spirit which quickly explains why they would sooner be in submarines than anywhere else.’³⁸

Notes on contributors

Commander Jeff Tall OBE RN, Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, Gosport, UK.

Commander Jeff Tall is the Director of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum in Gosport, a post he has held since August 1994 when he retired from the Royal Navy. A submariner for twenty eight years, he has served all over the world and commanded four submarines: HMS Olympus, HMS Finwhale, HMS Churchill and, finally, the nuclear powered Polaris Missile submarine, HMS Repulse. He served as Admiral Sandy Woodward’s submarine staff officer during the Falklands Conflict in 1982. He was co-author, with the naval historian Paul Kemp, of HM Submarines in Camera, he wrote the historical element of the CD-Rom The RN Submarine Service - Past Present and Future, produced jointly with the Royal Naval School, which is available to the general public.

Recommended reading

Carr, William Guy, By Guess and By God (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1930)

Chapman, Paul, Submarine Torbay (London: Robert Hale, 1989)

Chatterton, E. Keble, Amazing Adventure (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1935)

Dickison, Arthur, Crash Dive (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, in association with The Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1999)

Edwards, Kenneth, We Dive at Dawn (London: Rich & Cowan, 1939)

Mackenzie, Hugh, Sword of Damocles (Gosport: Royal Navy Submarine Museum, 1995)

McGeoch, Ian, An affair of Chances (London: Imperial War Museum, 1991)

Padfield, Peter, War Beneath the Sea – Submarine Conflict 1939–1945 (London: John Murray, 1995)

Shankland, Peter and Hunter, Anthony, Dardanelles Patrol (London: Collins, 1964)

Wilson, Michael, Baltic Assignment – British Submarines in Russia 1914–1919 (London: Leo Cooper)

Wingate, John, The Fighting Tenth (London: Leo Cooper, 1991)

Young, Edward, One of our Submarines (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1997)

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