Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars

Andrew L. Brown, Douglas E. Delaney, Mark Frost, Andrew L. Brown, Douglas E. Delaney, Mark Frost

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501755859
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, a cast of leading military historians explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen.

Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized.

Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars.

Contributors Paul R. Bartrop, Charles Booth, Jean Bou, Daniel Byers, Kent Fedorowich, Jonathan Fennell, Meghan Fitzpatrick, Richard S. Grayson, Ian McGibbon, Jessica Meyer, Emma Newlands, Kaushik Roy, Roger Sarty, Gary Sheffield, Ian van der Waag

CHAPTER 1

The Government That Could Not Say No and Australia’s Military Effort, 1914–1918

JEAN BOU

When war broke out in 1914, the Commonwealth of Australia was a nation barely more than a dozen years old, the federation of the Australian colonies having occurred only in 1901. From a population of fewer than 5 million people, the country eventually sent 330,000 men overseas, where they fought at Gallipoli, in the Sinai-Palestine campaign, and on the Western Front. For a young country, this was an enormous undertaking and one that dwarfed anything that had been undertaken to that point. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there were significant difficulties. This chapter outlines the raising and expansion of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) as well as some of the policy choices that accompanied that process. It describes how the government’s ardent commitment to the empire and the war led, in combination with what might be best described as naivety and an underdeveloped administrative and military capacity, to a number of systemic problems and profoundly divisive politics. To that end, this chapter examines how the AIF was created, how and when it was expanded, and how these steps combined with poor decision-making to cause problems in administration, training, command, and finding enough men. Finally, it considers the link between the 1914–1916 decisions to expand the force and the government’s unsuccessful efforts in 1916 and 1917 to introduce conscription for overseas service via plebiscite—efforts that split the ruling Labor Party and fractured the country politically and along sectarian lines.

Creating and Expanding an Expeditionary Force

The military forces inherited from the six separate Australian colonies by the new Commonwealth of Australia in March 1901 were a mixed bag. Apart from a small cadre of instructors, administrators, and fortress gunners, all the troops and officers were part-time soldiers of various kinds. Some were unpaid volunteers, although most were actually paid to don a uniform. But their part-time character, the variability of colonial resources, and the policy choices of their half-interested colonial governments meant that equipment was insufficient or antiquated, and military competence generally low. Post-federation reforms, begun by the first and only general officer commanding (GOC) of the Commonwealth Military Forces, Major-General Sir Edward Hutton, and continued by other Australian and British officers, were beset with difficulties and achieved only modest success. In light of this, and driven in large part by growing anxieties about Japan, a more radical idea was gaining traction by the end of the decade, and, in 1911–1912, what is generally known as the Universal Training era began.

Although there were a variety of exemptions, mostly for those who lived too far away from a town where they could parade, this compulsory scheme aimed to make all able-bodied males part-time militiamen, beginning with cadets in their teens and ending when they passed out of the ranks after fourteen years’ service, aged twenty-six. The defense budget and the forces expanded dramatically under the compulsory training scheme, but the system was hamstrung by the myriad complications of part-time service and an underdeveloped military system, which was still in its infancy in 1914.¹ Moreover, the provisions of the Defence Act forbade sending these men overseas unless they volunteered for active service. The result was that, when war came, a separate expeditionary force had to be created, which left the militia to continue at home, where it withered on the vine as military resources went to the fighting forces overseas.

As war erupted in August 1914, the need for expeditionary forces demanded the government’s attention. The first operational requirement was capturing German New Guinea, and to do that the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force (AN&MEF) was hastily raised and sent northward, where, after a few skirmishes, it ejected the Germans that September and expanded Australia’s modest Pacific empire.² This effort was soon overshadowed by the creation of the AIF, which was to be dispatched to the main theaters of war. In early August, the outgoing government of Joseph Cook, then in “caretaker mode” due to a looming federal election and seemingly spurred by inaccurate reports that Canada had promised 30,000 troops, offered a 20,000-man force to London. In the heat of an election campaign, the Labor opposition leader, Andrew Fisher, did not hesitate to commit the nation, famously, to its “last man and last shilling,” and, upon winning the election in September, his government soon offered more troops. The AIF’s first contingent, made up of a complete infantry division and a light horse brigade, left Australia on 1 November after a hurried period of raising and equipping the units. More was soon on offer. A fourth infantry brigade and two more light horse brigades were raised by the end of 1914, to be followed by two more infantry brigades early in 1915. These latest infantry brigades helped establish in Egypt the 2nd Australian Division, which soon went to Gallipoli, where it joined the 1st Australian Division and the New Zealand and Australian Division.

The end of the Gallipoli campaign in late 1915 brought about the greatest period of the AIF’s expansion. The 3rd Division was raised in Australia and then sailed direct to England, where it trained thoroughly, the only Australian division in the war to do so before commencing operations. It was committed to the Western Front in late 1916, although its first major action was at Messines in mid-1917. Meanwhile, in Egypt, each of the relatively experienced units of the 1st and 2nd Divisions was each divided in two during the early months of 1916 to create a cadre for expansion. By blending these with the nearly 40,000 reinforcements that had accumulated in Egypt during 1915, the old divisions were brought up to strength and two new divisions, the 4th and 5th, were added to the order of battle. Three light horse brigades were paired with the New Zealand Mounted Rifles Brigade to create the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Division, which was to continue fighting in the Middle East until the end of the war. Later expansions of the mounted arm in 1917–1918 meant that the AIF finished the war with five light horse brigades, which together made up the better part of two mounted divisions in Palestine (the Australian Mounted Division, created in 1917 from the Imperial Mounted Division, being the other).³

There were other expansions. The Australian government proposed a sixth infantry division in May 1916, but the War Office initially declined it because no one was sure, not least the Australians, if the Commonwealth could generate sufficient recruiting to sustain it. The government kept trying, however, and, at British urging, the 6th Division was raised in England in early 1917. But a lack of reinforcements from Australia and high casualty rates on the western front led to its being picked clean of manpower and eventually disbanded before it had a chance to see any action.⁴ Still, other Australian combat units and supporting elements contributed to the British Empire’s war effort. These ranged from battalions of camel-borne mounted infantry in Palestine, several squadrons of the Australian Flying Corps, siege artillery batteries, mining companies, and remount units and hospitals (see table 1.1). Many of these support units were designed to meet imperial needs and did not directly support the AIF’s combat formations.

Hence, as the war reached its costliest stages in 1917–1918, the AIF comprised five infantry divisions, the better part of two mounted divisions, a range of army and corps troops, and a host of miscellaneous units that were involved in or supporting the fighting in variety of ways. It was a remarkable demonstration of Australia’s commitment to the war and to supporting the British Empire. That enthusiasm came at considerable cost, however. In the first instance, the young and war-inexperienced country encountered numerous problems of creating, expanding, and maintaining a large military. A further complication was that Australia’s politicians, as well as the government agencies under their control, proved to be rather poor at managing some of these problems, which exacerbated them and helped bring about a political crisis that still rates as the most divisive and bitter in Australian history.

A Multitude of Growing Pains

Raising, expanding, and sustaining the AIF was a demanding enterprise, and problems were frequent, particularly in the war’s earlier years. Some difficulties, such as how to administer the mass of manpower and resources deployed overseas, were, after a poor start, overcome, while others could never fully be conquered. This section examines three key personnel-related problems: training (with some observations of the related matter of administration), command of the force, and finding sufficient manpower.

Training the Australian Imperial Force

Despite the large military establishment that had grown in Australia by 1914, the country possessed little in the way of a military training organization. The only standing full-time institution, the Royal Military College at Duntroon, had been established in 1911 to provide permanent instructors and staff officers for the expanding militia, but when the war broke out, it had not yet produced its first junior officers, even as its first classes graduated early to bolster the AIF. Almost all other training before the war was conducted within units, leading to highly variable results. When the first contingent left Australia, it continued this practice. In broad terms, this worked reasonably well in Egypt in 1914 and early 1915, although the lack of training time meant that Australia’s earliest formations were badly underprepared for their first battles.⁵ This in-unit-training policy failed once the Gallipoli campaign got under way. As minimally trained reinforcements began arriving in Egypt, the units in which they might have completed their training were busy fighting, and the AIF had little to no administrative or training system in place either to manage them or prepare them for service at the front. Measures to redress this training shortcoming were slow to come because the man in charge of the entire contingent, Major-General William Bridges, was also commanding the 1st Australian Division in action at Gallipoli. He had little time to attend to the demands of the whole force, and, anxious that force administration not lead to his having to give up his field command, was not inclined to do so in any event. After trying and failing to get the British Army to take responsibility for the AIF’s “tail” in Egypt, Bridges established an intermediate base in Egypt, but he did not do much to support the officer whom he sent to command it, Colonel Victor Sellheim. Eventually, Britain’s War Office stepped in and appointed a British regular, Major-General James Spens, to oversee the training of the Australians and New Zealanders in Egypt.

Spens greatly improved the training arrangements, but it was months before his system produced useful material, and properly trained reinforcements did not make it to Gallipoli until late in the campaign. Even then, the system remained underdeveloped and scandalously ad hoc; and indeed the appointment of Spens can be seen as one example of the many extemporizations that characterized both the AIF and wider British imperial armies through 1915. Spens brought a few experienced British Army instructors, but they were spread thin, and the Australian instructors whom commanding officers sent to Spens from the front tended to be poor performers, rather than the energetic and competent men the situation demanded. Finally, as the year went on, the mass of volunteers arriving in Egypt started to overwhelm the training battalions there. Most of these units eventually contained between 2,000 and 4,000 men, often under the command of junior and relatively inexperienced officers.⁶ Not surprisingly, training standards slipped or were almost nonexistent, and major disciplinary problems festered.

The doubling of the AIF’s divisions in Egypt in 1916, a measure that soaked up the excess manpower in the bloated training battalions, restored some semblance of balance and order to the force, but it also brought about new problems. While the AIF had seen considerable combat at Gallipoli, the notion that it was now experienced should be treated with caution. Older or less capable officers had been weeded out, and competent ones were starting to take the reins, but the AIF’s training before Gallipoli had been incomplete, meaning the force’s underpinnings were not particularly strong. Training had been impossible in the cramped conditions at the Anzac Cove beachhead, and even if it had been possible, there was no training program to execute.⁷ In broad terms, the Australians at Gallipoli had endured, but there is little to suggest that there was much systemic learning and adaptation going on, and certainly no worthwhile local training programs.

Splitting up somewhat haggard units to create cadres for the army’s expansion did spread the AIF’s experience in early-1916, but it also greatly diluted it. Rather than provide balanced and strong cadres, some unit commanders took the low road and used the opportunity to get rid of their malcontents or duds. Worse, in the quest to find enough officers for every level of command, some unsuitable men received too-hasty promotion. Often, there was not enough equipment to go around, with the result that many men had yet to even hold a rifle on parade. Moreover, this expansion necessitated updating the AIF’s organization to meet the demands of the western front by adopting the same establishments as the British Territorial and New Armies. Suddenly there were machine-gun companies, cyclist units, pioneer battalions, and all the other new capabilities that the AIF now had to incorporate. The more technical the demands, the harder it was to train new units. Getting the artillery prepared had been difficult in 1914–1915, and it was still a severe challenge for the new formations in 1916, particularly when one of the two new corps that they were arranged in (I Anzac and II Anzac...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Government That Could Not Say No and Australia’s Military Effort, 1914–1918
• 2. Irish Identities in the British Army during the First World War
• 3. Conserving British Manpower during and after the First World War
• 4. The Canadian Garrison Artillery Goes to War, 1914–1918
• 5. “Returning Home to Fight”
• 6. Martial Race Theory and Recruitment in the Indian Army during Two World Wars
• 7. Manpower, Training, and the Battlefield Leadership of British Army Officers in the Era of the Two World Wars
• 8. Legitimacy, Consent, and the Mobilization of the British and Commonwealth Armies during the Second World War
• 9. “Enemy Aliens” and the Formation of Australia’s 8th Employment Company
• 10. The Body and Becoming a Soldier in Britain during the Second World War
• 11. Canada and the Mobilization of Manpower during the Second World War
• 12. South African Manpower and the Second World War
• 13. Manpower Mobilization and Rehabilitation in New Zealand’s Second World War
• 14. Caring for British Commonwealth Soldiers in the Aftermath of the Second World War
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index