And We Shall Shock Them: The British Army in the Second World War

501 Pages·2012·7.94 MB·English

by  David Fraser

AND WE SHALL SHOCK THEM
THE BRITISH ARMY IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
DAVID FRASER
For my friends who fell
Contents
Author’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I
Triumph to Tragedy
1. The Rusting Sword
2. The First Shock
3. Flight from the Continent
Part II
Reforging the Sword
4. The Tools of the Trade
5. Officers and Men
Part III
The Habit of Defeat
6. False Dawn in Africa
7. The Wehrmacht Once Again
8. The Mirage of Victory
9. Burnt by the Rising Sun
10. The End of the Road
Part IV
The Tide Turns
11. Daybreak
12. Return to Europe
13. Fourteenth Army
14. France and Flanders Once Again
Part V
Triumph at Last
15. The End in Italy
16. The Road to Mandalay
17. “Forward on Wings of Flame”
Appendix I Divisions of the British Army, 1939-45
Appendix II Codewords used in the text
Sources and Bibliography
Part I
Triumph to Tragedy
1
The Rusting Sword
11th November 1918
Throughout the British Army in France and Flanders men rubbed their eyes and
stretched their wet and weary limbs. “One has been feeling one’s way through
the dark for four and a half years,” wrote a Battalion Commander, whose time on
the Western Front had been unbroken save when wounded, “and now one has
come out into the sunlight, but one is blind, one cannot see the sun.”1 As
companies turned out in the early morning, to march towards the enemy, to
parade for training if in reserve, the message came through which had been
rumoured for the previous three days. The Armistice would be signed at eleven
o’clock.
There was some relief, little triumph, rather a bemused sense of anticlimax
mixed with exhaustion. Yet the army’s achievement was on a mighty and
memorable scale. Sixty divisions formed the command of Field Marshal Sir
Douglas Haig. Behind this huge force, the greatest by far ever put into the field
by Britain, lay a vast administrative system of transportation, ports, depots, field
hospitals, repair and recreation facilities, a great training organisation for the
British Expeditionary Force alone. The British Army was enormous and all-
conquering.
It had not always been so. The Expeditionary Force of 1914 was excellently
trained and disciplined, entirely professional, described even by its enemy as “a
perfect thing, apart” - but tiny. A mere four British infantry and one cavalry
divisions faced the Germans at Mons and Le Cateau. That little Regular Army
largely perished at the First Battle of Ypres, and a hastily improvised citizen
army, drawing still on the voluntary principle alone, formed the “New Armies”
which fought the battle of the Somme. Conscription was only introduced in
1916. It was both the glory and shame of Britain that the army had been manned
entirely by volunteers in its greatest expansion, and throughout the first two
years of the most demanding war in its history: glory to the race and generation
that volunteered, shame on society and government that permitted such
inequitable sacrifice of the bravest and the best.
Now, after all the suffering, the achievements of the army were phenomenal,
the soldiers’ spirits high, their victory assured. Since August 1918 the army had
undertaken six major offensives, ended the long stalemate of the trenches,
broken through the redoubtable Hindenburg Line, carried the campaign into
enemy-held territory and played the major part in forcing upon Germany an
historic capitulation. Fifty-nine British divisions fought and defeated ninety-nine
German in the battles of those last months, taking nearly 200,000 prisoners and
close on 3,000 guns. At Amiens, Courtrai, Le Cateau, Maubeuge, Mons the
German Army was driven with terrible cost from the fields they had overrun.
Their Emperor abdicated. Their emissaries sued for peace.
These triumphs, however, found little place in popular British mythology
about the First World War. Triumphs they certainly were. German spirit, worn
down by the attrition of the last four years, was beginning to fail; but this was no
rounding up of a beaten enemy, rotted by internal subversion. Here and there the
British took whole German units prisoner with few casualties - but in much of
the great area of campaign, right up to November itself, British battalions were
recording actions in language reminiscent of any time in the last four years:
23rd October 1918
The Companies got a good bit mixed up at the entry to the village but they got
to their objectives pretty well. The village itself was being very heavily
shelled all the time by the Boche. Have not seen his artillery fire so heavy in
battle for a long time now …1
But the enemy was beaten - in open warfare, in fair fight and beyond hope of
negotiation. “Haig,” ran a German assessment, “is master of the field.”2
This encomium was deserved. True, the British formed only part of a great
Allied force. But the Americans, fresh and unwearied, were still few in numbers
of divisions, having entered the war only in 1917; and the French were
exhausted, bled white by the terrible casualties of Verdun in 1916 and the
disastrous offensive of 1917 which followed. A great and disproportionate share
of the fighting of the last glorious months was done by the British Army.
That army had learned much. At the grim game of trench warfare it had
become adept. It had shown itself - New Armies and conscript force alike -
worthy successor to the old Regular Army of 1914. Its organisation was
magnificent - it was a huge and well-designed machine. “The army,” said Alfred
de Vigny of other times, “is a machine - but a machine that can suffer.” And this
army had shown exemplary capacity to endure. Nearly 600,000 British soldiers
had died, on all fronts. Now all the endurance seemed redeemed, all the suffering
rewarded, all the terrible and costly attrition of the enemy justified. The
Hindenburg Line was breached, clean open country was at last discovered
behind the brown shell-torn landscape of the trenches. In muddy fields
surrounded by bivouacs, in the squares of battered villages and looted towns,
drums and fifes, pipes and drums, paraded to play the Regimental Marches to the
cheers of French and Belgian inhabitants, dazed by it all. It was over. We had
won. November 1918.
Twenty-one and a half years later, on the same ground and against the same
enemy, another British Army suffered humiliating defeat. Once again, early in a
war, it formed a small element of an Allied force; and whatever its skill it could
hardly have averted disaster if the French Army collapsed as it did. But in fact
skill was absent. The British Army at the beginning of the Second World War
was unprepared for war, materially, tactically and - perhaps above all -
psychologically. In less than a generation the hard-won heritage of victory had
been dissipated. “If mortal catastrophe should overtake the British nation,”
declared Churchill, “historians a thousand years hence will never understand
how it was that a victorious nation suffered themselves to cast away all that they
had gained by measureless sacrifice.” No reversal of military fortune has ever
been more complete than that evoked by the two dates 1918 and 1940. In that
fact lie the seeds of the tragedies and triumphs to come.
So great a victory as that of the First World War should have been followed by
a determination to protect its fruits and to learn its lessons. Instead, the next
twenty years were marked by neglect of every principle which the war had
produced.
First, and by far the most important, was the very principle of participation by
the British Army in Continental warfare. This had, before 1914, been
contentious. There had been those who believed that our strategy should be
solely maritime, relying upon our island situation and upon that sea-power
which, it was argued, had played the ultimately decisive part in frustrating the
ambitions of Napoleon, and in other historic struggles. The difficulty, as ever,
was to reconcile this essentially national and protracted strategy with a policy of
alliance. Some, like Lord Esher, had maintained that British naval power would
be “the value of the Entente to France in war” - to find, as had always been
manifest, that no Continental ally is interested in the attritional effects of sea-
power unless the land frontiers are secure. A coalition only survives if there is
some perception of equality of sacrifice. Britain’s maritime contribution,
however formidable, could never hold together a Continental alliance. The
lesson had been clear from the first to the last day of the war - not only clear in
political terms but militarily compulsive, since all could see that without the
British Army France would have been beaten by Germany on land.
Yet, after 1918, there was revulsion from the terrible logic of these events.
Because Britain, surrounded by sea, had once been able to “eat à la carte” in the
matter of a Continental commitment for her army - to take as much or as little as
desired - it was soon believed that this could again be so. Soon the experience of
the war was to be described as “abnormal” for the British Army - not because of
the tactical nature the war assumed but because of the scale of our participation
on the Continent. This was irrational. The advent of air power had increased the
significance of keeping an enemy as far as possible from our shores, and the
resurgence of Germany in the 1930s made clear who that enemy might be. But
the principal lesson of the First World War which the British decided to learn
was that our casualties had been proportionately higher than in previous wars,
and that these had been, in the main, suffered on land and on the Continent of
Europe. It seemed reasonable to listen to those voices that preached the
possibility for Britain, maritime power and possessor of a worldwide empire, to
avoid Continental war. Even when under the pressure of international politics,
and late in the day, it was recognised that an Expeditionary Force would once
again need to be despatched, the commitment was hedged about by reservations.
There must be no great national army raised for Continental warfare on the
pattern of 1914-18. There must be limited liability. The respected “guru” of
British military thinking, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, preached a “British way in
warfare” which, when shorn of qualifications, eschewed the Continental
commitment altogether.
Under the stimulus of Adolf Hitler all this changed - jerkily, tardily and
reluctantly. Almost throughout the last twenty-one years, however, the British
Army had no clear role to guide it towards preparedness for war. Instead it was
absorbed by the many tasks of imperial policing which arose in the aftermath of
1918 and for which it was often inadequate in size; as well as by the minutiae of
garrison and regimental life without clear military purpose. No army can
produce quality in such circumstances. Many of the best had fallen in battle.
Unsurprisingly, the army generally failed to attract the sort of minds it needed:
its function provided inadequate stimulus, and its beggarly pay derisory reward.
Idleness and intellectual sloth, besetting sins of armies, tended to prevail. It was
all remarkably and sadly different from the years before 1914.