Mobilizing the Anglo-Canadians, the Commonwealth, and the Volunteers

Abstract

The most puzzling thing about the British Army is how it managed to survive the Second World War at all, despite its successes in 1918. At the beginning of the Second World War it remained grossly under-funded thanks to years of government parsimony; it was not organized for continental European offensive action but for Imperial defence; it was led by an officer corps that retained its preference for the amateur gentleman over the professional; and its tactical doctrines, such as they existed, were still rooted in the disciplined hierarchy of the parade ground rather than the flexible heterarchy of a mobile battlefield. The weaknesses of the British Army did not prevail through all the units however, and the elite groups tended to organize themselves along rather more flexible lines. Moreover, over time the British government and the British Army learned quickly that you could not fight a modern war without huge financial and material resources and that equitation training had little in common with the desperate fighting in Normandy, where casualty rates often replicated the horrors of the First World War. Nevertheless, the British Army persisted in its habit of retaining the highest ratio of officers to soldiers in any major army of the time. In short, the British Army seldom trusted its own soldiers to lead themselves and that proved to be their greatest weakness: once the Germans realized the inability of most of the British soldiers to act without direction from above they could effectively immobilize any unit just by killing the officers and NCOs. Nevertheless, the process of mobilization was at least Tame: the British had been there before.