British Army Research Articles

Entry Fitness And Subsequent Physical Performance Change In Recruits Across British Army Basic Training Courses.

Soldiers require high levels of fitness to perform physically demanding role-related tasks, such as load carriage and moving equipment. Developing cardiorespiratory endurance and muscular strength through progressive physical training programmes during Basic Training (BT) will support soldiers to perform their duties and reduce musculoskeletal injury risk. PURPOSE: To (1) quantify physical performance changes in recruits undertaking three British Army BT courses; Standard Entry (SE), Junior Entry Short (JE-Short) and Long (JE-Long) and (2) explore differences between courses, men and women, and entry fitness level. METHODS: Performance of 2 km run, medicine ball throw (MBT) and mid-thigh pull (MTP) were assessed at entry and completion of BT (14 [SE]), 23 [JE-Short] or 49 [JE-Long] weeks in duration) for 2350 (272 women) British Army recruits. Performance change was analysed with entry performance as a covariate (ANCOVA), before an additional interaction term allowing different slopes for course and gender. RESULTS: There was high heterogeneity, although BT courses saw average improvements in surrogate tests for cardiovascular endurance (2 km run: SE: -6.8% [-0.62 min], JE-Short: -4.6% [-0.43 min], JE-Long: -7.7% [-0.70 min]; all p < 0.001) and muscular strength and power (MBT: 1.0-8.8% [0.04-0.34 m]; all p < 0.05; MTP: 4.5-26.9% [6.5-28.8 kg]; all p < 0.001). Regression models indicated a form of regression to the mean whereby performance change was negatively associated with entry fitness (those with low baseline fitness exhibit larger improvements), particularly for women. However, when matched for entry fitness, men displayed considerable improvements in all tests, relative to women. CONCLUSIONS: British Army BT courses were effective in developing physical fitness and entry fitness was negatively associated with change over time. Other factors not measured including age and physical maturity could also be contributors to the training response. Individualising physical training may enhance physical fitness development and role-related job-task performance. Funded by the UK Ministry of Defence (Army).

Warfare and Logistics Along the US-Canadian Border During the War of 1812 by Christopher D. Dishman

Reviewed by: Warfare and Logistics Along the US-Canadian Border During the War of 1812 by Christopher D. Dishman David Curtis Skaggs Christopher D. Dishman. Warfare and Logistics Along the US-Canadian Border During the War of 1812. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 334. Bibliography. Index. Maps. Notes. Cloth: $39.95. There’s an old military adage that “amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.” Others invoke the maxim attributed to Erwin Rommel: “Battles are won by the quartermasters.” To the military, logistics is concerned with maintaining supply lines of personnel, equipment, food, weapons, and ammunition from one point to another while disrupting the capabilities of an enemy to do the same thing. The importance of supplying military forces is similarly emphasized in Christopher D. Dishman’s Warfare and Logistics Along the US-Canadian Border During the War of 1812. In the preface, Dishman notes that “Victory for either side often depended on enough men and supplies arriving promptly at a remote outpost or dockyard. This dependence on external supplies meant that military operations in one theater could produce cascading effects hundreds of miles from the battle.” In addition to logistics, he also undertakes the operational and tactical actions of the contending military and naval forces from Lake Champlain to Lake Michigan. No one previously has integrated the logistical and combat aspects of the border warfare in this central region of this war’s military operations as effectively as he. Unfortunately, William S. Dudley’s Inside the US Navy of 1812–1815 (2021), with its supportive conclusions, was unavailable before Dishman’s manuscript went to press. Michiganders will find special interest in the inept American leadership during its failures at Detroit and Frenchtown (now Monroe), as well as the surrender of Fort Michilimackinac (as it was spelled at the time) on Mackinac Island and the failure to retake the post in 1814. Dishman gives a detailed analysis of the combined operations led by General William Henry Harrison and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry on Lake Erie and southwestern Upper Canada in 1813. Critical to both the operational and logistical aspects of this conflict was the control of Lake Ontario, where both sides failed to implement combined operations decisively and the British were able to escape disaster by the narrowest of margins. As Dishman’s study becomes more involved in the detail of combat in 1814, the depth of logistical discussion declines. He could easily have developed more thoroughly the logistical problems of the Lake Champlain campaign. His description of the expedition of Miller Worsley, for the relief of Fort [End Page 117] Michilimackinac in the fall of 1814 deserves greater depth. Totally ignored is the role played by the British Army, the North West Company’s operatives, and Native Americans who relied on support out of Mackinac Island for operations in the upper Mississippi Valley. Dishman’s disparagement of the militia compared with the regular army fails to contrast the performances of the common militia (mostly conscripts) and the volunteer militia, which sometimes exceeded that of the regulars in battle. Also, he demotes one of my unsung heroes of the war, West Point graduate Eleazer Wood, who was a lieutenant colonel, not a major, before being killed during the 1814 Niagara campaign. Finally, one reason why British negotiators at the Treaty of Ghent agreed to the status quo antebellum was that the Harrison-Perry campaign had resulted in the United States controlling both sides of the Detroit River in the Western District of Upper Canada. Had the treaty been settled on uti possidetis (retaining property held at the war’s end), this would have given the Americans domination of the logistical route to Lake Huron, although the British would have acquired the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Wisconsin. But such trivial criticisms should not disparage the thoroughly researched, engagingly written, insightfully analytical contents of Warfare and Logistics, which should be part of anyone’s collection of important War of 1812 studies. After reading it, you will agree with Dishman’s conclusion: “The war along the US-Canadian frontier was a testament to the importance of logistics when waging war.” David Curtis Skaggs Professor Emeritus of History Bowling Green State...

Ghosts of Tao House

Ghosts of Tao House

Companion interview

Chris Laurence is a member of that select band of people who have been made honorary life members of the BSAVA. He is known to the profession as the former chief vet of two of the main animal welfare charities. But he is also noted for his contributions to various other charitable bodies, within the ranks of the British Army as a distinguished and long serving officer in the Signals Corps, and for the residents of Tytherton, Wiltshire, as the main driving force behind the campaign to build a new village hall. John Bonner wondered where he gets the energy.

Occupational health screening during Gurkha Central Selection: a retrospective cohort study

ObjectiveThe selection process to the British Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas is rigorous, demanding and competitive. The ethos of recruitment to the Gurkhas is grounded in an overarching tenant: that selection...

Reluctant nationalists: the life writing of two soldiers in WWI Middle East

ABSTRACT An analysis of the diary of Ihsan Turjman, an Arab soldier who served in the Ottoman army in World War I, and of letters written by B. Zilberman, a Jewish soldier in the British army fighting the Ottomans, reveals common themes that nuance the widely held assumption about the inevitability of the Arab-Jewish conflict in the Middle East.

‘Can I Be Gay in the Army?’: British Army recruitment advertising to LGBTQ youth in 2017–18 and belonging in the queer military home

ABSTRACT In 2017, the British Army opened its ‘This is Belonging’ recruitment campaign, aimed at groups of young people who were considered traditionally less likely to join the Army, with marketing at Pride in London aimed at LGBTQ youth. The campaign’s next phase, in 2018, consisted of live-action and animated YouTube videos targeting specific groups including young women, religiously observant youth, emotionally sensitive young men, youth with average fitness levels, and, in the animations, LGBTQ youth again. While every other theme appeared in both sets of videos, the live-action set contained a video depicting homosocial male bonding instead of any LGBTQ theme. The Army’s acknowledgement of LGBTQ identities during recruitment in 2017–18 suggested certain advances from the 2000s position where LGBTQ personnel were expected to keep their sexuality private. A close audiovisual analysis of the LGBTQ-themed video, ‘Can I be Gay in the Army?’, and its intertextual relationship with the other videos nevertheless reveals hesitancy over how to represent a legibly gay male soldier that hints at limits to the institution’s inclusion of sexual difference. Drawing on both ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ scholarship, the paper illustrates how concepts of domesticity and futurity can contribute to critical understandings of LGBTQ military inclusion.

“Most naturil causes”: Rudyard Kipling and the suicidal soldier

ABSTRACT Nineteenth-century discourses on suicide lamented vast systemic causes for self-killing – ranging from supposedly racial predispositions to the ennui of modernity to a culture-wide breakdown of education. Yet in tension with authorities’ overwrought conjectures about the sources of suicidal desire, the British Army in India devised an effective deterrent that bypassed motives altogether: removing ammunition from off-duty soldiers’ kit, statistics showed, decreased incidence of both suicide and murder. Rudyard Kipling’s short stories about suicidal ideation grapple with this paradox. While evoking a whole host of racial, climactic, and societal causes for soldiers’ suicidal impulses, the stories counterbalance such seemingly inescapable forces with canny bystanders who view suicidal actions as avoidable and thus step in to foil the man’s plan. Previous scholars have argued that imperial suicides enacted a fantasy of self-determination in Victorian culture, yet Kipling echoes contemporary military statistics by depicting the suicidal act as a mere accident, a preventable tragedy. Kipling’s stories acknowledge that the everyday work of empire fell to a population of men who were vulnerable to seemingly thoughtless acts of self-destruction. Yet, strangely enough, the apparent vulnerabilities of imperial masculinity in these texts are shorn up by a soldierly community who intervene precisely because they admit they have, at times, felt the same way.

‘NO GO’: Artists, Trespass and the Aftermath of Occupation

Abstract This paper considers the relationship between site, memory and fine art practices, as viewed from the perspectives of a practitioner informed by the discourses of commemoration and the aftermath of conflict. Through an exploration of art works derived from encounters with displaced spaces, peripheries and edgelands, Gough situates his practice – and that of several selected artists – as a conversation between “place”, “space” and the geopolitical. Artists have long employed the notions of ambiguity, transition and the hybrid in their work. Framed within the discourses of liminality and aftershock, practitioners have explored various strategies to address rites of in-betweenness to evoke a sensation of transition and displacement. To explore these ideas, Gough posits a number of his artworks as ‘provocations’, and draws attention to other contemporary artists and practitioners similarly drawn to the aftermath of constructed places and re-constructed histories. The paper draws upon two suites of Gough’s work each addressing aspects of the aftermath, and each to a degree addressing issues of transgression. The first is a series of site-specific photographs take on the decrepit and abandoned British army bases in former West Germany where Gough’s family was garrisoned during the Cold War. They speak of an abjectness and blankness tempered by the depth of familial association. The second suite of practice use frottage, rubbings and photographic collage, to assemble a cycle of triptych forms drawn from prolonged site visits to the sites of twentieth century battle in Turkey, France, Belgium and Macedonia: locations richly associated with transgressive military intervention and now comprised of preserved terrain, military cemeteries and rhetorical topography that has long informed Gough’s practice.

Moman's Secret Agenda

Moman's Secret Agenda

"One in the breech, five in the magazine": British Aircrew Armament of the First World War

Prior to the successful adaptation of machine guns to military aircraft by means of fixed or flexible mounts, pilots and observers wishing to attack or defend themselves from enemy aircraft were obliged to make use of small arms—pistols, rifles, and shotguns. Whereas a body of research into those armaments integrated into aircraft exists, no dedicated study of aircrew weapons has thus far been published. In an effort to shed light on this little-understood aspect of firearms history, this article summarises the small arms, other than machine guns, known to have seen air service with the British Army’s Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) during the first two years of the First World War (1914–1918). It also addresses, as far as is practicable, their usage and effectiveness with reference to period examples.

REVIEW: Parents’ letters trace story of triumph and tragedy from Egypt to New Zealand

IN HIS newly released Wars Apart: WWII Letters of Love and Anguish From Cairo to Christchurch, retired award-winning New Zealand journalist and academic Alan Samson tells the love story of his parents through the letters and photographs they exchanged while they were stationed in the Middle East during the Second World War. They later migrated to New Zealand and their story continued from Cairo to Christchurch. Cairo was the place in which his parents began their story, which continued as they adapted to the diversity and triumphs of a new life in New Zealand. A journalism lecturer who taught at Wellington’s Massey University for more than a decade and is a former Pacific Journalism Review reviews editor, Samson uses his academic research skills and journalistic expertise in telling this story of love and anguish, hope and despair, of his own mother and father who had distinguished service records with the South African and British armies.

Why Did Rebuilding the Afghan and Iraqi Armies Fail?

Investigations into why Western forces – primarily the US and British Armies – failed to build effective and accountable Afghan and Iraqi armies have not focused enough on the links between state and army, Colin D Robinson argues. Building strong states in such circumstances is near-impossible and has dire consequences for armies. In addition, the regular combat culture of Western armies serves them extraordinarily badly when they are called to make things, not break things, in totally dissimilar societies. ◼

Are British soldiers adequately prepared to make safe sexual health decisions when deployed to areas with high HIV prevalence?

IntroductionSoldiers deployed to British Army Training Unit Kenya (BATUK) are at increased risk of sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, compared with when in the firm base, due to the increased...

The First African Doctors-West Africa Medical Service of the British Army

The First African Doctors-West Africa Medical Service of the British Army

‘A Ticklish Craft’: Viewing Britain’s empire from inside a birch-bark canoe in the eighteenth century

At the end of the French and Indian War elements of the British Empire moved quickly into the western Great Lakes and central Canada in an effort to partake in and control the lucrative fur trade. To do this both the British army and fur traders adopted a piece of Native American technology: birch-bark canoes. What may have seemed like just an expedient tool for travelling from one point to another actually had far reaching implications for all parties involved. Archival research, material culture analysis, and geographic information systems data together demonstrate that the birch-bark canoe’s speed and efficiency both facilitated and frustrated fur traders and the army alike. For the army it meant a lack of control over traders looking to skirt imperial oversight. Conversely, the trader’s ability to go far beyond the government’s reach put them under the power of Native communities. Decisions about how much food or trade goods to pack, which waterways to take, where to trade, where to get the canoes, and how to stay alive were all influenced by the unique characteristics of this remarkable craft.

Reappraising Expropriations

The attack on Benin City by British forces in 1897 has evolved into a symbol in the twenty-first century of the contested legacy of taking in military colonial conflicts. This revolves around questions of legitimacy of retention and, in a more focused manner, on the question of military looting. A number of scholars have written about the looting activities of British and other European forces concerning Yuanmingyuan (Tythacott 2018), Tibet (Carrington 2003; Harris 2012), and Benin City (Bodenstein 2018, 2020/1, 2022; Eyo 1997; Hicks 2020; Igbare 1970, 2007; Lundén 2016; Plankensteiner 2007; Ratté 1972; Shyllon 2019) to mention but a few. Some historians have provided an overview of the system that British land and naval forces operated to expropriate, and manage the expropriation of, artworks during colonial conflicts in the nineteenth century and prior (Finn 2018; Hevia 1994; Hill 1999; Spiers 2020). As noted in other publications (Lidchi and Allan 2020b; Lidchi and Hartwell 2022), colonial military conventions and codes that historically governed the taking of objects changed over the centuries, and this renders them somewhat opaque regarding what was being allowed and disallowed and how this was implemented. These governance structures, understood and applied by British army and naval forces, as well as such entities as the presidency armies of the East India Company, were obviously part of the “extractive statecraft” (Finn 2018: 17) of British governments that deployed a range of economic and military strategies to constrain and, in many cases, humiliate those who resisted while expanding the boundaries of trade and empire.

The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands

The Fortress: The Siege of Przemyśl and the Making of Europe's Bloodlands

The habit of excellence: why British Army leadership works, Lieutenant Colonel Langley Sharp MBE

The habit of excellence: why British Army leadership works, Lieutenant Colonel Langley Sharp MBE

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer

Bernard Shaw as Political Writer