Browse

The veterans of the Fourteenth Army who fought in Burma between 1942 and 1945 called themselves ‘the forgotten army’. But that appellation could equally well be applied to the whole of the British army after 1945. Histories of Britain's post‐war defence policy have usually focused on how and why Britain acquired a nuclear deterrent. This book takes a new look at it by placing the army centre‐stage. Drawing on archival sources that have hardly been used by historians, it shows how British governments tried to create an army that would enable them to maintain their position as a major world power at a time when their economy struggled to foot the bill. The result was a growing mismatch between the military resources that the government thought it could afford on the one hand, and a long list of overseas commitments, in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, that it was reluctant to surrender. The result was that the British created a Potemkin army, a force that had an outwardly impressive facade, but that in reality had only very limited war‐fighting capabilities.

This is the story of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries — the most notorious police forces in the history of the British Isles. During the Irish War of Independence (1920–1), the British government recruited thousands of ex-soldiers to serve as constables in the Royal Irish Constabulary — the Black and Tans — while also raising a paramilitary raiding force of ex-officers — the Auxiliary Division. From the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1921, these forces became the focus of bitter controversy. As the struggle for Irish independence intensified, the police responded to ambushes and assassinations by the guerrillas with reprisals and extrajudicial killings. Prisoners and suspects were abused and shot, the homes and shops of their families and supporters were burned, and the British government was accused of imposing a reign of terror on Ireland. This book, based on extensive archival research, is the first serious study of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and the part they played in the Irish War of Independence. It examines the organization and recruitment of the British police, the social origins of police recruits, and the conditions in which they lived and worked, along with their conduct and misconduct once they joined the force, and their experiences and states of mind. For the first time, it tells the story of the Irish conflict from the police perspective, while casting new light on the British government’s responsibility for reprisals, the problems of using police to combat insurgents, and the causes of atrocities in revolutionary wars.

During the Korean War nearly a thousand British servicemen, along with a handful of British civilians, were captured by North Korean and Red Chinese forces. In various camps in the vicinity of Pyongyang and villages along the Yalu River these men found themselves subjected to a prolonged effort by the enemy to undermine their allegiance to the Crown and enlist them in various propaganda campaigns directed against the UN war effort. This is the first academic study to examine in detail exactly what happened to the major groups of British military and civilian prisoners held in different locations at various junctures between 1950 and 1953. It explores the extent to which factors such as exposure to the actions of the North Koreans as against the Red Chinese, evolving physical conditions, enemy re-education efforts, communist attempts at blackmail, British attitudes towards the Americans, and personal background and leadership qualities among captives themselves influenced the willingness and ability of the British prisoners to collaborate or resist. Thanks to the availability of hitherto classified or underutilized source materials, it is now possible to test the common popular assumption—based on official accounts and memoirs from the 1950s—that, in marked contrast to their American cousins, British captives in the Korean War were pretty much immune to communist efforts at subverting their loyalty. The results suggest that British attitudes and actions while in enemy hands were rather more nuanced and varied than previously assumed.

‘The experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict.’ (Ministry of Defence, 2001). Over the next decade these claims unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and this book suggests that one reason for that was because contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine was based upon a serious mis-reading of the past. Many observers believed that during their wars of decolonisation in the two decades after 1945 the British had discovered how western liberal notions of right and wrong could be made compatible with the imperatives of waging war amongst the people, that force could be used effectively but with care, and that a more just and prosperous society could emerge from these struggles. By using only the minimum necessary force, and doing so with the utmost discrimination, the British were able to win by securing the 'hearts and minds' of the people. But this was a serious distortion of actual British practice on the ground. The main contention of this book is that the British hid their use of naked force behind a carefully constructed veneer of legality. In reality they commonly used wholesale coercion, including cordon and search operations, mass detention without trial, forcible population resettlement, and the creation of free-fire zones, to intimidate and lock-down the civilian population. They were nasty, not nice, to the people amongst whom they were operating.

During the Second World War British intelligence provided politicians and soldiers with invaluable knowledge; Britain was determined to maintain this advantage following victory. But the wartime machinery was uneconomical and unwieldy, and unsuitable for peace. Drawing on oral testimony, international archives, and private papers, this book provides the first history of the hitherto little-known organization designed to preserve and advance British capability in military and military-related intelligence for the Cold War: the Joint Intelligence Bureau. Headed by General Eisenhower’s wartime intelligence man, Major General Kenneth Strong, the JIB was central to the mission to spy on and understand the Soviet Union, and the broader Communist world. It did so from its creation in 1946 to its end in 1964, when it formed a central component of the new Defence Intelligence Staff. This book reveals hitherto hidden aspects of Britain’s mission to map the Soviet Union for nuclear war, the struggle to understand and contain the economies of the USSR, China, and North Korea in peace and during the Korean War, and the urgent challenge to understand the nature and scale of the Soviet bomber and missile threat in the 1950s and 1960s. The JIB’s dedicated work in these fields won it the support of some politicians and military men, but the enmity of others who saw the centralized organization as a threat to traditional military intelligence. The intelligence officers of the JIB waged Cold War not only with Communist adversaries but also in Whitehall.

The period 1902–14 was one of great change for the British army. The experience of the South African War (1899–1902) had been a profound shock to the army and it led to a period of intense introspection in order to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the force. As a result of a series of investigations and government-led reorganization, the army embarked on a series of reforms to improve its recruitment, standards of professionalism, training, and preparation for war. Until now many of the studies covering this period have tended to look at the army in a top-down manner and have often concluded that the process was extremely beneficial to the army, leading it to be the most efficient force in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. This study takes a different approach. It takes a bottom-up perspective and examines the many difficulties the army experienced trying to incorporate the reforms demanded by government and the army’s high command. It reveals that although many good ideas were devised, the severely overstretched army was never in a position whereby it could act on them, and that few regimental officers had the opportunity, or even the desire, to change their approach. Unable to shake off the feeling that the army’s primary purpose was to garrison and police the British Empire, it was by no means as well prepared for European continental warfare as many have presumed.

Covering the period from the late 1930s up to the spring of 1940, this book offers the first systematic comparison of how two countries, Britain and France, responded to the possibility and then reality of total war by examining developments in three dimensions: strategic, domestic political, and political economic. To date, studies of French and British policies during this period have focused almost exclusively on diplomatic and military events. Yet because 20th-century war demanded a massive effort on the part of nations and societies, its study requires a broader approach, one that encompasses the political, social, and economic dimensions as well as the links between them. Using a wide array of archival and secondary sources, including the records of government departments, trade unions, business groups, and political parties, this book demonstrates that the British were more successful in managing the strains of modern industrial war than the French. Whereas in France political, economic, and military developments combined to produce a multi-faceted crisis by early 1940, imperilling the war effort against Germany, developments in Britain followed a different course that laid the political and economic foundations for a long war. The book addresses such current historical debates as the nature of the political Right and Left in Europe during the 1930s, the extent of rearmament and economic mobilization, and the causes of France's defeat in 1940. As an extended comparison of how two liberal democracies met the challenge of war, it also addresses debates concerning the relationship between democratic regimes and capabilities for war, the influence of domestic versus systemic factors on national policies, and the nature and relative performance of different types of political economic regimes.

This book explores the way in which the peoples of the United Kingdom – —England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland—went to war in 1914. It is the first fully documented study of UK public opinion at the time and successfully challenges the myth of British ‘war enthusiasm’. It explores what people felt, and how they acted, in response to an unanticipated and unprecedented crisis. It is a history of both ordinary people and elite figures in extraordinary times. It demonstrates that describing the reactions of over 40 million British and Irish people to the outbreak of war in 1914 as either enthusiastic in the British case or disengaged in the Irish is over‐simplified and inadequate. A society as complex as the UK in the Edwardian era did not have a single, uniform reaction to such a major event as the outbreak of European war. Emotional reactions to the war were ambiguous and complex, and changed over time. By the end of 1914 the populations of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland had largely embraced the war. But the war had equally embraced them, and showed no signs of relinquishing its grip. In fact it would continue for another four years. However, the five months from August to December 1914 set the shape of much that was to follow. This book seeks to describe and explain that twenty‐week formative process.

This book analyses the place of the army in British interwar strategy and during the Second World War. The book sweeps away the myth that the army suffered from poor morale, and that it only won its battles through the use of ‘brute force’ and by reverting to the techniques of the First World War. The book shows that after 1918 the General Staff tried hard to learn the lessons of the First World War, enthusiastically embracing technology as the best way of minimizing future casualties. In the first half of the Second World War the army did suffer from manifold weaknesses, not just in the form of shortages of equipment, but also in the way in which it applied its doctrine. Few soldiers were actively eager to close with the enemy, but the morale of the army never collapsed and its combat capability steadily improved from 1942 onwards. The book assesses Montgomery's contributions to the war effort and concludes that most important was his willingness to impose a uniform understanding of doctrine on his subordinates and to use mechanized firepower in ways quite different from Haig in the First World War.

This book examines the way in which the prospect of a wartime German assault on British seaborne commerce influenced the development of British naval policy in the run up to the First World War. It argues that, owing to the Admiralty’s consistently expressed fears that, in the event of an Anglo-German conflict, German commerce-raiders could interdict vital supplies, the British government began to consider German maritime power as a serious danger to British national security at the very outset of the twentieth century and that this sense of anxiety continued, even sharpened, as the years unfolded. It further argues that as a result of this perception of a growing menace, the Royal Navy devoted considerable time and energy to devising ever more elaborate countermeasures. These included developing new types of auxiliary and then regular warships, attempting to change international maritime law, creating a new global intelligence network, seeking to involve the government in the maritime insurance system and, finally, arming British merchant vessels and taking steps to place trained gun crews on these vessels in peacetime. While some of these developments have been subject to alternative explanations, some have never been explained at all. Yet, as this book shows, all had their origins, substantially or even entirely, in the Admiralty’s fears of a German threat to British maritime commerce. As a result, it concludes that the prospect of a German assault on British trade played a major part in shaping Admiralty policy in the twelve years before 1914.

There is an old story about Winston Churchill, which relates that, during his time as First Lord of the Admiralty, he made a proposal for reform that was strenuously opposed by the naval officers around him. The reason given was that Churchill’s measure was not in accord with naval tradition. Hearing this objection, Churchill immediately retorted, ‘Naval tradition? Naval tradition? Monstrous. Nothing but rum, sodomy, prayers and the lash.’ The quotation is frequently dismissed as apocryphal or a jest, but, interestingly, all four areas of naval life singled out were subject to major reform initiatives while Churchill was in charge of the Royal Navy between October 1911 and May 1915. During this period, not only were there major improvements in pay and conditions for sailors, but detailed consideration was given to the future of the spirit ration; to the punishing and eradicating of homosexual practices; to the spiritual concerns of the fleet; and also to the regime of corporal punishment that underpinned naval discipline for boy sailors. In short, under Churchill, the Royal Navy introduced a social reform programme perfectly encapsulated in this elegant quip. And, yet, not only has no one studied it; many people do not even know that such a programme even existed. This book rectifies that. It shows that Churchill was not just a major architect of welfare reform as President of the Board of Trade and as Home Secretary, but that he continued to push a radical social agenda while running the Navy.

The belief that crime declines at the beginning of major wars, as young men are drawn into the armed forces, and increases with the restoration of peace, as brutalized veterans are released on to a labour market reorganizing for peace, has a long pedigree in Britain; but it has rarely been examined critically and scarcely at all for the period of the two world wars of the twentieth century. This book is a serious investigation of criminal offending by members of the British armed services both during and immediately after these wars. Its particular focus is the two world wars but, recognizing the concerns and the problems voiced in recent years about veterans of the Falklands, the Gulf wars and the campaign in Afghanistan, the book concludes its narrative in the present. The book begins with a comparison of the military law, means of enforcement and punishment, and the civilian criminal law. It argues that military law, with its rather different aims, was not quite as old fashioned as is often assumed on the eve of the First World War, but that the mass armies and navies of the two world wars accelerated moves towards greater similarities with civilian law. There follow a series of thematic chapters assessing different forms of criminal offending by service personnel both during and immediately after wars. The conclusion assesses the contemporary attitudes to service offending, with some emphasis on concerns about the damage inflicted on service personnel by conflict.