The British army is still composed of fiercely individualistic regiments and corps. This is a reflection of the tenacity with which it has clung to its roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, when units were raised by individual colonels. A series of reforms over the last century and a half have failed to ‘nationalize’ the army in a thoroughgoing fashion. Officers and men have traditionally been drawn from extremes of society. The abolition of the purchase of commissions in the 1870s failed to end the dominance of the officer corps by the upper and middle classes, and even in the late 20th century products of fee-paying schools have been disproportionately represented in officers' messes, although the balance has been changing. With the exception of the two world wars and the period of National Service (peacetime conscription, 1947-63) the army has remained separate from mainstream British society. An inherently conservative organization, the British army has nevertheless succeeded in remaking itself at regular intervals over the last 300 years.
Since the Middle Ages, the British army and its antecedents consisted of both a part-time force and a permanent or semi-permanent component. The British have had the luxury of being able to rely on militia-type forces and a small standing army because Britain is an island, and for much of this period had a powerful navy, so did not run the risk of sudden invasion. While the exact origins of the militia system are unclear, some historians believe that in Anglo-Saxon times there was a ‘great’ fyrd (army) in which there was a general obligation for freemen to participate, and an élite ‘select fyrd’, perhaps of 14, 000 men. Under Henry II, the Assize of Arms (1181) reaffirmed the freeman's obligation to serve in the militia. In 1558, in the reign of Mary I, county lord-lieutenants were appointed to control militia units; all adult males were, in theory, obliged to serve in them. Other preparations for home defence were put on a sensible footing, including regular training of militiamen. During the Spanish war in the 1580s the coastal county of Kent could raise perhaps 4, 000 men, although under the early Stuarts the militia fell on hard times, the efficient ‘trained bands’ of London being a notable exception.
The militia was not the only source of troops. In the medieval period troops were raised by feudal obligation; under Henry I (1100-35) the king demanded that knights serve him for two months a year (or 40 days in time of peace). Increasingly, however, the practice of giving scutage—a fee paid in lieu of service—became the norm, the monarch using this money to hire mercenaries, often foreigners (see mercenaries, medieval). In addition there were small standing forces, usually household troops such as the housecarls of the Saxon kings or the Yeomen of the Guard, formed by Henry VII in 1485.
Armies, above all, are instruments of foreign policy. The participation of Richard ‘the Lionheart’ in the Third Crusade, Edward I's campaigns in Scotland, and Henry V's French campaigns are three very different examples of medieval English kings using armies to pursue political objectives. However, in the second half of the 16th century the disadvantages of relying on ‘traditional’ armies became clear. Under Elizabeth I (reigned 1559-1603) England began to take her place as a major player in European affairs. In 1585 England went to war with Spain, a conflict that was to last for the rest of Elizabeth's reign. An important aspect of the war was a long-running land campaign in the Netherlands supporting the Dutch in the Netherlands revolt. Ultimately, England committed about 80, 000 men to this war, most of whom were militiamen. The militia was only liable for home service, but these men were, at least in theory, volunteers, although ‘masterless men’ could be dispatched overseas by justices of the peace. A recognizably modern, if rudimentary, administrative and command system was developed to control the army in the Netherlands. Although the ‘professionalization’ of the English army did not survive Elizabeth's death, it foreshadowed some important developments of the 17th and 18th centuries and demonstrated the importance of an army for an emerging great power.
The breakdown of the Elizabethan consensus under the early Stuarts brought the issue of control of armies to the fore; parliament was reluctant to grant Charles I funds to raise an army in a time of crisis in 1639-41. This unwillingness to provide the funds to deal with a Scots invasion and a rebellion in Ireland was related to parliamentary distrust of Charles's ‘tyrannical’ tendencies. The constitutional crisis escalated into civil war. Initially, the parliamentarian and royalist armies were drawn from the militia and volunteers, and later by conscription. In 1644 the red-coated New Model Army was raised by parliament. Disciplined, ideologically motivated, sometimes regularly paid and commanded by effective officers—notably Fairfax and Cromwell--the New Model Army tipped the balance in the British civil wars. It also became the basis of the British standing army. However, the legacy of the Army's involvement in politics and Cromwell's military rule in the 1650s was a strong distrust of standing armies that remained a factor in British politics for some 200 years.
Under the Protectorate, Cromwell used military force to conquer Scotland, subdue Ireland, and to begin to carve out an overseas empire (Jamaica was taken in 1655). Moreover, under Cromwell England had once again begun to play a role on the European stage. The advantages of a standing army, not least in terms of the survival of his regime, were clear to Charles II, and in 1660-1 he raised a tiny standing army of 5, 000 men, tactfully described as the king's ‘Guards and Garrisons’. A former Cromwellian unit, Monck's Regiment (now the Coldstream Guards) was technically disbanded but then remustered, and was joined by ex-royalist units such as the 1st (now Grenadier) Guards. Other units which later came into royal service such as the 1st Foot (Royal Scots) and 3rd Foot (Buffs) actually pre-dated 1660, having been raised overseas.
Charles II's army gradually increased in size, thanks to the demands of foreign wars and the requirement of a garrison for the newly acquired colony of Tangier. James II built up the army to about 40, 000 men, stoking the fears of royal, Catholic despotism that led to his overthrow by the Dutch Prince William of Orange in the 1688 ‘Glorious’ Revolution. The army effectively collapsed during William's coup and its aftermath. Under William who saw England as a useful source of manpower for his interminable wars with France, the army was rebuilt. Another important consequence of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution was the 1689 Declaration of Rights, which stated that without the consent of parliament, a standing army was illegal, and also established that parliament had the right to vote funds for the maintenance of the army. Moreover, the institution of an annual Mutiny Act effectively gave parliament a veto over the very existence of an army. Control of the army had shifted decisively from the monarch to parliament, although monarchs and other royal figures continued to have immense influence. Suspicion of a standing army did not vanish, and the militia remained, in theory if not in practice, a rival to the army. Until the establishment of civilian police forces the army had an important internal security role in Britain, which added to suspicions of a standing army.
In the first decade of the 18th century the British army (Scotland and England were politically united in 1707) once again assumed its place as a primary instrument of foreign policy. Under Marlborough, British forces won an impressive series of victories, earning Britain a place at the top table. Like most future European conflicts, the War of the Spanish Succession was fought as part of a multinational coalition; the outcome of the American independence war, which became a European war in which Britain had no major continental allies, showed the wisdom of this approach. Marlborough and Wellington both commanded armies which included large numbers of foreigners: at Waterloo, the latter's army was barely one-third British. Similarly, at other times British forces have fought under the overall command of a foreigner: Herman von Schomberg commanded a British force in the Walcheren campaign of 1673, while in 1991 British forces in the Gulf were under the nominal command of a Saudi Arabian prince and under the actual command of US Gen Schwarzkopf.
Traditionally, in times of major war the British army has had the option of two strategies: committing forces to the continent or pursuing a maritime strategy of amphibious operations and peripheral campaigns. The second option—broadly what Liddell Hart described as ‘The British Way in Warfare’—sometimes worked well, as it did when Wellington defeated Napoleon's forces in the Peninsular war. Unfortunately such successful examples are paralleled by disasters such as Gallipoli, or the operations in the West Indies in the 1790s, which gained colonies but had little impact on the outcome of the war in Europe. The army's major roles in the 18th and 19th centuries included expansion and consolidation of empire. Wolfe's victory at Quebec in 1759 which secured Canada and the Wellesley brothers' campaigns in India are examples of the former, and the lot of many British soldiers into the 20th century was garrisoning India and the colonies. Colonial policing often involved small campaigns although on several occasions, such as the Indian Mutiny and the Second Boer War, the British became involved in major conflicts.
During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the British regular army remained fairly small, but home defence forces such as yeomanry, volunteers, and fencibles proliferated. The militia in particular formed a useful source of volunteer recruits for the regulars. Yet another species of auxiliary force emerged in 1859, when the Rifle Volunteer movement began in response to the fear of French invasion.
Between Waterloo in 1815 and Mons in 1914, the British fought only one major war in Europe. This was the Crimean war, the conduct of which contrasts strongly with the generally successful colonial campaigns. Following the Crimea, a series of reforms was carried out, although useful foundations had already been laid. The technical arms, the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers, had acquired a training institution, the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, in 1741. The infantry and cavalry had to wait until 1802 for their equivalent, the Royal Military College, which moved to Sandhurst in 1812 (the two institutions amalgamated as the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 1947). In 1858, military education was taken a stage further with the creation of the Staff College. In 1853 work began on Aldershot, which was to become the ‘home’ of the British army. Edward Cardwell, Secretary of State for War (1868-74), and his successors, principally Edward Stanhope (1887-92) and Richard Haldane (1905-12), carried out a number of important reforms. These included the abolition of purchase, remoulding the regimental system to create county regiments in place of the numbered regiments of the past, and the creation of a general staff. Haldane was responsible for amalgamating the militia into the regular army (as its Special Reserve) and creating the Territorial Force (later Territorial Army) from the yeomanry and volunteers.
In 1914, the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of six infantry and one cavalry divisions was dwarfed by the armies of its French allies and German enemies. A mass ‘New Army’ of volunteers was raised by Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, but was not ready to fight in strength until 1916. In 1914, the BEF fought well at the battles of Mons, Le Cateau, and first Ypres, although its tactical achievement—reflecting hard lessons learned in colonial warfare—was always better than the performance of its senior commanders, for whom large-scale continental operations against a first-rate opponent were unfamiliar. The British army was transformed by the war. The old Regular army was largely destroyed by the end of 1914. Reinforced by Territorials and the first divisions of the New Armies, the BEF faced the challenge of trench warfare in 1915, and began to develop the technique of launching the offensive operations demanded by the fact that the Germans were occupying a great swathe of French territory. The battle of Loos, in September 1915, the British army's biggest attack to date, proved unsuccessful, and led to replacement of the BEF's C-in-C French by Haig.
The Somme offensive was the debut of Britain's mass army. Despite suffering almost 60, 000 casualties on the first day, the bloodiest single day in British military history, the British inflicted serious damage on the Germans and gained much experience that was applied to good effect at the battle of Arras/Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Faced with the insatiable demands of total war, conscription was introduced in 1916. The third battle of Ypres was, in spite of its appalling reputation, a partial—if enormously costly—success that demonstrated that the BEF was now tactically highly skilled. This point was reinforced by the initial success of the battle of Cambrai in November-December 1917, when a British invention, the tank, was used en masse for the first time.
In the spring of 1918 the BEF weathered a series of heavy German offensives and then, at Amiens on 8 August, went onto the attack. The subsequent ‘Hundred Days’ marked the greatest achievement in the history of the British army. It is the only time in history that it had taken the lead in defeating the main body of a major continental enemy in the main theatre of operations. However, this achievement remains largely forgotten by the British public, who prefer to remember the disasters of the earlier years, such as the ill-fated amphibious operation at Gallipoli and the first day on the Somme.
The British army which went to war in 1939 had forgotten many of the lessons of 1914-18. It had ‘lost the lead’ in tank design and doctrine, which it had held until the early 1930s. The Norwegian campaign in 1940 was handled as ineptly as Gallipoli in 1915, and although the major blame for the fall of France must lay with the French, the BEF cannot escape its fair share. The British army only returned to form in late 1942 at Alamein when Montgomery arrived in Egypt and returned the army to the ‘set-piece’, attritional methods of WW I. The record of 1939-45 is decidedly mixed. British attempts to fight manoeuvre warfare in the desert between 1940 and 1942 failed as often as they succeeded. Generalship and tactics in Italy (1943-5) were uninspiring and the early campaigns against the Japanese were disastrous. By contrast, Montgomery was a highly effective, if cautious, general and his armies had an almost unbroken run of success in Western Desert and North-West Europe. Perhaps the most impressive British general of the war was Slim, whose 1945 campaign in Burma was a masterpiece of which the German blitzkrieg generals would have been proud.
In 1939 Britain resorted to conscription, which was renewed in 1947 and retained until 1963. Unlike in 1914-18 there was no long-running campaign of the proportions of the western front. Indeed, many British soldiers spent the years 1940-4 in training in the UK. Specialist units increased, ranging from airborne forces to the Chindits and commandos. Their military usefulness is still a matter for debate; certainly, the war in Europe and Burma was won by conventional infantry, armour, artillery, and air power.
Between 1945 and 1998 the British army fought only four conventional wars, yet between the end of WW II and 1998 there has been only one year—1968—when British soldiers were not in action somewhere over the globe. Counter-insurgency (COIN) was the army's stock in trade in these years, as Britain disengaged from empire. The legacy of colonial policing and the experience of successful operations such as the Malayan emergency (1948-60) and the Dhofar war (1970-5) as well as failures such the campaigns in Palestine (1945-8) and Aden (1964-8) led to the emergence of an informal COIN doctrine. This emphasized recognition of the political nature of the insurgency, intelligence, winning the hearts and minds of the population, and political reform. While British COIN operations did not always succeed, their record of success compared very favourably with those of the US and French armies. From 1969 onwards the army was heavily involved in internal security duties in Northern Ireland. During this period the British army was engaged in UN peacekeeping operations, such as in Cyprus (1964 onwards). A small British contingent also participated in the non-UN peacekeeping operation in Beirut (1983-4). The end of the Cold War has seen the army gain much experience of what is now termed ‘Wider Peacekeeping’ in such far-flung places as Kurdistan (1991) and the former Yugoslavia (from 1992). The British COIN experience has proved to be very useful in this new global environment.
Of the four conventional wars fought during this period by the British army the Korean war was fought in the manner of WW II, while both Suez and the Falklands were species of amphibious operation. For more than forty years, the British army trained for the war that never was: a defensive battle in northern Germany against invading Soviet forces. In the 1980s the British army underwent a series of reforms instituted by FM Sir Nigel Bagnall that transformed army doctrine from a broadly attritional approach to one of manoeuvre warfare, in line with similar developments in the US army. Ironically, as a result, in the 1991 Gulf war the British and US forces used methods that owed much to the influence of their Cold War enemy, the Soviet army.
In 1991 and 1998 governments undertook radical reorganizations of the armed forces that involved cuts in numbers but also the purchase of new sophisticated equipment. Other developments included the introduction in 1988 of a Higher Command and Staff Course dedicated to the operational level of war and, a year later, the promulgation of a formal written doctrine—the first in the army's 300-year history. Subsequently, a Permanent Joint Headquarters and a Joint Services Command and Staff College was set up to enhance co-operation between the services. Thus, at the end of the 20th century, the British army is undergoing change as radical as any in its history.
Bibliography
- Chandler, David, and Beckett, Ian, (eds.) The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994).
- Pimlott, John, The Guinness History of the British Army (London, 1993)
— Gary Sheffield
