Questions and Answers Episode 32

Our latest questions from listeners range from could Britain have stood back from conflict in 1914 and not been part of the Great War, how accurate was the final dugout scene in the film 1917, what duties did Royal Field Artillery Drivers have on the battlefields of WW1 and what was the story of the Canadian soldiers who rioted in Britain in 1919 while awaiting demobilisation?

The Old Front Line Youtube Channel: Old Front Line on YouTube.

Recommended novel on 1914: Robert Harris - Precipice (Penguin 2024)

Books on The Canadian Riots:

• The story of the Kinmel Park Camp Riots in 1919 by Julian Putkowski (1989)
• Riots Death and Baseball - Robert H. Griffiths (2019)

Got a question about this episode or any others? Drop your question into the Old Front Line Discord Server or email the podcast.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Welcome to some more questions and answers here on the old front line. These are questions submitted by you, the podcast listeners, and each month we select some of the best questions that have been submitted via email and the Discord server to answer here and hopefully give us all fresh perspectives and new knowledge of this vast subject of the Great War. So let's begin. I was back out on the old front line just last week on the Somme battlefields filming some content for the YouTube channel. And if you've never had a chance to have a look at the old front line YouTube channel, I'll put a link to it in the show notes for this episode. It's never going to replace the podcast, far from it. It really supplements the podcast, gives a kind of visual aspect to what we do, and I think that's quite important. And while I was out there with my friend John who's helping me with a YouTube channel, we were talking about fiction and the Great War because John recommended a book to me quite recently which I've been working my way through and which I'm going to mention in one of the questions. So let's get down to this week's questions and answers on this episode of The Old Frontline and we're going to begin with our first question that comes from Alice Williams via email. Alice asked, did Britain really need to get involved in the Great War? And what do you think the outcome would have been if we had not taken the side of France and Belgium against Germany and our allies in 1914? There's a school of thought of which you are no doubt aware that Britain has never recovered financially or in other ways from taking part in the First World War. From the vast amount of money which was spent to the hundreds of thousands of dead, wounded and traumatised soldiers, the country was left diminished in so many ways despite the Allies' so-called victory. So was our involvement in the war worth it only when 20 years later we were getting prepared for another huge fight with Germany? Now, I'm not sure I can answer a question as to whether any war was worth it, because with any conflict, victory or defeat, there's a price, and that price is paid in human lives. And while for the First World War, compared to, say, with the Second, there is less of what would be perceived to be a threat, if, for most people, you said Kaiser Wilhelm II, Adolf Hitler... Adolf Hitler's pretty clear cut most people would have said well he was a cousin of our king and cousin of Tsar Nicholas it was cousins at war it was kind of a European civil war I mean that is something you won't have to go far into the literature of the First World War not always the best literature to find that kind of thing but that's not really at the essence of this question I don't think in terms of and again going back to the fiction that I mentioned in the intro to this episode I've just been reading Robert Harris's Precipice which is a set in Britain at cabinet level, with one of the central characters being Herbert Asquith, H.H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, in that lead-up to the First World War, with all the machinations that led to war, political intrigue, all that kind of stuff. And it's fiction, but it's based on reality, and he recommends a lot of really good books at the end of the novel to get you more informed on the actual history of what happened. But fiction can be a good way into subjects like the First World War and I would certainly recommend that Robert Harris book and again I'll put a link to it in the show notes but should Britain have really got involved in the First World War is the first level of your question I think Alice well Let's say Britain stood back and did nothing. Britain had not been involved in European conflict for 99 years in 1914. Its last foray into Europe was the Battle of Waterloo in June of 1815 which had kind of set a route for many nations, amongst them Prussia, to follow a path that in many ways would create the Europe that made the First World War possible and create the circumstances that made that conflict possible as well. If Britain had stayed back and had not gone to war over the invasion of either France or Belgium it was legally tied to stepping in to protect Belgium a neutral country less so with France it was the Entente Cordiale which had been signed in the decades before the Great War which the French I'm sure saw as a treaty but the British perhaps less so if we'd have stood back from both of those things one more imperative than the other then Germany would have succeeded in 1914 It would have overrun Belgium, controlled it, even if it saw it as a buffer zone for a route to France, it almost certainly would have occupied it, and it certainly would have occupied France, having defeated it, potentially in that Schlieffen Plan of 1914. And if it had defeated France then, it would have done what it didn't do in 1871, and that would be to take over France's colonies. And that really is at the essence of why Britain was never not going to be involved in the First World War. Empire, was a massive part of British status. And if you just look at Africa, for example, a big chunk of it is French, a small chunk of it is Belgium, and another big chunk of it is British. And if the Belgian and the French parts of Africa had suddenly been under German control, then even if Britain had never fought on European soil in this conflict, it certainly would have gone to war over Africa. It would not have stood back and watched its empire anywhere on the globe be threatened by the German acquisition of empire and creating a country that could easily become on parity really with Britain in terms of its economic political and military capabilities through the acquisition of this empire so I think Britain would never have stood back and let that happen because the collapse the occupation the overrunning of Belgium and France would potentially have been catastrophic for Britain and now Germany Just as would happen a generation later would be just across the channel and that would affect all kinds of things from an island nation, even with the Navy behind it. And there was a sense of justice here as well from a British perspective. The Kaiser's Germany, Kaiser Wilhelm II's Germany was as much a threat to them. as Adolf Hitler's Germany was a generation later. They could see their whole way of life being potentially changed by German success in a war in 1914. And so I really cannot ever see Britain just sitting back as it had done for the last almost century. And of course what you say here is right. Britain went to war and for all nations in Europe and beyond Europe the First World War was a watershed. It changed society. It changed the world in all kinds of different ways forever. And Britain suffered substantially and its empire as well. It sees the beginning of a fragmentation of an empire into eventually a commonwealth and it sees a nation damaged and economically huge losses on the battlefield over three quarters of a million British dead by the end of the Great War once you add the Empire to that well over a million and a country having fought four years of war was up to its neck in debt so there was a price to pay as you say for this victory to do the right thing often costs on all kinds of different levels but I think that was a generation of people within Britain who felt felt that this was the right thing to do and even despite that outcome it was still considered worth it if you look at the language of sacrifice and how that sacrifice was described in the post war period it is about the righteousness of that sacrifice that the cost had been worth it we may now look back and see that differently but from a contemporary point of view their opinion was not the same as ours their opinion shaped by experience shaped by that experience of loss I guess that many wanted to believe that there was some purpose to that loss. And you see that being expressed in... the many, the myriad of ways that that generation is eventually memorialised. But that doesn't mean that people didn't question it. There was a feeling amongst many men who'd survived that there was too much emphasis on the dead and memorialising that generation that had fallen. And that led to war memorials being daubed with graffiti by those veterans, which read,"'Remember the dead, but don't forget the living.'" that far more men had come home than those had been killed on the battlefronts and there was certainly a decade or so after the war with the publication of war memoirs many reflections on service and sacrifice asking these kind of questions was it all worth it there was a classic memoir the first world war called and all for what in that period particularly once you move into the 30s with the resurgence of interest in books about the first world war and the whole political movements going on within Europe leading to that polarised battle between left and right, communism and fascism and the arrival of the National Socialists, the Nazis in Germany and that path of course to that next conflict. I guess what I'm saying Alice is I don't necessarily have an answer to your questions here but it is food for thought and there's plenty of books out there on aspects of this that I'd thoroughly recommend from Harris's novels to more recent books about the pathway to the First World War and British involvement in it the drama 37 Days BBC did for the centenary pretty sure that's still on iPlayer and there's also The Sleepwalkers which I don't necessarily agree with everything in that book but it's an interest So a great question and I know I say this often but it could be a podcast in its own right and maybe it will be one day. So thanks for that Alice. So let's move on to question number two which also comes via email from Steve McQuaid. And Steve asks, When is any film ever perfect from a historical point of view? and you raise an interesting point here because this particular part of the film which is towards the end when the runner's going to find the unit he's got to deliver this message to he discovers finally where they are they've moved into a series of very shallow chalk cut trenches on that big green landscape and they're shallow trenches there's no proper parapet or parados there's no sandbags or duck boards they're just kind of gullies cut into the chalk and we see go down the communication trench into this system of positions that is on the front line and finally with being thrown out the trench and running down no man's land as these guys are going over the top he gets to battalion headquarters which is in a bunker as you say and on one level perhaps that shouldn't be there because what we're seeing here is in some degrees an aspect of the truth because when the British advanced to the Hindenburg line they got into these bits of open field now the Germans had hadn't provided positions for them they had to dig in and it's amazing how quickly a man digs in when he's under fire so Over the first few days of being in these areas, positions were made on the edges of villages or copses or in these fields, shallow trenches, and then at night more men would be brought up. You've got a huge workforce available to you. You can put that to use with picks and shovels and work on those trenches pretty quickly and expand those basic positions that have been dug by men under fire. The trenches are deepened, the trenches are widened, the crenellations, the zigzag are effect is put in proper system of trenches is established with a front line support line reserve line communication trenches linking them up and then duck boarding trench supports sandbags on the front of the trench the parapet sandbags at the back of the trench the parados and all the other features that are in there from funk holes for the soldiers to rest in to ammunition points and all kinds of equipment that is needed has to be installed in these trenches you've left all that behind and in the trenches that you've had to evacuate as the enemy has pulled back so you've got to establish that kind of infrastructure again and you're quite right that would have taken weeks and months which is why when the Germans started pulling back in February and March to the Hindenburg line and the British began to establish their positions opposite that Hindenburg line it was nearly a month and a bit before the fighting in Arras onto that Hindenburg line took place and even in a week a trench system could easily be constructed in a given area given that you could bring in a brigade size four battalions of men to work on that in a fairly small area but I think what you're seeing in the film is a degree of what you've described as poetic license I think the writer and director of this film wanted to accelerate aspects of the storyline you couldn't really spend 30 minutes of the film watching men dig trenches and build a dugout so you've moved the kind storyline forward a bit to tell that story that wider story and you're not just in a system of shallow trenches you're now in a system of shallow trenches where there is one or two features which are needed in the storyline and you need a headquarters for the runner to go to to get to the battalion commander Cumberbatch who plays him to try and deliver that message so I think what this is is kind of a part of the plot really it's a device within the plot to help tell the wider story and something that you see quite a lot in that movie 1917 so he gets from the rear area where they're singing in the wood through the communication trenches straight into the front line very quickly whereas there would have been a bit of distance between all those locations and then when he gets back to the dressing station behind the lines that looks as if it's just behind the front line trench and I think they kind of shorten the distance between those two places to keep that plot to keep that story moving so it is a film probably in reality in some of those early attacks where for example the 7th division moved forward to attack the outposts of the Hindenburg line around Buller Corps for example they would have had trenches very similar to what we saw in the film shallow trenches cut into that chalk landscape but the proper infrastructure of those trenches just wouldn't have existed at that stage and battalion HQs probably would have been in shell holes or buildings or embankments or something just away from the fighting area and not properly established. But for a film of this nature, that probably would have been too detailed and not that comprehensible to an audience who wouldn't have really understood that. So I guess it's all part of what First World War movie making is all about. But it is a great film. I think despite some of the problems within it and some odd little quirks like the pilot and the plane and the bayonet and all the other things we've spoken about in the review of that film, I think it does tell a wider truth about the First World War, and it exposes the fact that the landscape of the First World War was not just mud and shell holes and water and slime, that there were these landscapes that were almost untouched. And even in that area opposite the Hindenburg Line, after the fighting at Arras in the spring of 1917, the area chosen for the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917 would have been very similar. When we look panoramic photographs taken by the Royal Engineers and air photos of Combré before the tanks went in, before the bombardment, before the British attack there. It is very similar terrain to what we see depicted in the film 1917 and with the only real proper deep established trenches being those pre-prepared positions that are part of that wider Hindenburg line. So a fascinating question there, Steve. Thanks for that, which helps us talk about a kind of wider aspect of how First World War films are made and what they tell us and how that links to the real history. So on to question number three. This one comes from Sean Turner, also on email. My great-grandfather, Alec Walker, served in the Royal Field Artillery as a driver, joining up in the huge rush at the outbreak of the war. He passed away when I was a toddler, and I gather, like many veterans, he never really spoke of his service or experiences. What was the day-to-day life of a driver in the Royal Field Artillery like? Was life dangerous for these men, and what would he have experienced in his role? I do know that he suffered a back injury that that led him to be sent home for a few months and then later awarded the silver womb badge? And secondly, is it possible to find out where he served in France and at what periods during the war as I couldn't find this information on ancestry? Well, Sean, The Royal Field Artillery was one of the main parts of the artillery in the First World War. It was broken up into essentially three branches. The Royal Horse Artillery that operated with largely cavalry divisions and had horse artillery weapons like 13-pounder field guns. They're the ones that still fire the salutes on ceremonials today. And then the Royal Field Artillery that had weapons from 18-pounder up to 4.5-inch howitzers. And then the Royal Garrison Artillery that operated 6-inch guns and above right up to 15-inch railway guns and heavy guns. So the Royal Field Artillery, which your great-grandfather, Alec Walker, was in, were normally divisional-level artillery units. There was normally three Royal Field Artillery brigades in an infantry division as part of their support units, in this case to provide their divisional firepower. But also, as the war went on, a lot of what were called army brigades of Royal Field Artillery were formed, which were not attached to specific formations and could be moved up and down the front so that meant there was much more flexibility in where you could move artillery around and all of the Royal Field Artillery units that operated all were horse-drawn units they were not mechanized in any way so that meant with a gun team you had the field gun you had a limber with two drivers on it who were in charge of the team of horses that pulled the limber and pulled the gun and the drivers were the ones for maneuvering those horses so they got down the roads and round the bends and over all the obstacles correctly and took the weapons from A to B so they could be taken to new locations to be dug in there and the rank of driver was a specific one for these men so when people see driver they think somebody driving a vehicle a driver is someone in charge or part of a team in charge of the horses that pull the limbers and pull the guns and so they are responsible for for the wider welfare of the horses in their team and I interviewed quite a few Great War veterans who were drivers in the Royal Field Artillery who absolutely loved the horses that they served with many many years later when I went to see War Horse with my daughter it brought back many many memories of talking to these veterans who cried more really about the loss or the injuries and the wounding of their horses in combat than they did about some of their mates who were killed on the Somme or at Passchendaele or whatever it was so there was a great bond between the driver and the horses that formed part of his team and if the horses are being wounded that shows that the whole team the drivers included are under threats, this is not any kind of safe job, there wasn't really safe jobs of any description in the First World War if your work brought you onto the battlefield and while the infantry who were, of course, the tip of the spear in most battles of the First World War, might have unkindly referred to the artillery as thousand-mile snipers, indicating that they were miles away from the battlefront and in some kind of safe, cushy job. The reality was that guns were incredibly important, often very close to the areas of the fighting, and had to be brought up often over open terrain, not just at night but sometimes during the day, and that the enemy were always seeking artillery, to knock it out, destroy it, neutralise it and with it the horses and with it the men that manned the guns and led those horse teams pulling the guns up to their gun sites to fire and take part in the fighting. So that meant that the artillery suffered huge levels of casualties in the First World War and many, many drivers were killed going up from Ypres to Hellfire Corner and along the Menin Road during the Third Battle of Ypres. You don't have to go far in the cemeteries in that area to find drivers who were killed on their limbers as shells came down to try and take out those lines of guns moving up so this was not any kind of safe job and being up high on a limber if a shell came down and did damage to the limber or frightened the horses and they bolted you could be thrown from the limber injure yourself I mean I don't know if that is the circumstances which happened to your great grandfather but there could be injuries like that caused by being thrown from a moving vehicle essentially as well as shrapnel or gas and all the other things that these men had to face and there's plenty of memoirs of artillerymen in the First World War which it's worth kind of looking at to get a sense of what the experience of men like this, what their experiences were on these battlefields of the Great War. In terms of tracing soldiers we've had an episode where we looked at how to trace soldiers in the Great War and you've gone on to Ancestry which is one of the main providers of military records for the First World War and you fail to find very much about him. Unfortunately that is all too common the case because so many records were destroyed in the Second World War so the complete picture of what happened to these men have been lost and the problem with a unit like the Royal Field Artillery is there's hundreds of artillery brigades so without knowing which one he was in it's very difficult to say exactly where he was and when these wounds could have been and where his service took him. If he was awarded a 1914 or 1914-15 star, and you know from the medal index card that there's a date of overseas service, you may be able to tie that into when a division or an artillery unit went overseas and narrow it down to a handful of units, or if you're very lucky, perhaps just one, and then you could consult the war diary. Now, artillery units are much smaller than infantry battalions, and there's much more of a chance of ordinary men in the ranks being mentioned in those war It's something I've seen quite a lot. You have a soldier who's been killed or wounded on a particular date, and when you look at the war diary for a field artillery brigade, very often they're mentioned in there by name. So it is worth kind of persevering with this, even if a service record for him does not survive. And if you look for one of those on Ancestry and you haven't found it, unfortunately they aren't anywhere else. They've digitised the surviving record. So if there's no trace, then that's it, I'm afraid. It is worth looking at. at the Western Front Association pension records because if he got a silver wound badge then he might have potentially have qualified for a pension and sometimes on those pension cards that the WFA have on their website if you're lucky then you might find that it doesn't just say Royal Field Artillery it might say 121 Brigade Royal Field Artillery or whatever it is so it's worth looking at those and looking at Various different sources like that, often fragmentary, is a way of kind of putting those jigsaw pieces of his service together to try and get some kind of meaning out of it. It's complicated and it can be time-consuming and often very frustrating, but it's worth trying to put those pieces together. But it is much more difficult to try and trace the men who served in those big corps of the army, like the artillery and like the engineers and like the army service corps, if you haven't got a specific... unit that you know that they served in because there are so many that served in all these different theatres of war. But even if you aren't able to entirely piece that service record together, when you think of those battlefields of the First World War, think of him atop his limber with a fellow driver and a team of horses in front of them, the gun bouncing around on the road behind them and them darting down a road in France or Flanders and taking the guns forward up to the gun sites and then the gunners moving in to get those guns established and firing on the enemy and then afterwards the the limber teams going up to reattach the guns to the limber and get them out of the gun pits and off down the road and back to safety and it's the movement of military traffic like that that i often think of every time i'm going around hellfire corner on a coach or going on that road between popperinger and eat that main arterial road that fed the war in Flanders with men, ammunition, food, water, equipment and the guns themselves. Drivers like Alec Walker commanding those horses, taking those guns ever forward towards the front line. And it's long overdue for us to have an episode about the work of the artillery in the Great War, something we will come to. So thanks for that question. I'm going to move on to our fourth and final question that comes from the Reverend Matthew Stevens on our Discord server, another way to post questions for these Q&A episodes. He asks, I've read about the riots that occurred in Britain with Canadian soldiers awaiting demobilisation in 1918 and 1919. Can you provide some more detailed information and suggest some sources of additional details on this story? Well, this is a really good question about a much lesser-known aspect of the end of the First World War, in many respects the aftermath of the First World War, and something that I didn't know a lot about until I watched a Channel 4 film made in cooperation between Channel 4, Wales and Canada in 1987 called Going Home that dramatises the story of Canadian soldiers kept in a camp, which is meant to be a criminal camp up in North Wales, awaiting demobilisation and leading to riots and deaths as well. Now this is a bit of drama, but the historical advisor for this drama was Julian Patowski, who had then published his book Shot at Dawn with Julian Sykes about the executions in the Great War, the men shot at dawn, executed by firing squad for a whole variety of crimes. And Military Crime and Punishment, And some of those kind of connected lesser aspects of the First World War was one of Julian's specialities, really. And he went on to write, and you asked for some potential sources for this, a book called The Story of the Kimnel Park Camp Riots in 1919, which was published by Julian, a little paperback book, in 1989. And since then, more recently, there's been a book by, I think, a Welsh historian, Robert H. Griffiths, in 2019 called Riots, Death and Baseball, which also tells the story of the Canadians involved in these riots. So what's the story? It's not just at Kimnell Park. There were two key locations where the Canadians rioted because the men at those camps felt they were being kept there for far too long before they were being sent home. One of those was in Surrey at Whitley Camp, and this was a big camp formed initially for the for Kitchener's army which greatly expanded the South Downs battalions of the Royal Sussex were there before they went to France in 1916 the Canadians then took it over it became a big Canadian depot and a lot of Canadian troops after the armistice were sent there prior to demobilisation and as I understand it the Canadians the Canadian Expeditionary Force operated a similar system to the British the earlier your enlistment in theory the quicker your release and discharge happened but that seems to have broken down a bit and at Whitley Camp this was a main Canadian demobilisation camp and on the 4th 5th of March 1919 around a thousand Canadian soldiers rioted after there were repeated delays in them being sent home the soldiers concerned attacked canteens they destroyed military records which I'm sure didn't help with the whole process of demobilisation and they looted property and caused a lot of damage And the riot was there sparked in part by the arrest of a popular soldier and the growing suspicion that shipping spots that were meant for Canadian soldiers being sent home were being allocated unfairly. And this is a kind of recurring theme that a belief grew that Canadian ministers, politicians, politicians, business owners were profiteering from the use of shipping to ship material across the Atlantic rather than Canadian soldiers who were meant to be going home. Now, I'm not sure of the truth of that, but that was certainly a widespread belief that led to a lot of disorder. And the second big incident, which was around about the same kind of time in March 1919, was at Kimmel Park. This was the most violent and deadly riot that took place. took place on British soil involving Canadian soldiers, and the camp was located near Rhyl in North Wales. There was about 15,000 men of the CEF, Canadian Expeditionary Force, being kept here and awaiting demobilisation. And once again, there were delays, unexplained delays. Perhaps military authorities felt they didn't have to explain to the men, but that caused a lot of frustration and riots broke out over this. And in the riots here that went much more violent than the ones at Whitley, five soldiers were killed and at least 23 were injured. Military buildings were looted, burned and destroyed. and at least 60 Canadian soldiers were arrested and dozens were subsequently court-martialed. Now, no one was executed for this. The death penalty did not apply now that the war was over. They were not on active service on a front line, but of course they could be facing long periods of detention in prison as a consequence of their actions here. And this was also a period with the civil war going on in Russia where Allied troops were fighting alongside men who were still loyal to the Tsar although he was dead against Bolshevism against the Bolsheviks in that Russian Civil War there was a feeling within Britain or fear really within Britain that something similar could happen there and certainly in that bit of drama that I mentioned going home that docudrama really from the 1980s one of the aspects of the storyline there was that one of the Canadian officers claimed that he'd seen a red flag a communist flag being flown and that then led to the response where men opened fire and Canadian soldiers were killed it certainly wasn't the finest hour for anyone involved in this and the frustration you can imagine the frustration of Canadian soldiers some of whom had spent spent years on the Western Front, sitting in these camps, waiting to be sent home and being given lame excuses all the time. You can see that the kind of frustrations that they had just bubbled over into this unrest. Eventually, the Canadian military authorities got their act together and these men were properly demobilised and sent home. And the men who died in the riots do have war graves. I've been to the little churchyard, St Margaret, its church in north wales not far from where the camp was located where you can find a plot of canadian war graves some of them are men who died of influenza because this is also kind of in that period in which influenza was sweeping its way across the world and amongst them are these who died in the riots for a long long time i guess they were kind of silent witnesses but with that drama with julian patowski's book and the more recent publication then this cast a bit more light on an aspect of the First World War that I'm sure many people would not even consider. The drama Going Home from the 1980s that was on Channel 4 I don't think was ever repeated and it's not available on DVD or any streaming services which is a great shame because it was a really good drama with some great actors of that period and the trench scenes where one of the characters has flashbacks to his experiences on the Western Front were particularly So who knows, maybe one day it'll pop up on Netflix. But an excellent question, Reverend Stevens, and thank you so much for enabling us to talk about this lesser-known aspect of the Great War. So that's all of our questions for this week. I hope it's been another interesting episode of the Q&As. And as always, you can send your questions in via email or via the Discord server or even via fan mail. And there's links to all of those on the show notes for this episode. But until we meet again for some more questions and answers on the old front line. You've been listening to an episode of The Old Frontline with me, military historian Paul Reid. You can follow me on Twitter at Somcor. You can follow the podcast at oldfrontlinepod. Check out the website at oldfrontline.co.uk where you'll find lots of podcast extras and photographs and links to books that are mentioned in the podcast. And if you feel like supporting us, you can go to our Patreon page at patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon