r/AskHistorians Jul 08 '24

A whole Generation lost in The Great War?

I’ve often heard that entire towns lost their young soldiers when they went to war, I’ve been looking for the information.

In the Great War, there were Blessed/Thankful Towns which lost no men, but there’s also been places that lost all their soldiers. What places were they, and are there names for these “Cursed Towns”?

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u/AidanGLC Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24

My guess is that you're thinking of the Pals Battalions. In the initial wave of recruitment for the British Expeditionary Force in 1914, when the emphasis was on building as large a volunteer army as possible as quickly as possible, towns were encouraged to form "Pals Battalions" with entire units recruited from a single town, workplace, or school - the idea being that you were more likely to enlist if all of your schoolmates or work buddies were also enlisting, and if you knew you'd be serving with people you knew in civilian life. There are conflicting accounts of who first suggested the idea, but it approved by Earl Kitchener (the Secretary of State for War) in September 1914. Out of the nearly 1,000 battalions raised in 1914-15 (which then formed the backbone of "Kitchener's Army" - the first wave of voluntary British recruitment during the First World War), around 150 were pals battalions.

Of course, the flipside of this is that a concentration of recruits means a concentration of casualties - especially in the context of attritional warfare on the Western Front. Particularly on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, a number of pals battalions suffered apocalyptic casualty rates - to the point where some were effectively wiped out overnight. A few of the most famous examples:

  • The Accrington Pals (officially the 11th Service Battalion, East Lancashire Regiment) are famous for two reasons. First, because they were among the smallest towns (population of 45,000 in 1911 according to British census documents) to field a pals battalion. Second, because they suffered one of the highest casualty rates of any battalion-level unit on the First Day of The Somme. From a strength of 700, the battalion suffered 585 casualties (235 dead, 350 wounded) in a matter of hours.
  • The Sheffield City Battalion (12th Service Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment) suffered 513 casualties (255 dead and 258 wounded.
  • The Grimsby Chums (10th Service Battalion, The Lincolnshire Regiment), which were drawn from the town of Grimsby, suffered 502 casualties.
  • The Royal Newfoundland Regiment, while not technically a pals battalion, was in practice almost entirely drawn from the dominion capital of St. Johns. It suffered the second highest casualty rate of any battalion at the Somme. From a strength of 780, 680 became casualties (including the regiment's entire officer corps). At the evening's roll call, 68 soldiers were deemed fit for action.

There are frequent accounts - both apocryphal and from contemporaneous personal and public records - of towns where every single resident knew someone who'd been killed or wounded on July 1, 1916. Andrew C. Jackson quotes the diary of the brother of a member of the Accrington Pals: "I remember when the news came through to Accrington that the Pals had been wiped out. I don't think there was a street in Accrington and district that didn't have their blinds drawn, and the bell at Christ Church tolled all the day." Even if it wasn't technically true that everyone had a family member who was killed, it tells us a lot about the collective spirit in the aftermath of such losses.

The system of local recruitment had already gone into decline earlier in 1916 with the shift from a volunteer army to conscription. The scale of losses at the Somme effectively ended it - local units had suffered such high casualty rates that they simply couldn't be replenished by local recruits. The pals battalions above were brought back up to strength by conscripts drawn from across the UK.

Sources:

Andrew C. Jackson. Accrington's Pals: The Full Story (2013)

Brig E.A. James, British Regiments 1914–18 (2001)

Martin Middlebrook. The First Day of The Somme (1971)

Gerald W.L. Nicholson. The Fighting Newfoundlander: A History of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment (2007)

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u/TheIrishCrumpet Jul 08 '24

Yeah, I heard about it but I couldn’t remember what it was called. Thanks

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 08 '24

[1] u/AidanGLC has the right of it, that the recruitment system used in 1914 and 15, and the way that those New Army formations were subsequently deployed, meant that when those formations took casualties, it really could feel, to the affected communities, like every family in the area had suffered a bereavement.

However, without in any way denigrating the huge personal impact of those losses, or detracting from the carnage which the war unquestionably wrought, statistical analysis gives a bit more perspective. 734,697 men from the United Kingdom were killed whilst serving in the Armed Forces. This does not include Dominion and Empire soldiers, as they cannot readily be compared to the population data of the 1911 Census. Those figures are for men died from combat-related causes (i.e. not including Spanish Flu etc.). That represents 1.62% of the population (734,697 for a population from the Census of 45,221,000). Total wounded came to around 1.67m, or 3.7% of the population. 5.32% of the population were thus killed or wounded - a huge amount, although dwarfed by the figures suffered by France, Germany, Russia and Austria Hungary in sheer numbers, and many other nations suffered proportionally more, or otherwise similarly.

Of course the Census includes those too young to serve, and those too old. The key is looking at the men who served. For Britain, 8,375,000 men were mobilised to serve in the Army. Of those, 702,410 were killed. Thus, 8.4% of servicemen were killed in action or from wounds sustained, and when you factor in the influenza epidemic, HM Government gives the figure as 12.5% of all servicemen in total. Again, huge - but let us be clear here, that statistically speaking you were more than likely going to survive, although it's worth remembering that this carried around a 20% chance of sustaining an injury.

And as u/AidanGLC notes, if you had joined an early-war New Army unit, you were almost certainly grouped by local area, or even profession. Not only were your immediate comrades - your Battalion - grouped like this, but the Battalions were grouped similarly. For instance, the 36th Ulster Division in 1916 consisted of 3 Brigades, each of which had 4 Battalions, all New Army Bns from either the Royal Irish Rifles or the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. When the Division went into action, all those casualties which were taken were falling on the same recruiting areas.

By the latter stages of the war, the Army was training its troops on an industrial scale - they were sent to centralised training establishments, and sent to reinforce whichever units happened to be prioritised. Therefore the phenomenon of hugely localised formations never happened again like it did for the New Army. The Army learned its lesson for the Second World War and was more careful in how it deployed its expanded forces: Gordon Corrigan gives some comparative statistics:

Percentage of men killed from certain areas who were killed whilst serving in their local regiment\*

Residence (Local Regt.)................WW1...............WW2

Leeds (W Yorks)...............................44....................5

Bradford (W Yorks).........................33....................5

Barnsley (Y & L)...............................56....................6

Durham City (DLI)...........................50....................25

Canterbury (E Kent)........................40....................19

*These figures mean that, for example, of all of the men from Canterbury who died in the wars, 40% did so with their local regiment in the First World War, and 19% in the second.

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 08 '24

[2] If we look at the 36th Division in the Second World War in 1944, every Battalion was from a different Regiment. Not only were the recruits coming from a wider area, but they were also not serving at the same places.

The reason the Somme left its mark on the British memory of the war so much was because the high casualties, which heavily landed on the New Army. That is to say, civilians who had volunteered, who would not otherwise have been serving in the Army. Britain sustain among the highest casualties ever. But again, some perspective is needed here: more Englishmen were killed as a percentage of the population at the Battle of Towton in 1461 than the first day of the Somme. Gordon Corrigan also makes the point that over the course of the Battle of Normandy, Britain sustained a higher average casualty rate than the First Somme (89 dead per week vs 100). 74% of all men who served in the British Army at the First Battle of the Somme came out unscathed.

So why does the idea that the war, and the first Somme particularly, annihilated communities? Gordon Corrigan suggests that part of the reason it "felt" like so many died were because the country wasn't prepared for such a sweeping impact across the whole of society. In previous wars, the casualties fell over the Regular armies - over approximately 20 years of the Napoleonic Wars, the Navy and Army lost ~72,000 men, all Regulars; for the Boer War around 22,000 died. Here, the casualties hit a larger part of the population that never experienced this in previous wars, and the war was also the most devastating that Britain had participated in.

It's also a reflection of the society of the time and how they function: for most people, the ability to move around the country for work or other reasons wasn't an option like it is now. Communities were much more localised and insular, and consequently socialising and marriages would take place at a local level too. The average household size in the 1911 census was 4.5 people and the average age for having left home was 20. 50% of households consisted of couples with offspring, by far the most significant type of household. For aging families, about 45% of people lived within 5 miles of where they were born. What I'm getting at is that communities would have many shared familial links between many households. Between siblings and parents and grandparents and cousins, potentially living close but separately, one death might be considered a 'personal loss' for many separate households at the same time and so it could accurately be said that almost every household knew someone close who had been killed whilst in actuality the vast majority of a town's men actually came back.

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 08 '24 edited Jul 08 '24

[3 (final)] Sources

Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War - Official Statistics published in 1922 retrieved here.

Gordon Corrigan - Mud, Blood and Poppycock - lecture hosted on YouTube by the Western Front Association retrieved here.

Parliamentary Report The Fallen on casualties of the war retrieved here.

K. Schürer, E. M. Garrett, H. Jaadla, A. Reid: Household and Family Structure in England and Wales, 1851 - 1911 retrieved here.

Long Long Trail for being such a wonderful resource on many levels, but here particularly for the Orders of Battle retrieved here.

It kills me to admit to having a look given the general quality of the publication, but the Daily Mail published an article looking at what they state, based on research by Ancestry.co.uk, are the most heavily affected places in the UK. Their figures are interesting, particularly when you compare Durham (7.69% deaths of all men who joined from there) to Corrigan's table quoted above and the overall national figures. retrieved here.

Peter Hart, The Great War

Oh and all credit to Calculator.net for its percentage calculator which has obliged me here by doing a lot of heavy lifting!

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u/Madman200 Jul 08 '24

Thank you for all this information! Your comment touches on something I have often wondered about: looking at the proportion of servicemen who died. In a vacuum, I wonder if it paints the clearest picture of how likely you were to survive a war if you had to fight in it.

It’s clear from your numbers that many more servicemen survived the war than died in it, but the popular perception seems to be that death practically inevitable for the infantry in the First World War. I also know that every infantryman was supported by a legion of support and logistical staff, who were not facing the same level of danger.

Let’s say I was a regular infantryman in the British army in 1913, or perhaps a Canadian in the first batch of soldiers who fought at Ypres. Is there any kind of data that would be able to quantify my risk of death over the course of the war ? How likely was it that I would make it back home ?

I have often wondered how these odds changed from battle to battle, war to war, front to front, and nation to nation.

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 09 '24

That's not something I can answer directly, as I simply don't know either the relevant figures or a publication that directly discusses this question. There probably is, but my focuses on other areas. Received wisdom that I've come across a lot is that the pre-War regular army suffered such attrition that it had effectively ceased to be by 1915, but to what extent that is hyperbole or accurate, I couldn't say. That also doesn't factor how the attrition took place - deaths, casualties and prisoners yes; but how many men were reconstituted into new formations or sent on training, or combed out for specialist skills etc.

The official Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War does break down casualty figures by Month, but it doesn't start accurately listing men under arms until later in the war, so one could feasibly have a look through that, but realistically you'd need to pick a few regular Bns and follow through its men, tracking whether they were regulars or post-1914 joiners.

A quick search on this question though suggests some 145,000 men, and up to 378,000 though. That is based on the statistics of the 1914 star, which was awarded in 1917 and 380,000 men were eligible. To be so, they must have been serving in France prior to the conclusion of the First Battle of Ypres (November 1914). In 1919 a clasp was made available for award for those who had been in combat in that initial period, and 145,000 men applied for that. It was not awarded posthumously. There may have been more: men had to take positive action to obtain that medal, and prove it too. It's likely some didn't, or couldn't. Combat here was defined as being within range of German artillery.

The National Army Museum states that the whole of the Army was around 700,000 men - or 250,000 Regulars, 250,000 Territorials and 200,000 Reservists. They state that the BEF went to France with ~90,000 men, and by October it had suffered ~90,000 casualties (although not necessarily deaths).

I've had a look through the official statistics and come up with:

16,759 deaths for all ranks in the Regular Army (not TF or British Indian Army) up to the end of December 1914;

91,531 Other Ranks and 4,271 Officers Killed, Wounded or Taken Prisoner - RA, TF and BIA.

It's not possible to track accurately what happens to the men after that because the New Army formations are grouped into the Regular Army statistics and in any case, Strengths only get recorded from 1916 onwards. There's a Quora discussion on this which I link below, because people claim to be quoting the Official History, which claims that of those serving at the outbreak of war, 280,000 had died by 1918. It makes for interesting reading, with the caveat that there are some comments which do not cite what sources they're referring to.

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 09 '24 edited Jul 09 '24

However, if we take those who were issued the 1914 Star clasp as a baseline, then you get these figures:

58% survived of all Regulars, or 29% of all Regulars and Territorials, or 20.1% of Regulars, Territorials and Reserves.

Taking the official history figure of 280,000 killed, that works out as 112% of the Regular Army, or 40% of all Regular, Territorial and Reserve soldiers in 1914.

These statistics are very broad estimates on flawed data, though. I can't even find an accurate number for the men that deployed to France in August 1914. The National Army Museum estimates 90,000 men. If we take that though, 18.62% of men who deployed with the BEF had died by December 1914.

You are very right in your comment that this is only in a vacuum, because the other half of the story really is told by u/AidanGLC in his answer. It's all well and good saying that statistically you were indeed very likely to survive the war, but at individual moments, that would absolutely fly up so that you might be incredibly lucky indeed to even survive a single individual action depending on what it was and when. I would say that in the First World War, the amount of men in the fighting arms was proportionally higher than the support arms, this is something that Charles Carrington comments on, and he was well placed to know, having served in both the First and Second World Wars.

Bizarrely, the percentages of men who marched to war in 1914 are quantified in the statistics, but not the actual numbers of men! In any case, on 1st September 1914, 83.37% of men in the BEF in France were in fighting arms like the infantry and Artillery, whilst 16.63% were in support arms like the Army Service Corps and Royal Army Medical Corps. On 1st July 1918, these were down to 66.55% against 33.45%, a reflection on just how vital it was to maintain a support backbone to allow your troops to fight effectively.

I finish with this picture from J C Dunn's The War the Infantry Knew, which shows all men who had embarked with 2nd Battalion the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1914 who remained when it was demobilised in 1919. This doesn't mean everyone not pictured must have died, but it is a very good indicator for how much Bns changed to become effectively completely new ones over the course of the war. It is also interesting to consider that Robert Graves, who was in the same regiment, once complained about how the influx of war service Officers was degrading the "social life" of the regiment (which is to say, he was a bit of a snob for those from the "wrong" officer backgrounds), yet it was utterly impossible for even a regular Bn to maintain the old ways in the face of such heavy attrition.

1914: Mons to Christmas | National Army Museum (nam.ac.uk)

In WW1, how many British soldiers who started with the original professional army in 1914 survived through the end of the war in 1918? - Quora

Captain J C Dunn - The War the Infantry Knew

Charles Carrington - Soldier From the Wars Returning

Robert Graves - Goodbye to All That

Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War - Official Statistics published in 1922 retrieved here.

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u/Madman200 Jul 09 '24

I really appreciate the time you took to put together this answer :) Thank you for all the insight!

In particular I find the fighting men - support staff ratios very interesting. I always had the impression that it was the other way around

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u/Flagship_Panda_FH81 Jul 09 '24

You're most welcome! Regarding the ratios, that's a reflection really on how unprepared Britain was for a war of such scale. All its campaigns and deployments were Colonial actions, generally done on the cheap, so a lot of things were done in ad-hoc or local manner. For the Second World War, the British tend to invest more in specialists and material.

The logistical transformation of the BEF is absolutely the reason the British side of things was so successful (not to say that the French weren't also, but I can't comment so broadly) by the end of the war. The prevailing attitude in 1914 was that war was the preserve of professional soldiers, and civilians should stick to their own business. Perhaps the biggest achievement of Haig really is to effectively organise the BEF in such a way that where expertise was needed, it was brought in, a recognition of the fact that the war was so much more than the effective handling of troops engaged in combat.

It continues to blow my mind that in the midst of the Third Battle of Ypres, the GOC 36th Division requested lemons to issue to every many in the division, some 8,000 men. And two days later, this was fulfilled. The British Army did not maintain Strategic Lemon Dumps that we know of, but this request filtered from France to Britain, where the lemons were sourced, dispatched and delivered without any issue.

That the Germans almost took the key British railway Regulating Station at Amiens during their March Offensive (1918) but then pivoted away really highlights for me how little they really appreciated the matter. Because the loss of Amiens would have shattered the entire logistical chain of the BEF, but there you go. The only reason the 1918 Hundred Days Offensive is able to be sustained is due to the strength of the logistical chain. For instances, the 1914 Field Service Pocket Book assumes an operating radius of 7 miles from a railhead, for units to remain in supply whilst in action. By the end of 1918, these chains are up to 60 miles.

The role of logistics is so under-appreciated but I'll never miss an opportunity to highlight these incredibly informative lectures by the late Rob Thompson hosted by the Western Front Association:

Rob Thompson Lectures - I will never miss an opportunity to recommend in particular the ones on the ASC and Railways