Milking under fire

The next few posts of the blog are going to look at the soldiers' relationship with food and drink.  The men came up with interesting/ingenious ideas born out of the boredom of eating the same things day in, day out, and sometimes sheer desperation.

D/DLI 7/424/2(30) Photograph of orange sellers with the soldiers of 6^th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry shortly after their arrival in France, taken by Captain PHB Lyon [1915]

In our collections we have a series of letters that Major John English, 9^th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry wrote to his wife in May 1915 (The Second Battle of Ypres - 9th Battalion) In the following extracts he muses on food and the lack of access to anything to drink.

6 May 1915

“…I am lying on a blanket in a beautiful green grass field all clothed with dandelion and a herd of cows grazing all round I am sitting with the shade of a tree with chocolate to eat, papers to read & nothing to do. This is the strenuous life I like and if you had only been here. We are always rushing for something to drink. I never drink their water as I am suspicious of it, now just at this moment a man & his wife have come into the field shouting oranges. What luck & what yells of delight. I must resume after having eaten four …” (D/DLI 7/1151/7)

  

15 May 1915

“I got the chocolate & cake dear heart & never tasted either as an attack was imminent & we had orders to move down the trenches to fill up a gap which did not exist. I went down to the left to get a move on & was away some time ordering & counter ordering, it was raining hard all the time & I had no coat or rather discarded it. I got wet through.  We had to move back to the same positions & when I got back I found our dugout full of men & absolutely nothing left, all the food & cakes & other delicacies which we had had been taken. Send me some more chocolate like that dearie & another cake, also 3 boxes of sardines.” (D/DLI 7/1151/14)

D/DLI 2/8/62(5) Soldiers receiving rations from a field kitchen at Ancre, France, October 1916

20 May 1915

“There is a goat just outside my hut eating a newspaper and one of the men is chasing it, unfortunately it does not give milk.  I told you of the herd of cows near the trenches, and it was quite a common sight to see men milking the cows under shell fire.” (D/DLI 7/1151/19)

 

21 May 1915

“We are going to have chicken, pigeons, and mutton all boiled up together today with rice and compressed vegetables, so that ought to make a nice stew.  Water is the thing we want more than anything, it is so scarce.  The farms around now refuse to give it to us and they charge exorbitantly for everything we buy.” (D/DLI 7/1151/20)

The organisation of the British Army during the First World War

D/DLI 7/805/73 Officers of ‘D’ Company, 14^th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, 1916

A few people have asked me about how, for example 8^th Battalion, fits into the larger scheme of things.  My first thought was ‘that’s straightforward’ but it can get complicated quickly.  To some extent, it depends how much you want to know.  Firstly, I’ll be talking about the Infantry, things will vary for other types of unit.

In the First World War the British Army was organised into a number of separate Armies, dedicated to fighting or home service operations.

Working from the top down, each Army was subdivided into a hierarchy of units.  An infantry regiment and its constituent battalions fit midway between the top level (Army) and the smallest (Section).

Army

Corps

Division

Brigade

Regiment

Battalion

Company

Platoon

Section

It is important to note that whilst the others are all fighting units, the regiment was only an organisational unit.  A regiment, such as the Durham Light Infantry, never fought altogether as one entity. 

As we hold the Regimental archive for the Durham Light Infantry it is the one I know most about and will be using for examples.  Not all of its battalions were formed immediately as the war began (and some were in existence beforehand), but at its largest, there were over 30 battalions at home and overseas.

Above the regimental level is where it becomes complicated as not every battalion was in the same brigade/division/corps.  What’s more, battalions changed brigade, brigades changed division, and divisions changed corps due to the requirements of battle.  Below battalion level, companies could be attached to battalions of other regiments but this was a temporary arrangement.  

D/DLI 2/20/5(30) ‘A’ Company, 20^th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, taken United Kingdom, [1916]

The Armies are the top level (though they still came under the authority of the government department of the War Office).  The First to Fifth Armies were formed between 1914 and 1916, the British Salonika Army formed in 1915.  The First to Third Home Forces Armies formed in 1914 and disbanded at the end of 1915/early 1916, replaced by the Northern and Southern Home Forces Armies in early 1916.  A battalion could be an Army Troop – not part of the intermediate unit levels – in November 1916 2/9^th DLI became part of the British Salonika Army.

In this context, corps refers to the unit comprising two or more divisions and commanded by a Lieutenant General.  There were also supporting troops that came under direct control of the corps.  The Army Service Corps, for example, used the term differently and were not part of this hierarchy.

Commanded by a Major General, divisions were the basic fighting units of the army and moved around as such; the 5^th Division was in France and Flanders, then moved to Italy.  Some battalions, such as 1/7^th DLI in November 1915 and 1/9^th in February 1918 became Pioneer battalions which were Divisional Troops.  Pioneer battalions worked on building and maintaining the infrastructure and came under the supervision of the division, and were thus not part of a brigade. 

Brigades were commanded by Brigadier Generals and were typically formed of four battalions (reducing to three in 1918).  

D/DLI 7/426/155 13 Platoon, ‘D’ Company, 2^nd Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, taken behind the line at Loos, France, 1917

At full strength, a battalion had about 1000 officers and men led by a Lieutenant Colonel; there were four companies in a battalion, four platoons in a company, and four sections in a platoon.

Explanation of 1/9^th, 2/9^th, 3/9^th:  The Territorial Forces were volunteer battalions of part time soldiers that existed before the war.  In the Durham Light Infantry, there were five territorial battalions, the 5^th to 9^th.  The Territorials were mobilised at the outbreak of the war (see the posts on the Second Battle of Ypres for more about this).  As the majority of these men volunteered to go abroad, a second line reserve unit was raised for each of the territorial battalions for home service.  As these became active on home service, third line units were formed as another reserve.  Many second line units ended up going abroad eventually.  The third line units were either disbanded or in the case of the DLI, merged into other units, in 1916.

D/DLI 2/1/268(21) Sergeants of 1^st Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, taken at Nowshera, India, 1916

It is worth mentioning that not all battalions existing in the army between 1914 and 1918 were considered as fighting in the First World War.  The army had units in India for example and this is where 1^st Battalion DLI spent the war period.  The men serving here were entitled to the British War Medal as this was given for overseas service.  To confuse matters, some were also entitled to the 1914-15 Star and the Victory Medal.  These medals applied to service in a theatre of war and some areas of India were classed as such.  This included the 1^st Battalion DLI who took part in fighting on the North West Frontier with the 1^st (Peshawar) Division.

It is possible to go further into the different types of battalion at which point it gets ever more complex.  As a reference I have used The Long, Long Trail website which I can highly recommend to find out more about what I have been writing about and more information about the brigades, division etc. that battalions were in.  A good starting point is their Order of Battle page.

Forward 30 Years - the Anniversary of the D-Day Landings

D/DLI 2/6/593(1) Oblique air photograph of the east of Gold Beach, Normandy, France, the site of the 50th (Northumbrian) Division landing on D-Day, 6 June 1944

Whilst this is a First World War project blog, it is hard not to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings during the Second World War. Many of the men involved would have been the sons of First World War soldiers, and some men were born at a time that meant they served in both wars.

We hold a set of oblique and vertical aerial photographs, of which the above is an example, used by Durham Light Infantry soldiers who took part in the 50th (Northumbrian) Division landing on Gold Beach in Normandy seventy years ago. To make the photographs easy to carry they were stuck to a piece of linen cloth in nine separate sections on each side, so that they could be folded up to fit inside a map case.

The oblique air photos, taken from a few feet above the sea, were supplied to the assaulting troops so that, as they approached the beaches, they could check whether they were landing in the right place.

D/DLI 2/6/11(569) Photograph of Lieutenant-Colonel G.L. Wood, left, and Major Atkinson, right, of the 6th Battalion, The Durham Light Infantry, standing on a beach, taken in Normandy, France, June 1944

At the time of the D-Day landings, Lieutenant Colonel G.L. Wood held the rank of Major and was second in command of the 6th Battalion, Durham Light Infantry, to Lieutenant Colonel Green. On the 5 June, the eve of the landings, Colonel Green was hospitalised with malaria, putting Major Wood in charge. He wrote an account of the operation (D/DLI 7/789/1): 

0500 Hours [6 June 1944]
…How this ship rolls and tosses. Feel a bit queasy…the men look ghastly – white faces, dirty, unshaven, some being dreadfully sick…Will be damn glad to get my feet ton shore.

The first attempt to land is aborted due to the rough seas, the second attempt is successful. They do not receive any shell fire until the men start digging it at their assembly position, the shells pass overhead.  'Phase I is complete…we will soon be ready to move forward as a Fighting Force…'

At 1500 hours the mobile column moved off, two hours later than planned, ‘…we encountered no enemy artillery and were only held up only by small pockets of enemy which were beaten up by the mobile column.’ The battalion reached its first objective of Esquay sur Seulles by 2000 hours and were ordered to dig in. 

It was at Esquay that the battalion

…had our first spoils of war in the shape of a 10 HP Ford car, proudly driven into the Battalion Area by Major MJ Kirby, officer commanding ‘C’ Company. Two days later its German camouflage had disappeared and the emblem TT 60 was in bold letters on the body. [TT = Tyne Tees Divison]

The account continues:

[7 June 1944] The advance to the final objective was without incident and the mobile column established itself in three strong points in the area north west of Conde.
The process of clearing out the enemy was carried further by Captain G Hawkins, officer commanding Anti-Tank Platoon. While siting his guns…he noticed a 37mm Anti Aircraft Gun behind a 5 ton truck standing on the cross roads…He sited his gun behind a hedgerow some 200 yards away from the cross roads and cleaned out the AA gun and the truck with his first shot.

The battalion carried on throughout June, including six days of continuous fighting.

The successes of the battalion were not won lightly and by the end of June the battalion had suffered the following casualties:
Officers:       1 missing
                    18 wounded – 3 later died of wounds
Other ranks: 62 killed
                    17 missing
                    239 wounded – 8 later died of wounds

Taking part in commemoration events in Normandy today is HMS Bulwark, County Durham’s ‘adopted’ Royal Naval vessel. You can find more about this relationship here: http://www.durham.gov.uk/Pages/Service.aspx?ServiceId=6846