Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors. Richard Holmes
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as to constitute a large on-off switch to be pressed only in time of the gravest crisis.
The process of making it easier to use Territorials in situations short of general war began with the ‘Ever Readies’. This small group of TA volunteers was set up in 1962 and they agreed to accept a higher liability in return for a bounty. Ever Readies were called up for service in Aden in 1965. There was some controversy: 14 of the 175 selected appealed against call-up, and men argued unsuccessfully that because they had been unable to take their brief leave entitlement in-theatre, they should have it added as paid leave at the end of their mobilised service. The three officers and 120 men who served with 1st Royal Sussex were well regarded by their battalion, and one of the officers, Lieutenant Mike Smith, won the first Military Cross awarded to a Territorial since the Second World War.
The Reserve Forces Act of 1996 did not simply create a small High Readiness reserve intended to produce specialists like interpreters and civil affairs experts, but it made the whole of the TA subject to call-out by the secretary of state, who could use it not only ‘when warlike operations are in preparation or progress,’ but for the protection of life or property and the alleviation of distress at home or abroad. Since then Territorials have been called up for service in the Balkans, the Falklands, Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Kingsman Michael Davison, a 22-year-old Liverpool builder, won the first Territorial Military Cross since Mike Smith a generation before by dragging a wounded officer to safety in Basra in 2003. The TA is now emphatically a reserve for use, and nobody joining it can be in any doubt of that.
There have been attendant casualties. The problem of ensuring that a reservist did not lose his civilian employment by being called up for full time service long pre-dates the TA. Liaison with employers was one of the tasks laid on County Associations, and since then first the National Employers’ Liaison Committee and then SaBRE (Supporting Britain’s Reserves and Employers) have striven to persuade employers that there are practical benefits to having reservists amongst their employees, for they acquire transferable skills like leadership and initiative. When the TA was first formed many employers were hugely supportive, granting their employees paid leave to attend annual camp. The Alliance Assurance Company and the Westminster Fire Office even insisted that their employees should be Territorials.
It was always much harder for small firms, who could be seriously inconvenienced by the disappearance of, say, one of two plasterers at a busy time. Shifts in employment patterns have not necessarily helped the TA. Large, British-owned firms tended to take a more supportive view than multinationals with concerns about the uses to which reservists might be put in a complex world. When jobs are hard to come by, employees are disinclined to risk them, and a pattern of TA service that is now very likely to involve occasional periods of mobilisation makes it harder for professionals like lawyers, doctors, or university teachers to harmonise military and civilian identities. The TA, like the militia before it, was able to profit from the fact that many of its officers enjoyed high status in their civilian capacities, and these have been precisely the individuals squeezed most tightly by changing circumstances. Conversely, many of those attracted by the periods of Full Time Reserve Service (essentially short-term, often extendable contracts) made available by the 1996 Act had reached a dead end in their civilian careers.
A 2007 study by the National Audit Office concluded that most reservists joined with the intention of serving on one mobilised tour, but that 16 per cent of those questioned intended to leave within a year, and just under half of this group had been called up. Most Territorials planning to leave blamed personal or family pressure, with a substantial minority attributing their decision to ‘lack of support’. There were difficulties where a reservist’s military pay fell short of his civilian salary, and in access to medical care after deployment. In particular, reservists were more likely than regulars to suffer from psychiatric problems on their return, not least because of their rapid transition from military life, with its supportive bonds of mateship, to the more humdrum world outside. These difficulties are exacerbated where there seems no clear mandate for the war, and by the practical problem of finding, within the immediate community, somebody who can begin to understand what it was really like in Al Amarah or Musa Qal’h.
The TA remains under-recruited (in 2006 it was 19 per cent down on its established strength of just under 40,000), and the shortfall is at its most severe in the Royal Army Medical Corps, upon which the army relies so heavily. There is a worrying shortage of officers, not least because the very individuals with the qualities needed to encourage folk on a rainy Friday night on Salisbury Plain are exactly those most likely to be most in demand in the pressure-cooker of stressful civilian jobs. In his epilogue to the book marking the TA’s hundredth anniversary, Brigadier Greg Smith, then Deputy Inspector General of the TA and shortly to become Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, argued that one of the TA’s most important tasks lay in ‘effectively providing the essential link between the army and society’.28 It does so with increasing difficulty, and part of the price it has paid for increased military efficiency and tighter links with the regular army is to make it harder to retain its foothold in a society with other pressing concerns.
II
CHAPTER 7
A NATIONAL ARMY: 1660–1914
FOR MOST OF its life the regular army was a volunteer force, its members, officers and soldiers alike, having decided to embrace the profession of arms. The decision to join was rarely simple. A man could be led to enlist for many reasons: a fit of pique, a brush with the law, that extra pint of porter, the vision conjured up by an eloquent recruiting sergeant, or unrelenting hardship in an age of social insecurity. Nor was it necessarily easier for officers, who might find family tradition, patriotic obligation or (especially for Scots or Irish youngsters with many hungry siblings but few paternal acres) the lack of alternative gentlemanly employment scarcely less compelling. The army had existed for two and a half centuries before the exigencies of the First World War forced it to adopt conscription, though there had been times, notably during the Napoleonic wars, when the voluntary principle was stretched to its very limit.
The years between 1916–18 and 1939–60, when conscription was in force, do not fit into the broader pattern of Britain’s military development. Both world wars saw the transformation of a small, professional force into a massive national army, a process that helps account for early setbacks. It also explains the rise of a style of war-fighting in which the British army engaged ‘the enemy with the minimum of manpower in the front line and employ the maximum of machinery to generate the overwhelming firepower required to suppress enemy fire and so make possible movement across the battlefield.’1 The process was cumulative, for the generals and political leaders of the Second World War – most of whom had fought on the Western Front as young men – knew very well that society would never again tolerate the sacrifice of life on such a scale. Their soldiers, who had grown up in the shadow of the Somme, were less deferential than their fathers. Field Marshal Montgomery’s predilection for letting metal, not flesh, do the business of battle was firmly rooted not only in his own military experience but also in the culture of the men he commanded.
As I shuffle off to lunch after a morning spent lecturing newly promoted majors on the Intermediate Command and Staff Course, I am struck by that same mixture of continuity and change that characterises the whole of the army. There will be a few names that have been in the Army List since there was an Army List, with the same regimental connections. Introduce me to a Tollemache and I will confidently expect the cap-star of the Coldstream. The Winchester College–Oxbridge nexus that would once have taken a boy into the Rifle Brigade or the 60th Rifles, might now see him in the Rifles – arguably the most successful of the recent amalgamations. However, there will be many officers with no family connection with the army, who have arrived by way of comprehensive school and redbrick university, or indeed no university at all. There will be some who have risen through the ranks, being commissioned after making their mark as a private or junior NCO. Others will