how many front line troops survived

[phil andrade]

Just under 8.7 million men served in the British Army in the Great War. Just under 8 million survived it.

An awful lot of those 8.7 million were not " Front Line" troops, though, were they ?

Well over four fifths of the nearly one million dead were infantrymen, who comprised....here I guess...fewer than one half of all the soldiers ?

The odds begin to look a lot more frightening in that light.

Phil (PJA)

[Roxy]

To be fair, Phil, the OP mentions nothing about infantry nor even 'front line troops'.

Still, an interesting discussion.

Roxy

[Scalyback]

Infantry and cavalry are the frontline troops. Entire purpose is to engage the enemy, take and hold ground. So are frontline troops.

Support arms harder to say about. RAMC could be the battalion MO in frontline danger(double VC) or tucked up in a base hospital well out of the front line. Still same capbadge. RE at the time included signals, brave lads to rewire field telephones underfire.

So not a purely Inf/cav/arty danger in frontline. Support goes up to and over no man's land as well. Special tasks could be more dangerous than infantry attacking on mass. The RE helping j.Solomon placing a false tree in no man's land was not easy.

Tanks used for the 1st time. Big targets in an offensive. However lot of the time not near the front. Frontline troops?

Danger was not on a constant threat level and same threat to all troops at the same time. Yes infantry took the brunt of holding the line but not all the time and at risk of going over the top.

[phil andrade]

To be fair, Phil, the OP mentions nothing about infantry nor even 'front line troops'.

Roxy

The title bar above is as plain as a pike staff HOW MANY FRONT LINE TROOPS SURVIVED.

I honour Chris Baker in his endeavour to remove the hyperbole from the folklore of The Great War.

A generation was not wiped out. Subalterns survived for more than six weeks.

And yes, the survivors in khaki outnumbered their dead comrades by a ratio of eight or nine to one.

That said, let's not forget that among those contingents which bore the brunt of casualties - whatever their designation - the fatality rate was vastly higher than those figures suggest.

Phil (PJA)

[Roxy]

Aye. Fair point. Wood from trees! I read the post rather than the heading!

Roxy

[gordon92]

The data point that I have is that of the 1000+ men of the 1st Bn Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders who stepped off the boat in France on 14 August 1914, only one man of the original was still with the battalion at war's end. Of course, there are reasons other than hostile action for soldiers to have left the unit over 4+ years. Nonetheless, I think this is an interesting data point.

[phil andrade]

Brian Horrocks and Bernard Law Montgomery were both infantry officers from the original B.E.F. contingent who survived - albeit badly wounded in both cases, and captured in one - to reach high command in the Second World War.

There must be plenty of other examples.

In the 1960s, I nurtured my adolescent interest in the Great War by reading a book by Tim Carew, who wrote about the Old Contemptibles.

I'm sure that he wrote that by the end of 1914, one third of the original force of infantrymen who had disembarked in August 1914 were dead.

This, I suspect, is rhetorical exaggeration, although the reality was bad enough. Most of them had become casualties, and maybe one fifth

of them had been killed by year's end. Perhaps nearly one quarter. Nearly as many had been captured.

As to how many survived the rest of the war, that will require a lot of research. Where there's a will etc.

I bet that the likes of Monty and Horrocks felt themselves to be set apart by their experience of 1914 and its aftermath...you know, the " We few, we happy few" syndrome.

Phil ( PJA )

[James]

From a photo of G company 1/5 KOSB on mobalisation August 14,

There are 101 soldiers and Officers of who 32 are marked as being killed during the course of the war.

This figure includes those who died at home or in other units.

Amongst the living are 2 pipers and a bugler (the last was most unlikly to have served overseas given his apparent age).

In broad terms this gives 32 out of 98 or 32.7% chance of being killed. If one takes as an average 2.7 wounded for every one killed then almost all would have been wounded or killed.

A few would have served at home however the majority went to Gallipoli and then Egypt.

[phil andrade]

James,

Thanks for that very instructive example.

One third of the whole lot of them died : that is chilling, especially when allowance is made for the wounded.

On the other hand, Carew's assertion that one third of the entire original contingent were dead by the end of 1914 is exposed as fallacious.

It would be interesting to find out how many of the 32 fatalities you allude to were casualties of the 1914 campaign.

Phil (PJA)

[James]

Phil,

None were as a part of the 14 campaign. Unit was home defence till being sent to Gallipoli. Many of those injured/ illness on Gallipoli were sent to other units so I am having a job tracing them.

Of the 32:

8 KIA Gallipoli most on the 12th July 15

9 KIA Egypt/Palestine most during 1917

6 KIA France / Flanders at least 2 with other units mostly 1917/18

3 in UK from wounds or illness. 1 1914, 2 1916

6 so far unacounted for.

James

[Derek Black]

Anyone know size of B.E.F. that was in France in 1914 and the number of British deaths by the end of that year?

I supppose it would be too difficult to do this for "front line" only troops?

Derek.

[phil andrade]

A bit rough and ready here, posting this away from home, but fairly confident that total deaths by the end of 1914, France and Flanders, were in the order of 25,000. The initial contingent that arrived in France in August 1914 was 90,000 or thereabouts.

In the course of the following five months, many more came over, the territorials making their debut at Messines in the 1st Ypres fighting.

By the end f the year, total battle casualties came to one hundred thousand, a number in excess of the troops who disembarked in August.

About seventeen thousand of these were prisoners. Sixty thousand, more or less, had been wounded, of whom a significant proportion recovered to rejoin their units.

I would guess that if you were to analyse the infantry casualties in the First Corps, the fatality rate would have been more extreme than the ballpark reckoning that I've given would suggest.

Phil (PJA)

[Derek Black]

Thanks for those stats Phil. Those heavy death and casualty figures for the regular army in 1914 front line troops could be where the death of an army stuff comes from?

[phil andrade]

Happy to contribute, Derek....hope my figures are helpful.

I understated the number of prisoners - the BEF yielded about twenty thousand in 1914 ; there were just over twenty three thousand deaths and fifty five thousand wounded.

Surprisingly, the average ration strength of the BEF on the Western Front in 1914 was in excess of 200,000, which indicates the flow of reinforcements and the large number of rear area troops that were sent to France and Flanders during those five months. The initial contingent of two infantry corps and a cavalry division must, surely, have been limited to fewer than 85,000.

It must be quite " do-able" to obtain the muster rolls of a number of infantry battalions that disembarked in August 1914, and to investigate the fate of the soldiers.

I wonder how many survived to see the Armistice.

Phil (PJA)

[Guest]

I think it is impossible to answer this question. Anyone who has tried to analyse casualty data on this scale will understand immediately that the data simply does not exist. Neither the mighty "Statistics 1914-18" or the "History of the Great War: Medical Services - Casualties and Medical Statistics" recorded the data in this way. Given most of the service records were destroyed, I would argue that it is an impossible question to answer.

To attempt to answer this question from the available data requires just too many assumptions. The more refined the data, the longer the definitions become.

The War Office did an incomplete analysis of casualties - some 1,043,653 between 1916 and 1920 and did differentiate between "Fighting Arms" * and "All Arms" which is the nearest definition to "Front Line Troops" however the real issue is defining the denominator of the equation: how many men actually served in the "fighting arms"? And how do we account for men who served in a "fighting arm" and transferred into a non-fighting arm and were subsequently killed?. From the available data it is impossible to define how many men served in the "Fighting Arms". I have recently tried on another thread to work out what per cent of all men who served had served in the infantry. It is impossible to discover although my analysis would indicate somewhere in the region of 67% of all men who served, at one stage served in the infantry.

Put simply, how does one categorise a man who served 50 months in the infantry (defined as a "fighting arm") who was then transferred to the Labour Corps (defined as "other") and then killed in the last month of the War? And multiply that type of challenge by some millions. It is impossible to calculate.

To extrapolate a single Battalion's worth of data, while an interesting exercise is not going to answer the question. The huge variation in the experiences of the 951 infantry battalions that served overseas of the 1,619 battalions that existed makes it a meaningless exercise. Anyone wanting to explore the extremes should dig into the data of the Scots Guards which saw the highest numbers killed per service battalion than any other Infantry Regiment...by a very long shot.

* War Office definition of "Fighting Arm": Cavalry, Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Infantry, MGC, Tank Corps. It does reveal that the Infantry accounted for 86.07% of Total casualties to Fighting Arms and 84.39% of Total casualties to all Arms. What is revealing is that within each arm of the Army, the proportion of those killed as a per cent of casualties was higher in Other Arms than in Fighting Arms [ref Table (i) (d) Percentage of Battle Casualties British Regular and Territorial Forces (All Theatres) page 247 "Statistics 1914-1920"]

It is worth noting that the OP states "survived" which I assume would imply the question is about the numbers who died of all causes rather than those wounded or injured or gassed. Many survived the War but were not present in their original battalion or unit at the end.

As a reference point, the nearest you will get for the British (all Arms) is this: 5,704,416 men and women from the British Isles were enlisted (out of 8,586,202 British, Dominion, Indian and Colonial Troops) of which 662,083 British troops were killed, died or wounds or died. This implies that 5,042,333 'survived' i.e 88.39% survived. The calculation for the British Empire is 90.09% survived. [source: Statistics 1914-19120 page 756 Tables 1 and 2.]

MG

Edited for typos. Any mistakes are mine.

[phil andrade]

Are there not records of the names of men in a battalion that disembarked in August 1914 ? Given that starting point, a search through SDGW might indicate how many died. Not a job that I would care to do, I must admit. But I would be keen to find out what the odds had been. I suppose you would have to do it to several units, in the hope that there would be some extrapolative merit. A sample of several thousand of those original troops would be sufficient to give some indication, surely ?

Phil ( PJA)

[Chris_Baker]

An awful lot of those 8.7 million were not " Front Line" troops, though, were they ?

Well over four fifths of the nearly one million dead were infantrymen, who comprised....here I guess...fewer than one half of all the soldiers ?

The odds begin to look a lot more frightening in that light.

Phil (PJA)

I would have thought 0.7 million dead was frightening enough.

[phil andrade]

I would have thought 0.7 million dead was frightening enough.

It was worse than that, surely, Chris ?

0.7 million from UK alone, from five million or so in the army : more than 0.9 milion for the Empire as a whole, from the 8.7 million who served in the army. Another forty to fifty thousand sailors and airmen bring the total up to very near the million mark.

Edit : I've just stumbled across an interesting statistic, cited in Whalen's book Bitter Wounds : one quarter of all the German regular officer corps was killed during the war. Presumably, these officers were in service at the start of hostilities, and, since German officer fatalities were higher - in proportion to numbers commissioned - than those of their British counterparts ; and since officer death rates were relatively higher than those of other ranks in both armies - it's difficult to avoid concluding that four fifths of the original contingent of the BEF survived.

Phil (PJA)

[Derek Black]

It is perhaps surprising that no one has done a PhD on this.

In principle, it can't be that difficult. There is, presumably a list of those in the am yion 1914, and there are lists of those who survived. Compare the two.

What would be really interesting is to see how the life span of those who survived com[ared with that of the population at large.

Just hink of the ages of Harry Patch, etc.

Was this survival of the fittest in operation in tooth and claw?

the number of Mons stars awarded (5th Aug - 22/23 Nov) is given as 365,622, so a trawl through the medal rolls for these men against the CWGC database will show how many of these men died.

Although it may take a while....

[Guest]

the number of Mons stars awarded (5th Aug - 22/23 Nov) is given as 365,622, so a trawl through the medal rolls for these men against the CWGC database will show how many of these men died.

Although it may take a while....

Derek

What is the source for the Mons Star 356,622 number? Just curious. Thanks. MG

[Derek Black]

The Mons Star Wiki page, which itself sources the number from the book British Battles and Medals

Derek.

[Mark Hone]

The Honourable Harold Alexander, later Field Marshal Lord Alexander of Tunis, aka 'Alex', was another 'original' who survived to achieve later eminence-he too was badly wounded.

[Willh1664]

For anyone interested, I am currently working through the Scots Guards (1st and 2nd battalions) 1914 Star medal roll in a bid to work out a survival rate of the 'originals'. 

 

I am working with number of dead, wounded to point of discharge,taken prisoner and the deserters, all broken down into years (1914 through to 19). 

 

To work with the entire regiment and the 11000 odd men who served with the Scots Guards would be a very long job in deed and in that much detail!

 

Baby steps first...

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Willh1664 said:

For anyone interested, I am currently working through the Scots Guards (1st and 2nd battalions) 1914 Star medal roll in a bid to work out a survival rate of the 'originals'. 

 

I am working with number of dead, wounded to point of discharge,taken prisoner and the deserters, all broken down into years (1914 through to 19). 

 

To work with the entire regiment and the 11000 odd men who served with the Scots Guards would be a very long job in deed and in that much detail!

 

Baby steps first...

 

Willh

 

There is a separate thread which looks at this exact dynamic. I have just finished this exercise for the Grenadier Guards and am close to finishing the same for the 1914-15 Star medal roll. 

 

MG

 

 

[Keith_history_buff]

The attached picture was doing the rounds on social media about 18 months ago. Further comments to follow