BEF 1914 - Early Disembarkation and Survivability

[phil andrade]

Keith,

 

Kind of you to go to this trouble.

 

Spreadsheets and graphs have always confounded me.  I rely on bag of a fag packet interpretation and hope that I’m not too far off the mark.

 

The Great War is such a groundbreaking event, and  the record of its fatality differs so much from previous experience of warfare that it is stupefying .

 

We’ve already remarked on the overwhelming preponderance of enemy fire as the cause of death.  This speaks of that relentless intensity of battle that I allude to : accidents and disease still took their toll, but they were trivial agents  compared with that “ universe of battle “.

 

This in itself poses another challenge.  The SWB Bn conforms with the earlier experience of warfare, in so far as just three days of fighting account for the  majority of its total combat deaths. Just sixty years earlier , in the Crimea, roughly half of all British soldiers killed in action or died from wounds in the entire war could be attributed to three days of battle : Alma, Inkerman and one assault on the Russian lines at Sebastopol .  Fifty per cent of battle deaths suffered in three days. ....how different things were to be within the course of one lifetime !  The Western Front, 1914-18, produced three days of battle that stand out as  exceptional for the British in terms of loss of life : 1st July 1916 , 25th September 1915 and 21st March 1918.  Those three days combined did not account for more than five per cent of all British combat fatalities in France and Flanders in the entire war.  And yet the individual battalion records still attribute large proportions of their battle dead to those notorious “ bad days”.

 

Phil