Best British Divisions on the Western Front by Peter Simkins

[David_Blanchard]

A while ago Peter Simkins compiled a list of British Divisions on the Western Front- can someone tell me where I can find this list?

 

thanks in advance 

 

David 

[Ron Clifton]

I'm not sure that it was actually published, but it was known as the SHLM Project, after the initials of the four historians who worked on it. The IWM should know.

 

Ron

[David_Blanchard]

Thanks- I know about the project there is a chapter published about this in Paddy Griffiths book British Army’s Fighting methods- I think I have seen British Divisions rated somewhere- it may have been in this forum a while back.

[KernelPanic]

There's a well-referenced article here from the WFA that discusses 'best and worst' Divisions with regard to the numbers of soldiers who were executed for disciplinary and other charges. But not sure whether this will help with what you are looking for. 

[ilkley remembers]

Gary Sheffield at a conference in Australia in 1998 quotes the Simkins research and states that that the 10 best British Divisions were Guards, 9th 16th, 18th, 19th, 24th,25th, 34th, 38th and 66th. I have never read the Griffiths book so cannot say if this list is the same mentioned there. As far as I know the SHLM project was never pursued any further because of the problems posed by comparison of the effectiveness  of different divisions over the whole war as divisional fortunes waxed and waned over its course. Clearly, if you have a top 10 then it suggests that there was a bottom 10. There was a thread on GWF recently which suggested that the German Army kept a list of the best and worst British Divisions.

[Steven Broomfield]

2 minutes ago, ilkley remembers said:

There was a thread on GWF recently which suggested that the German Army kept a list of the best and worst British Divisions.

 

Indeed there was such a thread, although it (yet again) failed to produce any hard evidence that such a list existed.

 

Personally I am always reluctant to produce 'best' and 'worst' lists as these things are always subjective and taken across four years of an extremely difficult war I would struggle to say any division was good all the tme (or bad all the time). That, I suspect, is why the SHLM Project foundered.

 

As for the WFAarticle referenced above, t seems to use a lot of words and a lot of facst and figures to prove very little, I would say. To suggest that Territorials knew what army discipline was so were less likely to desert (etc) seems to me to underestimate the ethos f the pre-war territorial to quite a degree - it's not understanding of the system, srely, but the whole experience of belonging to a 'club'. 

[Chris_Baker]

Previous discussion at 

 

[derekb]

2 hours ago, Steven Broomfield said:

 

Indeed there was such a thread, although it (yet again) failed to produce any hard evidence that such a list existed.

 

Personally I am always reluctant to produce 'best' and 'worst' lists as these things are always subjective and taken across four years of an extremely difficult war I would struggle to say any division was good all the tme (or bad all the time). That, I suspect, is why the SHLM Project foundered.

 

As for the WFAarticle referenced above, t seems to use a lot of words and a lot of facst and figures to prove very little, I would say. To suggest that Territorials knew what army discipline was so were less likely to desert (etc) seems to me to underestimate the ethos f the pre-war territorial to quite a degree - it's not understanding of the system, srely, but the whole experience of belonging to a 'club'. 

Surely whether a Division or any units performance was influenced by the "quality" of the enemy that they were facing.

[David_Blanchard]

Thanks for your replies. The basis of my investigation was to see if the 8 Division had been somehow ‘rated’. Starting a new research project on the battle of the Bois des Buttes- trying to establish how effective the 8 Division was by 1918. 

 

And any any help with sources for the role of 8 Division at Villers-Bretonneux would be appreciated. I think I have most of the obvious ones ie Div Hist OH etc but would appreciate it if any kind would like to give me the ‘The landlocked Lake’ by Hanbury-Sparrow!

 

David 

[Ron Clifton]

2 hours ago, ilkley remembers said:

Gary Sheffield at a conference in Australia in 1998 quotes the Simkins research and states that that the 10 best British Divisions were Guards, 9th 16th, 18th, 19th, 24th,25th, 34th, 38th and 66th. 

One Regular Division, one second-line Territorial Division and eight New Army Divisions. I think that one factor which skews this list is that, on the whole, Regular Divisions were given the toughest tasks to undertake. Similarly, some of the divisions who acquired a bad reputation did so because of indifferent GOCs.

 

Ron

Edited 1 May , 2019 by Ron Clifton

[Steven Broomfield]

And taking the 8th Division as a case in point - how many times were the constituent units subject to massive casualties and an almost complete rebuild? Comparing a Division of Regulars in 1914 with a Division of under-age conscripts in 1918 must be stretching it, without taking into account the various technological changes.

[Neill Gilhooley]

5 hours ago, Steven Broomfield said:

As for the WFAarticle referenced above, t seems to use a lot of words and a lot of facst and figures to prove very little, I would say.

"The conclusion seems to be that neither condemnations nor executions were linked to a division’s fighting spirit."

This looks like the negative result of a science publication, worthwhile but not proving the hypothesis...

[Ron Clifton]

1 hour ago, Steven Broomfield said:

And taking the 8th Division as a case in point - how many times were the constituent units subject to massive casualties and an almost complete rebuild? Comparing a Division of Regulars in 1914 with a Division of under-age conscripts in 1918 must be stretching it, without taking into account the various technological changes.

8th Division in particular suffered fairly heavy casualties in the first two phases of the Kaiserschlacht and was sent to a nominally quiet sector of the French front, on the Chemin des Dames, where it was promptly thumped a third time at the end of May 1918.

 

 

1 hour ago, Neill Gilhooley said:

"The conclusion seems to be that neither condemnations nor executions were linked to a division’s fighting spirit."

This looks like the negative result of a science publication, worthwhile but not proving the hypothesis...

This is true, but high rates of condemnations and executions indicate a likely problem with discipline in the division, which also implies a lower than average level of morale, and hence of willingness to fight. Compare the situation in the French Army in 1917, and much of the German Army in the Hundred Days.

 

Ron

[Steven Broomfield]

1 hour ago, Ron Clifton said:

8th Division in particular suffered fairly heavy casualties in the first two phases of the Kaiserschlacht and was sent to a nominally quiet sector of the French front, on the Chemin des Dames, where it was promptly thumped a third time at the end of May 1918.

 

 

Ron

 

One of the reasons I singled them out. They were also, of course, badly cut up at the end of 1914, at Neuve Chapelle and on the Somme, and at Ypres in 1917. Indeed, I would suspect they were one of the hardest-hit divisions in the whole war.

[David_Blanchard]

There does seem to be some sort of contemporary ranking system in operation- extract from 8 Division Phd 2010 by Alun Thomas page 273

Edited 1 May , 2019 by David_Blanchard

[Steven Broomfield]

Not sure where that came from, but then footnote 31 '... I can find no other reference to such a system' looks a little like the German 'Most Feared' list in terms of hard proof.

[Neill Gilhooley]

15 hours ago, Ron Clifton said:

Compare the situation in the French Army in 1917, and much of the German Army in the Hundred Days.

Ron, this is perhaps a more interesting question than the very mixed results from the BEF. I may be a long way off the mark, but quite a lot may have been down to the GOC, as FP Crozier, for example, was convinced of the efficacy of death sentences. However I am less convinced it is a metric of discipline and morale.

From https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/military_justice

For the British "There seems to have been a clear correlation between the enforcement of death sentences and the lead-up to major British offensives" quoting Gerard Oram.

"In the French army the highest number of executions, 296, took place in 1915; in 1917 the number fell to eighty-nine and in 1918 to fourteen."

The Germans had low levels of executions and very few for desertion.

12 hours ago, David_Blanchard said:

some sort of contemporary ranking system

News to me - it would be interesting if anyone knows more.

20 hours ago, derekb said:

Surely whether a Division or any units performance was influenced by the "quality" of the enemy that they were facing.

I don't know how the SHLM project intended to rank divisions, but this makes me think of ICC player rankings!

[Ron Clifton]

46 minutes ago, Neill Gilhooley said:

However I am less convinced it is a metric of discipline and morale.

I agree that it is a debatable point, but as British Army death sentences passed up the chain of command to final confirmation or otherwise, reviewing officers were specifically requested to comment on the levels of discipline and morale in the man's unit. If these factors were not a statistical metric, they were certainly perceived as such.

 

50 minutes ago, Neill Gilhooley said:

The Germans had low levels of executions and very few for desertion.

I believe that the Germans relied heavily on summary executions by battlefield police, which do not show up in "official" figures.

 

Ron

[Neill Gilhooley]

10 minutes ago, Ron Clifton said:

I believe that the Germans relied heavily on summary executions by battlefield police, which do not show up in "official" figures.

Thank you, that is very interesting and again proves you cannot rely on the odd table of stats.

[Steven Broomfield]

2 hours ago, Neill Gilhooley said:

Thank you, that is very interesting and again proves you cannot rely on the odd table of stats.

 

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

[Neill Gilhooley]

12 minutes ago, Steven Broomfield said:

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

Indeed!

As a case in point...: THE RELATIONSHIP OF BATTLE DAMAGE TO UNIT COMBAT PERFORMANCE, Leonard Wainstein, 1986, "to investigate the historical basis for the assumption that a military formation will cease to be effective after having lost a certain pre-ordained percentage of its strength."

This seems to say (on a light read) that morale is an 'imponderable', that the results are all mixed and cannot be assigned to losses, but that morale was remarkably high throughout the First World War, with the possible exception of Gallipoli.

[AOK4]

5 hours ago, Ron Clifton said:

I believe that the Germans relied heavily on summary executions by battlefield police, which do not show up in "official" figures.

 

Ron

 

Sources?

 

I have never heard of anything like that in the First World War and I've read a lot of German books and archival sources!

[Ron Clifton]

Anecdotal only, I'm afraid. But since such activities would have been plainly illegal under German military law, it is hardly likely that such information would have found its way into official archives. Given the known propensity of the German officer corps to treat its other ranks with brutality and contempt (source: Admiral Scheer's book on the German High Sea Fleet) I find the anecdotes easier to believe.

 

Ron

[AOK4]

18 minutes ago, Ron Clifton said:

Anecdotal only, I'm afraid. But since such activities would have been plainly illegal under German military law, it is hardly likely that such information would have found its way into official archives. Given the known propensity of the German officer corps to treat its other ranks with brutality and contempt (source: Admiral Scheer's book on the German High Sea Fleet) I find the anecdotes easier to believe.

 

Ron

 

I'm sorry, but the Imperial German Army was not the Wehrmacht. And anyway: do you really think the German army would have been such a formidable fighting force until 1918 when the German officer corps treated its other ranks with brutality and contempt?

 

Start reading German sources and memoirs and get a clearer view about how the German army worked.

 

In general, higher ranking officers blame at least a large part of the lack of discipline in the German army from 1918 onwards to the total absence of executions as opposed to the British and French armies. Indeed, German soldiers were sent (in large numbers) to all kinds of military prisoner companies to work, but executions remained extremely rare.

 

Jan

[Steven Broomfield]

Regarding the above, I recall reading that senior British officers in Italy during the Second World War felt that discipline would have been served were the death penalty still available in 1943-45.

 

I, too, have heard the anecdotal stories of Germans being subject to summary execution, but never having seen anything as a proper reference, I have my doubts too, I must say.