Attrition

[ilkley remembers]

Thanks Phil. Yes I certainly remember reading 'The Face of Battle', although, it has been many years. He compared Agincourt, Waterloo and The Somme if my memory serves me correctly.

 

From the quotation that you have highlighted Keegan was aware of the limitations of his analysis but nevertheless it seemed quite radical at the time. The German army does seem to have had a remarkable resilience in the face overwhelming odds. It reminds me of a story from about 10 years ago when I had to speak to an elderly chap here in Ilkley. He was a German in his 90s who had served in the Hitler Youth  and then as a paratrooper in the Luftwaffe. He was captured in March 1945 when in his own words "I jumped into a ditch and had the sharp end of a Lee-Enfield rifle pushed into my face". He was brought to Britain and put to work building new houses in nearby Otley, got married and became a successful businessman. I asked what made him continue fighting when it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war. In reply he said that he and his comrades were aware that the cause was hopeless but to run would probably have meant death at the hands of the battlefield police. But as well he said that obedience had been instilled into him as a soldier and the need to defend their homeland was extraordinarily motivational. He also told me that what most lowered his morale was the incessant pursuit by the Allies and the knowledge of their huge material advantage most visible in the continuous stream of British and American aircraft as they flew overhead.

 

I always thought that it was interesting that it wasn't necessarily the the casualty rate or the possibility of his own death that lowered his morale but a sense of hopelessness in the face of  an unstoppable enemy.

 

Perhaps for the German Army of 1918 the knowledge of a mighty and well resourced enemy rather than casualty rates, which few front line soldiers whose horizon was limited by the walls of a trench would have been aware of, that finally broke this extraordinarily resilient army.

Edited 18 May , 2021 by ilkley remembers

[PhilB]

Did Keegan include consideration of the effects on morale of the November Revolution, the Wilhelmshaven Revolt, the Kiel mutiny and the general civil disorder?

[phil andrade]

1 hour ago, PhilB said:

Did Keegan include consideration of the effects on morale of the November Revolution, the Wilhelmshaven Revolt, the Kiel mutiny and the general civil disorder?

 

PhilB,

 

Those events were in November, 1918, weren’t they ?

 

The army was still fighting resolutely in October, judging by the quarter of a million plus Allied casualties suffered on the Western Front that month ( I’d better check that ! )

 

It was all so sudden.  The thing was hanging in the balance until mid July : then , within four months, it was over.  So different from the protracted death of Nazi Germany a generation later.

 

How far was attrition the common denominator in both the conflicts ?

 

Phil

[PhilB]

1 hour ago, phil andrade said:

 

PhilB,

 

Those events were in November, 1918, weren’t they ?

 

Phil

Yes, Phil, but they must have cast a long shadow before then. It probably became obvious weeks before to the frontschwein that support from the civil population and other services was draining away? Weren’t they accused of unnecessarily prolonging the war by continuing to fight?

[phil andrade]

44 minutes ago, PhilB said:

Yes, Phil, but they must have cast a long shadow before then. It probably became obvious weeks before to the frontschwein that support from the civil population and other services was draining away? Weren’t they accused of unnecessarily prolonging the war by continuing to fight?

 

This is where I need enlightenment .

 

Something catastrophic happened quickly.  I’ve always attributed this to the military failure and the huge loss of life and blood that it entailed.  The implication of your post is that I’m underestimating the home front disaffection as a reason for the German collapse.

 

I’ll confess to being very open to persuasion here.

 

Phil

[ilkley remembers]

Phil, one of the problems seems to be that that there are a number of parallel narratives to explain the collapse of the German Army in 1918. It seems that purely military historians  have a tendency to offer explanation based on battlefield outcomes and crisis of morale within the German Army. Conversely, historians writing about the immediate post war period see the influence of the German home front on morale as being of greater significance.

 

It  seems to have been the case that by Sept 1918 Ludendorff was telling civilian members of the German Government that the war was lost which certainly appears to have provoked a crisis at the highest levels. This along with a general war weariness amongst the general population it no doubt rather concentrated the minds towards an ending of the war. Ludendorff himself seems to have fallen into a malaise and his decision making erratic, some authorities have suggested that he along with Hindenburg were already planning for the the effects of losing the war and hoped to keep the army reasonably intact. I think inevitably these attitudes percolated downward affecting a change in attitude amongst the General Staff and by stages down to officer ranks at a lower level. Perhaps it is possible to speculate that this became contiguous with the psychological state of front line troops who themselves were no longer motivated. Anecdotally, there is evidence that many of those who surrendered did so under the orders of officers whose morale must also have been seriously compromised. 

 

To me, if anything explains what happened to the German Army it is the that the low morale of those at the bottom was reinforced by a similar feelings coming from the top of the command chain.

 

Edward 

[phil andrade]

Edward / PhilB,

 

A statistical trope  that I’ve pitched before, and which I think bears repetition, is that, throughout the war in France and Belgium 1914-18, 775,000 German prisoners were counted by the Allies.  Of these, 385,000 - almost exactly half - were taken in the period from mid July 1918 to the Armistice. Half of all prisoners captured were taken in the final four months, which, if my arithmetic bears up, implies that the rate of loss as POWs equated to six times the norm in that final period.  I don’t know where to go with this, except to suggest that the battlefield experience was becoming unbearable for large parts of the German army.

 

Phil

[ilkley remembers]

Quite astonishing figures, Phil, I wonder what the equivalent statistics are for British and French POWs over the same period? I suppose that the high figures for 1918 could also be a reflection of the changing nature of the battlefield that year as it moved from static to a more mobile form. That certainly has been put forward as an explanation for the large number of British POWs taken during the Spring Offensive.

 

Perhaps one of the difficulties in assessing the state of the German Army in the second half of 1918 is the comparative dearth of scholarship available in the UK. Unlike the British, the Germans had attempted to make psychological assessments of their frontline troops. Sadly, apart from the occasional mentions this research appears unavailable in translation.

 

Of course in the years after the war ended the Germans were able to convince themselves that their army had remained undefeated in 1918, an opinion which was widely held by former soldiers of all ranks as well as the general public. The nature of the Armistice itself and the protracted financial negations during the 20s perhaps rather reinforced this view as did the more ameliorative attitudes of Britain and America.  The speed at which German revisionism created myths about WW1 is remarkable and I’m sure that it is no coincidence the suitably Wagnerian motif of a ‘stab in the back’, a la Siegfried, was used by one former corporal in the German army.

[phil andrade]

2 hours ago, ilkley remembers said:

Quite astonishing figures, Phil, I wonder what the equivalent statistics are for British and French POWs over the same period? I suppose that the high figures for 1918 could also be a reflection of the changing nature of the battlefield that year as it moved from static to a more mobile form. That certainly has been put forward as an explanation for the large number of British POWs taken during the Spring Offensive.

 

 

 

Edward,

 

The number of British prisoners taken by the Germans in 1918 exceeded that of all the previous years combined ;  of that haul captured in 1918, the overwhelming majority were taken in the spring offensive, of course.  I can only hazard a guess, but I would think that fewer than twenty thousand British prisoners were taken between July and November 1918, suggesting that the number taken March to June was approaching one hundred thousand, more than three quarters of them in the six weeks between 21 March and the end of April.  This is mirrored by the German experience : of the 201,000 prisoners taken by the British in 1918, nearly 190,000 were captured in the final four months.  The number taken in the March to June phase can hardly have much exceeded ten thousand, which goes to show how the German casualties were almost entirely comprised of killed and wounded when they were attacking so profligately. I don't have data on the French 1918 experience to match those of the British, but I would expect that they were in harmony.

 

It's challenging to form an  interpretation of  those figures : one thing is very apparent, the French, British and German armies all exhibited an astonishing ability to take terrible punishment, and then to recover.  Nothing illustrates this better than the experience of the French in 1914 : their losses in killed and prisoners in a six week period between later August and mid September that year were simply stupefying.  Maybe the lesson of the story is, if you're going to take a terrible beating, it might be better to take it at the beginning of the fight than at the end !

 

Phil

 

Edited 20 May , 2021 by phil andrade

[PhilB]

This might account for the great increase in PoWs:-

 

Though they had endured increasing privations and were half-starved due to the Allied blockade by mid-1918, the German people had retained their morale surprisingly well as long as they believed Germany had a prospect of achieving victory on the Western Front. When this hope collapsed in October 1918, many, and perhaps even most, Germans wished only that the war would end, though it might mean their nation would have to accept unfavourable peace terms. German public opinion, having been more suddenly disillusioned, was now far more radically defeatist than the supreme command.

 

World War I - The end of the German war | Britannica

 

And also:-

In 1918 293,000 Germans died from starvation and hypothermia. 

The end of World War One, 1918-1919 - Weimar Germany, 1918-1924 - AQA - GCSE History Revision - AQA - BBC Bitesize

 

 

[ilkley remembers]

Phil and PhilB

 

If you have £35 going spare you could always download this article by Jonathan Boff from The Journal of Strategic Studies 

 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01402390.2013.846854

 

He did write a well regarded book on the 3rd Army in 1918 'Winning and Losing on the Western Front' and also has quite a good blog page https://jonathanboff.wordpress.com/about/

 

Edward

[ilkley remembers]

55 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

The number of British prisoners taken by the Germans in 1918 exceeded that of all the previous years combined ;  of that haul captured in 1918, the overwhelming majority were taken in the spring offensive, of course.  I can only hazard a guess, but I would think that fewer than twenty thousand British prisoners were taken between July and November 1918, suggesting that the number taken March to June was approaching one hundred thousand, more than three quarters of them in the six weeks between 21 March and the end of April.  This is mirrored by the German experience : of the 201,000 prisoners taken by the British in 1918, nearly 190,000 were captured in the final four months.  The

 

Which does seem to suggest that being under attack and away from the 'safety' of a trench, soldiers had a greater tendency surrender in adverse circumstances. Perhaps it was a training issue; they were never really taught to deal with the differing demands of mobile warfare.

[phil andrade]

Edward/PhilB,

 

Jonathan Boff has written some great stuff.  I've recently finished his book on Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, HAIG'S ENEMY, which gives us plenty to think about.

 

When Kitchener went on the record as saying  :  We make war as we must, not as we would wish, he might well have been stipulating that, like it or not, the war of attrition was an inescapable consequence of deadlock, and it was better to reconcile that his, Haig's and others' predictions of a war of several years and sustained intensity , with all its attendant coalition duties , was what happened by default.

 

I like to interpret the war of attrition, 1914-18, as divided into two parts, roughly dividing the Great War in half : the first phase, extending until the summer of 1916, going in Germany's favour ; the second transferring the advantage to the Allies.

 

You could almost cite the time of Kitchener's death as the  moment of change over.

 

Phil

 

 

 

 

[ilkley remembers]

4 hours ago, phil andrade said:

onathan Boff has written some great stuff.  I've recently finished his book on Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, HAIG'S ENEMY, which gives us plenty to think about.

 

Yes, Phil, have read some of his stuff online and his views are interesting. I think that he has been able to mine valuable resources from German archives.

 

4 hours ago, phil andrade said:

When Kitchener went on the record as saying  :  We make war as we must, not as we would wish, he might well have been stipulating that, like it or not, the war of attrition was an inescapable consequence of deadlock, and it was better to reconcile that his, Haig's and others' predictions of a war of several years and sustained intensity , with all its attendant coalition duties , was what happened by default.

 

 

No great expert on Kitchener, but I suppose his star was on the wane by 1916 despite his prescient comments regarding the nature of the coming in 1914. He seems to have been closer to Haig than is often thought and appears to have taken his loss rather badly. 

 

4 hours ago, phil andrade said:

I like to interpret the war of attrition, 1914-18, as divided into two parts, roughly dividing the Great War in half : the first phase, extending until the summer of 1916, going in Germany's favour ; the second transferring the advantage to the Allies.

 

I suppose that we are back in the land of the 'learning curve' explanation of British tactics in WW1 which has proponents as well as sceptics. Being in the latter camp I see rather distinct plateau's and troughs in the supposedly upward trajectory  

[phil andrade]

One of Boff’s books - Winning and Losing on the Western Front - contains an analysis of the proportion of young soldiers in the British and German armies.

 

Hoping that I remember and understand correctly, the data were taken from CWGC for the age of British soldiers, and from BEF records of German prisoners.

 

The surprising - indeed, barely explicable - conclusion is that the British dead contained a higher proportion of soldiers of 21 and younger than the German prisoners.

 

This was in the final battles of the war, when attrition had done its work.  German military war dead outnumbered those of the U.K. by three to one, approximately, and in per capita terms were twice as high.

 

What a grotesque feature of attrition, if it leaves the victorious party  mourning a higher proportion of very young soldiers among its dead than the vanquished.

 

Phil

[Foresterab]

1 hour ago, phil andrade said:

One of Boff’s books - Winning and Losing on the Western Front - contains an analysis of the proportion of young soldiers in the British and German armies.

 

Hoping that I remember and understand correctly, the data were taken from CWGC for the age of British soldiers, and from BEF records of German prisoners.

 

The surprising - indeed, barely explicable - conclusion is that the British dead contained a higher proportion of soldiers of 21 and younger than the German prisoners.

 

This was in the final battles of the war, when attrition had done its work.  German military war dead outnumbered those of the U.K. by three to one, approximately, and in per capita terms were twice as high.

 

What a grotesque feature of attrition, if it leaves the victorious party  mourning a higher proportion of very young soldiers among its dead than the vanquished.

 

Phil

I might be miss understanding but could the difference in the age of casualties also be a reflection of the different make up of the German vs. British Armed forces?  

 

German forces as I understand it were a mix of 1st line prime age soldiers (i.e. early 20's) and supported by numerous units of reservists mobilized (up to age 45) and these remained the principal unit for the war.    In addition enlistment was set at age 20 (at least initially) which once training was added in would drastically affect the amount of younger soldiers killed.  I believe you could enlist at younger ages with parental consent (vague recollections of stories of men leaving the gymnasium for enlistment) but not sure how widespread this was or if the age was dropped during the later stages of the war. 

 

British forces, regular forces and initial reservists recalled on the other hand had a goal of enlisting men 18-38 (Kitchener battalions) and youth under 18 were often accepted if they would be 18 (wink wink) upon completing training.   This combined with a lower overall casualty rate for the British Empire troops (https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing gives 35% of British Empire troops vs. 65% of Germans) indicates to me at most of the British casualties were A) young men who enlisted, b) the death/age would be skewed heavily by the events of 1916 and the green troops thrown in the mix and c) the % of British casualties is skewed by the huge number of empire troops who were involved with other fronts besides the Western front (i.e. how many men were on garrison duty in India for example?)

 

To flip to a more Canadian perspective...Newfoundland still celebrates Beaumont Hamel day - the day when the "flower of Newfoundland died" due to the huge number of young men killed that day and in turn became a factor in Newfoundland's decision to join Canada.   So statistics on a big picture are different than a local level but that is the grim reality of war. 

 

foresterab

[phil andrade]

1 hour ago, Foresterab said:

I might be miss understanding but could the difference in the age of casualties also be a reflection of the different make up of the German vs. British Armed forces?  

 

German forces as I understand it were a mix of 1st line prime age soldiers (i.e. early 20's) and supported by numerous units of reservists mobilized (up to age 45) and these remained the principal unit for the war.    In addition enlistment was set at age 20 (at least initially) which once training was added in would drastically affect the amount of younger soldiers killed.  I believe you could enlist at younger ages with parental consent (vague recollections of stories of men leaving the gymnasium for enlistment) but not sure how widespread this was or if the age was dropped during the later stages of the war. 

 

British forces, regular forces and initial reservists recalled on the other hand had a goal of enlisting men 18-38 (Kitchener battalions) and youth under 18 were often accepted if they would be 18 (wink wink) upon completing training.   This combined with a lower overall casualty rate for the British Empire troops (https://www.britannica.com/event/World-War-I/Killed-wounded-and-missing gives 35% of British Empire troops vs. 65% of Germans) indicates to me at most of the British casualties were A) young men who enlisted, b) the death/age would be skewed heavily by the events of 1916 and the green troops thrown in the mix and c) the % of British casualties is skewed by the huge number of empire troops who were involved with other fronts besides the Western front (i.e. how many men were on garrison duty in India for example?)

 

To flip to a more Canadian perspective...Newfoundland still celebrates Beaumont Hamel day - the day when the "flower of Newfoundland died" due to the huge number of young men killed that day and in turn became a factor in Newfoundland's decision to join Canada.   So statistics on a big picture are different than a local level but that is the grim reality of war. 

 

foresterab

You make good points here, Foresterab.

 

The Germans lost huge numbers of men, from start to finish.

 

I do wonder if , in the process, they somehow managed to preserve the “ qualitative “ , while yet lavishing the “quantitative “.  Something to do with the professional standards of a very large army ?  If so, the March and April 1918 battles certainly disrupted that routine.

 

The original British contingents were also professional, but they were too limited in number and expended with indecent haste, leaving their following cohorts vulnerable.

 

From the more human point of view, might the prisoner statistics suggest that the older Germans,  likely to be men with children, were more  inclined to throw in the towel than their adolescent comrades?

 

There is also an unpalatable thing to contemplate : the old hands were better able to survive by exploiting the inexperience of their young counterparts ....” stick with me, lad, you’ll be alright “....you can guess the rest.

 

Perhaps I’m reading too much into these anomalous figures, but they do invite reflection.

 

Phil

 

 

[phil andrade]

Thinking of putting my suggestions to the test  : a survey of names on CWGC for 21 March 1918, taking a sample of , say, a couple of hundred , and seeing what the average age was.  There must be something in archives somewhere for those taken prisoner that day, and maybe the average age of a sample could also be identified.  It would be instructive to see if the age profile of the dead differed from that of the POWs. I’m talking a brave effort here, but do you think it would be feasible, or even desirable, to seek out such data ? Quite a lot of heavy lifting to face !

 

Phil

[Robert Dunlop]

The German army remained a coherent and potent fighting force on the Western Front right up until the signing of the Armistice. The Entente casualty rates in the Last 100 Days testify to this. Equally, there is no doubt that the army was in decline. Mention has already been made in this thread of the significant increase in the numbers of German soldiers who surrendered/were captured in the last phase of the war. IMHO, this phenomenon was not due primarily to apathy on the part of the individual soldiers. Men fought on throughout the last months, driven by the desire not to let colleagues down as much as anything. There was a much stronger sense that the Motherland could not be protected; starvation and political instability had eroded to the point where there were major concerns about loved ones and the situation back home, which effects were happening despite the strenuous efforts and military sacrifices on the frontline. Any other sense of higher purpose had been driven out by the indiscriminate killing associated with massed artillery. It became almost impossible to rest out of the line. Anecdotal accounts are full of examples where camaraderie was eroded by losses and stamina eroded by lack of sleep and the seemingly continuous fighting. The latter effects were a major contributor to the mass surrenders. It was no longer possible to keep on fighting under merciless conditions during a major battle. This explains, in large part, why the army as a whole could maintain coherence but parts of it would disintegrate under levels of pressure that would have been tolerated previously.

On the face of it, the events of late 1918 support the idea that a 'learning curve' had finally plateaued. If only the same 'lessons' had been 'learned' in 1915 or 1916 then the war would have been over much sooner. The final human cost of attrition would have been much lower, based on this logic. Huge efforts have gone into 'understanding' how generals failed to appreciate, let alone 'learn', these lessons. But attrition is not about losses in lives or men wounded or captured. It is about the breaking of the collective will of the enemy to wage war on the battlefield. Whether the enemy loses fewer men earlier on or never loses as many men is not the major consideration. There was no short-cut to 'victory' so long as the major protagonists were committed to seeing the war through. Over time, industrial capacity increased dramatically. Logistics improved as well, driven by the need to distribute the ever-increasing outputs of industry. By the Battle of the Somme in 1916, UK industrial production (including French and USA outputs as well) was just able to support a single major campaign. The logistic network in the Somme area was just able to support the campaign. The battle had some effects on German manpower numbers, quality and morale but the effects were relatively small overall.

By 1918, the combined industrial output of the Entente enabled the existing French and British armies, as well as the newly formed American army, to mount a continuous series of attacks along the Western Front. This type of campaign, the brainchild of Marshal Foch, was simply not doable in 1915 or 1916. The Battle of Passchendaele demonstrated the maximum capacity of the German logistic network in late 1917, which hampered Ludendorff's attempts to mount a rolling series of attacks during the 1918 Spring offensives. The events of late 1918 were not sudden, though they were more dramatic. They were the sequelae of all that had gone before as part of the overall process of attrition.

 

Robert

Edited 24 May , 2021 by Robert Dunlop

[PhilB]

Thanks, Robert. So it required a Foch to know when and how to administer the coup de grace. Is there evidence that Foch had grasped the principles of the extended attrition leading up to that point? Or was it serendipitous?

[Robert Dunlop]

I have read Foch's memoirs and French primary sources about what was happening in GQG from the time Pétain came into post. There was no sense of a definite end in 1918 until the Armistice negotiations were well underway. War planning continued for 1919 but there is no doubt that Foch was behind the constant pressure to keep at the German army across the Western Front. 

 

Robert

[Sasho Todorov]

On 21/05/2021 at 09:36, phil andrade said:

One of Boff’s books - Winning and Losing on the Western Front - contains an analysis of the proportion of young soldiers in the British and German armies.

 

Hoping that I remember and understand correctly, the data were taken from CWGC for the age of British soldiers, and from BEF records of German prisoners.

 

The surprising - indeed, barely explicable - conclusion is that the British dead contained a higher proportion of soldiers of 21 and younger than the German prisoners.

 

This was in the final battles of the war, when attrition had done its work.  German military war dead outnumbered those of the U.K. by three to one, approximately, and in per capita terms were twice as high.

 

What a grotesque feature of attrition, if it leaves the victorious party  mourning a higher proportion of very young soldiers among its dead than the vanquished.

 

Phil

 

The BEF indeed recruited significantly younger than the continental armies, in large part thanks to it relying on volunteering earlier on vs. the more formalized conscription at a fixed age system. In one of my twitter threads a while back I compared the age of death statistics for the French and British war dead, using the Memoire des Hommes and CWGC database information. 13% of Commonwealth dead were under the age of 20, while only 3.3% of French dead fell under that threshold.

 

France: (Avg/Median/%<20)

1914: 27/26/1.2%

1915: 28/27/4.6%

1916: 29/28/3.2%

1917: 29/28/4.6%

1918: 28/27/3.6%

 

Commonwealth:

1914: 28/27/8.2%

1915: 26/24/13.0%

1916: 26/24/11.7%

1917: 27/25/9.8%

1918: 26/25/15.6%

 

As a caveat: date of birth information was significantly more consistent within Memoires des Hommes vs. CWGC, as MMDH gave date of birth information for 985,000 men out of ~1.4 million (though I cut a good deal of these off by ending the study on November 11th, 1918), while the CWGC gave about 500,000 age at deaths for ~1.1 million. However, I still think the law of large numbers is sufficiently applicable to say that differences/inconsistences in recording are insufficient alone to produce such a stark gap in the use of very young soldiers.

Edited 24 May , 2021 by Sasho Todorov

[phil andrade]

Robert,

 

 ‘If only the same “lessons “ had been “learned” in 1915 or 1916 then the war would have been over much sooner...’

 

Only if the Germans were static in their assimilation of lessons.  

 

The German “ learning curve” must have thwarted the Allies time and again.

 

Phil

[phil andrade]

11 minutes ago, Sasho Todorov said:

 

The BEF indeed recruited significantly younger than the continental armies, in large part thanks to it relying on volunteering earlier on vs. the more formalized conscription system. In one of my twitter threads a while back I compared the age of death statistics for the French and British war dead, using the Memoire des Hommes and CWGC database information. 15% of Commonwealth dead were under the age of 20, while only 2% of French dead fell under that threshold.

 

France: (Avg/Median/%<20)

1914: 27/26/1.2%

1915: 28/27/4.6%

1916: 29/28/3.2%

1917: 29/28/4.6%

1918: 28/27/3.6%

 

Commonwealth:

1914: 28/27/8.2%

1915: 26/24/13.0%

1916: 26/24/11.7%

1917: 27/25/9.8%

1918: 26/25/15.6%

 Sasho,

 

Damn my eyes !

 

That’s astonishing.

 

That solves the riddle.

 

Thank you.

 

First rate research.   

 

Had I not seen that tabulation , I would never have believed it.

 

Why such a large proportion in 1918, when the BEF was most replete with conscripts ?

 

Phil

 

 

[Sasho Todorov]

4 minutes ago, phil andrade said:

 Sasho,

 

Damn my eyes !

 

That’s astonishing.

 

That solves the riddle.

 

Thank you.

 

First rate research.   

 

Had I not seen that tabulation , I would never have believed it.

 

Why such a large proportion in 1918, when the BEF was most replete with conscripts ?

 

Phil

 

 

Biggest factor is the release of 18 year olds for overseas service in the UK combined with the fact that the UK set the conscription age at 18 instead of 20 or 21 as done on the continent. I don't quite know exactly why, but the UK just chose to recruit significantly younger than others. This had to have had an impact on manpower quality, given that the delayed puberty of older times (thanks to decreased access to nutrition, especially fats, which tend to trigger the body to begin the process) would mean that a significant chunk of men in their late teens would still have a significant amount of physical development to go.