Churchill Warrior by Brian Lavery

Author:Brian Lavery
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781612005676
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2017-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Churchill continued to find time to play polo regularly, to the annoyance of Wilson: ‘Winston said he would see about it tomorrow but he had to play polo!’53 But that did not mean he had any illusions about the usefulness of cavalry in modern war; he wrote at the end of 1917: ‘The cavalry myth is exploded at last …’.54 In February 1920 he told parliament: ‘If anything had been proved by the war, it was that cavalry was less useful than we had previously thought.’55 He was already proposing that ‘these splendid regiments’ (the cavalry) should be ‘given a fair opportunity on the modern field’. He was pressing that they ‘should be put by regiments into the tanks’.56 He approached the issue differently in May 1920: ‘There are 28 regiments of cavalry of the line, costing approximately £275,000 a year each. My proposal is to reduce these to 12, saving about £4,500,000, and to substitute temporarily an addition of 8,000 bayonets to the infantry of the line costing only about £800,000. It will later be possible to substitute for these bayonets the technical and mechanical units on which we are now experimenting …’.57

As to the most decisive weapon of the war, since 1915 the heavy automatic weapons had been organised in the Machine Gun Corps so that their strength could be co-ordinated on the battlefield. A committee was appointed to consider ‘the Provision of Officers for the After the War Machine Gun Corps’. It recommended three branches, for infantry, cavalry and motors. One officer even managed to blend the old and new armies by suggesting that officers for the cavalry section should ‘go through all the elementary training as a cavalry recruit officer, riding school, square etc.’, but that was never likely to happen.58 In February 1920 Churchill told parliament: ‘It was decided not to maintain a separate machine gun corps, but to put the machine gun units into the different battalions and squadrons, and that implies no diminution in the proportion of machine guns, but a different method of arranging them’ – though the Corps was not abolished until 1923 after Churchill left the War Office.

The After War Committee of 1919 had not found the Territorial Army very useful, claiming that each unit contained ‘men of unequal physical standards and widely differing ages’ with ‘no mechanism for expansion beyond units maintained in peace’. The great expansion during the war had by-passed the territorials, largely due to Kitchener’s prejudices. Nevertheless it was planned to revive the force. Churchill spent a year discussing the subject ‘with a great number of men, who from their experience were common to express an opinion’. He concluded that the old idea of a Territorial Force for home defence only was not practicable and recruits would be made aware that they might be called on to serve abroad or in the empire, but only with the consent of parliament, and they would be sent as units and not as individuals. Fourteen divisions were to be raised in this way.

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