Pioneer Battalions in the Great War by K. W. Mitchinson

Author:K. W. Mitchinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473842724
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books

After the war Wood argued that from their creation Pioneers should have been organized along the same lines as the divisional Engineers and artillery. This would have entailed allocating one company of Pioneers to each of the infantry brigades. The alternative was to have a theoretically centralized battalion but which, in practice, consisted of several virtually independent companies. The CRE of the 37th Division largely echoed these sentiments. In his War Diary he wrote an appreciation of the operations undertaken by the division between March and November 1918. He argued that the Field Companies needed more skilled and semi-skilled men, and that ‘probably’ the best way of securing this would be to amalgamate the R.E. and Pioneer companies into one unit under R.E. officers. This solution would also alleviate, he thought, the contemporary problem of the shortage of Pioneer officers with engineering experience.(34)

After the war another junior officer went a stage further than Wood by completely dismissing the whole idea of Pioneer units. To Dillon of the 14/N.F., the concept was ‘a military nonsense, and only added more semi-combatants to the tail of an already encumbered division’. Furthermore, he believed, ‘it also led to jealousy from the R.E., whose functions were intruded upon, and who were expert in such matters’.(35) How much weight should be put on Dillon’s comments is open to some speculation. Although he later became a lieutenant colonel, his writing reveals a deep hostility towards the way the war was conducted and of the abilities of the High Command in general. He was by training a mining engineer and spent some time attached to tunnelling companies, for whom he had a thorough respect. He later left the Pioneers and transferred to the tanks.

Whatever the benefits or drawbacks of the Pioneers and R.E. maintaining separate identities, it must be stressed that in general the cooperation was close and effective. Whether the reduction to three Pioneer companies per division made this cooperation any better in the latter months of the war is unclear. What is clear is that the reorganization of 1918 merely added to the troubles and trauma of an already seemingly interminable winter of debilitating work. A stolid determination to see the job through was the essential requirement for Pioneers, infantry and artillery alike. They could expect little in the way of comfort and genuine rest, knowing instead that baths, recreation and proper billets were only for the lucky few. In the minds of men in many non-Pioneer units, there was a contemporary belief that Pioneers and their comrades in the R.E. were among this fortunate minority.

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