The British Army in Heroes and Leaders mod

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The British Army is coming

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British Army

"Tommy" and "British" it's usually used taken to mean any troops that fought within the overall structure of the British Army, including Commonwealth, Polish, Free French, and liberated forces. However, in Heroes and Leader mod, the "nation" British does not include the forces of Free France, nor the Polish army, nor the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) forces, nor the Canadian Army. All nations not included within the British "nation" are included within the Allied "nation".

Here is offered some explanations of the rules and capabilities that are peculiar to the British and it's questioned some well-worn myths (perhaps the most enjoyable bit) about the "Tommy" of World War II. His strengths and weaknesses will be measured against the rather sweeping statement made by Hitler about "Tommy" after the Dunkirk debacle:

The British soldier has retained the characteristics which he had in World War I. Very brave and tenacious in defence, unskilful in attack, wretchedly commanded. Weapons and equipment are of the highest order, but the overall organisation is bad.

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Tommy Atkins

Certainly Hitler was being rather generous when he praised British equipment and Tommy's uniform in particular did nothing to improve his image when compared to the often elegant German uniforms of the early war period. The choice of Tommy's often ill-fitting new uniform, called "Battledress", was made in 1938 and comprised, as one author described it "...the top half of a golfer and the bottom half of a skier along with the most ridiculous head-dress imaginable...There was no escape and the Army went to France dressed as convicts". The Home Guard uniform, when eventually available made a man either resemble "... an expectant mother or an attenuated scarecrow".

The generic "Tommy Atkins" nickname is often, but wrongly, attributed to the celebrated encounter between the future Duke of Wellington and the dying Private Thomas Atkins in 1794, but the term actually dates back to at least 1743, along with less enduring but more colourful names like "Thomas Lobster" (because of the traditional red coat worn by troops) and "John Tar", which were both in use by 1740, or some 29 years before the future Duke, Arthur Wellesley, was even born!

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British Fiery Tempers

Some Gurkha, ANZAC, Irish, Scottish and French-Canadian troops earned a reputation for their fiery tempers and sometimes exhibited far less self-restraint towards wounded or captured enemy personnel than other British soldiers. That said, like the American GI even the usually more restrained British personnel would murder prisoners or civilians on occasions. A celebrated, and controversial, British Lieutenant Colonel Colin ("Mad Mitch") Mitchell and veteran of Aden and Northern Ireland once observed that the British Empire spanning one third of the world's land surface was not won by being nice to people, and a veteran naval officer observed that Britons are "when roused from lethargy, a barbaric people". In Burma, one British officer, aware that some junior US officers wanted to `frag' their blustering US colonel, deliberately took him into an area infested with Japanese snipers—but without 'success'. Certainly any local civilians caught robbing British dead or wounded during the war were usually given short shrift, but balanced against such ruthlessness a Brigadier General was court-martialled and reduced to the rank of private for inflicting violence on captured German bomber crews.

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The British officers

The British officers brandish nothing more lethal than a cane and would probably frown on a Japanese officer being so ill-mannered and theatrical as to wield a sword. In reality, many officers in Franceand Burma during the early war period had to privately-purchase their own side-arms, if opportunity and time allowed. For example the use of hunting-horns to spur-on or rally their men in Normandy and Arnhem, or the major who led his men into battle at Arnhem wearing a bowler-hat and carrying a battered umbrella for, as he later claimed, identification purposes, or the company commander in Burma who toted a shepherd's crook and thus "stood out like a biblical prophet". Such behaviour was partly fostered by pre-war Indian army drills which demanded that infantry officers lead attacks by waving their walking-sticks in the air as they advanced to encourage their men. In Italy the commando officer Colonel Jack Churchill wielded both a sword and bowler-hat! Small wonder then that German and Japanese snipers were able to identify and pick-off British officers with ease until some at least swallowed their pride and both dressed and behaved to better resemble their subordinates.

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Sporting officers

All armies have their share of idiots, particularly in wartime when standards inevitably fall, but the evidence shows that most British officers were good at their job despite a degree of apparent eccentricity in foreign eyes. Some senior officers may have been mediocre at the start of World War Two, but staff work became at least adequate after a poor start.
On a tactical level, some shortcomings allowed old methods and inadequate officers to linger on. Even in 1944 officers in the UK were taught "how to command a battalion from a coal-cellar", rather than near the front line, although experienced desert veterans knew better. Many pre-war officers were expected, even pressured, to participate in polo matches, fox hunting, pig-sticking or other 'machismo' sports rather than encouraged or instructed to study their profession seriously. Ambition in an officer was seen as an unsavoury trait, and in 1942 some officers in Burma were still expected to ride and hunt with hounds. In army life and language fox-hunting or other 'sporty' terminology abounded and many BEF officers went to France with their horses, dogs, golf-clubs or tennis equipment. One lieutenant colonel even took his shotgun and golf clubs to Arnhem, and a sergeant his football and French officers manning the Maginot Line in 1940 criticised the British tendency to view their time in the line as an adventure or sport.

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The British Expeditionary Force

The British Expeditionary Force sent to France in 1939-1940 was composed largely of infantry reservists (cheaper to deploy than tanks and better at holding ground), whereas that of 1914 contained the cream of Britain's professional soldiers. When these strategies proved illusory and the army had to be rapidly expanded for a new and greater role there were insufficient trained staff officers. The absence of meaningful pre-war exercises compounded matters and during the war there was an understand-able reluctance among commanders to release their brightest subordinates for staff college courses.
As late as 1944 one British commander in Burma had to be removed because he insisted that his troops stand and fight upright "like men" rather than dig in. Even the British High Command suffered from this gentlemanly and Napoleonic mentality and refused until 20 May 1940 (i.e. ten days after the German attack) to permit British Expeditionary Force troops to improve their defences by loop-holing' or "mouse-holing" French buildings by knocking through internal walls to improve access for the occupants, through a misguided respect for private property. Nor, of course, was any training given to, nor tactics developed by, the British Expeditionary Force to fight in urban terrain for the same reason—with unfortunate results for the poorly-trained defenders at Amiens and Abbeville. Similarly, in Burma, the defences at Kohima were seriously compromised by the Naga Hills civil authorities forbidding the use of barbed wire to hinder the Japanese.

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The Regiment

Regimental history, jargon and etiquette in the mess took precedence over teaching new officers how to wage war, and these attitudes were particularly common in the cavalry regiments, some of whose officers, though by no means all, had fought their badly-managed, frantic and belated mechanisation tooth and nail even though mechanisation was inevitable due to the lack of reserve horses in any conflict, and to a lesser extent by the Royal Horse Artillery.
To the cavalry, "the haughty queen" in this "spiritually eighteenth-century army" and this "most mentally inert, unprofessional and reactionary group" within it, a large percent-age of the wartime AFVs were entrusted—despite the initial reluctance of the cavalry to accept them. In North Africa 7th Armoured Division officers preferred playing polo to combat training. Small wonder that there was often a mindless insistence on simple, futile, and suicidal-inappropriate tactics until the Axis obligingly and violently removed them from command. Unfortunately some of them were still there in Normandy.

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Quality of British leaders

Luckily, the artillery and infantry were less infected by this mental malaise, especially officers in the pre-war Indian army (who were probably far more professional overall than their British home forces counterparts), as were those in Egypt. Certainly at the junior level in particular most officers were as good as their allies, if usually not quite up to the best German standards, particularly when they began to be recruited from a wider social group through modified selection procedures. While men like these found it difficult to adjust to life in the armoured formations of World War Two, and were not exactly renowned for their tactical brilliance, they did at least know how to care for, motivate and lead their men properly.
The better quality of British leaders was due as much to social factors as changes in recruitment. Most officers—however tactically-inept some might have been—were taught in no uncertain terms and took to heart the notion that the welfare of their men was "a solemn responsibility", not least because the supply of British and Commonwealth personnel was severely limited. Overall, British officers showed far more concern for the welfare of their men than US officers. German selection procedures were copied, including psychological assessments with great success and officer quality was also enhanced by the recruitment of more worldly-wise individuals who had hitherto followed civilian careers, especially in Africa and the Far East; the latter ensured in part that African, Indian and Burmese formations among others received officers who were experienced at handling personnel, spoke their language and knew their customs and culture.

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Non-commissioned Officers

The Indian and Burmese armies differed from the British in that commissioned officers were not present below the position of second-in-command of a company, and platoons were commanded by "Viceroy Commissioned Officers" promoted from the ranks, who had no direct equivalent in the British army, but who performed admirably once properly trained and experienced. Officer quality in the British army was also enhanced by the many NCO platoon commanders (sergeant-majors) of 1939 who were also commissioned, some rising to command battalions or regiments by 1945, as well as some men who received com-missions-in-the-field for outstanding bravery or initiative. So serious was the shortage of officers that by 1945 some of the newer ones were barely 18 years old, despite the fact that a number of Dominion and Commonwealth officers, especially from Rhodesia and South Africa, had been trans-ferred to British units by 1942.
By 1943 it was unthinkable—at least officially—to have mere NCOs commanding platoons as practised so successfully in the German army. There was also a glut of senior officers due to over-promotion, as in the US army. By contrast, the Germans used their officers much more economically and efficiently, delegating far more responsibility out of sheer necessity and giving their NCOs equivalent responsibilities to Allied junior officers or even higher when occasion demanded.

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The firepower

The firepower of most British squads in Heroes and Leaders mod is low due to an over-reliance on bolt-action rifles and the small size of the British infantry squad, as well as for organisational and historical reasons.

Organisationally, the British squad had only 8 men up to 1943, ten there-after (sometimes 11 in Burma from 1944, personnel permitting), and this compared badly with the 9-man Soviet squad, 10 (later 9) for the German, 12 in the French and US squad, 13 in the USMC squad and 15 or more in the Japanese. This small size, and hence reduced firepower, was mirrored in larger formations too, for the British infantry company was one of the smallest of any World War Two army; at full strength in 1939 it had 129 men if there were 4 platoons, but usually there were just 3 with 100 men between them. By 1944 this had grown to a nominal 125-127 men, whereas foreign equivalents were usually much larger—US infantry divisions had between 193 and 223 men per company, a US armoured division's between 178 and 251, the Germans between 191 and 200 before 1944 and 161 thereafter (but partly offset by a great increase in firepower to offset the manpower reduction). While the Soviet SMG companies boasted only 78-100 men (but had lots of fire-power), their rifle companies contained 143 men, the French 190 men, the Italian between 144 and 156 men and the Japanese between 180 and 262 men.

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Deficiencies in MMGs and HMGs

British rifle battalions were also far more poorly equipped with organic support weapons than their foreign equivalents, with serious deficiencies in MMGs and HMGs. British MMGs were not organic below divisional level until late in the war, being kept in specialist MG Battalions with 36 or 48 MMGs apiece, and they had little direct contact with ordinary infantrymen, which did little to enhance tactical efficiency. MMGs were doled out downwards to smaller formations `on loan' as required and in defence this usually sufficed but in fluid situations or in attacks they were rarely in the right place in meaningful numbers when suddenly needed; by 1944 there were MG Companies detached to infantry brigades, but there were never enough of them.
While the earlier 8-man rifle squad was probably not seriously disadvantaged in combat with larger enemy squads, especially when defending, the deficiencies in organic MGs was quite another matter at company level and above, as was the latter's low firepower. Later on, when the British army assumed an increasingly offensive role it was clear, even against those German squads using the older MG 34, let alone the faster-firing MG 42, that the British squad could not generate enough firepower to suppress these formidable German weapons without significant supportive fire from distant heavier weapons. To say that this caused a feeling of inferiority and a crisis in confidence would be putting it mildly.
Unless it was a squad in an elite "private army" like the Commandos or paratroops, the typical British squad had to make do with just a Thompson or STEN SMG for the leader, and only the BREN LMG to bolster the firepower of the bolt-action rifles.

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Regiments and Battalions

In Heroes and Leaders mod the best British squads still have a range of only 5 hexes, though "home-grown" Britons (at least) were famous for their marksmanship. But range factors in Heroes and Leaders mod represent much more than just shooting skill. Unfortunately there was also another legacy from the colonial wars that militated against tactical efficiency (in Heroes and Leaders mod, range factors)—the regimental system of the British army.
The "Regiment" bred a dislike, suspicion and even hatred on occasions of outsiders, i.e. other regiments or services within the British army. Small wonder that in 1942 a British cavalry officer in North Africa loftily refused the offer of assistance from a field artillery unit with the words "We only accept help from the Royal Horse Artillery". In 1944 a British tank officer faced with a difficult mission likely to bring heavy losses exclaimed "couldn't you send a less well-known regiment?". Not so the Germans or Americans, their loyalty was to the division, with all the benefits that accrued from this lack of organisational arrogance at the lower tactical level.
Although wartime necessities eroded regimentalism somewhat and provided a greater mix of personnel within battalions, its members still thought in terms of "regiment" rather than "division", and as a result different types of unit often fought their own bizarre and hopeless little private wars against a fully integrated foe.

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Personal Initiative

"Tommy", like his Soviet ally, was usually hard to dislodge when defending in strong positions but (as the Germans observed, did their best to bring about and then quickly exploited) their combat performance deteriorated when officers became casualties. "Tommy" expected his officers to lead and in the attack often went to ground if rendered leaderless, commandos, paratroopers and other elite types excepted. In contrast, the Germans since the inter-war years had trained all men to be able to do the job of someone up to two ranks above their own to minimise the effect of casualties, while officer cadets were trained to take command of an infantry battalion if necessary. Thus German troops were expected, let alone encouraged, to show high levels of personal initiative, and US troops often tended to do likewise because of poor leadership by many "90-day wonders", whereas the British army's training methods were enshrined in overdetailed orders and tended to emphasise obedience at any cost and the consolidation of newly-won objectives.
Most British line troops never developed effective counter-measures in 1939-1945 (except per-haps in siege-type situations against the Japanese) and were far less willing to use such tactics than German, Japanese or Soviet troops despite such measures being advocated before the war in Captain Liddell-Hart's book The Future of Infantry. The closest that `Tommy' got to infiltration tactics were the nightly raids and patrols, which invariably involved returning to his own lines before daylight rather than remaining behind the enemy's to cause trouble. Perhaps the only tactics at which the British excelled were in carefully planned and executed night attacks.

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Infantry tactics

Until 1938 imperial policing by means of a comparatively small, and cheap, army of volunteers was regarded as the British army's first priority. Fighting wars was regarded more as an obscene art-form and an unwelcome but brief interruption to the many delights of peacetime soldiering, rather than as a science. Infantry tactics, in the absence of an official tactical doctrine and with the British army burdened with a poor mechanism for analysing and then distributing the lessons gained in combat, were therefore usually over-cautious, unimaginative, inflexible, relatively predictable, slow in their implementation and sometimes very parsimonious with the human resources provided for a military task.
A US officer in the ETO observed that the British would send in a company of infantry to take objectives against which an American commander would have sent a battalion. All this paradoxically made British methods, like the tightly controlled but larger and more aggressive Soviet operations, sluggish in execution and expensive in lives and the exploitation of battle-field opportunities was generally poor compared to German or to a lesser extent US performance. For their part, the British saw the US troops as "slap-happy in their approach. They had a heavy reliance on superior armour and used ten times as much material as they needed to accomplish their targets".

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Training

Pre-war, and even war-time, training was no real preparation for fighting a first-rate mechanised army. One author observed that "Although capable of marching 20 to 30 miles a day and sticking bayonets into sacks filled with straw, the British infantry in truth was not prepared for modern war". Time that could have been spent more profitably on tactical or weapons training was wasted in the preparation of static defences or guarding 'vulnerable points' in Britain or France throughout 1939 and 1940, or in the Far East in 1941. No British (or US) units received any preparation for fighting in the Normandy bocage prior to D-Day, or in the jungle, even though many British units in India and mainland Britain had been "trained" almost stale for years on end.
In a similar vein, whereas the Germans con-ducted training exercises with live ammunition and strove to make the whole business brutally realistic regardless of casualties among the recruits, the western Allies (army commando training excepted) were slow to do likewise due to the constraints imposed by public outcries when accidents occurred—one of the drawbacks of democracy. Although British training methods did become more brutal they lacked one vital ingredient that the Germans routinely included; they (unlike Anglo-US armies) gave each new formation, however raw, a nucleus of battle-hardened officers and NCOs to ensure that training was not only realistic but also up-to-date and they also rotated not just officers and NCOs but also battalions and companies between the battle fields and training commands.

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Battle schools

Because British training was very decentralised and much was left to the whim of unit commanders, the quality of training varied much more than the standardised training in German or US formations; a comparison between the "green" teenagers of Germany's 12th SS Panzer Division in Normandy and similarly 'green', or even veteran, Allied units demonstrated the superiority of German training methods in boosting combat performance. A better example might be the ill-fated Operation Market-Garden, in which improvised German Kampfgruppen of 16-17 year olds and old men (of whom on average only 10% had seen any active service) fought British and US elite troops to a standstill and inflicted two enemy casualties for each one suffered.
The British army had regarded training as "Cinderella" even before the Great War, as well as during it and comparisons with contemporary German methods are sobering. US General James Gavin remarked that the British "took the war far less seriously than we". A good example of this was the large number of head wounds sustained by commandos in Burma through a stubborn refusal to wear steel helmets in place of berets—until ordered to do so. Britain's first "battle schools" typified this with obstacle courses, mock explosions and simulated "tough" conditions like "running up-hill to bayonet straw sacks", thus over-emphasising the physical rather than mental demands of combat.
Moreover, by emphasising fire and movement, the infantry had to work purely with their own firepower and so the drills (ironically) undermined inter-arms co-operation based on artillery or other fire support, as well as increasing small arms ammunition expenditure. Significantly, Rommel observed that the British were better trained for static warfare than for mobile battles; with good reason, for he had his proverbial fingers very badly burned during his initial and forlorn attempts to capture Tobruk thanks to an inspired British, Australian and Polish defence.

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Poor organisation

British officers complained that it was difficult to get their men to do more than the minimum required, whereas the Germans who saw all tactical situations as essentially unique, trained men to continually do more than should have been reasonably asked of them. A typical British attack after the slaughter in Normandy "...had become a short rush for-ward, dig in and await the inevitable German counter-attack. These were soldiers who would grind the enemy down, or hold a defensive perimeter to the death, but they had acquired neither the battlefield habits nor the confidence in their leaders necessary for a blitzkrieg [sic] -style operation such as Market-Garden". Complaints in Normandy and Burma cited excessive bunching-together by troops and an over-reliance on supporting fire rather than their own weapons (because of the British infantry squad's low organic firepower.
Poor organisation sometimes meant that mostly raw troops with little or no training faced a much more proficient enemy, especially in Norway in 1940, France 1940, the Far East and then North Africa. Where training was given it was sometimes wholly inappropriate as for example when Commonwealth, especially Indian, units were equipped and trained for mountain warfare or mobile desert warfare but were then thrown against the Japanese in the jungle.
A shortage of experienced leaders aggravated this situation, particularly in Indian army units due to the rapid wartime expansion of British and Commonwealth forces which ruthlessly 'milked' existing units of too many experienced officers and men.

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British empire units

In some British empire units a dearth of local officers and (especially) NCOs necessitated the use of British and Polish officers and partly explains why in Heroes and Leaders mod some African, Indian and other native colonial squads only have a "4" range factor in PTO, despite these being volunteer units. As such the Indian army became the largest volunteer army in history some 2.5 million strong, and without the Indian Jawan the final victory in Burma against Japan would have been impossible. The poor "4" range factor of some African units can be ascribed to a general lack of empathy by some of their (white) officers and NCOs for their religion and customs, and a demonstrable lack of faith in their men's abilities, stemming in part from the total unpreparedness for modern mobile warfare and the widespread fatalism shown by these troops.
The stalwart Gurkhas are a mix of elite and first-line squads, although even green Gurkha troops usually fought well. Such troops fought on daring commando-style raids proved to be ferocious in close combat. When deployed as raiding forces, they went into close combat bareheaded and barefooted with machete, rifle and bayonet-they deserve "stealth" advantages.
The routine use of languages such as Welsh, Hausa (used by African troops) Urdu, Hindustani or Gurkhali or even English laced with Arabic in British radio communications robbed the Germans and Japanese in particular of very valuable intelligence previously gleaned from poor British radio security.

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Local Defence Volunteer

The British LDV (Local Defence Volunteer, and wryly re-named "Look, Duck and Vanish"), was renamed Home Guard from 23rd July 1940 . Personnel nominally ranged from between 17 and 65 years old (sometimes more). Only after November 1940 when the immediate threat of German invasion was over did the Home Guard evolve into a more potent force with the introduction of uniforms, better training, a military command structure and more effective weapons than the initial pitch-forks, clubs and museum-piece firearms that most personnel had toted. Of these re-equipped units, only certain coastal AA units ever fired their weapons in anger at the enemy. Significantly, when its younger members were absorbed by the regular army when they attained military age, they were retrained from scratch regardless of their previous Home Guard experience. As a military force it was best described as "...a gigantic bluff", particularly in 1940 when Britain faced the greatest perceived danger from invasion. These units are not represented in Heroes and Leaders mod.