Army, British

The history of Delphinium is more peaceful, although, due to its poisinous property it was used against mammals. Crushed seeds of Delphinium staphisagria L. was used against body lice [5]. British army used the plant for this aim in Waterloo war as well as in the Great War. Medicinal use of Aconitum and Delphinium spans... 

David French, The military background to the shell crisis of May 1915 , Journal of Strategic Studies, 2 (1979), no. 2, 192-205 Graham R. Winton, The British Army, mechanisation and a new transport system . Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 78 (2000), 197-212. 

Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 109-11. 

The British army had ample experience in the Boer War of how accurate rifle Are could inflict heavy casualties and bring a frontal attack to a halt, and the Russo-Japanese War had confirmed that modem artillery could be expected to be very effective against troops in the open. Even before war ceased to be mobile in 1914, troops would dig impromptu Are pits. What was not anticipated was that the unprecedented size of the armies on the Western Front would make it possible to build and defend continuous series of trenches from the Channel to the Swiss border, or that rifles would be supplemented by machine guns in the ratio of 1 to every 20 infantry by 1918 compared with 1 to every 500 in 1914. 

A. M. Low, Modem Armaments (London Scientific Book Club, 1939), pp. 108—16 Rolf-Dieter Muller, Total war as a result of new weapons The use of chemical agents in World War F, in Roger Chickering and Stig Forster (eds.) Great War Total War Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914—1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.95—111 Albert Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (Lincoln University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 123, 185-7. 

See Anthony Clayton, The British Empire as Superpower, 1919-39 (Basingstoke Macmillan, 1986) Keith Jeffrey, The British Army and the Crisis of Empire 1918-22... 

David French, Raising Churchill s Army The British Army and the War against Germany 1919-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 157. 

The performance of the British army in the Second World War has been criticised on two broad grounds first, its tactical doctrine second, its equipment. According to Elizabeth Kier, defeat by the Germans in 1940 was the result of the British army s defensive doctrine, whereby superior firepower was a pre-condition of manoeuvre, the purpose of tanks was to support the infantry, and the mobile or armoured division... 

Ironically, in view of the charge that British army doctrine was defensive in nature, the deficiencies of its infantry weapons could be linked to the priority given to mobility at the expense of firepower. 

The commitment of a large part of the British army to the Mediterranean and elsewhere meant that of the thirty-five divisions required for the cross-Channel invasion of France, only sixteen would be British, and that subsequent reinforcements would have to come from the United States. The overriding importance of the cross-Channel operation was such that from April to September 1944 the direction of Bomber Command was transferred to the American Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in North-West Europe, General Dwight Eisenhower. The appointment of Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder as deputy supreme commander, with his experience of air co-operation in North Africa, ensured that optimal use was made of Allied air power. 

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