British Expeditionary Forces

Could the tanks of 1918 have been war winners for the British Expeditionary Force , Journal of Contemporary History, 27 (1992), 389-406. 

British Expeditionary Force (BEF) assumed it must land in France within days of war being declared for it to be effective. These plans show the extent to which strategists committed themselves to the view that standing on the defensive would lead to destruction. These strategic calculations, however, proved to be ill-founded and the end of 1914 locked the armies on the Western Front in a deadly, static form of trench warfare and about to experience the nightmare intensification of the industrialised battlefield. 

A cmia/i conveyed the first units of the British Expeditionary Force to Europe in 1914. 

Following the withdrawal of the British Expeditionary Force from France in the spring of 1940, and from the ill-fated incursion into Norway in June, large quantities of ammunition were shipped back to England. The bulk of this stock, which in the first instance found its way to No. 12 District at Monkton Farleigh, had been hastily despatched and was found upon receipt to be in a very mixed state, badly packed and in poor condition. Included among the returns were several tons of gas shells of French and British manufacture. As this ragbag assortment of bullets and shell was sorted and cleaned, the ammunition inspectors found that many of the boxes had been stuffed with letters to relatives and loved ones by soldiers of the BEF who feared they would never return home. 

The more modest Bertram Lambert and E. G. J. Hartley worked on respirators, sometimes collaboratively. The former devised in 1915 a new type of anti-gas respirator which in modified form became by 1916 the British service gas mask. He ended the war as a captain, doing chemical research with the British Expeditionary Force. He received not just an OBE but also a huge reward of 12,500 from the War Inventions Board. It seems that E. G. J. Hartley served in France as a chemical adviser to the First Army and from 1917 was posted to Gas Services (Home) Research in London where he worked on respirators. ... 

By 1915, the trench line between the French and British forces and the Germans was established from the English Channel to the Swiss border, and a stalemate set in. At the junction of the British Expeditionary Force and a French territorial division near the old Belgian city of Ypres, an event occurred on 22 April 1915 that marked a new kind of warfare (Figure 3-3) ... 

Within a few days after the Ypres attack, on the appeal of Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, British women had equipped the entire British Expeditionary Forces with gauze pads which could be used as a crude mask to protect against toxics. The French provided similar pads, and, like both the British and Germans, furnished chemicals to wet the pads in order to increase their filtering potential. The development of an offensive capability in gas warfare naturally took longer. The British designated elements of the War Office to initiate... 

AYRTON FAN. Initiation of chemical warfare in April 1915 brought with it many suggestions for means of combating its effects. British physicist Hertha Marks Ayrton (1854-1923) made one such suggestion, which came to be dubbed the Ayrton fan. It was a handheld, broom-like device made of wood and canvas. Soldiers were issued these fans with instructions to use them to sweep away the poisonous gases that would otherwise drift into their trenches. The Ayrton fans proved a failure, as winds would force the vapors back into the trenches, and using them to sweep proved nearly impossible to do while under attack. Ayrton s prominence in British science, however, forced the govermnent to adopt them, and at least 25,000 were produced and issued, primarily to British Expeditionary Force personnel. Ayrton was the first woman to read a paper before the British... 

Indeed, on October 13, 1839, Palmerston sent a secret dispatch to Elliot in Canton informing him that an expeditionary force proceeding from India could be expected to reach Canton by March, 1840. In a follow-up secret dispatch dated November 23, Palmerston provided detailed instructions on how Elliot was to proceed with negotiations with the Chinese — once they had been defeated by the British fleet. 

In October 1860 the joint British-French expeditionary force laid siege to Peking. The city fell within a day with almost no resistance. Despite French protests, British commander Lord... 

When General John J. Pershing faced the task of organizing the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France in the summer of 1917, he decided to place responsibility for all phases of gas warfare in a single military service, and he recommended that the War Department at home do likewise. On 3 September 1917, the AEF established a centralized Gas Service under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Amos A. Fries. 25,26 The new organization had many hurdles to overcome. The troops had virtually no chemical warfare equipment of U.S. design and relied on the British and French to supply equipment from gas masks to munitions. 

Fig. 3-21. In 1918, the British prepared for the American Expeditionary Force a series of color drawings and descriptions of injuries caused by chemical warfare agents. This drawing depicts a severely burned eye in the acute stage after exposure to mustard vapor. A portion of the original description follows ...

Fig. 3-22. An extensive mustard burn of the buttocks. This degree of mustard injury, analogous to a second- or third-degree thermal burn, was unusual. The original description that accompanied this drawing, provided to the American Expeditionary Force by the British (also see Figure 3-21), follows ...

Gas was first used extensively in early 1915 by the Germans against both the French and the British. In the accounts of that war, over and over poor discipline is recorded as a significant source of gas casualties.2 The American Expeditionary Forces used primarily the British small-box respirator, with the French M2 mask as a reserve. Both masks were very uncomfortable, and soldiers took them off at the first opportunity, often while gas still lingered in the area. Many casualties were sustained.3 "In the recent gas attack practically all casualties had been caused by ignorance of the officers concerning the persistency of mustard, premature removal of masks, and failure to evacuate the camp promptly. 4(pll)... 

The Allies plans for the spring of 1919 envisaged the use of gas, especially mustard, on an enormous scale. Moreover, the aerial delivery of chemical munitions was becoming more likely. The British had been concerned as early as 1917 about the probability of the enemy resorting in future wars to the use of gas shells .In the spring of 1918 Colonel Amos Fries had proposed that the Allies use aircraft to deliver gas. This was rejected by General Pershing, but the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) was not unprepared to retaliate to aerial gas attacks. ... 

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