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Kitchener's Army
Kitchener's Army was an innovative method to rapidly expand the British army in the first days of the Great War. When completed it would provide 30 divisions to the 60 division British Expenditionary Force and would prove to be an essential element in keeping the German army from defeating the allies in the first three years of the war.
The original planning for wartime expansion in the British army had two phases. The first was an immediate expansion of existing divisions by the addition of reservists. These soldiers, recently trained in regular service and familiar with their regiments, took little effort to integrate into their parent battalions.
The second component of army expansion was the Territorial Army (TA), the brain child of Richard Haldane. Formed in 1908, it assembled the nearly 150 administrative and operational volunteer force battalions that were geographically formed and placed them under lord lieutenants, or commands of noble rank from the regions the battalions were drawn from. The territorial army though was a political creation and not a military one. Officers of the TA were chosen for their social rank and not their military training - meaning that battalions could become ineffective for years under the lead of incompetent officers without any effective way of correcting the situation. A further difficulty was that the TA had two classes of volunteers, general volunteers and local volunteers, with the later category prevented from service outside of Great Britian. Thus even a qualified unit with good training would see itself ripped apart if deployed overseas.
Kitchener, a war hero with great public standing and little regard for the political convulsions that had seen the Army divided into two circles during the Boer War (and whose division resulted in French and later Haig, two officers of only medicore ability, take command of the main striking force of the Empire) decided that the whole Territorial Army was a wasted effort. Instead, he wanted a "new" army to be formed along a best practices model, with all soldiers in the army volunteers who agreed to overseas service. This would possibly short circuit the crony system of appointment that was becoming common under General French, and would at the same time bring entire division sized organization into battle trained from the outset to work together.
Kitchener was so popular in fact that the plan succeded far beyond the capability of British to quickly arm the new soldiers. Kitchener's Army was formed into groups, called K1 to K6, each of which held a pool of 6 divisions (the 4th would be disbanded to provide soldiers to the broken 1st to 6th divisions in late 1914, so the K4 and K5 drafts had the same divisions assigned). This organization provided the 9th to the 26th divisions, and the 30th to the 41st divisions usually officered by soldiers promoted from the trenches in France.
The flaws in Kitchener's army were the flaws of the entire British Army. They lacked equipment in the first twelve months of the war, with formed units showing up in France with cannon that lacked sighting equipment, batteries with no artillery shells in store, soldiers carrying older rifles and wearing ad hoc uniforms, often purchases for themselves in tailor shops, and without telegraphy equipment. Many solkdiers fired their first shots when they arrived at the front, and the doctrine of bayonet advance was impressed on these new divisions even as it was being abandoned by the French and Germans.
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