Photograph from Shropshire.

[Bruce_in_Oz]

The Viet Minh / NVA / VC were pretty creative with bicycles , too. A couple of small, fit blokes pushing a well-built bicycle loaded with a couple of sacks of rice or a few slabs of small arms ammo can cover a LOT of ground discretely in a fairly short time. A bamboo pole was rigged like a reverse tiller off the handlebars. One person pushing from beside the bike and the "helmsnman" pushing and steering with the pole.

Not surprisingly, the bicycles made in the Hanoi factory were somewhat "overbuilt" compared to the French pattern civilian jobs from which they were copied. Not many left now.

Then, there are the wonderful contraptions used in southern Africa during the Boer War and later. These were basically two tandem bikes with a spacer frame between them and "biolt-on" wheel flanges. Thus a couple of these monsters could rapidly carry a combat-ready patrol quite quickly along the railway tracks. I saw some period photos a while back: Time to re-post them hereabouts?

[Daan Kemp]

Said railway bicycle was on view at the Schanskop Fort in Pretoria. Not sure if it is still there. Doubt if there more than a few as railway lines weren't all that widespread.

[Alan de Enfield]

Then, there are the wonderful contraptions used in southern Africa during the Boer War and later. These were basically two tandem bikes with a spacer frame between them and "biolt-on" wheel flanges. Thus a couple of these monsters could rapidly carry a combat-ready patrol quite quickly along the railway tracks. I saw some period photos a while back: Time to re-post them hereabouts?

All sorts of variations and adaptions in WW1 :

Twin Maxim Tricylcle

[RobD]

Here's South Africa's most famous scout, Danie Theron, with his bicycle. He led Theron se Verkenningskorps (Theron's Reconnaissance Corps), and twice crept through the British encircling lines at Paardeberg, though not on a bicycle. Charlize Theron is his great great niece.

.

[smerdon42]

What a great topic and lots of different stories , i have a great great uncle who served with the Australian 55th in ww1 he wa wounded in the 2nd battle of the Somme shot through the leg, he recovered after several bouts of VD from French houses of ill repute , to go back and be blown up and buried for several hours in the 3rd battle of the Somme on 1917 . He was later found and taken off th e line due to shell shock / PTSD. He returned to australia and was working on my great grandfathers property near Wagga NSW , he was doing better but had a fall off a bike and hit his head and ended up passing away from his head injury in early april 1918. One of our relatives is john hurst edmonson VC Tobruk ww2.

[Daan Kemp]

Danie Theron was in charge of the "Wiegelrijderskorps" early in the war. Meaning his corps of scouts were on bicycles. This faded as the war dragged on, bicycles couldn't be replaced and horses were more readily available.

[Gil Boyd]

Charlize, stunning lady and great actress, don't think if she had been riding the bike back then, she would have been allowed through British lines so easily

[RobD]

Gil, I just had a word with Charlize [en in Afrikaans, nogal] and she tells me she fancies you, too.

[Surpmil]

Agreed, & of course, many Britons also felt bitter about British leadership failure at Singapore.

The chickens of Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele and the rest came home to roost in WWII. A nation's biological resources are a fixed quantity, and when they are squandered past a certain point the damage often is irreparable.

It has been said that nations last as long as their top soils; they also last as long as their birthrates. Kitchener typified the idiocy of the time when he blithely remarked that he could easily replace the 7000+ men and 700-odd(?) officers lost for nothing at first Loos.

Had he and his ilk the wits he might have remembered that each one of those men was a thread that stretched over countless generations, a thread that out of hundreds of others had survived unbroken to that day, and once cut off there is no knitting it back together. Shells and guns can be made to order, men cannot.

The Spartans IIRC did not allow a man into battle until he had at least two sons alive, albeit children. For all the classics read at public schools, this lesson was apparently forgotten.

F.M. Dill remarked in 1940 or 41 that most of the senior officers he had at his disposal were simply unfit for their positions, but he had no one else! Whether he included himself in that we are not told. Hence the Can-Loan officers and other such programs, though of course those were only junior officers.

The moral(e) decline in Britain post-WWI can be laid largely at the door of the simple demographic decline - as it can be in the Commonwealth at large. WWII was another nail in the coffin. Not for nothing did the then Japanese PM gloat in 1914: "This is the end of Europe". When a nation or a sports team or a company loses too many of its best people the result is inevitable, unless extraordinary measures are taken.

As for the Japanese, they chose their moment to pull the lion's tail while he was busy elsewhere. One has to look at these things through the lens of the times, not retrospectively. The Japanese invaded China in 1937 and never did conquer the entire country. It was well withing living memory when a puny expeditionary force had taken Peking during the "Boxer Rebelliion", but the Japanese could not??

The Soviets gave them a bloody nose at Nomonhan in 1939 and the world took note of that, and from a Red Army which was in the throes of being purged by Stalin's NKVD. The next year what seemed to be the same Red Army was humbled by the Finns. Naturally Japan's military reputation suffered severely as a result: lower than the Soviets who are lower than the Finns, who "are certainly no better than us British/French etc."

So the duffers tended to be sent to the Far East where climate, comfort and imperial power served to induce even more complacency. Percival seems to have had some sort of mental-medical problem as he served quite effectively in Ireland in 1920-21, but had become a complete "wet" by 1942. Why naval officers should be automatically court-martialled for the loss of their ships, but army officers let off scot-free for their failures, I've never understood!

What was needed as Churchill later said of the North African campaign, was "a field court martial and a firing squad". Had he sent Ironside out there things might have been very different.