Looking for WWI-era soldier experiences/thoughts on the SMLE rifles

[Peter Laidler]

I think a blank would kill a rat on the end of a bayonet............ Certainly deafen and blind it!

[browningautorifle]

a blank

Blanks act like a little shotgun actually, but yes, you need to be very close. They're very effective...we used them on snakes. (7.62)

[can14&]

Read Haig's Command A Reassessment by Denise Winter. It is a wonder he could sleep nights after
all the Commonwealth troops his mismanaged plans killed plus his own. This book makes you wonder
why the Commonwealth bothered to go back to war in Europe twenty years later for more of the same,
Canada at Dieppe comes to mind. Read that book. Newfoundland lost most of its troops in two weeks
in WW1

[Surpmil]

A couple of spare pre-war H barrels there I see!

For some good quotes, try the online newspaper archives. You will find comments scattered through memoirs, but not easily. McBride and other rifle enthusiasts who served, and published, were some of the best sources.

[Richard Hare]

Read Haig's Command A Reassessment by Denise Winter. It is a wonder he could sleep nights after
all the Commonwealth troops his mismanaged plans killed plus his own. This book makes you wonder
why the Commonwealth bothered to go back to war in Europe twenty years later for more of the same,
Canada at Dieppe comes to mind. Read that book. Newfoundland lost most of its troops in two weeks
in WW1

The trouble was, WW11 had nothing to do with "going back for more".

The Second World War was fought because it Had to be fought And won, to destroy the Reich and its associates.
Can I ask what sort of a world you would think it would be, had the Third Reich been victorious? Thank God it was not. And, Thank God some lessons were learned from WW1 !
Quite agree, higher command didn't get it all right in WW1, but I always have trouble with armchair theorists re-visiting such topics when hindsight is 20-20.


One has to also remember that Haig was deeply troubled by the losses, and founded the Haig Foundation.
No, this doesn't make it right, but I think Haig gets more blame than he should, as it takes 2 sides for a war, and the other side fared no better.

Best,
Richard.
And yes, we lost four in WW1, and only one in Round two...

[Surpmil]

I'm guessing Can14 was thinking along the same lines as the later Lt. Gen. Alderson who said on hearing of the Armistice: "the stupid b----ds; we've got them [the Germans] on the run! Now we'll have to do it all over again in twenty years!"

Or that French general who said, "this is not a peace, it is an armistice for twenty years."

Haig was a man of vast personal ambition. While Smith-Dorrien's Corps fought, Haig's marched away and he then went to work behind Smith-Dorrien's back undermining him with letters to French and his London connections. Soon to be followed by letters undermining French for whose job Smith-Dorrien was his competitor, at least in Haig's mind. Smith-Dorrien had the moral courage to recommend withdrawal from the ludicrously enfiladed Ypres Salient, while duffers like French and Haig clung to it like winkles at the cost of how many tens of thousands of dead. Haig then went about saying S-D's recommendation was bad for morale etc. etc. Oddly for a man who was close pals with gays like Lord Esher and manifested not much more interest in the fair sex than K of K, (and that was none) Haig also took care to marry one of Queen Mary's Lady's in Waiting, the better to get an in at the Palace no doubt. A perfunctory 'courtship' of the old maid variety it seems. He then made assiduous use of his connection by frequent letters to the King's Private Secretary polishing apples or knifing others as the situation required.

And when it was all over Haig had the cheek to ask for a quarter million pound gratuity! Poor chap had to settle for just a 100,000 which he used to buy the Haig ancestral home, to which he had but a remote connection IIRC. He then went to work rewriting his diaries with the result that they show him to be a spiteful little man, continually jeering at the French who saved his bacon in March 1918. By 1917/18 he had become a little wooden idol, replacing Kitchener in the role, and thus untouchable politically. It's a pity Lloyd George didn't chuck him out on his ear after the debacle of the Kaiserschlact, but who would he have replaced him with? Haig had taken care to get talented potential rivals like Allenby well out of the way, and Currie would have been too much of a blow to pride.

As for his purported concern for soldiers, how much of his hundred thousand did he dole out? If he had possessed any such concern he would have demonstrated it during the war, as Currie did, rather than squandering their lives in futile attacks that ignored elementary common sense, the clearly demonstrated power of technologies and what any fool who visited the front lines could have learned. These debacles were repeated again and again out of desperation to gain some small success that might stave off the impression of failure and its "professional" consequences.

Donkeys is much too polite a term for such swine.