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The Indian Memorial at Neuve Chapelle,
Western Front |
By Corey W. Reigel, PhD, West Liberty University
Deployment
By 1914 the Indian Army consisted of 129 battalions of infantry or pioneers, 39 cavalry regiments, and 12 mountain artillery batteries (155,423 combatants), plus extensive support units. By World War I these were organized into nine divisions and several independent brigades. Each division had three infantry brigades made of one British and three Indian battalions, and one cavalry brigade composed of one British and two Indian regiments. A separate source of soldiers was the Princely States, whose units formed the Imperial Service Brigades. In theory the 29 Princely States were independent, or at least autonomous, and thus could maintain their own units, under British supervision. In 1914 they contributed 14 battalions and 20 cavalry regiments (22,515 men). Also, in an emergency the European population of India formed the Auxiliary Force, 42 battalions, 11 regiments, (33,677 men) mostly with the intention that they would serve in South Asia.
When the Great War began, the Indian Army still was not ready. The quality of training varied greatly from one unit to the next, while the organization of the army into nine divisions was still new and poorly executed. The chain of command was poor since the Indian Office stood in between the Indian Army in the field and the War Office. The infantry had been armed with obsolete rifles, sufficient for India, but were only issued new Lee-Enfield rifles when they shipped out in the expeditions. Some units had no machine guns until they were deployed. The artillery, again adequate for India, was old ten-pounders, whose virtue was disassembly for easy mobility over difficult terrain. There was no heavy artillery or howitzers. Communications were obsolete and there was no mechanical transportation, only animals. In many respects, the Indian Army still was fit only as an Imperial Constabulary.
In the 19th century, the Indian Army was frequently used as the muscle behind imperial ambitions, as an emergency reaction force, providing reliable soldiers for service in difficult environments, with service in Africa, China, and elsewhere; thus World War I was largely a continuation of this policy. Indian soldiers fought in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion in China. In Africa, they campaigned in Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, while small numbers served in East Africa and supplemented the West African Field Force. One contingency had included possible deployment into Central Asia to counter the Russian threat, and when Germany's empire was created, the Indian Army added new plans.
On Multiple Fronts
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| Indian Troops on the Western Front |
Four divisions (3rd Lahore, 7th Meerut, 1st and 2nd Cavalry, none from the Princely States) of Task Force A arrived at Marseilles, France, on 30 September 1914. During the volatile early battles and into 1915 these skilled and experienced soldiers helped stymie German flanking efforts in the famous "Race to the Sea." By October 1914 they were in combat at La Bassée and Ypres, but the cold, wet environment was more troublesome than German gunfire. In addition to frostbite, influenza, and pneumonia, an unexpected problem was mumps and measles, since they had no prior exposure. When British civilians learned of their suffering, vast quantities of clothing were sent and Indian hospitals in England received generous donations due to the popularity of a publicity campaign. Such admiration was earned in battles like Neuve Chapelle in March 1915 when the Indian Corps led the well-planned attack that ultimately failed strategically, after a successful opening attack.
Later, in September 1915, the Battle of Loos began when a large British mine was exploded under the German trenches followed by an artillery barrage and an infantry assault that included the Meerut (7th) Division attack. The assault, again at first was promising but then could not be exploited and failed.
Despite many acts of heroism, logistics compromised their fighting ability. The dietary and religious restrictions were so severe that even in base camps Force A required six different kitchens. Seemingly, even the slightest, unintentional action could contaminate a meal, in which case even severe hunger was preferable to death in an impure state but a full belly. In the front lines, food was even more difficult, since basic army rations of bully beef and biscuits were unacceptable. The prewar officers understood and observed these religious practices, but as they became casualties, their replacements were ignorant or insensitive and the system of race/caste segregated units broke down. The Western Front infantry units were transferred to Egypt in October 1915 and the cavalry units (renamed Force E) followed in March 1918.
Force B (8,000 men) contained both Imperial Service units from the Princely States and the 27th Brigade of the 9th Division, British Indian Army. While the latter again performed admirably, the former units behaved very badly at the 2-3 November 1914 attempted amphibious invasion at the port of Tanga. Similarly, when Force C (4,000 men) was hastily assembled to protect Kenya's border, they too had a few good units, but most of the Imperial Service units tarnished the reputation of all Indian soldiers. The humiliations of 1914 continued as the two task forces were merged and became the heart of the British military in East Africa during 1915. German raiding parties took advantage of Indian incompetence until early 1916, when reinforcements from many colonies in Africa and a general advance altered the situation. In late 1916, most Indian combat units were withdrawn from Africa due to illness and exhaustion. However, support units, virtually the only ones in the theater, remained until after the end of the war.
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| Indian Laborers Building a Rail Line in the Sinai |
Force D began with a modest assignment that became one of the largest and most difficult theaters of the war and one of the worst events in India's military history, Mesopotamia, today's Iraq. The British prewar competition with German interests in the Persian Gulf grew sharper with the discovery of oil, and the relationship with the leaders of Kuwait led to the decision to protect British interests by occupying the oil refinery at Basra. What began with one brigade group arriving on 24 November 1914 was soon reinforced with two infantry divisions (the 6th Poona and the 12th Indian). In April 1915, a general offensive began up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers with the intention of capturing the fabled city of Baghdad. Despite extreme heat and humidity and clouds of aggressive flies, the advance was initially successful. In late November 1915, however, the advance stalled after the Battle of Ctesiphon, and rather than abandon all the captured land, the decision was made to hold the Tigris River town of Kut-el-Amara with an Indian garrison (mostly the 6th Poona Division) which was soon besieged. Kut was one of Britain's worst moments in the war. Despite attempts to break in, or out, the command was surrendered on 29 April 1916 after the soldiers had suffered horrible deprivations. It got much worse. The soldiers were forced on a death march of 500 miles from Samarrah to Aleppo in the worst summer heat. The prisoner-of-war camps were awful in the treatment of these soldiers, British as well as Indian. Of the 14,000 men who surrendered 4,000 died. Yet General Townshend and his officers were kept separate, in comfortable conditions, seemingly unaware of their men's misery.
After the fall of Kut there was a pause as both sides rested and received reinforcements. Major General Maude renewed the offensive in December 1916 with six Indian divisions and one British—166,000 soldiers, two-thirds of them Indian. The force entered Baghdad on 11 March 1917. Later, many Indian units were transferred to Palestine.
Expedition Force F was composed of two recently created divisions (10th and 11th Indian) with some units from the Princely States, intended for France but suddenly redirected to the defense of the Suez Canal and all of Egypt after two Turkish Army attacks across the Sinai. These units later blended into the Sinai-Palestine campaign. Expedition Force E (the cavalry units in France) was redeployed to Palestine in March 1918, where regiments from the Princely States joined them. Other British and Indian divisions were reassigned to Palestine so that by the end of the war the Indians again were a large portion of the British Army forces. This included 30 Gurkhas on camels who assisted T.E. Lawrence of Arabia and Major F. G. Peake of the Egyptian Army.
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Gurkhas in a Trench at Gallipoli
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Force G was by contrast only a small percentage of the British units sent to Gallipoli. The 29th Brigade (one Sikh and three Gurkha battalions) was detached from the 10th Division in Egypt and saw extensive combat, especially around Gully Ravine in the Helles sector. They suffered horrible summer heat and winter blizzards without proper clothing. The Gallipoli Peninsula was completely evacuated by January 1916.
Beyond the expedition forces, one Indian division garrisoned Burma and a brigade was stationed in Aden, continuing colonial security. Other units remained in India for the essential role of colonial security against rebellion, but these forces were sometimes committed to other foreign deployments such as southern Persia in 1915 and Afghanistan. Also, one battalion of the 36th Sikhs (and the 2nd Battalion South Wales Borderers) joined in the Japanese attack on the German treaty port of Tsingtao, China, October–November 1914.
Much like before the war, Indian soldiers were often the majority of British units used in difficult theaters such as East Africa, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. Better the heat of deserts or jungles than the mud and cold of France and Flanders. This meant that the Indian Army was the primary weapon against the Ottoman Empire. Regarding the broad British war effort, the empire's Indian troops constituted a strategic manpower reserve. However, with the necessary continuation of prewar practices, there was an upper limit in the number of suitable recruits that could be provided based on the martial race theory of the British and the religious and racial beliefs of the people of South Asia.
Source: "The British Indian Army in World War I: A Strategic Manpower Reserve," by Corey W. Reigel, West Liberty University; originally presented in the Journal of the World War One Historical Association, 2012, Vol. 3.
Read Part I, The Coming of War, HERE
Read Part III, Aftermath, Pending
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