The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India, 1902-1945

by Douglas E. Delaney

How did British authorities manage to secure the commitment of large dominion and Indian armies that could plan, fight, shoot, communicate, and sustain themselves, in concert with the British Army and with each other, during the era of the two world wars? What did the British want from the dominion and Indian armies and how did they go about trying to get it? Douglas E Delaney seeks to answer these questions to understand whether the imperial army project was successful.

Answering these questions requires a long-term perspective - one that begins with efforts to fix the armies of the British Empire in the aftermath of their desultory performance in South Africa (1899-1903) and follows through to the high point of imperial military cooperation during the Second World War. Based on multi-archival research conducted in six different countries, on four continents, Delaney argues that the military compatibility of the British Empire armies was the product of a deliberate and enduring imperial army project, one that aimed at standardizing and piecing together the armies of the empire, while, at the same time, accommodating the burgeoning autonomy of the dominions and even India. At its core, this book is really about how a military coalition worked.

374 pages, Hardcover

Published March 4, 2018

Reviews

[Ross Mallett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the British Army began considering the possibility of tapping into the manpower of the self-governing Dominions. The South African War had demonstrated that the British Army was nowhere near large enough to fight a major war against a European power like Germany or Russia. Although the British government was wary about a continental commitment, the country was on trajectory towards one. Even today many British people think that the armies of the Dominions were part of the British Army, but this was never the case. What was the case was that they did not have the resources to develop their own weapons, so adopting those of the British Army seemed a reasonable course of action. Tactics and organisational structure, at least at the lowest levels, generally followed suit, although there were always local variations (which this book does not cover well).

Things went further than that though; the British Army offered places to the Dominion armies at the British staff colleges at Camberley in England and Quetta in India, and at the British Army's other schools. There were also secondment and exchange programs. The Dominions, at least in the early years of the 20th century, lacked the economies of scale to run their own training establishments. Offering places cost the British Army very little, and in return they got a commonality of doctrine and procedures as well as organisation and equipment. This created a high degree of interoperability. It also meant that British and Dominion officers were familiar with each other on a personal basis, which offered intangible but substantial benefits. The benefits were seen in the Great War, when the Dominion armies contributed a fifth of the British forces on the Western Front. This was repeated in World War II, when Australian and New Zealand forces fought alongside the British in the Western Desert campaign, and the Canadian Army in Italy and North West Europe.

The strength of this book is in the way that it places the narratives of the different Dominions side by side, where the common themes are exposed. This is very well done. Its weakness is that in its broad scope it does not go into a great detail after the first couple of chapters. It also stops at the end of the the Second World War; coverage of Korea and the subsequent military relationships between the former Dominions would have been a good addition to the work.

[Benjamin Tanton · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly fascinating academic account weaving together the story of the armies of the empire from the end of the boer war to the end of the Second World War.