The Long Service: A History of the British Army
Ask a British soldier how old their army is and you will usually get a slightly complicated answer, because the honest one depends on where you draw the line: at the Parliamentary force that won the Civil War, or the rather more royal one that replaced it a generation later. Either way, the British Army's story runs to more than three and a half centuries of continuous service, fought across Europe, North America, India, Africa and the Middle East, through periods of genuine tactical brilliance and periods it would rather not discuss at regimental dinners.
This is a factual account of how that force came to be, and of the battles, reforms and turning points that shaped it.
From Civil War to Standing Army (1645 to 1685)
The British Army's institutional ancestor was not, strictly speaking, British at all: it was English, and it was born out of a war Englishmen fought against each other. On 17 February 1645, Parliament authorised the creation of the New Model Army, a force of some 22,000 men, comprising 6,600 cavalry organised into eleven regiments, 14,400 infantry in twelve regiments, and 1,000 dragoons under Colonel John Okey.
Commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Oliver Cromwell rising through its cavalry, it was something genuinely new: a national force, centrally administered and regularly paid (eight pence a day for a foot soldier, two shillings for a trooper), whose officers were barred from sitting in Parliament so that the army answered to command rather than faction.
It proved devastatingly effective. At Naseby in June 1645 it shattered the King's field army; at Langport the following month it mopped up what remained of Royalist resistance; and in 1648 and 1650 it saw off a Scottish invasion at Preston and crushed the Covenanters at Dunbar. It was, in short, very good at its job: good enough that when the monarchy was restored in 1660, the new King rather sensibly decided not to disband the whole idea, even as he disbanded the men.
The New Model Army itself was stood down in 1661 under the Convention Act, its regiments paid off amid understandable anxiety about a large body of battle-hardened republicans loitering with weapons. But Charles II, mindful of both security and the optics of a Restoration that could be undone as easily as it was arranged, issued a royal warrant on 26 January 1661 creating a new standing force: initially around 5,000 men styled the King's Guards and Garrisons.
This is usually taken as the founding moment of the English, and later British, Army, and it made Charles II the first British monarch to keep a standing army in peacetime, a fact that would have scandalised his father's generation.
Some of the new units were simply re-badged old ones. General George Monck, whose defection had done more than anything to bring about the Restoration, saw his own Parliamentarian regiment absorbed into royal service: it survives today, remarkably, as the Coldstream Guards, which makes the small point that the Army's most ceremonially royalist regiment began life fighting for the other side.
By the time Charles II died in 1685, England alone fielded three troops of Life Guards, a regiment of Horse, a regiment of Dragoons, two regiments of Foot Guards and five regiments of Foot: a modest beginning for what would become one of the largest fighting forces on earth.
Marlborough's Continent: The War of the Spanish Succession (1701 to 1714)
For its first few decades the new Army was a minor European player. That changed dramatically under John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, whose campaigns during the War of the Spanish Succession the National Army Museum credits with stopping France from dominating Europe outright, bringing about, in its words, "the first popular recognition of the British Army's fighting powers." Marlborough's career, spanning the reigns of five monarchs, combined genuine tactical brilliance with a gift for alliance management that several later British commanders would have done well to study.
His masterpiece came on 13 August 1704. Marching some 40,000 men from what is now Belgium to Blenheim in Bavaria, undetected by the French (no small feat in an age of slow communications), Marlborough and his Austrian counterpart Prince Eugene of Savoy fell on a Franco-Bavarian army and destroyed it, ending any illusion of French invincibility and lifting the threat to Vienna.
Queen Anne was sufficiently delighted to grant Marlborough the manor of Woodstock and fund the construction of Blenheim Palace, which remains the only non-royal, non-episcopal country house in England to carry the title "palace": a fairly extravagant thank-you note, even by eighteenth-century standards.
Blenheim was followed by further victories at Ramillies, Oudenarde and the grim, costly stalemate at Malplaquet, and by the war's end in 1713 Britain had established itself as a European military power to be reckoned with, rather than an offshore irritant that occasionally sent troops abroad.
A World at War: The Seven Years War (1756 to 1763)
If Marlborough made Britain's name in Europe, the Seven Years War made it a global one, sometimes called history's first true world war, fought simultaneously in North America, India, West Africa and the European mainland. It was, among other things, a laboratory for military innovation: British forces developed light infantry companies specifically to cope with forest warfare in North America, a tacit admission that parade-ground volley drill was not much use against an enemy who declined to stand still in a field.
In North America the war produced a roll call of names still familiar today: the capture of Louisbourg in 1758, the fall of Quebec in 1759 (where General James Wolfe died in the moment of victory, achieving the rare trick of becoming more famous in death than most generals manage in life), and Montreal's surrender in 1760, which effectively ended French rule in Canada. In India, Robert Clive's startling victory at Plassey in 1757, won with barely 750 European troops against a Bengali army estimated at 50,000, opened the door to a century and a half of British dominance on the subcontinent.
By the war's end Britain held Canada, dominant positions in India, and a clutch of Caribbean and African territories: the foundations, like it or not, of empire.
Losing an Empire, Gaining Perspective: The American War of Independence (1775 to 1783)
Having so comprehensively won the previous war, the Army spent the next one discovering the limits of tactical competence when set against geography, logistics and an increasingly hostile ocean crossing. British troops, by most assessments, performed relatively well on the battlefield throughout the American War of Independence: Bunker Hill in June 1775 was a British victory, if a costly one at over a thousand casualties, and British forces captured New York City after the Battle of Long Island in August 1776.
But battlefield competence proved to be the wrong metric. Washington's surprise victories at Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776 to 1777 kept the rebellion alive when it might easily have collapsed, and the surrender of General John Burgoyne's entire army at Saratoga in October 1777 had, as the National Army Museum puts it, "far-reaching consequences": chiefly persuading France to enter the war on the American side.
French naval intervention from 1778, followed by Spanish involvement the next year, tipped the balance decisively away from Britain, and the war ended with Lord Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown in October 1781 and the Treaty of Paris two years later. It was a strategic defeat dressed up in a number of tactical victories, a pattern the Army would, unfortunately, see again.
Wellington and the Fall of an Emperor: The Napoleonic Wars (1793 to 1815)
The Army's reputation was rebuilt, slowly and expensively, in the wars against Revolutionary and then Napoleonic France. The decisive theatre was Spain and Portugal, where Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington, landed in August 1808 with 14,000 British troops and, after early setbacks under other commanders, returned to lead a campaign that would eventually field 70,000 men.
The Peninsular War, fought from 1808 to 1814, ran through a litany of battle honours still carried on regimental colours today: Rolica and Vimeiro in 1808, Talavera in 1809, the great defensive lines of Torres Vedras that stopped a French invasion of Portugal cold, Salamanca in 1812 (arguably Wellington's masterpiece), and Vitoria in 1813, which effectively broke French power in Spain. Wellington, not a man given to easy compliments, called the army he had built "the most complete machine for its numbers now existing in Europe."
It all came to a head, of course, at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. Wellington's Anglo-Allied army of around 68,000 men, alongside Field Marshal Blucher's 48,000 Prussians, faced Napoleon's 72,000 French troops south of Brussels in a battle that lasted a single, appalling day. Allied casualties ran to around 22,000; the French lost roughly 40,000 killed, wounded or captured.
It was decisive in every sense: Napoleon abdicated within weeks, was exiled to St Helena, and Europe settled into the longest run of great power peace it had known in generations, broken only by the Crimean War until the catastrophe of 1914.
Redcoats and Reversals: The Victorian Army (1854 to 1902)
The nineteenth century gave the Army no shortage of work, spread thinly across an empire on which the sun famously never set, which also meant, less famously, that somewhere on it a British soldier was usually being shot at. The Crimean War produced two of the era's defining, and rather contradictory, images. At Balaclava on 25 October 1854, the 93rd Highlanders under Sir Colin Campbell formed an unconventional two-deep line rather than the traditional infantry square to see off a Russian cavalry charge: the origin of "the thin red line," as war correspondent William Howard Russell described the "thin red streak tipped with steel." On the very same day, confused orders sent the Light Brigade, 673 horsemen, charging down a valley flanked by Russian guns on three sides.
Around 260 men were killed or wounded and 475 horses lost, in what even contemporaries recognised as a magnificent, textbook example of how not to issue an order. Tennyson turned it into poetry; military historians have mostly turned it into a case study.
Africa provided its own lesson in humility, delivered twice in the same 24 hours. On 22 January 1879, at the opening of the Anglo-Zulu War, a Zulu army destroyed a British force at Isandlwana: despite superior weaponry, the British column of around 1,700 men was overwhelmed, one of the most complete defeats the Victorian Army suffered against non-European forces.
That same evening, a garrison of just 150 men held a mission station at Rorke's Drift against a Zulu force estimated at 4,000, fighting for over twelve hours before driving them off; seventeen British soldiers died, and eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded, still the most ever given for a single action. History, with its usual sense of theatre, remembered the small victory far better than the large defeat.
The Second Boer War, fought from 1899 to 1902, was messier still. Early British confidence collapsed during "Black Week" in December 1899, when defeats at Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso followed each other in quick succession, and the sieges of Kimberley, Ladysmith and Mafeking (the last lasting 217 days before relief arrived in May 1900) became national obsessions back home.
Victory eventually came, sealed by the Treaty of Vereeniging in May 1902, but the campaign's use of concentration camps, in which some 28,000 Boer civilians and 14,000 black Africans died from disease and neglect amid an international outcry led by the activist Emily Hobhouse, remains one of the more shameful chapters in the Army's history. It also, to its credit, forced serious self-examination: by 1914 the reforms prompted by the Boer War's near-humiliations had helped produce what is generally regarded as the best-trained and best-equipped force Britain had ever sent abroad.
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Cardwell, Haldane and the Business of Modernising
Much of that late-Victorian improvement traces back to the Cardwell Reforms of 1868 to 1874, pushed through by Secretary of State for War Edward Cardwell under Gladstone, partly in response to the sobering spectacle of Prussia's professional army flattening France in 1870 and 1871. Cardwell abolished the purchase of officers' commissions, a system under which rank had essentially been for sale to whoever could afford it, cut standard enlistment from 21 years to a more humane maximum of 12, and tied regiments to home counties under the Regulation of the Forces Act 1871, so that a battalion serving overseas had a linked battalion training recruits back home.
It was unglamorous administrative plumbing, but it built the trained reserve, some 80,000 men by 1900, that Britain would badly need. A generation later, Richard Haldane's reforms of 1907 to 1909 went further still, creating the Territorial Force and an Expeditionary Force structure explicitly designed for rapid deployment to the Continent, a piece of foresight that turned out, in August 1914, to be rather well timed.
The War to End All Wars: The First World War (1914 to 1918)
Nothing in the Army's history, not Isandlwana, not the retreat from Kabul, nothing, compares in sheer scale to the trauma of the Western Front. The war's grinding, industrial character is distilled most starkly in the Battle of the Somme, which ran from 1 July to 18 November 1916. On its first day alone the British Army suffered 57,000 casualties, close to 19,000 of them fatal, still described, without much need for embellishment, as the bloodiest day in its history.
By the battle's end in November, British Empire casualties had reached roughly 420,000, against French losses of 200,000 and German losses of at least 450,000, for a total territorial gain of about seven miles.
It would be easy to leave the story there, as pure catastrophe, and for a long time popular memory did exactly that. But the Somme also forced a hard, expensive education in modern warfare: tanks were used in action there for the first time, and the "creeping barrage" artillery technique developed through 1916 became a standard tool for the more successful offensives of 1918.
One German officer reportedly called it "the muddy grave of the German Field Army," a grim tribute to an attritional cost the German officer corps never fully recovered from. None of which made the losses among Britain's volunteer "Pals' Battalions," whole streets and workplaces enlisting and dying together, any less devastating to the communities that sent them.
The Second World War: From Dunkirk to Victory (1939 to 1945)
The Army's Second World War began in near disaster and ended in the total defeat of Nazi Germany, which is as good a summary of the whole conflict's arc as any. Following the German invasion of the Low Countries on 10 May 1940, the British Expeditionary Force was driven back to the Channel coast; Lord Gort received the order to evacuate on 26 May, and over the following days 328,000 Allied troops were lifted off the beaches at Dunkirk, with a further 140,000 evacuated through Cherbourg and Brest.
It preserved the Army as a fighting force, at the cost of enormous quantities of equipment (64,000 vehicles, 20,000 motorcycles and 2,500 guns left behind on the sand), and Churchill, characteristically clear-eyed, warned the Commons that "we must be very careful not to assign to this the attributes of a victory." It was a rescue, not a triumph, and everyone involved knew it.
The tide turned properly in the North African desert. At the Second Battle of El Alamein, fought from 23 October to 4 November 1942, General Bernard Montgomery's 190,000 strong Eighth Army, backed by more than a thousand tanks, decisively defeated Erwin Rommel's 116,000 German and Italian troops: the first clear cut, irreversible British victory of the war against the Axis, and the moment Churchill judged worthy of his famous verdict, that it was "not the end" nor "even the beginning of the end," but perhaps "the end of the beginning."
Victory in Europe was completed on the beaches of Normandy. On 6 June 1944, D-Day, more than 160,000 Allied troops landed under General Montgomery's overall command, with British forces going ashore at Gold and Sword beaches as part of a fleet of over 5,000 ships and landing craft. Allied casualties on the day totalled at least 10,000, but the beachhead held, and Operation Overlord opened the long-awaited second front that would, within eleven months, end the war in Europe.
Cold War, Retreat from Empire, and the Falklands (1945 to 1990)
Peace in Europe did not mean peace for the Army, which spent the following decades fighting a string of smaller, less commemorated wars across a rapidly shrinking empire. In Korea, the 29th British Independent Infantry Brigade, including the 1st Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment, forever after "the Glorious Glosters," held a defensive line on the Imjin River from 22 to 25 April 1951 against a Chinese offensive of some 300,000 men.
The Gloucesters alone suffered 622 casualties out of roughly 650 men engaged, but their stand bought crucial time for UN forces to regroup before Seoul, and both the brigade and the battalion were awarded the United States Presidential Unit Citation, a rare honour for a foreign unit, and a fair reflection of what four days of near encirclement had cost them.
The most vivid post-war campaign, though, remains the Falklands War of 1982. Argentina's invasion on 2 April prompted a Task Force that sailed 8,000 miles south within days, landing the bulk of its troops on 21 May. The fighting that followed was compressed and brutal: 2 Para's costly victory at Goose Green on 28 and 29 May, where commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Herbert "H" Jones was killed leading from the front and posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross; 3 Para's assault on Mount Longdon on 11 and 12 June, the single costliest British action of the war at 23 dead; and the final push on Mount Tumbledown and Wireless Ridge that opened the way into Port Stanley.
Argentina surrendered on 14 June 1982, having lost 649 men to Britain's 255 servicemen and 3 civilians: a short, sharp reminder, delivered a long way from home, that the Army's expeditionary reflexes had not gone entirely soft.
Into the Modern Age: Gulf, Afghanistan and the Army Today
The 1991 Gulf War gave the Army one of its cleanest operational successes in living memory. Some 35,000 British personnel deployed as part of the coalition under Operation Granby, with the 1st Armoured Division spearheading a wide flanking manoeuvre that advanced 290 kilometres in 66 hours, destroyed the equivalent of three Iraqi armoured divisions and took 7,000 prisoners, for the loss of 10 British lives.
A Challenger tank of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards achieved what is often cited as the longest range confirmed tank kill in history, at around five kilometres, a statistic that says a great deal about how far battlefield technology had travelled since a cavalry charge at Balaclava.
The two decades that followed were dominated by counter-insurgency rather than manoeuvre warfare. British forces entered Afghanistan in November 2001 and, from 2006, concentrated in Helmand Province around the sprawling Camp Bastion, a base whose 20 mile perimeter and 2.2 mile runway briefly made it one of the busiest airfields in the world.
Peak deployment reached around 9,500 troops; over thirteen years, 454 British service personnel were killed, nearly half of them by improvised explosive devices, before the last combat troops withdrew in October 2014. The campaign combined counter-insurgency with reconstruction, with mixed and much debated results, a reminder that not every chapter of a three hundred and sixty year history ends as tidily as Waterloo.
Today's British Army is a smaller, more technically specialised force than at almost any point in its history: recent Ministry of Defence figures put trained strength at around 71,000 regulars, supported by reservists, against a stated ambition to grow toward 76,000 full-time soldiers. It is, by the standards of 1914 or 1944, a modest establishment.
But it remains organised around regiments whose names, the Coldstream Guards, the Gloucestershire Regiment's successors and the rest, connect a soldier on exercise today to Restoration London, to Blenheim, to the Somme and to Camp Bastion, in a line of continuous service that very few institutions on earth, military or otherwise, can claim to match.
The Army's history does not move in a straight line from weakness to strength, or from ignorance to wisdom. It is a story of genuine tactical brilliance (Blenheim, El Alamein) sitting uncomfortably alongside catastrophic misjudgement (Isandlwana, the first day of the Somme); of an institution that has, at its best, learned hard lessons quickly and applied them (Cardwell after the Franco-Prussian shock, the army of 1918 after the Somme), and at its worst has needed a very expensive reminder before it did.
What is harder to dispute is its endurance. Few armies anywhere have fought so continuously, across so much of the globe, for so long, and fewer still can trace an unbroken institutional thread back to a warrant signed by a restored king in January 1661, in an England still getting used to having a monarchy again.
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