Kitchener's Army - Later Developments

Later Developments

At the beginning of 1918, the shortage of manpower in the British Expeditionary Force in France became acute. The Army ordered infantry divisions to be reduced from twelve infantry battalions to nine. The higher-numbered battalions (in effect the New Army units, and some Second-Line Territorial units) were to be disbanded rather than the lower-numbered Regular and First-Line Territorial battalions. (Since Kitchener's death in 1916, no other major figure opposed this fundamental change to the principles on which the New Army had been raised.) In some cases, New Army divisions had to disband about half of their units to make room for surplus battalions transferred from Regular or First-Line Territorial divisions. While the change reduced the unique sense of identity of some New Army formations, it developed the divisions in France into more homogeneous units. By this time there was no longer much real distinction between Regular, Territorial and New Army divisions.

Following the failure of the Ludendorff Offensive in the spring of 1918, the BEF performed a combined arms counterattack. The Hundred Days Offensive drove the German forces back through Belgium, with high casualties. The British took many hundreds of thousands of German soldiers by capture or surrender. Coupled with a revolution in Germany, the German generals requested an armistice, which came into effect at 11 o'clock on 11 November 1918.