Manpower and Military Service, 1914–1918

Abstract

The central problem of organizing Britain’s war effort in 1914–18 was how to distribute resources effectively as between civilian and military requirements. This was nowhere more obvious than in the case of manpower. Essentially there were four primary elements in Britain’s manpower equation, each of which placed limits on the scale of her military effort. The first was a given fact: the age-structure of the population; the other three were subject to intervention and organization. These were: the propensity of men to come forward as recruits for the army between 1914 and 1916, and as conscripts thereafter; the necessity of balancing the increasing demands of Army Command for more men against the needs of home industry, and in particular, the needs of those sectors engaged in war-related production; and the physical fitness of the men who joined up. In this chapter we shall consider each of these determinants of military participation in wartime.