The British Expeditionary Force in the First World War

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the army that Britain sent to France in August 1914, and also the official name of all British forces in France and Flanders until the end of the war. It began as a few divisions of regular soldiers who fought at Mons and Ypres, and grew into five armies. It was commanded first by John French and then by Douglas Haig. In the autumn of 1918 its armies broke through the Hindenburg Line.

The regular army (1914)

The expeditionary force had been prepared after the Boer War as part of the reforms of the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane. On 4 August 1914 its command was appointed: Field Marshal John French became commander-in-chief and General Archibald Murray chief of staff. The main body, Haig’s I Corps and II Corps, crossed the Channel between 12 and 17 August without loss and went by rail to Maubeuge, on the left flank of the French army. The first to arrive were four infantry divisions and a cavalry division, about 100 thousand soldiers, roughly half regulars and half reservists.

On 23 August the British stood at Mons in the path of Kluck’s far larger 1st Army and that night had to begin a retreat. On 26 August Horace Smith-Dorrien’s II Corps fought a hard action at Le Cateau. The retreat ended on 5 September beyond the Marne, after about 200 miles, or more than 300 kilometres, of marching by British accounts, and already on 6 September the force took part in the counter-offensive on the Marne.

In October it was moved from the Aisne to Flanders, where in the First Battle of Ypres, together with the French and the Belgians, it held the town. According to the British official history, between 14 October and 30 November it lost 58,155 killed, wounded and missing. The old regular army ceased to exist, and its veterans later called themselves the “Old Contemptibles”, after an alleged order of Kaiser Wilhelm II about a “contemptible little army”, whose existence has never been proved.

The volunteer army (1915–1916)

The Secretary of State for War, Lord Herbert Kitchener, ordered as early as 21 August 1914 the creation of the first of the New Armies, made up of volunteers. The Territorial Force went to the front as well: in February 1915 its first division crossed to France complete. The force itself grew too: on 26 December 1914 it was divided into two armies, and in 1915–1916 three more were formed, among them Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth and Hubert Gough’s Fifth, which grew out of the Reserve Army.

The force was not only British. In September 1914 it was reinforced by Indian Expeditionary Force A, in February 1915 the 1st Canadian Division crossed to France, and later the Australian divisions arrived. By the end of the war the Canadians had a corps of four divisions in France, and the Australians five divisions. From February 1917 a Portuguese corps also fought under British command.

The year 1915 brought costly attacks without a breakthrough, from Neuve Chapelle to Loos, where the reserves came too late, while at Ypres the force defended itself against the first German gas attack in the west. The government forced French to resign, and on 19 December 1915 Haig took over command.

In January 1916 Britain, which had so far fought with an army of volunteers, introduced conscription. In the summer the force attacked on the Somme. On 1 July 1916 the Fourth Army lost, according to the official history, 57,470 men, including 19,240 killed and died of wounds, the most in a single day in the history of the British Army. By the end of November British losses had reached 419,654 men, and the front had moved at most about 10 kilometres.

Arras, Passchendaele, Cambrai (1917)

In 1917 the force attacked at various points of the front. At Arras in April it advanced on the first day further than at any time since trench warfare began, and the Canadians took Vimy Ridge, but in five weeks it lost about 150 thousand men. In June Herbert Plumer’s Second Army, after the explosion of 19 great mines, took Messines Ridge.

From 31 July to 10 November Haig attacked from Ypres towards Passchendaele: in the Third Battle of Ypres British losses amounted to 244,897 men according to the official history and to about 275 thousand according to Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. In November Julian Byng’s Third Army broke the Hindenburg Line with hundreds of tanks at Cambrai, but a German counter-attack took back most of its gains.

From defeat to victory (1918)

On 21 March 1918 the Germans launched Operation Michael, routed the Fifth Army and took about 75 thousand British prisoners, and on 9 April they struck on the Lys in Flanders. On 11 April Haig issued his “backs to the wall” order, forbidding any retreat. The force fell back but held: the Germans did not take Amiens and did not reach the Channel ports.

On 8 August Rawlinson’s British troops, with the Canadians and the Australians, broke the front at Amiens. The Hundred Days Offensive began: in the autumn the First, Third and Fourth Armies broke through the whole Hindenburg Line between Cambrai and Saint-Quentin, and on 4 November on the Sambre the force fought its last great battle. On the morning of 11 November the Canadians retook Mons, where it had all begun four years earlier.

In March 1919 part of its divisions formed the British Army of the Rhine, the army of occupation in the Rhineland. According to the figures cited by The Long, Long Trail, at its peak the force numbered 2,046,901 soldiers, a total of 5,399,563 soldiers of the British Army passed through the front in France and Flanders, and 564,715 were killed or died there.