THE TINY HEROES
As lack of size is blamed for our World Cup failure, the First World War Bantams who – at 5’ 3’’ and under – fought like demons
THeRe were some 50,000 of them, they were tiny, they fought with such ferocity one battalion (from Glasgow, of course) was dubbed the ‘Devil Dwarfs’ – and that was just by the english – and they helped us win the Great War.
Today, the three divisions of the Bantam Battalions – tough, scrappy little men below the initial, 1914 minimum height for the colours – are largely forgotten.
Yet, as a new book by Kit Fraser details, these doughty chaps proved formidable soldiers – and belie the recent ridiculous claims of Gordon Strachan that Scottish football is undone by genetics; that too many of us are too wee.
The very last veteran of the First World War, Claude Choules, died in May 2011, and the conflict is now all but beyond living memory. It is also grievously misunderstood, after decades of Blackadder and satire and lugubrious poetry in english class.
We talk blithely of pointless conflict, senseless slaughter, still more senseless slaughter and lions led by donkeys. Yet our victory remains one of the greatest feats in the history of British arms; the vast majority of those who served survived – and, proportionately, the worst casualties were among officers, not private soldiers.
And we forget that, to the last, the war effort enjoyed overwhelming support and that men were desperate to serve.
Lord Kitchener’s recruiting poster is still vividly recalled – and widely parodied. But there were untold thousands of men the Secretary of State for War was convinced he did not need – those below 5ft 3in in height. In 1914, when the masses lived much harder lives and on worse nutrition than they do today, there were a great many of them.
Most were keen to fight – but simply not wanted. A little Scots coal-heaver, James Robertson, wasn’t even allowed into the London Scottish Regiment headquarters to put his name down. ‘Get away home, Titch,’ they mocked. When he protested, someone cackled, ‘To get in, there’d have to be two of you…’
One diminutive miner, from Durham, was so keen to fight he walked 150 miles – and, at 5ft 2in, no recruiting sergeant would take him. By the time he reached Birkenhead he was almost in tears.
When they declined his services, he flung his coat to the floor and offered to fight any man in the room, cursing and swearing until ‘with great difficulty’ he was removed from the building.
Word of this crossed the ears of Birkenhead’s MP, Alfred Bigland – himself an intimidating 6ft 6in – and he wrote to Kitchener at the War Office, urging that special battalions of men – healthy men, between 5ft and 5ft 3in inches tall, with a minimum chest size of 34in – be created. And why not call them Bantam Battalions, after the pugnacious fowl?
Kitchener did not reply. But his people did. The War Office could not afford the time and resources to raise such outfits – but they could provide equipment and some funding if Birkenhead itself got up such a battalion.
That was all Bigland needed and thus the 15th Battalion, 1st Birkenhead, The Cheshire Regiment, was born. And the idea caught on, especially as the 15th proved terrifyingly good soldiers. By war’s end, in November 1918, there would be 29 Bantam Battalions across British and Canadian forces and in three divisions – and 50,000 vertically challenged men served.
Many were miners, or from smoky mill towns and Glasgow shipyards. Startled officers soon realised that – apart from that certain pugnacity of temperament common in short men – they had other advantages. They were better suited for the trenches and the cramped dug-outs. They could fit more easily into that lumbering new invention – the tank – and less likely unwittingly to find their heads above the trench just long enough to catch the eye of a German sniper.
FOR them there was but one grim vulnerability – in the frightful mud of, for instance, Passchendaele, thigh-deep in the goo, they struggled more to move and, if wounded, were much more likely to drown.
The conflict became such a terrible, grinding war of attrition, of course, because it took so long for commanders to find tactics up to date with dark new technology – the high-explosive shell, the machine-gun and (readily overlooked) something as prosaic as barbed wire.
So mention of the Great War immediately evokes memories of grainy old film; jerky men scurrying over no man’s land and being mowed down by the dozen. But – as surviving Bantams attested, in long, taped 1982 interviews with Fraser – war can be far more intimate (and terrible) than that.
‘You know if you bayonet a chap,’ recalled George Palmer of the 14th Battalion, Gloucestershire regiment, ‘and I shall never forget the look on that bloke’s face. He were shocked. So was I, but I just stuck it in and out. If you stick your bayonet through a man you can’t get it out unless you put your foot on him and pull it, because the suction of the flesh is terrific.
‘It’s surprising, you just stick him in and out or tip your gun up and hit him in the privates with the butt, and that fetches him down – then you clobber him, and that’s it…’
The 14th Gloucester was a robust outfit. On June 8, 1916, 60 of its Bantams struck out for enemy trenches in France. After running ahead of German artillery, the shells exploding in their seconds-old footprints, the Bantams reached the enemy wire. ‘The fight became a hand-to-hand brawl with every man for himself – confusion of bursting grenades, shooting, stabbing and clubbing, while men screamed with the murderous voices of close combat,’ wrote author Sidney Allinson.
‘At the end of it, 30 Germans and eight British lay dead, and the enemy fled into the box-barrage where many more were killed. The Bantam raiders scampered back to their own side, dragging a heavy Maxim machine-gun with them.’
And there was soon popular doggerel about the pint-sized soldiers:
But recruitment grew ever more desperate, even after conscription began in 1916; and as hundreds of Bantams were slain, the quality of those drafted in their place declined – more and more sickly, runty, unfit men. ‘Shelled, machine-gunned, gassed,’ journalist Shane Croucher lamented in 2015. ‘Battle by battle – and there were many – Bantams were knocked down like skittles….’
By the spring of 1917, the War Office insisted the 35th Division be wound up. The Bantams of the 40th, though, survived to see brutal action at Cambrai in November 1917.
It was a mincing-machine of a fight. Veterans remembered shrapnel that ‘rattled like rain’, bullets whizzing within inches ‘like a swarm of bees’. The choking, acidic sting of gas; the forlorn sight of ‘clumps of small bodies in khaki’. In only two days the 40th lost more than 4,000 men as it finally captured the German position at Bourlon Ridge – only for us to lose it back a week later.
In final indignity, the nation that gratefully deployed the Bantams into battle had far less time for them in peace. For a host of jobs, they were dismissed as too small.
There was a particularly bitter struggle with the Post Office – even questions in Parliament – as it refused to hire men under a certain height; even after Tory politician Duff Cooper pointed out that, under such a petty regulation, Napoleon himself would have been ineligible as a postman.
Two Bantams did win subsequent fame – Billy Butlin, father of the celebrated holiday camps; and Arthur Askey, comic and vaudevillian. But the mass of them, as always, struggle to be seen over the parapet of history – even though, as Croucher observes, ‘they stand just as tall as any man who fought in that gruelling war’.
the triumph and tragedy of the Bantams by Kit Fraser, published by CreateSpace. Paperback £5.98 from amazon.co.uk
‘Each one a pocket Hercules five feet and a bit, a kind of Bovril essence of six feet British grit…’