The 36th (Ulster) Division

The History of The 36th (Ulster) Division by Cyril Falls. Late Lieutenant, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and Captain, G.S., 36th Division. M'Caw, Stevenson & Orr, Limited, The Linenhall Press, Belfast, And 339 High Holborn, London, W.C. 1922

 

This History is dedicated to the men of the ULSTER DIVISION, returned from the War, and to those who have not come back; of whom I name two friends:HARRY GALLAGHER, D.S.O.,Captain, Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers,killed at the Battle of Messines, 1917;and GEORGE BRUCE, D.S.O., M.C.,Brigade Major, 109th Brigade,killed near Dadizeele, 1918

 

                              

 

THE  History of the 36th (Ulster) Division is the record of a great effort and a great achievement. The effort which resulted in its inception was the outcome of the determination, on the part of a people brought up in great traditions and inspired with a fervent spirit of loyalty, that they should be worthily represented in the fierce and prolonged struggle which from the outset was clearly foreshadowed.

The achievement was the response made to the call by their representatives, the gallant deeds accomplished, the courage and determination displayed, and the sacrifices made.

The narrative gives a very clear picture of what the campaign in France and Flanders involved for the troops engaged in it.

There is no reference to any great strategical movements or brilliant tactical operations, because there were none such to describe. It brings out, however, quite plainly that the victory was gained in the only way in which it could have been gained, by sheer hard fighting, carried out continuously, now on a small, now on a large, scale, but always by troops who never admitted defeat.

This was the character of the struggle into which the Ulster Division was plunged from its entrance into the campaign until its close, and the book describes very fully the part it played in it. Each chapter is a little history of itself, which frequently has sufficient subject-matter for a volume, and which always contains a record of events or incidents of absorbing interest. It is not a narrative of a series of unbroken successes, and there is no pretence that all the efforts made by the Division were successful.

I made recently the discovery that between 1906 and 1921 there were published over one hundred books on the Napoleonic Wars. The number would have been far greater but for the fall in the publication of all books between 1914 and 1919. So. a hundred years hence, men will be delving into our records of the late war. Soldiers will be studying the lessons of its battles. But a yet greater number of seekers will be demanding with curiosity how men lived in such circumstances, how they reacted to the strain of war, what compensations they found. It behoves those who were eye-witnesses to depict it in all its aspects, not to shrink from discovering its horror, indeed, but also not to pretend that it had not a better side. The picture now so often painted, representing the war as a single scene in a torture chamber, whence men emerged physical or mental wrecks, may be good anti-militarist propaganda, but it is false, because incomplete. From those experiences many men have emerged happy and strong. Many knew how to snatch some happiness even from their midst. A far greater number can see, in retrospect, that they played a part in one of the most dramatic, as well as one of the most terrible, tragedies in history. That stands for something of good, amid all its evil, in any man's life. 

 

 

 

IT is no rightful part of the historian of a Division in the Great War to embark upon preliminary sketches of the state of Europe or of the movements in international politics that preceded the catastrophe. If once he begin to seek for causes he must seek far. Three pistol shots fired in the narrow streets of Serajevo may be likened to an accidental spark that explodes a great charge. But the charge was long laid.

 ar had been determined upon in Berlin. Without that accidental spark, there can be no doubt that it would shortly have been deliberately exploded by a detonator from that quarter. If the divisional historian cannot trace the laying of the charge, which had been accumulating, it may be a hundred, and certainly fifty, years, let him not begin by dealing with what were merely the final accretions. Let him begin with the beginning of the war. War was declared between this country and Germany on the 4th of August, 1914.

 There are, however, certain local circumstances anterior to that declaration, which have an intimate connection with the particular Division that is the subject of this History, and so could not be omitted without robbing the latter of much of its significance.

The Ulster Division was not created in a day. The roots from which it sprang went back into the troubled period before the war. Its life was a continuance of the life of an earlier legion, a legion of civilians banded together to protect themselves from the consequences of legislation which they believed would affect adversely their rights and privileges as citizens of the United Kingdom - the Ulster Volunteer Force.

The Ulster Volunteer Force, or U.V.F., as it soon came to be known the world around, was the creation of Sir Edward Carson.

 He believed that if the Imperial Parliament were to persist in its declared intention of forcing the Protestant population of Ulster into an Irish Parliament, without its consent, the inevitable consequence would be civil war in Ireland. Unorganized resistance would be ineffective, and would beyond doubt lead to disorder and unnecessary bloodshed.

That the attempt would be made appeared certain. The fate of the Government was bound up with its Home Rule Bill. A failure to carry it through would have involved instant defeat in the House of Commons, wherein the Irish Nationalist Party held the balance of power. All the signs pointed to a clash.

It appeared to Sir Edward Carson that the surest defence of the political ideals of his followers lay in convincing the people of Great Britain that Protestant Ulster would fight for the preservation of liberties and traditions which it held dear, which, in its eyes, were now menaced. It was in this faith that he gave his approval to the formation of the U.V.F.

 It was on the advice of Lord Roberts, a warm advocate of Ulster's cause, that Sir Edward Carson invited General Sir George Richardson to take command of the U.V.F. Under his leadership the force was organized on a territorial basis.

At the outbreak of war it contained over 80,000 men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five, and a number of women, enrolled not only as nurses but for many of those supplementary services which were not allotted to women in the European war until a comparatively late period. The people of Ulster entered into their adventure in the same spirit that they entered into that of the war when it came.

 

 

 

On the 3rd of the month Sir Edward Carson made a great appeal, at a meeting of the Ulster Unionist Council in Belfast, to the men of the U.V.F., urging them to come forward for the defence of the Empire, the honour of Ulster and of Ireland.

In Ireland much had happened meanwhile. A large number of Ulstermen, the eager spirits who would not wait, had already enlisted. Of these the greater number had gone to the 10th Division, then being formed.

Others had crossed the Channel and joined Manchester and Glasgow battalions. At Omagh Captain A. St. Q. Ricardo, D.S.O.,  Reserve of Officers, had been put in charge of the Depot, and in mid-August had, anticipating the formation of an Ulster Division, begun to recruit men from the Tyrone Volunteers for a battalion of Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.

In a very short time he had two companies, which were, as they had as yet no official status, attached to the 5th and 6th Battalions of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. In these battalions some of the officers subsequently elected to remain, and went with the 10th Division to the Dardanelles.

When the Ulster Division was formed these two companies became the nucleus of the senior battalion of the 109th Infantry Brigade, the 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.

The organization of the Division proceeded swiftly. A large house, 29, Wellington Place, Belfast, was taken over and equipped as Headquarters. Three Infantry Brigades were formed the 107th from the City of Belfast itself; the 108th from the counties of Antrim, Down, Armagh, Cavan, and Monaghan; the 109th from Tyrone, Londonderry, Donegal, and Fermanagh, with one Belfast Battalion.

The Pioneer Battalion was also recruited in County Down, mainly from the Lurgan area.

The Royal Engineers, of which two Field Companies only were raised at first, the 121st and 122nd, as well as the Divisional Signal Company, came mainly from Belfast, above all from the great shipyards.

Royal Army Medical Corps personnel was recruited and sent to Clandeboye, where, on the appointment of an A.D.M.S., Colonel F. J. Greig, it was formed into three Field Ambulances, the 108th, 109th, and 110th, and moved to Newry. So successful was recruiting for the R.A.M.C. that Colonel Greig was instructed by the War Office to raise a Casualty Clearing Station, the 40th, which served both in France and at Salonika.

The Royal Army Service Corps personnel was fine both in physique and intelligence. The horses were good, as was natural, seeing how large was the proportion of horses bought for the Army in Ireland, and among the officers were some excellent horsemen and horsemasters.

Indeed the horsemastership in the Division was throughout the campaign of a very high order, the Infantry contriving to keep their mules sleek and fat and the Artillery their gun-horses fit and well-groomed amid conditions which none can realize who did not witness them.

A Cavalry Squadron and a Cyclist Company were also formed, the former being unique in that it was a service Squadron of the Inniskilling Dragoons.One question which received much attention and gave rise to much discussion was that of a Divisional Artillery. It was reluctantly decided not to raise one in Ulster, though this meant losing many an Ulsterman to other Divisions.

The U.V.F. had no artillery and consequently no partially trained force upon which to draw. It was thought that the raising and training of artillery in Ulster would take so long that it might delay the departure to the front of the Division for several months.

 

 

 

 Carson takes the salute at an inspection of the West Belfast Volunteers. 

 

 In those days, it will be remembered, the one feverish anxiety of the men of the New Armies was lest the war should be over ere they were able to play their part in -it! In the event, as will later be explained, the Division went to France in advance of the Artillery that had been raised for it, with a Territorial Artillery attached.

The 36th Divisional Artillery was raised, six months after the rest of the Division, in the suburbs of London, though from quarters stranger to one another than towns fifty miles apart in Ireland. The 153rd and 154th Brigades R.F.A. were formed by the British Empire League, of which one of the moving spirits was General Sir Bindon Blood. They were recruited chiefly from Croydon, Norbury, and Sydenham. The 172nd and 173rd Brigades, on the other hand, came from North-east London. They were formed on the initiative of the Mayors of East and West Ham and recruited from those districts.

The first date recorded in the Artillery annals is that of May the 5th, 1915, when sixty recruits of the 153rd Brigade assembled at 60, Victoria Street, the headquarters of the British Empire League, and marched to Norbury, where they were billeted in private houses. Londoners from South and North did not meet until July, when the four Brigades and the 36th Divisional Ammunition Column were moved to Lewes. It was within a few days of the arrival of the rest of the Division, already at a high standard of efficiency, in England, that serious training of the Divisional Artillery really began.

To the great regret of all Ulster, it was ruled that Sir George Richardson, owing to the seniority of his rank, could not take command of the Division. He remained in Belfast, working for the good of the cause, and none can speak more highly of his efforts and his loyalty than Sir James Craig and General Hickman, the chief organizers of those early days.

 "Trusted by every class," writes an officer who had long worked on his staff, "he was able to induce employers to permit those of their workmen to enlist who were not indispensable, and to perform the much more difficult task of making the skilled craftsmen of the shipyards realize that their duty to their country called them to remain at work, helping the Navy and Merchant Service to hold command of the sea, on which our success depended equally with our victory on land."

How they and others, notably the makers of linen for aircraft, who were, for the most part, women, played their part, cannot be discussed here, though it is a record worthy the pen of a eulogist. What is less generally known to the people of Great Britain is that in Ulster not a strike occurred throughout the course of the war.

Major-General C. H. Powell, C.B,  an officer with a distinguished record in the Indian Army, was appointed to the command of the Division. Colonel Hickman, after remaining in Belfast till the three Brigades had been formed, went to Finner to take command of the 109 Brigade.