Troops boarded ships with kit bags, they went ashore with weapons/battle kit. The logistics of getting kit to the right/alive squaddies  seems a challenge. Anyone know how it worked?

This has been a family discussion because a US family have tracked down my toddler cousin whose photo an unrelated GI carried about Europe - mine was another one which was with a GI at D.day until he died a
 few years back. We hardly met either pre D-Day a few visits at most. I recall them because I have good recall. Keeping troops and their stuff together seems quite a challenge.

That's what A and B Echelons exist for.
see http://51hd.co.uk/page/glossary which says

Quote :

Echelon
Reference is made to F, A and B Echelon. The transport for a battalion is divided into these groups. F Echelon vehicles are the fighting vehicles which go into battle as part of the action; for example command vehicles, armoured troop carries and anti-tank guns. A Echelon vehicles have the immediate needs of the battalion after the battle such as rations, extra ammunition, packs and cooking equipment. B Echelon in further back and has the longer term stores and workshops.

FAB answer, il, thank you. I know more about how Romans ran their warfare - and of course later stuff from watching Sharpe. A rather interesting job, I imagine - the A part anyway. Sounds multi tasking and rather up my street. Well, F and B are not in my league; put me down for the next war if I am not put down by the director hereabouts any time now.

So how did it work as one goes back in time?

Take for example a tenant farmer called away from his farm in Yorkshire to serve in the army assembled to counter the Scottish invasion in 1513. At muster he's been issued with a helmet, a quilted jack, and a bill, and he also has an out-of-date sword inherited from his father. Since he and his colleages are expected to be in the army for several weeks, in addition to his arms and his usual clothes he probably has a thick woollen cloak (as much to sleep in as against the weather) a couple of spare linen shirts and some extra woollen socks, maybe a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and possibly a medieval style balaclava/poncho-type hood which can double as a pillow. He might also, if he's very lucky, have a oiled cloth groundsheet. He has his eating knife, a wooden food bowl and a small cup made of horn or pewter. In his wallet he probably has very little money but he does probably have his rosary, a lucky charm given to him by his mother, wife or sweetheart, and a couple of dice. He also has his tinder box, flint and steel, and if he's got any sense, a fine-toothed comb to combat lice.

Its not much but it would all weigh maybe 30 pounds and would need some sort of haversack to hold it all. So no real difficulty carrying it on the march to Northumberland, but the question is, does he have to still carry it while fighting in the battle of Flodden or was there some arrangement for companies to leave their kit together to be picked up afterwards, and if so how did that work?

Here he is .... but where's his kit?

Most medieval armies (and earlier organised ones) would have had a baggage train - there is a reference to the boys in the camp & baggage train being killed at Agincourt, and many earlier battles featured the capture or sacking of the baggage train.

I'd always assumed the baggage train was for general supplies and for the "kit" of the better off, and not for the ordinary soldier ... hence my question, but what you say does make sense. So for practical purposes there must have been a wagon assigned to, say, each company (which would be about 100 men). And so I'm guessing the wagon would also have carried the communal cooking pot(s) and immediate rations of bread and ale plus a stock of arrows, spare armour etc. That also explains the slow rate of advance since even a light cavalry unit would still be limited by the slow pace of its baggage wagon.

You might find that some cavalry armies - such as the Mongols - which had multiple horses per warrior could do without a formal baggage train but even the Romans, not noted for coddling "Marius' mules" still had a quadrupedal mule for each contubernium to carry the tent etc.

The Soyer cooker, invented by French born chef Alexis Soyer after hearing reports of the poor catering in the Crimea;



A battalion using the Soyer,required only one-tenth of the fuel compared to a battalion cooking over open fires, an important consideration in the largely treeless Crimea.
Soyers were used throughout both World Wars, in fact the last substantial stock of them was lost on board the Atlantic Conveyor in May 1982, and the occasional one can still be found.

I remember reading somewhere [The Reason Why ??] that the horses which survived the Charge of the Light Brigade were slaughtered for food over the winter of 1854/55 as the supply system in the Crimea began breaking down.

Chindits in Burma, Operation Thursday , March 1944, 10,000 troops and 1,000 mules airlifted behind enemy lines;



a mixture of the  new, C-47 Dakotas, with the old, Mules.

One of the great, but simple, designs in history, originally developed by the Germans in the late 30s for military use, copied en masse by the Allies in WW2, hence it's name "Jerrycan"




US Marines with water jerrycans on Grenada in 1983.

Right, so that's roughly 1 mule per 10 men whether we're talking Roman legionaries or 20th century Chindits ....  or sometimes, one or two small wagons (I'm guessing ones of 4-wheels/2 horses) for a company of about 80 to 100 men, during the late medieval/early renaissance period. 

Yes that's makes a lot of sense.

And so my hypothetical 16th century conscript's kit is safely stored with that of his immediate chums, in their own wagon and watched over by a driver and a boy, while he fights the Battle of Flodden. I'm relieved for him. And thanks Gil and Trike ... It's a little thing in the grand scheme of the world's history but I have always worried about exactly how medieval/renaissance armies worked, especially for the average squaddie.

But .... this does now beg the question: Who paid for the wagon + horses + their fodder + the driver + driver's boy? .... Are they part of the "package" to recruit these soldiers .... or are the soldiers themselves expected to chip in and pay for these support services? They often had to pay for all the bullets and gunpowder that they used (even in battle!) so I really wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't a regular deduction for these, and other, 'support' services.

So who actually paid for the mule/wagon .... and it's fodder costs etc..? The King? or the conscript?

The supplies for troops fighting the battles on the Kokoda trail, from the Owen Stanleys right up to Wairopi, were dependent on human porters - in total, up to 50,000 to maintain a fighting force which rarely numbered more than 3,500 in the field.

Another aspect of combat supply is the stockpiling of munitions for forthcoming operations. There are obvious dangers to storing large amounts of high explosives and there were incidents.

This is the crater caused by the explosion of 4,000 tons of high explosive at Bomber Commands' Fauld Depot in Staffordshire in November 1944. There are another 4,000 tons of unexploded munitions down there;








70 people were killed in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions  and the largest ever in Britain

Attacking enemy supply lines is one of the oldest stratagems in warfare. This is an example from the American Civil War, a raid carried out by a Federal cavalry brigade led by music teacher turned soldier Benjamin Grierson, against the Confederate rail depot at Newton Station, which was supplying Confederate forces in Vicksburg;

http://www.lagrangetn.com/grierson.htm

A still from the film "The Horse Soldiers" based on Grierson's Raid, showing the destruction of rail track;

This clip shows how to make what were known as "Sherman's Neck Ties", twisting rail track out of shape to make it unusable;

It's not just  twisting it - the heating / sudden cooling destroys the temper and makes it brittle, so straightening it won't allow it to be re-used.

Weymouth, June 5th 1944. US troops about to embark. Wherever their kit was it wasn't in the landing craft as you can see. It looks like there was just enough room for the troops and their firearms.

The photo is from a series of "then and now" clickable pics to do with D-Day on the Guardian website recently which are really worth a visit.

Heavily laden US Paratroopers boarding a C-47 Dakota;

And equally heavily burdened British soldiers on Sword Beach;

One thousand years of soldiers' kit;

Hastings to Helmand

Video of a US Army field kitchen:

A interesting find, Trike - thank you..... I wonder what a British field kitchen was like?  I started my Perils of P life young being recued by lifeboat in the early fifties. I recall being given a tin of soup that was heated by - as I recall- pulling a string at the top. This may well be wrong. What I do recall was being told it was dangerously hot. It was - so soup stains all down my sailing cable, as I recall - and cause of further trouble from parents who did not know I was going to sea that day.... etc etc.
We had in fact had lunch aboard of several tinned Heinz syrup puddings which is all I could find in the galley but enough to keep me busy in the galley when death seemed more likely than not at the time.
Keeping the forces fed was in fact a huge undertaking. Recently in a Rick Stein prog in Germany in a mock up model of Das Boot, we saw the minute galley for catering the crew of 60 to two meals a day... incredible. Food for it being stored in places all over the boat.

Really need to thank Peabody Kid over on Historum for that one, Priscilla.

As regards the self heating can, this is from wiki:

Self-heating cans have dual chambers, one surrounding the other. In one version, the inner chamber holds the food or drink, and the outer chamber houses chemicals which undergo an exothermic reaction when combined. When the user wants to heat the contents of the can, a ring on the can—when pulled—breaks the barrier which keeps the chemicals in the outer chamber apart from the water. In another type, the chemicals are in the inner chamber and the beverage surrounds it in the outer chamber. To heat the contents of the can, the user pushes on the bottom of the can to break the barrier separating the chemical from the water. This design has the advantages of being more efficient (less heat is lost to the surrounding air) as well as reducing excessive heating of the product's exterior, causing possible discomfort to the user. In either case, after the heat from the reaction has been absorbed by the food, the user can enjoy a hot meal or drink.

I'm sure this has been posted here before somewhere but I can't find it - A thousand years of kit inspections – images of soldiers’ personal equipment from 1066 to 2014 - by photographer Thom Atkinson for his ‘Soldiers Inventories’ series. The 13 images show the typical personal equipment and possessions carried by a common British soldier, from that of a huscarl at the battle of Hastings in 1066;



or an archer at Agincourt in 1415;



through a musketeer of the New Model Army at Naseby in 1645;



a private infantryman at Waterloo in 1815;



and at the Somme in 1916;



to a sapper of the Royal engineers serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in 2014;



As the photographer says,
"The Anglo-Saxon warrior at Hastings is perhaps not so very different from the British ‘Tommy’ in the trenches. There’s a spoon in every picture. I think that’s wonderful. The requirement of food, and the experience of eating, hasn’t changed in 1,000 years. It’s the same with warmth, water, protection, entertainment."

Priscilla wrote:

A interesting find, Trike - thank you..... I wonder what a British field kitchen was like?  

I did find one, P. It is silent footage and not always the clearest of images:



This gives a better explanation of the WW2 British Army 24-hour ration pack:

Click the play arrow, it does work.

Note that USN ships, destroyers and larger, had the ability to manufacture ice cream:

Unique ships of the US Navy

"With the ban on alcohol aboard ships in 1914, the US Navy sought to offset the loss of alcohol at sea and found that ice cream was popular among the sailors. It was so popular that the Navy borrowed a refrigerated concrete barge from the Army Transportation Corps in 1945 to serve as a floating ice cream parlor. At a cost of $1 million, the barge was towed around the Pacific to provide ice cream to ships smaller than a destroyer that lacked ice cream making facilities. The Navy proudly announced that the vessel could manufacture 10 gallons of ice cream every seven minutes and had storage capacity of 2000 gallons."

I knew Coca-Cola was delivered during the War but I did not know the story about Fanta:



Coca Cola WW2

After the US entered the war in 1941 Max Keith couldn't get Coca Cola syrup from America to make Coke so he invented a new drink out of the ingredients he had available to him and made it specifically for the Nazi market and the Third Reich. 

• The drink was called Fanta. 
  
  

Fanta came by its name thanks to Keith's instructions to employees during the contest to christen the beverage — he told them to let their Fantasie [Geman for fantasy] run wild. Upon hearing that, veteran salesman Joe Knipp immediately blurted out Fanta. 

Meles has already done the 1916 kit for the British Army.

The same year for the French;



the Germans



the US in 1918



and, the 1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death, 1917

I'm strangely gratified to see that the kit of even the '1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death' included a pair of stockings - certainly not nylons and highly unlikely to be made of silk, but 'pantyhose'-type stockings none the less.

Meles meles wrote:

I'm strangely gratified to see that the kit of even the '1st Russian Women's Battalion of Death' included a pair of stockings - certainly not nylons and highly unlikely to be made of silk, but 'pantyhose'-type stockings none the less.

Hopefully kept them warm.

Unlike the Germans in WW2 who went into the Soviet Union not expecting to, and therefore unprepared for, fighting a winter campaign. So badly off for winter clothing that Goebbels issued an appeal for the German public to donate whatever winter clothing items they had to the Eastern Front. Some 76 million individual items were collected during the appeal, but it was a shocking admission that things were not going well in the East.

From A Bridge Too Far, General Horrocks to J.O.E. Vandeleur

"I've selected you to lead us, not only for your extraordinary fighting ability but also because, in the unlikely event the Germans ever get you, they will assume from your attire that they have captured a  wretched peasant and immediately send you on your way"

British Army Battledress, introduced just before the outbreak of the Second World War, did not look as military as the uniforms of the German Army.

One Guards major remarked "I don't mind dying for my country but I'm not going to die dressed like a third rate chauffer"

The uniform was however, modern and practical. Made of wool serge, the underarm cut left plenty of room for free movement. It had a numerous pockets for storage, the knee high puttees of WW1 were replaced by canvas ankle gaiters and it was warm.
Most of all it was cheap, could be manufactured in large numbers and produced very little waste material.

Soldier wearing the basic battledress:




Battledress with associated webbing. The webbing was made of cotton, weatherproofed and dyed before being woven:

Short video about British Army equipment of WW1:

One of the many errors in "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda" is the issue of a Tin Hat (Brodie helmet) in 1915 in Australia.
No.
Look at pictures of the Anzacs in the Gallipoli campain.
Slouch hats yes, battle bowlers no.

Triceratops wrote:

British Army Battledress, introduced just before the outbreak of the Second World War, did not look as military as the uniforms of the German Army.

There had been changes to the British Army's standard uniform in 1933 too.



The original caption to the photograph (in 'The Pageant of the Century', by Odhams Press, 1933) reads,
Tommy's new uniform. The tight 'soldierly' collar is replaced by an open-necked shirt: the gleaming buttons, which received so much 'spit and polish' and whose dullness meant meant so many days C.B. to young recruits, are discarded: the flat pockets of the tunic have turned to 'sloppy' pleated patch pockets: the spiral puttees have given way to canvas leggings and the tight 'pantaloons', as army breeches are called, are almost plus fours. To crown everything, the hard-peaked forage cap is replaced by a soft helmet.

I don't recall ever seeing that "soft helmet" before, so I'm guessing it was soon changed. It looks almost like a return to the pith helmet in use during the 2nd Boer War,

I've never seen this type of uniform before either, Meles. Digging about the web it seems to have been an experimental uniform.

Couple of videos.

The initial introduction:




1st Battalion, Durham Light Infantry were issued with the uniform for trials




Newspaper article;


Hansard for the 28th November 1933, no decision on experimental uniform:

New Uniform

Found this on another forum:

We did talk about trying to find suitable Malaya type conflict figures to portray these chaps wearing the reissued experimental uniform in denim as shown in the photos from Central London recruiting depot dated 1/3/38 and wearing 37 webbing - the other battalion in the experiment was the Queens Royal Regiment (West Surreys) based at Aldershot - the DLI were at Catterick and the experimental uniform ran from November 1932 to November 1934 and then was reintroduced in March 1938 - as field service uniform which lost out to b/d - I think mainly because the idea was the f/s uniform was for infantry and the b/d for mechanised troops - and by 1938 we were going for the complete mech force.