Training the Troops: British and Commonwealth Armies, 1939-1945

In his unpublished autobiography, Major General Lewis Owen Lyne recounts an anecdote about General Montgomery speaking at the Senior Officers' School in 1942. An officer commented that Montgomery's talk was the opposite to what was written in the military training pamphlet he was brandishing, to which Montgomery replied by asking who wrote the pamphlet and he looked forward to reading all the training pamphlets produced by the War Office once the war was over.
This view of training in the British Army has persisted in the historiography.
This PhD project will, therefore, carry out thorough archival research at the IWM and at archives across Britain and the Commonwealth to examine the validity of
Montgomery's framing of the subject.
To achieve this end, the research project sets out to understand how the British and Commonwealth Armies prepared and trained to fight a multi-front multinational global war. The thesis will firstly document the work of the Directorate of Military Training at the War Office, which was responsible for producing suitable doctrine and the ensuing training pamphlets in the British Army. However, the thesis will also have a transnational dimension. It will be both a top down and a bottom up study of training across the British Empire and Commonwealth that fully embraces the lived experience of soldiers, whether they came from, for example, Britain, Canada, India or Africa.
The thesis will pursue four key strands of enquiry:
1. The Organisational and Doctrinal Framework.
2. Inter-Theatre Learning.
3. Training and Combat Performance.
4. The Lived Experience of Training.