Territorial army

The Ox and Bucks Light Infantry had a regimental history dating back to the 18th Century. At the time of the outbreak of WW2 the regular full time battalions were augmented by four territorial units: the 4th and 5th Battalions that recruited from Oxfordshire and the 1st and 2nd Buckinghamshire Battalions recruiting from Buckinghamshire. The 1st Bucks Battalion HQ was Aylesbury and the 2nd Battalion HQ was Slough (which was part of the county of Buckinghamshire at the time). The territorial army were volunteers giving up some of their spare time to form a trained, part-time armed unit.

The official formation of the 1st Bucks Battalion was HQ at Aylesbury with detachments at Wolverton (A Company), Risborough (B Company), Chesham (C Company) and Wycombe (D Company).

The Wolverton Company mustered at the Drill Hall in Wolverton, close by the railway station at the junction of the Haversham and Newport Roads. The Drill Hall was purpose built for the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry in 1914. Drill night was Thursday and men were transported there and back from the outlying villages via the battalion truck. In addition TA battalions were required to attend an annual camp, generally in August. Although camp was compulsory and employers were bound to release men to attend annual camp they were not bound to pay the men.

During the 1930s recruitment to the TA was seen by the Government as a matter of national concern. A strong territorial army was considered an important line of defence in the event of invasion and as a critical element for air defences. This became more urgent in the latter half of the 1930s as Germany, becoming ever more belligerent, had demonstrated its willingness to use civilians as a weapon of war by its bombing of Guernica in Spain in 1937. In the previous year a parliamentary debate had highlighted a lack of appropriate pay as an inhibiting factor for recruitment with employers' general lack of willingness to support the national effort in this respect.

(More research needed but ) I have seen a reference that suggests by 1937 men did receive army pay for annual camp attendance. But the discrepancy between army pay and the wages of a skilled working man was significant.

In the mid 1930s a soldier's pay was 14 shillings a week and a skilled working man earned at least 35 shillings. In today's terms this is equivalent to the difference between £170 a week and £400 a week

This meant that in parts of the country where there was plenty of well-paid, skilled work (ie places like Wolverton, Aylesbury and High Wycombe) many older men with families were disinclined to volunteer because they could not afford the drop in pay for the fortnight annual camp. Consequently some TA units were overwhelmingly youthful with more young unmarried men.

Lads could join from the age of 15. Elliot Viney (Battalion second in command at the Battle of Hazebrouck, and then in full command when Major Heyworth was killed) joined in 1932 at the age of 18 as a young officer out of public school. He was therefore only 26 when commanding a battalion in the most desperate circumstances. In an interview held in the Imperial War Museum sound archive he talks about the the Government's concern at the low number of recruits to the territorial army.

The reality of youthfulness is brought home looking at the memorial rolls for this killed in action in 1940 and those dying later in POW camps.

Of the two Bucks battalions it was only the 1st that embarked to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in January1940. Those men who were too young or too old were drafted into the 2nd Battalion along with those not deemed fit enough for one reason or another for service overseas. The minimum age for overseas service was 19.

It is not clear whether or not men from the 2nd battalion were drafted into the 1st to make up the numbers but the Regimental Chronicle (Neville, J. E. H., The Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Chronicle, Vol 1,Gale and Polden Ltd, 1949) records some regulars and reservists drafted in to the 1st Battalion to make up the strength.

One might assume that the part-time nature of territorial units led to reduced effectiveness as a fighting unit and this assumption is sometimes implicit in questions when veterans are being interviewed. In the case of the Bucks Battalion in northern France this was clearly not the case. Tired after days on the road in retreat and ill-armed they effectively held up a tank division for two days. In the years after the war these men were modest regarding their wartime exploits but were nevertheless proud of their achievement.

Elliot Viney was very clear in his opinion that the territorials were in many ways more effective than regular soldiers. He attributed this to the fact that as part-timers they had wider life experience. The regular soldier, especially the NCOs knew what they had to do and did it well but this was through much practice on a daily basis. The territorial man had less time to learn and therefore had to learn quickly demonstrating “great flexibility of mind”.