Tommies spent majority of time away from front-line, new analysis suggests

Goldsmiths, University of London historian Professor Richard Grayson has published the results of the first major academic analysis of historical data captured by the first online history crowdsourcing project, Operation War Diary.

The study challenges popular perceptions of the First World War by revealing that British infantry soldiers spent the majority of their time away from the trenches. 

The study carried out at Goldsmiths, University of London found that across the British army on the Western Front infantry soldiers spent a maximum of 47% of their time at the front or fighting. The infantry engaged directly with the enemy on just one in five of their days abroad.

Artillery soldiers spent 62% of their time either at the front or fighting, with the cavalry spending just 20% of their time at the front or fighting.

The research uses data from the first stage of Operation War Diary, led by The National Archives (TNA), Imperial War Museums (IWM) and academic crowdsourcing research group, Zooniverse, based at the University of Oxford.

27,000 volunteers have contributed to OWD since it launched in January 2014.

They extracted metadata from digitised war diary entries dating to 1914-1918, which are held in The National Archives. The volunteers produced over half a million data classifications for six infantry divisions and two cavalry divisions. The largest previous study examined just one infantry division.

The analysis was carried out by Goldsmiths’ Professor of Twentieth Century History Richard Grayson, working in conjunction with staff at TNA, IWM and Zooniverse.

“Even with less than half your time spent at the front and around one out of five days actually under fire, nobody should doubt that conditions were horrendous,” explains Professor Grayson.

It is also worth noting that these average figures mask some remarkably lengthy periods at the front by some units. For example, among the battalions examined so far in OWD, the 1st East Lancashires were almost entirely in the line between 21 October 1914 and 11 April 1915.

“But our research shows that popular representations of soldiers spending all day and night in the trenches – whether it’s in Blackadder, on the BBC Schools pages, or popular histories and broadcasts – do not properly represent the broad pattern of the daily lives of soldiers.”

In an article for the open access journal British Journal for Military History, Professor Grayson points out that it’s likely the percentage figures quoted are a maximum, as war diaries tended to be less detailed about their activities during ‘time off’ or training. That made it harder for OWD volunteers to identify, classify and agree upon how such time was spent in contrast to more dramatic and detailed entries about time at the front.

(A screenshot from the Operation War Diary website. Photo used with permission from The National Archives.)

Crowdsourcing is widely used in the sciences but in history it is a novel technique “which might be greeted with scepticism by historians accustomed to rather more solitary methods of research, in which ‘expertise’ measured by academic credentials is believed crucial to verifying facts,” notes Professor Grayson.

“The diaries we’ve analysed come from the six original British Expeditionary Force infantry divisions and the first two cavalry divisions to arrive in France. It’s certainly possible that these divisions spent more (or even less) time at the front than others but that will only become clear once data is available from later phases of OWD. In future we will be able to look at differences over time for different units, individual battalions, or other divisions – machine gunners, cyclists, veterinary sections.

“Even with 27,000 volunteers working on the project so far, we’ve only generated a small proportion of the data that we will be able to offer historians. But as the first example of a major crowdsourcing activity being applied to military history there are plenty of reasons to believe OWD can help historians and the public to understand both the patterns and nuances of army life during the First World War, and whether it was indeed a ‘life in the trenches’.”

Volunteers wishing to take part in Operation War Diary can join the project here: www.operationwardiary.org.

“A Life in the Trenches? The use of Operation War Diary and crowdsourcing methods to provide an understanding of the British Army’s day-to-day life on the Western Front” by Professor Richard S. Grayson is published in the British Journal of Military History on Friday 19 February 2016.

The BJMH is a pioneering Open Access, peer-reviewed journal that brings high quality scholarship in military history to an audience beyond academia. Online and FREE, you can get the latest issue by visiting: www.bjmh.org.uk