Dan Snow's History Hit - The Child Soldiers of WWI

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

After the outbreak of the First World War, boys as young as twelve were caught up in a national wave of patriotism and, in huge numbers, volunteered to serve. The press, recruiting offices and the Government all contributed to the enlistment of hundreds of thousands of underage soldiers in both Britain and the Empire. Having falsified their ages upon joining up, many broke down under the strain and were returned home, while others fought on and were even awarded medals for gallantry.Richard van Emden, who has interviewed over 270 veterans of the Great War and has written twelve books on the subject, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the unknown stories of boys who served in the bloodiest battles of the war, fighting at Ypres, the Somme and on Gallipoli.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. Great to have Richard Van Emden back on the podcast. He's one of my favourite Great War historians. He's talked to hundreds of veterans about the First World War in the course of a long career, and he continues to write wonderful stories that he discovers in the archives about the First World War. This one is no exception. He's dealing with the issue of child soldiers. Richard has for the first time fully identified the youngest known soldier in the British Army during the First World War. He's Private Sidney Lewis. He served on the SOM in the Machine Gun Corps and he also identifies the youngest soldier killed in the war, Private Aubrey

Hudson, who went to the war aged 14 and was wounded before his 15th birthday. In this episode I ask him why these young boys signed up, how they were allowed into the forces, or whether there was any difference from unit to unit or as things got more difficult towards the end of the war. And Richard's also got new figures out from his research about numbers of very young boys serving in the forces during 1915 in particular. It's quite extraordinary. You can listen to other podcasts that we have recorded and some that we've filmed with Richard Van Emden at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix for history. It's a digital history channel. If you go by clicking the link in the description to this podcast, you get two weeks free. So head over there and do that.

Check it out. For less than a price of a pint of beer, you get access to the world's best history channel. Go and check it out. You're going to love it. But in the meantime, folks, here's Richard Van Emden talking about the boys who fought in the trenches. Richard, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. It's great to have you. Great pleasure, Dan. Well, it's always a pleasure to have you on. Last time you were talking about the most extraordinary search for a missing loved one in the years that followed the First World War. But this time, you're revisiting an area of your expertise. What have you uncovered? What's new about the numbers of underage soldiers who fought for the British Army during the First World War? Well, I think that the numbers have exploded in the research I've done in recent years. I mean,

I've been researching this particular story about the boy soldiers for 20 years. I originally claimed 250,000 boys enlisted underage. Two thirds didn't serve abroad. One third did. Well, that's reversed now. It's now two thirds did serve abroad. And the numbers have exploded to 400,000 boys who served in the British Army in the First World War. That is absolutely extraordinary. And it's important to remember that doesn't include South Asians, West Africans or

any of the imperial forces. Absolutely. I haven't included any Australians, any New Zealanders, any Canadians, any South Africans whatsoever, other than those very, very few, and I haven't included them in the numbers anyway, who perhaps emigrated to Canada and then came back to the United Kingdom and joined the British Army. And there were a few like that. There are a few Americans who did that too. So it is an extraordinary number. And I've done it primarily by saying, okay, well, look, we can go on to the Commonwealth War Graves website, and you can put in, you know, 17, you can see how many people are thrown up by that little statistical fact. And you can say, okay, there are that many 17 year olds, that many 16 year olds. And I thought, well, hang on, you know, a boy might die in 1918, age 21, but he might have

been in France in 1914. So what I did, and I took the medal roll for 1914 and 1914-15, which gives you the specific date that a boy arrived overseas. And I said, okay, well, if I take the Commonwealth War Graves figures for 21-year-olds, let's say, for example, in 1917, or 19-year-olds in 1917, let's work back, let's look at what percentage of those killed in that year actually hold the 14 or 14-15 star. And as I said, the numbers just rose dramatically when I did that. So again, it's just about putting in the time, putting in the hours and hours and hours to do this. But I looked at a number of 3,000 boys to ascertain when they had gone overseas. And that has helped me form this new statistic, which I'm happy to stand by, of 400,000. That is extraordinary. How is this allowed to happen?

What was the process of recruitment? Why did so many people, young men, older children, manage to get through the recruitment process? Well, one of the things I've always looked at and always assumed I think many people do too is that the great surge of recruitment for underage lads was 1914. Well, there were a great many who served in 1914 or tried to serve in 1914, but the great rush to the colours for these lads was 1914. Well, there were a great many who served in 1914 or tried to serve in 1914. But

the great rush to the colours for these lads was very often 1915. So in 1914, the British Army could be choosy. They had men queuing down the street. And if they got a 15 year old, they very often said, look, Sonny, you know, go away, come back another day. Well, in 1915, the numbers enlisting fell through the floor. The army was desperate for new recruits. And so boys very often enlisted straight out of school. For example, I noticed a huge spike in the number of underage enlistments in August and September, July, August, September 1915. Why? School holidays. They left school and they thought, what are we going to do? So a lot of them enlisted there. So the numbers really for 1914-15 are enormous. But many of these lads didn't get overseas until 1916.

So by doing a kind of research in later years too, I could prove that far, far more boys enlisted in the British Army than I ever thought was possible. When conscription comes in, does that prevent boys from joining up? That does make a huge difference. I mean, there wasn't conscription comes in, does that prevent boys from joining up? That does make a huge difference. I mean, there wasn't conscription in Ireland, so still a lot of boys came over from Ireland and enlisted. So it was harder for them to ascertain the ages of these lads. But even so, you could still get around, you could still volunteer

in 1916. You were supposed to take your national registration card, which proved how old you were, but you could take a brother's. A lot of sergeants were still willing to say, well, OK, I trust that you're over 18. I'll enlist you in the British Army. So it did severely cut down the numbers who were able to join up. But what I found is that it's only when the British Army bring in conscription and those troops start to go abroad, so say about September on October 1916, that you really see a drop-off in the number of boys overseas, almost as if the British Army said, OK, we no longer need them. We needed them in 1915. We needed them during the early part of the Battle of the Somme. We don't need them now. And that's

when you really see the numbers being killed on the Western Front dropping dramatically. And so the numbers serving 1917, 1918 are a tiny fraction of those who were there in 14 and 15 and early 16. But having said that, of course, what's so remarkable are the number of boys who are killed in 16 and 17 and 18 who clearly were there underage in 14 and 15. What have you come across in the sources about boy soldiers? Are they written about? Did any leave memoirs? Do they appear in other people's memoirs? Did people find it alarming to be serving alongside children? Well, I didn't interview so many veterans that I could say that they were disquieted by. I certainly remember one veteran I spoke to who, at the Battle of Neu-Chapelle,

remembered a boy's hair turning from black to white, which I've always been told is physiologically impossible. But he swore was true because this 16-year-old was absolutely terrified and was trying to almost scrape his way out of the trenches. So he was disquieted by seeing that vision of utter, utter terror. Many of the lads I spoke to, you know, they performed extremely well. And I spoke to a number of boys who went overseas and they were not in any way that my sense was that they were safeguarded by other men or anything like that. They'd literally chosen to be there and they fought alongside these older men. So they all played their part. And Richard, what about military effectiveness? What was the impact of having young

boys on a unit? Did they weaken its performance? Yes, there was a general sense that the younger they were, the less likely they were going to be able to cope with the conditions. So there was a lot of political effort, especially by an MP called Sir Arthur Markham, to get particularly the very youngest boys out of the line, because he said, look, they physically can't do it. And there was a lot of truth with that. And one of the issues that I discovered was these lads who enlisted in late spring, early summer of 1915, of course, they would often do four-month service. They weren't necessarily in Kitchener battalions. They'd been formed the year before. And so a great many of them went to France or went to Gallipoli

in the autumn of 1915 and simply couldn't cope. So it wasn't just a question of, you know, could they stand the mortar fire and the shell fire and the rifle fire? Could they cope with the freezing cold? For example, the storms on Gallipoli in 1915, and a great many of them simply couldn't and broke down. And when I look very carefully at the length of time that these young lads spent abroad, very, very few lasted more than a year, and the vast majority, it was fewer than three months before very concerned parents wrote in

to ask for their return and discharge if they were under the age of 17. Who's the youngest boy soldier that you think you've found who served in the British Army during the First World War? Well, the youngest was a fascinating case, because when the book was updated in 2012, I had this case of a lad called S. Lewis, who appeared in the Mirror newspaper. And it said this boy had enlisted at 12 and served on the Somme aged 13. And there was no way of proving who this boy was, S. Lewis, while it could be one of thousands of men. And I was very fortunate to get a double-page spread in a national newspaper. And who should read that double-page spread but son of Private S. Lewis,

who then contacted me and said, that's my dad, Sidney Lewis. He was about 13 and two months when he went overseas, sent me all the documentation to prove it. And now he is being accepted as the youngest known soldier of the British Army in the First World War. Having said that, I mean, I've got two, I made a list. One of the things that's new to this book, as well as the statistics, new photographs, new stories, is a list of the youngest soldiers that I found. And to make that list, you have to be under the age of 15. So 14 or 13, serving at Gallipoli or the Western Front. Now, my list stretches to 70 names.

I've got more that I could have added now, but obviously it's post-publication. 70 boys, three of whom were serving on the Western Front aged 13. But Sidney Lewis is, by some distance, at 13 and two months, by far the youngest. The next one is about 13 and 10 months. What do you think the government knew? I think the government knew that tens of thousands of these boys were enlisting underage. I think they turned a blind eye. There was a definite move at the back end of 1914 to say, look, the military authorities released an instruction saying, look, you can't take

boys under the age of 19 overseas. Quite frankly, if they'd actually imposed that rule, particularly territorial battalions, which enlisted at the age of 17, could not have gone overseas. So I think they perfectly well knew that vast numbers of boys were enlisting underage. The problem was when they signed, the boys themselves were saying, I am legally 19. And that was what the government used to sort of back their case. They say, we're not knowingly taking any boy underage because they've all signed to say they're 19. And if they signed to say they're 19, they are 19. Now, that was utterly disingenuous. They knew perfectly well that they were 15, 16, 17-year-olds out there. But at the time, particularly in 1915,

I mean, I honestly believe if you had, and it would have been militarily impossible, but if you turn around and withdrawn every single boy underage, that is under the age for overseas service, which was 19, if you'd withdrawn the whole lot in one go from the Western Front, I believe we would have lost the war. We're talking of, I think, probably at least 130,000 boys underage on the Western Front in 1915. And it was probably considerably higher than that. But that's

a kind of conservative figure. Between 100,000 and 130,000 is what I've conservatively said. I think it's higher than that, but it's what I can prove. And if you'd withdrawn those from an army of 800,000, well, you're losing the war, aren't you? I know you may not be able to answer this, but do you think you see similar numbers in the French, the German armies on the Western Front? I've done no research on the French and German armies. The British army was a big enough job as it was.

So I can't say. All I can say is that the Germans relied on vast numbers of young soldiers, but at the back end of the war, whereas we tended to utilise them at the front end of the war. I mean, the Germans were literally running out of manpower in 1918. The number of 16, 17-year-olds overseas grew exponentially. You could, in the German army, with parental permissions, serve at the age of 16, 17 at the front. I don't know how many did that. I certainly know of cases. But the British Army, after conscription, became more and more stubborn about these underage lads going abroad,

simply because they didn't need them anymore. And so by 1918, the vast majority in the British Army who were overseas were at least 18 and a half. The age was played around with slightly during the March Offensive, but were at least 18 and a half. Very, very few were under that age. Whereas in the German army in particular, there were increasing numbers of lads aged 15 and 16. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking about boy soldiers in the First World War. More coming up.

Hello. If you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the History Hit Warfare podcast from the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11. We reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force. And there wouldn't have been a Waterloo. It would have been as simple as that.

Revolutionary technologies. that revolutionary technologies. By the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities' health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate, light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in

trillion-dollar wars, or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the History Hit Warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. To be continued... who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Do you think it's possible to generalise about what effect being in battle had on these children these young people obviously warfare can contain horrors no matter what your age but what effect do you think it had on people who took part in those battles so young it isn't impossible to say

i mean obviously we're dealing with vast numbers and so many individuals there's so many different stories i mean i've got lads who are self-inflicting wounds on themselves to get out of the line. There are boys who are physically breaking down again, as I say, in the winter in particular, they simply couldn't stand it. There were a lot of boys who simply loved it. I mean, there were a lot of boys who wrote back and were incredibly enthusiastic about what they've been through. Again, because so many of them didn't last that long, it's hard to know whether had they been at the front for two or three years, they would have felt the same. There are some great memoirs. I mean, I've utilised obviously the stories from the soldiers that I met over the years, over the last 30 years. But obviously, I've got material

as well from memoirs. And there was particularly one man called John Gowland, who did last the entire war. He served from October 14, age 16, right through to the end of the war. And he writes beautifully and very, very movingly about the effect of the war on him afterwards, and how he just was restless, he was depressed, he couldn't hold down employment. He felt much older than his parents in many ways. And he just went through a sort of fit of depression for years and years afterwards. Now, that, frankly, is probably true of a great many soldiers who served regardless of age. But the boys in particular, it robbed them of so much of their youth.

There's one particular story which I only got in right at the end of a lad called James Tormey, who served in the Connaught Ragers aged 16. I came across him by chance. He was 16 when he went to Gallipoli. And he lasted a short while there and was then taken home and discharged. And he was discharged weeks before the Easter uprising. He came from Ireland and he joined the IRA. And he was eventually killed in an ambush in 1921, an ambush that he was actually partaking in. He was ambushing some policemen. For good or evil, whatever the rights or wrongs of his particular case, I did feel sorry for someone whose entire later childhood had been robbed from him in terms of he'd seen nothing but war. He'd obviously been, I suspect, deeply affected by what he'd seen at

Gallipoli. He was there for long enough. And the rest of his war was fighting in the IRA and he died aged 21. And I do feel sorry for him, but I feel sorry for so many other lads. I've discovered possibly the youngest boy now. There's a lot of evidence that Private Condon, who's always celebrated as a 14-year-old who died, may not have been 14. Well, the next youngest is a lad called Aubrey Hudson, who I discovered, who was age 14, fighting overseas, was wounded at the age of 14, and then was killed aged 15 and 28 days. And he is way younger than Valentine Strudwick, the boy who's normally celebrated as about the youngest who served, the one that everyone goes to visit on the Western Front at Essex Farm Cemetery. everyone goes to visit on the Western Front at Essex Farm Cemetery. This boy, Aubrey Hudson, was 15 and 28 days and he'd already been wounded. And lads like that, you think, my God, you've seen nothing of life. Absolutely nothing. And, you know, in the list of 70 boys all serving under the age of 15 on the Western Front, quite a number of them are wounded. And it's only by sheer luck and chance that none of them were killed while they were still

14. I'm sure there is somebody out there who is 14 that we've not discovered yet, but whether we'll find them or not, heaven only knows. You mentioned discovering things. I know, obviously, in the archives, you interviewed hundreds of veterans. What's the Richard van Imden secret sauce? How do you keep finding these things out? Well, I mean, what I've done with this latest edition and this final edition, I'm not going to do this again, nine years research, I've concentrated massively on the records that's held on Ancestry, the soldiers' own records. And I've looked through thousands and thousands of personal documents looking not just for bold facts as to when they

served and how old they were when they were out there, but also the letters the parents sent to get them discharged or to say, look, my son is underage, he can't handle the conditions. And by doing that, by systematically searching through thousands and thousands of records, you then bring out new themes, new ideas, new stories, which I've put into this book. So, for example, there's a real sense of punishment of these boys. In 1914-15, they are kind of encouraged to join up. Yeah, certainly the blind eye is used in so many cases, and they're all cheered on in the local press. Our boy of 15 at the front, what a hero he is. But you try taking that boy out of the army, your parent trying to

get that boy discharged, and that boy is then suddenly punished for the temerity of leaving the army at 15 or 16. And what they did was they said, OK, you've been released now. You have to pay for your way home. Now, that's OK if you live in Reading and you're training in Aldershot. But so many parents said, hang on, my son comes from Dundee and you've taken him to Aldershot. How the hell is he going to get back? And what they did, they cut all allowances to the parents. They cut any allowance that the boy had made to his family and said, you will now sit in this camp until you raised enough money to go back home, which was tough on the boy, certainly tough on the parents who were then suddenly without the money that was allotted to them every month. So in a way, they were punished then. The other thing that came

across was the number of boys who applied for what was called the Silver War Badge, which was basically a badge given to all soldiers who'd served honourably and were discharged, having served not always overseas, but primarily overseas, you know, were discharged for wounds or unfitness or whatever. And you could apply for this badge that you wouldn't be called a shirker or a coward in the street. Now, a lot of these boys were discharged as the phrase was misstatement as to age, and that made them ineligible for the silver war badge. Now, a lot of these boys are saying, hang on a minute, I've just done six months at Gallipoli, I've done four months on the Somme, and I am now being spat at, being called a shirker, being called a coward

in the street because I look my age now. You know, I've aged because I've had all this time in the trenches. I'm physically bigger and I can't tell them that I've served and they don't believe me. And so they were punished again. These boys were punished again for having done their service. Suddenly they apply for this badge and they're told, no, you can't have one because you lied when you enlisted. Well, that is about as tough as it gets. Now, I have wondered subsequently whether some officers who discharged these lads

actually said, look, I'll discharge you as for wounds or being unfit or medically unfit so that you can apply for a Civil War badge. And that would be quite interesting if I could ever prove it. And I can't, but that would actually push my numbers even higher. Certainly those boys who were discharged specifically as being underage were not allowed to apply. Now, with all these things, you get the odd exception. I found the odd boy, he was given it, but that was clearly administrative error. But the vast majority had to go back into Civvy Street and to sort of face the taunts that they did

without any protection from the army or the government, despite having served overseas. Were there big variations from unit to unit? Well, it's difficult because you're talking with different battalions. So if you're looking at a regular battalion in 1914, they would have had relatively few men. A lot of men would come in from the reserve to make up the numbers. So the battalions that went out in 1914 contained relatively few lads who were underage. You know, if they were out there, they were out there legally, which you could be if you're a trumpeter or a drummer. But again, you're talking very, very small numbers. On the opposite, you know, if they were out there, they were out there legally, which you could be if you're a trumpeter or a drummer.

But again, you're talking very, very small numbers. On the opposite, you look at the other side, with the territorial battalions, you are talking a huge number, because, of course, you could join the territories at 17. You could sign your overseas obligation, which meant that you could be sent abroad. Although you were not meant to go across until you were 19, very often these battalions had so many underage

lads in them, they had no option if they were going to actually take a battalion aboard, but to include those boys who were 16 and 17. And a really interesting case was the Fifth Black Watch at Christmas 1914. They'd been out since the, I think the last day of October 14. They'd been out there about six weeks, and they got a draft of 191 men sent to the battalion, of which 58, I think it was, were found to be underage. So the commanding officer said, hang on a minute, let's look at the battalion as a whole. So he gets his, you know, nominally a thousand men together. 228 boys were discovered within the ranks of the 5th Black Watch. Again, if you go to Kitchener's battalions, it depends when the battalions deployed. If they

deploy earlier, they tend to have far more underage boys. If they deploy later, of course, those boys have the chance, you know, if they were 18 to become 19, and therefore the numbers are cut. What's interesting about some of the later Kitchener battalions, especially those from London in the Royal West Surrey Regiment, for example, had an enormous number of boys. There was one particular individual who's done a search on one battalion. And again, you're looking at about 20% of those that he's been able to identify were underage when they went overseas. And again, that's a case of desperation. That's a battalion that's K5, the back end of the Kitchener Army recruitment campaign. They've joined up in mid-1915 and

they've deployed in mid-1916. And still, even at that point, they've got 20% underage. Clearly, when they enlisted in 1915, you're probably talking more like 30% because they identified some, they left them out. Others, of course, enlisted underage and were 19 by the time they went overseas. So it really depends on what battalion and at what time that you're looking at them. If you go, of course, in 1918, you look at a battalion then, I'd be surprised if it was more than 2%. It's probably lower than that, who are actually underage in a battalion. So again, depends what you're looking at when you're looking at it. Richard, thank you very much for coming back on the pod. It's really electrifying whenever you come on. What's the new book called? Well, it's the updated version of Boy Soldiers of the Great War. But this is the final edition,

I promise I won't be bringing out another one. And it's got absolutely everything in it that I could bring to the party, including some really remarkable new photographs as well. If anyone listening to this wants to ruin Richard Van Emden's life, just do some research and find a young boy who was younger than Aubrey, who was killed in the British Army during the First World War, and you will turn Richard's hair grey. He will. Yeah, that is the only circumstance in which I will update this book. If someone comes with me younger than 15 and 28 days, then I promise I will update it, but only with that single fact. You heard it here, everyone. Looking forward to that next edition thank you very much richard for coming on thank you pleasure dan thank you so much for

having me i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country all were gone and finished thanks folks you've made it in the end of our episode. Congratulations. Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do here at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give a little rating, five stars or its equivalent.

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