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Jun 6Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

The Irish regiments were also a mix of town, county, and regional titles

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The local system produces strong cohesion and good units to this day in the National Guard.

It feeds it seems into the active army, the Communities in Killeen County Texas (Ft Hood) and Cumberland County (Ft Bragg).

‘each battalion drew most of its recruits from that place and, when not serving overseas, occupied barracks in one of its cities or towns.’

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Jun 5Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Thanks for discussing this ... as I mentioned to you in a recent chat message, I'd been puzzling over some of the less obvious British army battalion-naming practices during the 1st and 2nd World Wars, which I hope will be clarified in the next article in this series. (I mean, to someone not fully immersed in British army trivia, a designation like "4/5th Royal Scots Fusiliers" seems to indicate either a composite unit composed of subunits from both the 4th and 5th battalions).

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The slashed numbers (e.g. 1/6th) will play a central role in the next post in this series.

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Jun 5Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Thanks to your hint, I got part of the answer to my earlier question, but I'm looking forward to finally solving the rest of the puzzle.

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In the meantime, you may enjoy this article, which compares the two different systems of expansion used by the British Army in World War I.

http://the-military-learning-library.343.s1.nabble.com/file/n395/The_Walrus_and_the_Penguin_4.pdf

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Jun 5Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Oh. My. Goodness. And I thought Sir Sam Hughes was the original chaotic army raiser of the Empire. Kitchener, while doing different things, certainly appears to have felt the same about Haldane's Territorials as Hughes felt toward the (tiny) Canadian regular army. Rather than mobilizing and expanding the existing militia units in 1914, Hughes created a "New Army _avant la lettre_" (and given his antipathy toward anything French, I use that term advisedly). In Hughes' case, it gave him vast scope to appoint friends and allies to high military posts but I haven't heard the same about Kitchener.

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Jun 5Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

I always found it interesting how small the British army was at that time, relatively speaking.

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Jun 5Liked by Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Great article

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