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"Experiment Mechanised Force - Eastland vs Westland" Topic


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ROUWetPatchBehindTheSofa15 Jun 2020 5:12 a.m. PST

Google is being unhelpful! Does anyone know if there is an OOB online for the Eastland vs Westland Exercise in 1927 involving the UKs Experimental Mechanised Force? Since Wikipedia has a OOB for the EMF I'm mainly after info on the 3rd Division 'Westland' forces. I can find OOBs for the end of WWI and the beginning of WWII but nothing in between.

tsofian15 Jun 2020 3:20 p.m. PST

David Fletcher's book Mechanized Force would have all that. Its a good read in general.

Vintage Wargaming15 Jun 2020 5:13 p.m. PST

Fletcher only says 3rd Division supported by a cavalry brigade – no more detail than that.

When researching the much less well known Experimental Infantry Brigade of 1934-6 I had some success through reading contemporary press reports using the British Newspaper Archive, though you'll need a subscription or know someone who does. You'll also need to be imaginative in your searches – papers local to where the constituent battalions came from are a good source, and I also got a lot from reports in the Scotsman.

And of course you may need to accept that the information you are looking for may just not be available on line.

ROUWetPatchBehindTheSofa16 Jun 2020 4:41 a.m. PST

Thanks, I appreciate its possible its not online, and the general paucity of pages returned on the subject hint that may well be the case. For my purposes the late WWI OOB for the 3rd Division will probably do.

The Experimental Infantry Brigade I hadn't heard of. Interesting, obviously they felt to the need to test emergent technologies and how you deploy them on the battlefield, at a time when there was a lot of theory but not a lot of practice. I did find it faintly amusing that testing the substitution of cars for officers chargers is among the objectives…

Martin Rapier16 Jun 2020 6:01 a.m. PST

The 1920s/30s Infantry Division did look rather like its WW1 counterpart. Three infantry brigades of three battalions, and artillery 'brigade' with 18pdr and 4.5" howitzers plus divisional sappers, signals and recce.

The infantry battalions until the mid 1920s still had BHQ, AA Platoon with four Lewis guns and four rifle companies on the WW1 organisation (four platoons of four sections with two Lewis guns per platoon). The Brigade MG companies seem to have been devolved back to the infantry though as each battalion had an MG platoon with six Vickers guns.

The absence of a battalion mortar platoon indicates that the brigade 3" mortar company was retained.

At some point in the late 1920s, battalions dropped to three companies until the four company org was reinstated in 1936. The Vickers guns vanished back into the divisional MG battalion at some point too.

No idea about any AT gun allocations, but in the 'Defence of Bowler Bridge', the platoon defending the village was allocated a single 20mm AT gun with a tracked carrier which they engaged the enemy armoured cars with.

1920s/30s cavalry regiment was similar to a WW1 type, RHQ with a regimental Vickers platoon (4 guns) and three squadrons of four troops, each with a single Hotchkiss LMG.

ROUWetPatchBehindTheSofa17 Jun 2020 8:55 a.m. PST

Thanks Martin the divisional level info was just what I needed!

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