ANNALS OF THE KING’S ROYAL RIFLE CORPS: VOL 5 “The Great War”

The fifth and final volume in this magnificent unit history of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps describes the regiment’s role in the Great War. The Corps’ sixteen battalions were continuously in action from 1914, when the first shots were fired at Mons, until November 1918. Most of the fighting was on the western front, but the Corps also saw action in Italy, Greece and Macedonia and at Murmansk in 1919 during the allied intervention in Russia. The Corps took part in the retreat to the Marne and the subsequent ‘Race to the Sea’ in 1914; and the first battle of Ypres – when, such was the speed and power of the Corps’ famous rifle fire, – the Germans were famously deceived into thinking they were up against entrenched machine guns. In the same battle, three companies of the Corps’ First Battalion were surrounded and annihilated. The Corps saw action in 1915 at Givenchy, and the battles of 2nd Ypres – when they first experienced gas – Aubers Ridge and Festubert. Reinforced by New Army battalions, they fought at Loos and throughout the 1916 Battle of the Somme. In 1917, Corps battalions saw action at Arras, Monchy, Oppy and Third Ypres (Passchendaele). At the Battle of Cambrai, in November 1917, the Corps’ 10th and 11th companies, attacked on three sides, were destroyed. The Corps lost three more battalions, the 7th, 8th and 9th, on the first day of the German Spring offensives on March 21st 1918. The 16th battalion, by contrast, beat off the attacks on it in the battle of the Lys in April, and the Corps took part in the final allied offensive which brought the Armistice in the autumn of 1918. With two appendices on the eight VCs won by the Corps in the war, and listing the 567 K.R.R.C officers killed from its total death roll of 13,000. Illustrated with nine main maps and three sketch maps.