On August 12, 1914, a week after Britain declared war on Germany and entered the First World War, the British Parliament passes the Defense of the Realm Act (DORA), aimed at providing the British government with the means to support the country’s war effort. If the DORA marked Britain’s attempt to regulate life on the home front during wartime, even more measures were enacted to stimulate the country’s military preparedness. Of all the great powers at the start of World War I, Britain was the only one without a policy of conscription; as a result, their army was small and highly trained but numerically inferior to those of continental Europe. Beginning on August 7, Britain’s newly appointed war minister, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, sent out a public call for 100,000 volunteers to join the British army. Though the turnout was undeniably impressive—almost 500,000 men enlisted in the first six weeks of the war alone—some doubted the quality of these so-called Kitchener armies, especially compared to those of Germany, who with the help of conscription, had been steadily building and improving its armed forces for the past 40 years. In January 1916, with World War I entering its third calendar year, Parliament passed the Military Service Act, Britain’s first-ever conscription bill. By the wars end the country had enlisted 49 percent of its men between the ages of 15 and 49 for military service.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 07:22:56 +0000
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