Great Britain: A Shortage of ‘Eroes

In the palmy Victorian days when Kipling’s Tommy Atkins called the British army the “thin red line of ‘eroes,” few Englishmen could predict how thin the line might get. On the troubled island of Cyprus, in beleaguered Aden, and within the threatened Malaysian Federation, in recent weeks the line seemed stretched to the breaking point. Indeed, alarmed at the frequency with which British troops are dispatched to overseas trouble spots, the London Daily Telegraph harrumphed: “Officers who hold the Queen’s Commission cannot be air-freighted without ceremony from their lawful appointments. British battalions cannot be whistled about like errand boys.”

Last week, with some 5,000 British troops on duty to keep the uneasy peace in three new trouble spots—the East African territories of Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika—the line still held. But many wondered for how long. Britain’s central strategic reserve at home has been reduced to a collection of isolated units, her 5,000-man Aden force seriously depleted by East African demands, and in West Germany—where the NATO-committed British army of the Rhine is already some 3,000 troops below its pledged 55,000-man level—a 3,000-man brigade is poised for possible transfer to one of the trouble spots. Britain’s 171,000-man army is 9,000 men short of its authorized strength, and is already spread so thin that in the Middle East regular artillery units are now being used as infantry.

In fact, the army needs at least 35,000 more fulltime soldiers to meet Britain’s obligations—a level it will probably never attain without reintroduction of politically unpalatable conscription. As the London Times despondently observed, “The operation of scraping the bottom of the barrel has run against a predictable difficulty—the bottom of the barrel seems to have disappeared.”