The Social, Educational, and Early Military Backgrounds of Senior Officers of the British Army of the Second World War, 1944–1945

Abstract

Seventy-eight officers held senior command positions at army, corps, and divisional level in Britain’s three main field armies – the Second (North-West Europe), Eighth (Italy), and Fourteenth (Burma) – at the end of the Second World War. Using a range of source material, including their private papers, this article examines their socio-economic and family background, education, and early career development and finds that as a group, they were more representative of the middling classes than heretofore depicted. They were also far more diverse in education and place of birth: twenty-one were born outside Britain. As this article argues, the make-up of the three armies also differed, suggesting the formation of a more elite, home-grown, ‘first team’ for service with the Second Army in North-West Europe.