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    Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918)
    Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918)
    Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918)
    Ebook88 pages42 minutes

    Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918)

    By Paul Hinckley

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    About this ebook

    All kinds of groups develop their own slang, and the military is no exception. Slang is an in-group language which has to be understood if you are to be accepted as a member. An outsider can pretend to be a member, but unless they know the slang, they will not be accepted.

    On the Western Front, infiltrators and spies were a threat. The battlefield slang that developed over the course of the war helped to validate a person’s allegiance.

    In strongly hierarchical groups like the military, the enlisted men use slang to have a laugh at the expense of the officers, what linguists call ‘diminishing the dignity of the formal language’.

    The totality of the British armed forces was diverse. It comprised not just British soldiers. It also included soldiers from English-speaking former British colonies like Australia, Canada, India, South Africa and New Zealand.
    The colloquialisms of the British soldier are colourful and often irreverent for the reason mentioned earlier. Many come from Indian and Arabic words acquired during earlier military actions in India and Egypt. Other colloquialisms are Anglicised words, phrases and place names learned from their French allies.

    The military phonetic alphabet, known as Signalese, also contributed substantially to the battlefield colloquiums of World War I. The term ‘Ack-Emma’ for example means in the morning, or AM, and comes from the phonetic alphabet as listed below.

    In 1918, the British military alphabet was; Ack, Beer, Cork, Don, Eddy, Freddy, George, Harry, Ink, Jug, King, London, Emma, Nuts, Orange, Pip, Quad, Robert, Esses, Toc, Uncle, Vic, William, Xerxes, Yellow, Zebra.

    A-1. First rate, by 1916 the British War Office had instituted a nine point rating scale for recruit fitness; A-1 to A-3, B-1 to B-3, C-1 to C-3.
    ABDUL. Turk, the individual or collective term for Turkish people. Ottoman Turkey was a member of the Central Powers.
    ABOUT TURN. Hébuterne, a French village in the Department of Pas de Calais. For much of the war Hébuterne was on the Western Front and occupied by entrenched Allied Forces on the Eastern side of the village facing the Imperial German Army 800 yards beyond occupying the village of Gommecourt.
    ABRI. A dugout to shelter from bombardment. Deriving from the French.
    ACE. An outstanding aviator, literally a high-card to play against the enemy. Later in the war, it came to mean a pilot who had made at least 25 kills.
    ACCESSORY. Poisonous gas deployed from cylinders. Accessory was a code word used in communiqués in an attempt to keep the practice secret.
    ACK-ACK. Anti-aircraft (AA) fire. ‘Ack’ was the first letter of the military phonetic alphabet.
    ACK EMMA (1) Military phonetic alphabet for AM as in morning or ante meridiem, (2) Air Mechanic (RFC/RAF).
    ALLEY. Go! Get Clear! From the French word allez.
    ALLEYMAN. German soldier (from French word for German ‘Allemagne’).
    ALLY SLOPER'S CAVALRY. Army Service Corps (ASC). Ally Sloper was a fictional character drawn by W F Thomas that appeared in the popular pre-war paper Ally Sloper's Weekly. The ASC with their non-combatant role were held on low regard by the Infantry. In 1919, when the ASC became the RASC their nickname was changed to Run Away, Someone's Coming.
    AMMO BOOTS. Standard issue, hobnail boots worn by the Infantry (from the term ‘ammunition boots’).
    ANZAC. Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The collective name for participating units from these countries.
    ARCHIE. Anti-aircraft fire or artillery piece, from a popular music hall character.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAltiora Publications
    Release dateAug 8, 2013
    ISBN9781301970315
    Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918)
    Author

    Paul Hinckley

    Born and bred in England, Paul served as a combat medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps, with operational tours of Northern Ireland and Iraq before leaving the Army with the rank of Captain in 2006.He is now a health and wellbeing advisor.

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      Book preview

      Battlefield Colloquialisms of World War I (1914-1918) - Paul Hinckley

      Battlefield Colloquialisms

      of World War I

      (1914-1918)

      2nd Edition

      Paul Hinckley

      David Tuffley

      This work is dedicated to the men and women of all sides who

      answered the call to duty during the Great War of 1914-18

      "One day the great European War will come out

      \of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans."

      ― Otto von Bismarck in 1888.

      Published 2016 by Altiora Publications

      Copyright © Paul Hinckley & David Tuffley, 2013, 2016.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

      About the Authors

      Paul Hinckley's two Grandfathers, both called Tommy, ironically stood on opposing sides during World War I, one serving as a driver on the Western Front and the other being a devoted Irish Republican who opposed the British during the Easter Rising of 1916.

      Born and bred in England, Paul served as a combat medic in the Royal Army Medical Corps, with operational tours of Northern Ireland and Iraq before leaving the Army with the rank of Captain in 2006.

      He is now a health and wellbeing advisor.

      David Tuffley’s Grandfather Albert Money was a rifleman in the King’s Royal Rifles Corps who was wounded in action at Aubers Ridge in May 1915.

      David was raised in Brisbane, Australia, in the working class suburb of Cannon Hill. As a child in the 1960’s, he would spend his Sunday afternoons in his grandfather’s carpentry workshop, developing a close relationship. In the neighbourhood, David heard much colourful speech from the old soldiers who had returned from World War II and the older soldiers who had served in World War

      Contents

      The War to End Wars

      Brothers in Arms

      Battlefield Colloquialisms: A to Z

      A | B | C | D | E | F | G

      H | I | J | K | L | M | N

      O | P | Q | R | S | T | U

      V | W | X | Y | Z

      Soldier’s tales

      Learning from History

      Sources

      The War to End Wars

      Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea

      – Samuel Johnson, 1778.

      World War I, or ‘The Great War’ as it was known until World War II, was perhaps the one event in human history that challenged this widely held belief so eloquently expressed by Dr Johnson. Many of those who participated in the trench fighting, naval battles and aerial duels of the Great War were so affected - physically, mentally and socially - by the horrors they endured that they chose never to speak of it again.

      Beginning on 28 July 1914 and ending over four years later on 11 November 1918, World War I was called a ‘World War’ because it involved all of the world's great powers plus their colonies from the around the world. Initially it was the Allies (Britain, France and Russia) against the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary). In time, others would get involved; Italy, Japan and the United States joined the Allies, and the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers.

      The term ‘war to end wars’ was coined by the writer H.G. Wells, in his book The War That Will End Wars' in 1914. It was meant seriously at the time, but the advent of an even more catastrophic war a few decades later rendered the term laughably obsolete.

      World War I was the first major war of the Industrial Age. Its scale was unprecedented. Around 70 million military personnel were mobilised, with more than 9 million combatants killed. The scale of these losses was due to newly acquired industrial capability being applied to weapons production combined with outmoded thinking on the part of the military planners.

      It soon became a war of attrition. With a decisive victory beyond their reach, the strategists on both sides resorted to large-scale human wave attacks -- bayonet charges against entrenched machine guns -- in an effort to exhaust the other side.

      A hundred years later such thinking would be considered criminally insane, but at the time it was the orthodox way to wage war.

      The long-term cause of WWI was the resurgence of imperialism in the foreign policies of the great powers of Europe. Simmering tensions had been building for decades prior to WWI. The situation was like a large keg of gun-powder with multiple protruding wicks, any one of which could set off a cataclysmic explosion. As it happened, the match that set off the powder-keg was the assassination of Archduke

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