Corps War Establishment Mistake?

Discussion in 'Trux Discussion Area' started by pamak, Oct 16, 2017.

  1. pamak

    pamak Junior Member

    Hello, everybody!

    First, I want to congratulate Trux for his amazing job,.
    Second, I would like to point at a possible mistake in the War Establishment.
    I started going through this material to get a better understanding of the British TOEs before diving into reading some British Unit War diaries. I went over the HEADQUARTERS of a CORPS / War Establishment III/5/5. November 1943 ( ARMY and CORPS HEADQUARTERS) and I noticed the following part:

    I see that the "Operations" section is very thin and has no serjeants /clerks/privates assigned to it. This seems wrong. I tried to find the War Establishment on the Internet but I had no luck. So, I decided to start a thread here for any of you who may want to double check the accuracy of this part. It may be just a simple omission which is perfectly understandable when one posts such a wealth of information.

    Thank you
  2. Trux

    Trux 21 AG Patron

    This certainly seems to be wrong somehow. I have looked at my original transcript and it is the same as that posted on the forum. Certainly the Operations section should have clerks and probably cartographers. I have not yet looked at the original table.

    The 21 Army Group section was originally part of the Trux Models website. This closed down in 2010 and the forum kindly offered to host it. The source material is some 10,000 digital photographs of the original documents at Kew. These are on discs and in no particular order so searching could take some time. I will wait and see if anyone else has them to hand. If not I will certainly look. I like a good mystery.

    4jonboy, Tricky Dicky and dbf like this.
  3. Trux

    Trux 21 AG Patron

    Some time ago I sent Aixman (a forum member) copies of all my war establishment documents. He is more organised than I am and has them catalogued correctly. He has already looked and found that the 'missing' personnel are in fact missing from the original establishment table.

    It may be possible to look at earlier or later establishments to see if they appear there. I did wonder if they were hidden in other establishments such as Camp Commandant etc. but no sign of them so far.

    Thank you Wolfgang (Aixman). He knows as much as me and is certainly more organised.

    Tricky Dicky likes this.
  4. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    I've had a check of III/5/5 and III/5/6, and would concur. Is there a particular reason the GS Branch couldn't avail itself of the Intelligence personnel attached to it? By comparison Div HQ only had three GS Offrs under Ops as well.

  5. pamak

    pamak Junior Member

    Yes, but the Army HQs assign specific clerks to the Operations. As for the Division, the War Establishment is also somewhat confusing. Let me post the relevant part and tell my comments regarding how I read it...

    According to the above War Establishment, it does not assign specific clerks to the Operations section, but it does assign clerks to the intelligence cell. Furthermore, it assigns clerks under the title "General Staff. Branch" So, If I read it correctly, the quote above reveals that the General Staff branch as a whole has the following:

    " staff serjeant clerk RASC
    corporal clerk RASC
    lance corporal clerk RASC
    2 X clerk trained in the reproduction of tactical sketches RASC"

    Then, as it breaks down the General staff to its part it shows that the intelligence section staff has

    "corporal clerk RASC
    clerk, trained in the reproduction of tactical sketches, RASC"

    but this implies that the Operations section of the General Staff must have the rest of the clerks listed in the beginning. Notice also that overall, there are "2 X clerk trained in the reproduction of tactical sketches RASC." So, it makes sense to have one such clerk in each of the departments of the General Staff (Operations and Intelligence).

    By the way, notice another weird point in the Division Hq War Establishment. The Operations sections has a General "Staff Officer, Grade 3 (Intelligence)" I do not know what his duties were, but if these were mainly related to intelligence, why is he in the Operations branch? Unless he was mostly into "friendly intelligence"?

    Anyway, returning back to the topic of clerk assignments, at least in the Division HQ my reasoning can give an answer about the composition of the Operations section which seems reasonable. On the other hand, in the case of the Corps HQ, I cannot find a way to get a reasonable picture regarding the clerk assignments.

    Now, the Corps War Establishment does show a very heavy in manpower intelligence section . It actually has more non-officers than the intelligence section of the Army. So, perhaps there is a mistake in writing the total clerk manpower of the Corps General Staff under the intelligence section?
    Last edited: Oct 17, 2017
  6. pamak

    pamak Junior Member

    First of all, thank you for your efforts in general regarding the presentation of the War Establishment Tables.
    As for the "missing clerks," do you think that other Commonwealth countries followed the same War Establishment? I I am asking because when I was searching the internet I found the following which may have very detailed tables for the Canadian Corps.


    This is a canadian Army publication, and it is a rare book ( Worldcat reveals only one copy in Library and Archives Canada Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4 Canada). Plus, as I said, I do not know if the Canadians followed the same War Establishments. I just put the information here in case it proves to be useful to any person interested in this topic.
  7. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    Lots of points there, too late to try and address more than a few.

    First thing, if you've not already seen it have a look at this thread -

    War Establishments

    It contains scans from Aixman re various Corps HQs and you'll note that as they progress there is no dedicated clerical staff for the GSOs Ops. I really don't think there's an omission in the tables, it's just the layout.

    Re Canadian WEs, they were closely based on British WEs, but were not identical. I only have a select collection of Cdn WEs, fighting arms units and Bde level HQs only, so can't compare. I suspect their Staffs carried a few more officer posts than the British equivalents. I'm not familiar with the book you've seen details for so again can't comment.

    There is a description of the duties of a GSO3 (I) in the US Army Technical Manual from 1943, which is a bit too long for typing out now. If some kind soul can find a link it would be much appreciated, otherwise I'll have a look tomorrow.


  8. pamak

    pamak Junior Member

    Thank you Gary, and yes, I missed that thread, but as the people here said, we have established that for sure there is no mistake in copying the information from the original. Still, don't you find that the Corps General Staff in general is just too thin in non-officer manpower? How does it compare with the US Corps HQ TOE with respect to officers and non-officers? I do not have readily available the US TOE but if memory serves well, then there must be a similarity in the number of assigned officers but a big difference in the number of assigned clerks and non officers in general.

    By the way, can you please give the title of the US Army Technical Manual from 1943?

    Thank you
  9. Trux

    Trux 21 AG Patron

    I think that Gary is on the right track. I have looked at the establishments for Corps HQ kindly provided by Aixman and then looked elsewhere also.

    Perhaps we are being too literal when looking at the War Establishment table. These tables were prepared by the War Office to show what personnel they proposed to provide for each unit. They were primarily a planning document to ensure that the correct number of persons/grades/ranks etc were available. They were not organisational documents. There are various handbooks and pocket books describing the organisation and duties of the various elements but they could of course be re organised to suit circumstances.

    Perhaps it makes more sense to look at the table this way.

    The staff were to advise the commander and help him formulate a plan. They were then to implement the plan. The primary role of the Intelligence staff was to provide the information required to form the plan. The primary role of the Operations staff was to implement the plan. However both staffs were necessarily involved in both formulating and implementing the plan.

    Organisationally the tactical planning was under the leadership of the GSO1 (listed as Operations staff). He had at his disposal:
    Operations staff officers under a GSO2.
    Intelligence staff officers under a GSO2.
    Clerical staff under a Warrant Officer Chief Clerk.

    Other staff officers could be brought in as required.

    This is based on details for a division HQ.

    Aixman likes this.
  10. Gary Kennedy

    Gary Kennedy Member

    This is the list of duties shown for the General Staff Officer, 3rd Grade (Intelligence), taken from the US TM.

    1. Coordination of all Intelligence work in the Divisional Area.
    2. Situation map.
    3. Divisional commander's battle map.
    4. Divisional intelligence summaries.
    5. Deductions from information received.
    6. Confirmation of uncertain information.
    7. Reporting to GOC on requests for bomber support by Brigades (Army Air Support Control).
    8. Liaison with the Air Intelligence Liaison Officer on operational matters.
    9. Ordering and interpretation of air photographs.
    10. Distribution of intelligence of air photographs.
    11. Maintenance of diary showing identifications, enemy order of battle, and any other necessary items.
    12. Arrangements for preliminary examination of PWs and deserters (carried out by IO).
    13. Liaison with IO RA.
    14. Report of enemy identifications to higher authority.
    15. Circulation of intelligence.

    The publication is TM 30-410 of September 30, 1942 "Handbook on the British Army". I think it heavily influenced the old British Army Handbook by George Forty. I got my TM 30-410 from Merriam Press in the US as a CD-ROM.

    I don't have the equivalent US Army Corps HQ T/O to compare against. The closest I can offer is the USMC HQ Amphibious Corps. Their HQ as of Sep43 had 3 officers, 1 clerical sergeant and 1 orderly for C-1; 16 officers, 1 CWO and 33 EM for C-2 (clerks, draughtsmen, photo and language interpreters); 6 officers and 11 EM (mostly clerks) for C-3; 4 officers and 11 EM (again clerks, draughtsmen and stenographers) for C-4.

    Just to echo Mike's post above, something like a Corps HQ tends to be a bit amorphous in terms of personnel, especially with officer attachments. It might get support from Army staffs as well for some ops.

    Aixman likes this.
  11. pamak

    pamak Junior Member

    Thank you for the information. And yes, after going over the whole information I saw that the allocation of clerks is quite flexible. In one of the War Establishment photos , I saw that even though there were zero clerk positions in the operations branch, there were still clerks (under the miscellaneous section of the War Establishment) expected to work in the operations branch.

    By the way, while I was going over the issue of corps organization, I found a very interesting link with war diaries from the 2nd Australian Corps.

    AWM52 1/4/8 - 2 Australian Corps General Branch (2 Aust Corps 'G' Branch)

    The sweet thing is that one can download them as a single file instead of downloading them page by page.
    Based on a quick search there, I found a very detailed SOP for the 2nd Aus Corps with a lot of very interesting information, including allocation of duties among the staff for 1942 (and I assume this is heavily influenced by the British regulations)

    AWM52 1/4/8/1 - May 1942 (the SOP starts on page 27)

    Also, on page 22 of the following link there is an organization chart with the duties of the staff in 1944

    AWM52 1/4/8/29 - December 1944, part 2, appendices

    Aixman likes this.

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