Megan Hamilton

Men of the 7th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, taking part in a seashore training exercise at Sandbanks, March 1941. exercise.

Men of the 7th Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, taking part in a seashore exercise at Sandbanks, March 1941.

Megan Hamilton began her AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project “Training the Troops: British and Imperial Armies, 1939-1945” in October 2022.

As a partnership between IWM and King's College London, this project examines how the British and Imperial armies prepared and trained to fight a multi-front, multinational global war. It will use army training as a lens to study Imperial coordination and interoperability.

The thesis will firstly use the IWM’s extensive collection of training manuals to document the work of the Directorate of Military Training at the War Office, which was responsible for producing suitable doctrine and the ensuing training pamphlets for the British Army.

However, the thesis will also have a strong transnational dimension. It will be both a top-down and a bottom-up study of the dissemination of training practices across the British Empire that fully embraces the lived experience of soldiers, whether they came from, for example, Britain, Canada, India or Africa. Research for this project will take Megan to five continents and seven countries

War and the Mind

IWM

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Transcript

Megan Hamilton, researcher: “Britain was never fighting alone. For the entirety of the Second World War they had an entire Empire fighting alongside with them. This included Canada, South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, the colonies in Africa and in the Caribbean.

Various forces across the globe were fighting alongside the British Army. I'm focused on army training in the Second World War, looking at how armies around the British Empire were able to train and coordinate their training so that they were able to fight more effectively together.

Training acts as a bridge between civilian life and military life, and across the Empire 11 million men had to go through this change in mindset.

Training had some very fundamental purposes. It was about increasing physical fitness and strength, it was about learning how to work as a unit effectively, it was about learning how to handle your weapon, how to act and behave in wartime. It was about learning discipline.

Training had a number of roles to play, but it was all about crafting a civilian into a soldier. Training was about creating a realistic scenario where soldiers could learn to have discipline over their emotions. They all felt fear or fatigue or nervousness or anxiety but learning to have command over those feelings was what training was all about.

A key part of battle drill was battle inoculation. Getting men used to the sights and sounds and smells of the battlefield. How does it sound when you're crawling on your stomach through a muddy ditch when bullets are whizzing over your head? That's another thing they did in training. How does it sound when artillery shells are landing 100 feet away from you, or 50 feet away from you? That's another thing they practiced in training. They needed to get them used to what battlefields sounded and smelled like.

A key part of training is learning to stop thinking like an individual and to prioritise thinking as a group. Unit cohesion is actually a part of what they teach in training. You go through the training as a group because you're going to fight as a group.

At the peak of the training infrastructure in the UK, the British Army had 30,000 new recruits to train every month. But how do you deal with all those men at once? What I found so far is that there was a real emphasis on doing things the British way. This is part of a longer project starting at the beginning of the twentieth century. There was a real effort to make sure that armies around the Empire fought the British way. And so, they all used British doctrine, British manuals, British equipment, British standards and terminology. And so that was a real focus throughout the first half of the twentieth century. So, the Second World War is a continuation of that project where everything is being done the British way. The armies of the Empire are one large, kind of cohesive unit that can be plugged together like LEGO bricks very effectively. And particularly at the beginning of the war this is the case.

As the war continues, though, we do see that start to change. The Dominion armies start to build up their own capacity in training and command structures and, and kind of learning their own lessons. And so, we do see them start to, kind of, grow their independence as the war continues on.

One thing I've dived into lately is jungle warfare, and that's going to be a part of my thesis because I think it's a great example of the Dominions or maybe, kind of, the periphery creating knowledge and becoming real experts in something.

So, the Australians particularly become real experts in jungle warfare. They’re fighting the Japanese in the jungle. Obviously the Indian Army as well and the Americans, but the Australians really start to hone their ability to fight effectively in the jungle.

So, what I found that's very interesting is that the British Army in 1943 sends a group of officers actually around the world, but largely to Australia and India, to learn all about how they're fighting jungle warfare.

What are they doing? What kind of equipment are they using? I think it's a really effective example of how knowledge began to be created around, around the world, right? It wasn't just London who was creating everything and sending it out to the Dominions.”

IWM's War and the Mind exhibition ran from 27 September 2024 - 27 April 2025.

The exhibition explored the many psychological dimensions of war and featured ground-breaking research projects funded by UK Research and Innovation, in particular the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

A film featuring Megan's project was part of the Starting Wars section of the exhibition. In this video, Megan talks about how recruits from across the British Empire were trained to think and act like soldiers.