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World War 1 One ww1 wwII greatwar great 1914 1918 first battalion regiment
Sgt. Alfred John Ward
British Army 2/21st Btn. London Regiment
from:60 Royal Terrace, Newington
Alfred Ward was a volunteer soldier in A company, 21st Battalion, London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles) Territorial Army based at Flodden Road, off Camberwell New Road at the age of 18 in 1903 long before the Great War and had become a corporal by the 1st April 1908 after four years and 264 days of service. He gained a reputation for being a marksman and won silver spoons for target shooting in 1907 and 1909. He attained an Assistant Instructor's Certificate of Signalling on 23rd September 1909 at Aldershot.
He reported promptly at the start of hostilities with Germany on 7th September 1914 to join again the 2/21st Battalion 60th London Regiment (First Surrey Rifles). They were only slowly kitted with uniforms and initially old Japanese rifles and lived at home for much of 1915. In early 1916, they were trained in the Warminster Ranges on Salisbury Plain and were inspected by King George V on 31st May. They finally crossed to La Havre France in on 24th/25th June 1916 as part of the 60th London Division, XVII Corps and were moved by 13th July to the Western Front to join the Third Army under Lieutenant-general Edmund Allenby. Here, they spent a third of their time in the frontline trenches south of Vimy Ridge and north of Arras, a third in the reserve trenches at Ecurie & Roclincourt and a third in billets resting at trun & Maroeuil northwest of Arras. On the front line they were involved with sporadic mining, crater fighting and trench raiding. Before they could be involved in the utter carnage that is known as the Great Somme October Offensive, they were moved to the Macedonian Front in Salonika to fight the Bulgarians, disembarking on 8th December 1916 to be part of XII Corps. They were at Dove Tepe by the border with Serbia (the modern northern Greek border with Macedonia), carrying out one night raid during a rather static period and they were involved in the indecisive Battle of Doiran to the west in April and May, 1917. The British presence in Salonika was reduced and the First Surrey Rifles were moved on again.
On 16th to 18th June 1917, they were moved to Marseilles and onwards to Malta and Egypt to join the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, XX Corps (181st [2/6th London] Brigade) where they were re-equipped and intensively trained. Previously, the Ottomans had made incursions into Sinai and had come close to the east bank of the Suez Canal but had been driven back to their border. General Murray had failed twice to take Gaza in March and April. By the 4th July the Surrey Rifles were concentrated at Moascar on the Suez Canal and were moved up to Deir al Balah by the 23rd July on the static front line with the Ottoman Empire. Sergeant Alfred Ward was detached to attend a Visual Signalling and Field Telephone course at the Imperial School of Instruction at Zeitoun, Cairo. He qualified as a First Class Signaller in visual, field telephone and buzzer reading at 16 words a minute, on 11th of August 1917 under Lieutenant S. Gibbons. At exactly the same time, army intelligence set up a small radio station on top of the Great Pyramid to listen to Turkish radio traffic and the operator never failed to decode the intercepted messages (Lord, 1971). I wonder who this might have been?
Since June 1917 General Edmund (The Bull!) Allenby had replaced Archibald Murray as the head of command, EEF. Most of the infantry available to him were of Territorial divisions activated in 1914 such as the 2/21st Surrey Rifles. The 2/21st Battalion had been stationed at Kent Fort on the Shellal - Karm front line from 1st to 21st October 1917 and then on to Tel el Fara location M2b from 21st where they relieved to 2/17th London Regiment to the 26th, El Gamw on 27th and Rashid Bek on 28th to 29th October. After the Turkish incursions into Sinai had been pushed back during 1916 and early 1917 and the sixth month stalemate after the 2nd Battle of Gaza, Allenby was planning a major offensive to take Palestine from the Ottomans to start on Z day as it is called in the 2/21st Battalion war diary, on 31st October 1917.
Alfred was mentioned in a dispatch of 23rd of October 1917 from General Edmund Allenby to the Secretary of State for War for "gallant and distinguished service in the field" as recorded in The London Gazette on 16th January 1918 and signed by Winston Churchill. The London Gazette just lists his name without mentioning why he was so mentioned and I have also not found any mention in the Battalion war diary either. Was this for carrying important despatches by motor cycle, possibly under fire from the Turks and just before the British Palestinian campaign started? The only activity on 21st and 22nd October on the line was a move of the 60th and the 2nd light Horse (Anzac) Brigade down the Wadi Ghazzeh to Esani to develop the water supply before the attack on Beersheba and the unopposed occupation of Karm, another important water supply. On the 12th September Arthur C. B. Neate of the Desert Mounted Corps rode his horse close to the Turkish line and barely evaded capture. In the chase, he dropped a haversack, smeared with horse blood, with fake military plans, letters and a page of cipher in it. The plans falsely described how the British were to capture Gaza. (On 10th October, Richard Meinertzhagen, famous hoaxer, liar, Ornithologist, Entomologist and donator of specimens to the Natural History Museum, London and the author sees his specimens almost daily! claimed to have done the same [Garfield, 2007]). False radio messages were sent between 24th and 31st October also prompting the Turkish forces to think Britain was going to attack Gaza which could be decoded with the lost page of cipher. Additional radio messages directing that no secret documents be carried where they might be lost to the enemy, made up the Turkish Army's mind: the British Army was going to attack Gaza. Was Alfred that or one of these radio operator(s)? (Cocker, 1989: 103-104).
John Shea was not in favour of a second Trans-Jordan raid but his 60th Division was volunteered for the raid on the 30th April, less the 181st Brigade kept in reserve in the Judean Hills until 3rd May when they left Bethany and crossed the Jordan at Goraniyeh and bivouacked in Wadi Nimrin. This too was a failure with El Salt being taken and lost again and with 1,160 casualties for the 60th Division, ending in withdrawal back across the Jordan on the 4th May The battalion diary ends in June 1918 when long lists show the reassigned officers and men being shipped back to the western front to be replaced by mostly Indian soldiers from Mesopotamia and the Western Front so as to fulfil a promise to France to keep British troops defending French soil. Alfred obviously stayed on and was also probably still there to be part of the Battles for Megiddo and Sharon in September 1918.
Whilst attending a 20th Corps Signal School in Jerusalem in October 1918, he bought a bible with cedar of Lebanon board covers and got his sergeant colleagues to sign it as they did a group photo, see below. (The author had the bible repaired and re-bound in 1999.) Alfred finished his war service on 19th March 1919, being disembodied as opposed to de-mobilised from the TA. As far as I can tell Alfred was eligible for three campaign medals; the British War Medal, 1914-18 (colloquially known as squeek), the Allied Victory Medal (Wilfred) with oak leaf emblem for a "Mention in Dispatch" and the Territorial Force War Medal 1914-19. He was a very modest man and probably never applied for the medals.
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