39-08-24 Mobilisation

p 21, 2016

> Conscription, Recruitment >>

24-4-16 Is Mandatory Military Service Actually a Good Idea? - Context Matters > .

24-2-1 Could National Service fix British forces recruitment crisis? | Sitrep > .

National Service Act:

29 March 1939: Secretary of State for War announced expansion of Territorial Army from 130,000 to 170,000, and subsequent doubling.

27 April 1939: Conscription introduced. The Military Training Act required all males to serve in the Armed Forces for six months on reaching their twentieth birthday.

15 July: single intake of 35,000 men

39-08-24 Mobilisation:

24 August 1939
Given the worsening situation in Europe, Parliament is recalled and immediately enacts the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act 1939, granting the government special legislative powers for the duration of the crisis.
Army reservists are called up.
Civil Defence workers are put on alert.
25 August 1939
The National Defence Companies (a voluntary reserve force of former servicemen) are mobilised to protect "vulnerable points".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_United_Kingdom_home_front_during_World_War_II

http://ukcmilhist.freeforums.org/ww2-how-successfully-did-british-society-mobilise-t597.html

http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3424800081/world-war-ii-mobilization.html
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/sbroadberry/wp/totwar3.pdf
United Kingdom mobilized 22% of its total population for direct military service, more than any other nation of WWII era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilization#Mobilization_in_World_War_II
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilization

The British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was the part of the British Army in Europe from 1939 to 1940, early in the Second World War. Commanded by General Lord Gort, the BEF constituted 10 percent of the Allied force.

The British Expeditionary Force was established in 1938, in readiness for war, after Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss of March 1938 and made claims on Sudetenland, that led to the invasion and German occupation of Czechoslovakia in March 1939. After the French and British government had promised to defend Poland, the German Invasion of Poland began on 1 September and on 3 September, Britain and France declared war on Germany.

The BEF went to France in September 1939 and mostly assembled along the Belgian–French border during the Phoney War before May 1940. The BEF did not commence hostilities until the German invasion that began the Battle of France on 10 May 1940. The BEF was driven back through Belgium and north-western France, forcing its evacuation from several ports along the French northern coastline in Operation Dynamo, followed by Operation Cycle, an evacuation from Le Havre and Operation Ariel, evacuations from the French Atlantic and Mediterranean ports. The most notable evacuation was from Dunkirk and from this the phrase Dunkirk Spirit was coined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Expeditionary_Force_(World_War_II)

Pigeons, wirelesses, etc
Homing pigeon regulations

24:52 ""The possession of homing or racing pigeons is forbidden except under permit, and rules are made for the protection of such pigeons.""
http://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/News-for-August-28-1939.mp3

"Everything, it seemed was either banned, restricted or rationed. Even the raising of Homing Pigeons was banned, out of fear they would carry messages between enemy agents. Clothing and food were severely rationed, with priorities given to the Military."
http://pastdaily.com/2015/08/28/eyeing-pigeons-with-suspicion-august-28-1939/

BUT

"During World War II, the United Kingdom used about 250,000 homing pigeons. The Dickin Medal, the highest possible decoration for valor given to animals, was awarded to 32 pigeons, including the United States Army Pigeon Service's G.I. Joe and the Irish pigeon Paddy.

The UK maintained the Air Ministry Pigeon Section during World War II and for a while thereafter. A Pigeon Policy Committee made decisions about the uses of pigeons in military contexts. The head of the section, Lea Rayner, reported in 1945 that pigeons could be trained to deliver small explosives or bioweapons to precise targets. The ideas were not taken up by the committee, and in 1948 the UK military stated that pigeons were of no further use. However, the UK security service MI5 was still concerned about the use of pigeons by enemy forces. Until 1950, they arranged for 100 birds to be maintained by a civilian pigeon fancier in order to prepare countermeasures. The Swiss army disbanded its Pigeon section in 1996."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_pigeon .
AND
http://www.arcre.com/archive/pigeons .

Women in the Military - watm >> .

Interbellum - Freikorps

Interbellum - Freikorps

.Weimar Republic: The Freikorps > .

22-10-6 Rise of Hitler, 1930s, Invasion of Poland | WWII. E 2 (subs) - Katz > .

22-10-3 Comparing Pootin to Hitler | Dream of the Great Past (subs) - Katz > .

Freikorps ("Free Corps") were irregular German and other European military volunteer units, or paramilitary, that existed from the 18th to the early 20th centuries. They effectively fought as mercenary or private armies, regardless of their own nationality. In German-speaking countries, the first so-called Freikorps ("free regiments", Freie Regimenter) were formed in the 18th century from native volunteers, enemy renegades, and deserters. These sometimes exotically equipped units served as infantry and cavalry (or more rarely as artillery), sometimes in just company strength, sometimes in formations up to several thousand strong. There were also various mixed formations or legions. The Prussian von Kleist Freikorps included infantry, jäger, dragoons and hussars. The French Volontaires de Saxe combined uhlans and dragoons.

In the aftermath of WW1 and during the German Revolution of 1918–19, Freikorps consisting largely of WW1 veterans were raised as right-wing paramilitary militias. They were ostensibly mustered to fight on behalf of the government against the Soviet-backed German communists attempting to overthrow the Weimar Republic. However, many Freikorps also largely despised the Republic and were involved in assassinations of its supporters.

The Freikorps were widely seen as the precursor to Nazism, and many of their volunteers ended up joining the Nazi militia, the Sturmabteilung (SA).[6] An entire series of Freikorps awards also existed.
..
The meaning of the word Freikorps changed over time. After 1918, the term was used for the paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. They were the key Weimar paramilitary groups active during that time. Many German veterans felt disconnected from civilian life, and joined a Freikorps in search of stability within a military structure. Others, angry at their sudden, apparently inexplicable defeat, joined up in an effort to put down communist uprisings, such as the Spartacist uprising, or exact some form of revenge on those they considered responsible for the armistice. They received considerable support from Minister of Defence Gustav Noske, a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Noske used them to suppress the German Revolution of 1918–19 and the Marxist Spartacist League, including arresting and executing leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg on 15 January 1919. They were used to defeat the Bavarian Soviet Republic in May 1919.

On 5 May 1919, members of Freikorps Lützow in Perlach near Munich, acted on a tip from a local cleric and arrested and killed twelve alleged communist workers (most of them actually members of the Social Democratic Party). A memorial on Pfanzeltplatz in Munich today commemorates the incident. In another incident on May 6, 1919, Freikorps forces in Munich entered a Catholic Church proceeding to beat and then shoot 25 people who had been falsely accused of being Communists.

Freikorps also fought against the communists in the Baltics, Silesia, Poland and East Prussia after the end of World War I, including aviation combat, often with significant success. Anti-Slavic racism was sometimes present, although the ethnic cleansing ideology and anti-Semitism expressed in later years had not yet developed. In the Baltics they fought against communists as well as against the newborn independent democratic countries Estonia and Latvia. In Latvia, Freikorps murdered 300 civilians in Mitau who were suspected of having "Bolshevik sympathies". After the capture of Riga, another 3000 alleged communists were killed, including summary executions of 50–60 prisoners daily. Though officially disbanded in 1920, some of them continued to exist for several years and many Freikorps attempted, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the government in the Kapp Putsch in March 1920. Their attack was halted when German citizens loyal to the government went on strike, cutting off many services and making daily life so problematic that the coup was called off.

In 1920, Adolf Hitler had just begun his political career as the leader of the tiny and as-yet-unknown Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/DAP German Workers' Party, which was soon renamed the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei/NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) or Nazi Party in Munich. Numerous future members and leaders of the Nazi Party had served in the Freikorps, including Ernst Röhm, future head of the Sturmabteilung, or SA, Heinrich Himmler, future head of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, and Rudolf Höß, the future Kommandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Hermann Ehrhardt, founder and leader of Marinebrigade Ehrhardt, and his deputy Commander Eberhard Kautter, leaders of the Viking League, refused to help Hitler and Erich Ludendorff in their 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and conspired against them.

Hitler eventually viewed some of them as threats. A huge ceremony was arranged on 9 November 1933 in which the Freikorps leaders symbolically presented their old battle flags to Hitler's SA and SS. It was a sign of allegiance to their new authority, the Nazi state. When Hitler's internal purge of the party, the Night of the Long Knives, came in 1934, a large number of Freikorps leaders were targeted for killing or arrest, including Ehrhardt and Röhm. Historian Robert GL Waite claims that in Hitler's "Röhm Purge" speech to the Reichstag on 13 July 1934, he implied that the Freikorps were one of the groups of "pathological enemies of the state". 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freikorps .

● Baltics - WW2 .. 

Cold Tensions - Baltic, Nordic ..

Interbellum - Freikorps ..

Russia vs Baltics (NATO) ..