How George William Cover led me to examine this unit
My interest in this unit came through my study of George William Cover, who is shown by the campaign medal roll to have served as a Sapper with two numbers of the Corps of Royal Engineers of the Territorial Force. He began with the number 462 and later became 520268.
The latter number is known to be from a block of numbers issued to the Wiltshire Fortress Company, a unit of the Territorial Force, in relation to a change in the method of numbering in the spring of 1917. The company was instructed to renumber the men who were already serving, and then continue to use the block for numbering men who joined thereafter.
To find out more, I searched for service records of men of that unit who were originally numbered around 462. This did not prove to be easy, and it seems that most are missing, but there are a few and they provide good hints. The narrative that follows commences with the findings from that analysis, but it is first necessary to provide some context on the unit that George joined.
Technically, the unit that George first joined was the Dorsetshire & Wiltshire Fortress Royal Engineers. It was made up of two sub-units, with common administration and command. They were the Dorset (Electric Light) Company and the Wiltshire (Works) Company. The latter was based at the Drill Hall on Church Road in Swindon and recruited many of its men from the Swindon works of the Great Western Railway. Soon after war was declared on 4 August 1914, it moved to join the Dorset company at Weymouth, where they were put to work on completing the naval defences of Portland. The depot remained at the Drill Hall in Swindon.
George enlisted in the period between 19 May 1915 (when 456 Harry Bowring joined) and 22 June 1915 (479 John Carter). This is a rather wider gap than I would have liked to see, but the unit they joined was not a large one and the rate of recruitment was evidently fairly slow. Assuming that the rate of enlistment was uniform, it would put George’s enlistment into May rather than June. The date confirms that he joined the army voluntarily, for conscription was not introduced until 1916, and as such it was his own choice to join the Wiltshire Company.
The original company had gone to France in January 1915, but a reserve had been raised at the depot and it was into this unit that George would at first have been placed. By May 1915 it was formally named as the 2/1st Wiltshire (Fortress) Royal Engineers. In September 1915 it was renamed as the 566th (Wiltshire) Works Company, while the original out in France became the 565th Wiltshire (Army Troops) Company.
George does not appear to have become entitled to the medal known as the 1914-15 Star, which confirms that he did not go overseas before 1916. Aside from that, we have no information regarding when he did go, but we must assume that he would have followed normal practice in being part of a draft sent from the 566th to the 565th Company. Sadly, the war diary of the latter never mentions the arrival of drafts and only ever names officers. An example comes from the service record of 479 John Carter, who joined the company in France on 30 December 1916. There is a reference in the war diary at the end of that month, reading, “The 25 additional Sappers authorised by IV Army on the …. were not actually available until the end of the year. They were intended to relieve to some extent the abnormal amount of work demanded of the unit.” It seems that Carter was one of the men sent, and it may be that George also went to France at this time. The draft of men had landed in France on 26 December 1916.
What was an Army Troops Company?
In the language of the British Army of 1914-1918, a unit termed “Army Troops” was simply one that came under command of the headquarters of an Army, of which there were eventually five in France and Flanders alone. Similarly, units that came under the headquarters of a Corps, which would itself be under an Army, were known as “Corps Troops”. The terms themselves do not relate to any particular type of unit or work: for example, a heavy artillery battery might be “corps troops”.
The Army Troops Company of the Royal Engineers was not dissimilar to a Field Company in that it included men with a range of mechanical and civil engineering skills (see Fortress Companies link, below). The Field Company would work in and near the front lines, while an Army Troops Company tended to be much further back and was often engaged on construction and maintenance of water supplies or on special construction projects.
The 565th Company in France and Germany
The following summary narrative is copied from the Wikipedia web site which is not always wholly reliable, but I have checked its veracity against the war diary and other sources. For detail, the war diary is the best and most reliable source available. I begin the story at the turn of the years 1915 and 1916, as George is known not to have gone to France before then:
The company “spent the autumn and winter of 1915–16 building a new mill at Steenwerck and a hospital nearby at Trois Ambres, as well as working on roads, light railways and water supplies. The Battle of the Somme opened on 1 July 1916 and shortly afterwards 565th (Wilts) Company was moved into the area to camp at Bronfay Farm and work on water supplies in the Carnoy Valley. This work continued throughout the Somme offensive, and the company built a pumping station on the River Somme with a water pipeline to Trônes Wood after its capture. [It is possible that Geoge arrived with the draft on 30 December 1916].
“In the spring of 1917 the company was engaged in building a Corps HQ camp at Foucaucourt, then a new HQ camp for Fourth Army at Villers-Carbonnel near Peronne. This was in the devastated area beyond the old German front line after the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line (Operation Alberich). It then worked on five heavy steel bridges over the Somme at La Chapelette near Peronne.
“The Third Ypres Offensive was about to begin, and Fourth Army HQ was switched to Dunkirk to command a thrust up the coast to meet the expected breakthrough in Flanders. The 565th (Wilts) Company was sent to fit out the Terminus Hotel at Leffrinckoucke, where some shelling was experienced. Detachments installed water tanks and pumps at Dunkirk docks, and constructed a musketry school near Abbeville.
“In November 1917 the company was sent by lorry to Third Army’s front, where the Hindenburg Line had been breached in the Battle of Cambrai. The company was put to work filling mine craters where the Hindenburg defences crossed the Bapaume–Cambrai road between the Canal du Nord and Graincourt. This was done under sporadic machine gun fire. The men next worked on new defences. After the German counter-attack, Company HQ was moved back to Ervillers, where the men worked in the forward areas on water supplies and building camps.
“The German spring offensive of 21 March 1918 broke through in the Cambrai sector, followed by the ‘Great Retreat’, during which 565th (Wilts) Company found itself retreating by day and working on emergency defences with labour battalions by night. When the German offensive ran out of steam, the company was put to building a new defence line between Adinfer Wood and Fonquevillers on the old Somme battlefield. This involved repairing and linking up sections of old British and German trenches. One of the new trenches was named ‘Swindon Trench’ by the general commanding. During the summer the company had two companies of the US Army Engineers attached to it for instruction.
“The Allied counter-offensive (often known as the Hundred Days Offensive) began in August 1918, and 565th (Wilts) Company followed the advance, opening up new water points including an important one at Douchy. On 12 September the company reached Ruyaulcourt where it was given the task of constructing a 300 feet (91 m) ramp down the face of a retaining wall into the dry Canal du Nord suitable for traffic up to 6-inch guns. This work had to be done under observation from a German Kite balloon, which called down shellfire on the construction site. The balloon was shot down, but at 16.00 on 18 September the Germans put in a counter-attack, preceded by a severe barrage. The company lost one officer and seven sappers killed, 22 wounded (two mortally) [for a unit of less than 200 men this was of course a very significant loss].
“After these severe casualties, the company went for a week’s rest at Boyelles. It was back at the Canal du Nord on 27 September with VI Corps Troops RE, where it was joined by the New Zealand Tunnelling Company. Together (14 officers and 310 men in total) they built a Hopkins steel bridge across the canal between Hermies and Havrincourt. This was the largest heavy steel bridge erected on the Western Front during the war, with a span of 180 feet (55 m) above a 100 feet (30 m) deep gap; in total the bridge was 240 feet (73 m) long, launched by rollers. It took 80 three-ton lorry loads to bring up the material, and the total time to unload and erect the bridge was 104 hours. It was opened for traffic on 2 October.
“As the Allied advance continued, the company was sent to Raches, where it worked on repairing heavy bridges in the Douai area, as part of First Army Troops RE, though a lack of materials made progress slow. On 10 November a six-man detachment was working on the Douai railway bridge when a delayed-action German mine exploded, wounding the whole detachment. The company remained working in the area after the Armistice with Germany.
“It moved to Andenne on the Meuse on 8 January 1919, then to Troisdorf in Germany at the end of January. The company remained with the occupying troops of the British Army of the Rhine until it was disbanded on 19 November 1919.”
Links
Fortress Companies of the Corps of Royal Engineers
Company war diary at the National Archives (can be downloaded free if you register your email address there)