The surefire way to locate an infantry battalion war diary

The war diaries of infantry battalions are a wonderful resource for military researchers and family historians. They are held at the National Archives but those for units serving in France and Flanders, Mesopotamia and East Africa have been digitised and can be downloaded (free of charge, at time of writing) for the National Archives website. You will need to register an account at that website, but that is also free of charge and easy to do.

Let’s take a look at how you can find any given diary.

The catalogue descriptions used by the National Archives for these units is generally quite consistent, so the process should take you to any infantry battalion that you are looking for.

To illustrate the process, I have chosen at random the 2/8th Battalion of the Worcestershire Regiment. It was under command of the 183rd Brigade of 61st (2nd South Midland) Division until February 1918 when it transferred to 182nd Brigade. A transfer like that usually hints that the diary will be in two (or more) parts.

The short screen capture video below walks you through how I located the battalion’s diary. To do this yourself, just go to the National Archives website and mimic what I do, just changing the search terms for your own. Note that I do not include the “2/8” or any “th, rd or st”. Also avoid adding anything like the word “service” or “pioneers” to the search term.

The video begins at the National Archives “”search the catalogue” page. The catalogue is called “Discovery”:

Note that my search returned two parts of the battalion’s diary, which line up with its periods under two different brigades.

When you have found the diary you want, add it to your basket. You can add more if you want two or more diaries, or if (such as in my example) your diary is in more than one part. Once you have them all in your basket, you can checkout and download the diary or diaries. The diaries are presented in PDF format and are in colour.

Extra tip: under some circumstances you may find the search returns items that are not war diaries, but with war diaries mixed in with them. To cut through that, go back to search, click on “Advanced Search” and include WO95 (that’s a letter O not a zero) in the “Search for or within references” area. WO95 is the document classification for Great War war diaries.

Links

Operational records known as war diaries

The National Archives website