Clement Attlee - Military Service During World War I

Military Service During World War I

During World War I, Attlee was given the rank of captain and served with the South Lancashire Regiment in the Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey. After a period of fighting there, he became ill with dysentery and was sent to a hospital in Malta to recover. While he was in the hospital, many of his comrades were killed in the Battle of Sari Bair. Later, when he returned to the front, he was informed that his company had been chosen to hold the final lines when Gallipoli was evacuated. He was the second to last man to be evacuated from Suvla Bay (the last being General F.S. Maude).

He later served in the Mesopotamian Campaign in Iraq, where he was badly wounded at El Hannah after being hit in the leg by shrapnel from an exploding shell while taking enemy trenches. He was sent back to England to recover, and spent most of 1917 training soldiers. He was also promoted to the rank of Major. He would be known as "Major Attlee" for much of the inter-war period. He was sent to France in June 1918 to serve on the Western Front for the last months of the war.

The Gallipoli Campaign had been masterminded by Winston Churchill. Attlee believed that it was a bold strategy, which could have been successful if it had been better implemented. This gave him an admiration for Churchill as a military strategist, which improved their working relationship in later years.

His decision to fight in the war caused a rift between him and his older brother Tom Attlee, who, as a pacifist and a conscientious objector, spent much of the war in prison. After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics until 1923.