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.
Read more about this topic: Clement Attlee
Famous quotes containing the words military, service, world and/or war:
“War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valour, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“Smooth flow the waves, the zephyrs gently play,
Belinda smiled, and all the world was gay.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“War. Fighting. Men ... every man in the whole realm is in the army.... Every man in uniform ... An economy entirely geared to war ... but there is not much war ... hardly any fighting ... yet every man a soldier from birth till death ... Men ... all men for fighting ... but no war, no wars to fight ... what is it, what does it mean?””
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)