World War I
The Post Office Rifles served with distinction in the Great War. They arrived in France on 18 March 1915. By the end of the war, 1,800 men from the Post Office Rifles would be dead and 4,500 more would be wounded.
After the outbreak of the war, the existing units of the Territorial Force each formed duplicate (or "second line") units. The existing Post Office Rifles was redesignated as the 1/8th Battalion, London Regiment when a second Post Office Rifles battalion, the 2/8th Londons, was formed in September 1914. In 1915 a third line battalion, the 3/8th was formed.
Between them, the three battalions earned 19 battle honours.
At the Battle of Wurst Farm Ridge, in September 1917, the 2/8th lost over half its fighting strength, dead or wounded, but its men were awarded a total of 40 gallantry medals. These included a Victoria Cross won by Sergeant A. J. Knight, making him the only Post Office Rifleman to win this honour.
Read more about this topic: Post Office Rifles
Famous quotes containing the words war i, world and/or war:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“Ezra Pound still lives in a village and his world is a kind of village and people keep explaining things when they live in a village.... I have come not to mind if certain people live in villages and some of my friends still appear to live in villages and a village can be cozy as well as intuitive but must one really keep perpetually explaining and elucidating?”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war. Now this war is not at all a nice war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)